by Carrie Marsh
The stoplight to the main intersection barely registered in her head until the angry horn or the Prius snapped her to attention, making her foot instantly snap from the gas to the brake. Mary’s head lurched forward. The other driver swerved around her, waving his middle finger and shouting as he passed by.
“Okay. You’re okay. Just breathe.” Looking in the rearview mirror, Mary half expected to see one of the trucks from the movie Road Warrior barreling down on her, Ray Hulka hanging out of the driver’s side window waving a spear or shotgun or something at her. But there was nothing behind her. No one was there.
It certainly was a strange night. Looking into the dark sky as she pulled down Tree Top Lane, Mary saw the white sliver of moon staring out like a glittery adornment on a black velvet dress. The sight of that familiar celestial body comforted her. How long had it been since she gazed up at the moon to appreciate its presence and power?
“Too long.” Mary shook her head. Had she been a practicing witch, as she had been so many years ago, she would have been able to stomp right up to Ray Hulka and get him to confess his actions without fear. Wrapping up this case in a week could have been possible had she been using the gifts she was born with, that had been passed down from generation to generation.
“I just wanted to be normal,” she confessed to the moon. “Maybe I’m too old to be abnormal now. Look at the mess I’m in at the moment. Plus, how long will it take for me to get to the point I was when I set my spell books aside? It could take the rest of my life.”
Being a witch is in your blood. You can either ignore it, like someone who had the misfortune of being related to Attila the Hun. Or you can embrace it and use it for good, Alabaster purred. Either way, I’m not going anywhere. Just as quickly, he was gone from her mind.
Mary felt her strength returning. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that she couldn’t jump over tall buildings or race a speeding bullet but one thing she was certain of. There would be no way she could or would use her powers to hurt anyone. Even someone like Ray.
“No time like the present.” She knew in one of her dusty old books there was a binding spell. She just had to find it.
The headlights swept across the garage door of Mary’s home and it never looked so good to her in her life. There were her flowerpots and her wind chimes and the birdfeeders already empty. Those greedy little finches could eat their own weight in birdseed every day.
Pressing the button attached to the visor over her head, Mary heard the garage door opener motor kick to life as the cables slowly began to pull the door up. Before she could pull her car in, another vehicle pulled up behind her, its headlight dark. The driver was out of the car before Mary could pull her vehicle inside the safety of the garage.
Her mind was a blank.
“Mary?” Ray’s voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard, even though it was low and cool. A shiver ran up her spine, making her shoulders quiver. “Mary. Are you feeling okay? I’m so glad you made it home.”
He was setting the stage. Just in case anyone was out on the porch enjoying a forbidden cigarette or dropping the evenings trash in the garbage can. They would think he was a Good Samaritan. He would be known as that nice fellow Ray Hulka who followed her home after she had become ill at his house.
“What are you doing here, Ray?” Mary said as she emerged from her car, full of fear and anger. “I don’t need any help.”
“Sure, you do.” He took a step closer to her, his arm outstretched. “You weren’t feeling good. There is obviously something wrong with you.”
With every step Ray took toward Mary, she backed up into her garage. If she could get to the door of her mudroom, she’d be okay. It had a lock on it. A small one but it was better than nothing. It would at least buy her some time to get to her phone. Her phone. Like a slap across the face, Mary recalled her actions at Beads and Baubles. She had brought her phone there because she didn’t have a land line. She had used it to call Andrew. He said he was busy and he’d visit her tomorrow. That was when she’d hung up by swiping the little red button then she set it next to the register.
“Come on, Mary. Let me help you.”
“Ray, you’re not thinking. Summer’s death has… affected you, hasn’t it?”
“Summer.” Ray’s eyes hardened. At the funeral, Mary recalled Ray being deflated and even stunned that he was there. Like somewhere it would be revealed that the whole thing was some kind of mistake. His eyes almost pleaded with her when she spoke to him to put an end to the joke. To have Summer pop out of that casket and yell, “April Fools!”
But now he looked as if the word Summer left a bitter, ashy taste on his tongue. Clenching his teeth, he stepped closer to Mary.
“You don’t know the first thing about Summer. You were going to hire her to work for you but you didn’t know her. I knew her. I loved her. It was a complete love, full of passion. We understood each other. We were from the same cloth.”
“But, Ray,” Mary interrupted. “You were related. You were not just of the same cloth. You were of the same bloodline. What were you thinking?”
Ray laughed as he took another step closer, making Mary back up once more. She would soon have her back against Ward’s old work bench and making a dash for the two concrete steps that led to her mudroom door would be impossible.
Keep him talking. He’s dying to spill his guts. Just keep him engaged and you’ll earn yourself a chance to make a run for it.
“Is that what happened on those summers at your family’s lake house? Did you molest your cousin, Ray?”
“Me?” He laughed again. “Me? Molest her? Are you kidding? She was the one.”
Mary stared. That wasn’t what she expected to hear. She certainly didn’t expect Ray to blatantly admit he molested his cousin but she was sure he’d say something like “but we were in love” or “I knew she wanted me to.” But to suggest that Summer was the aggressor was an angle she didn’t think to look for.
“She told me she loved me. And when we were old enough, she showed me how much.”
Mary put her hand to her stomach. Now she really wasn’t feeling that well.
“So, you see, Mary Tuttle, you’re searching for a victim where one doesn’t exist.”
“What? What about Summer? Ray, did your wife have something to do with her death?”
“Hillary? She would never. She knew I wouldn’t tolerate anyone saying a bad word about Summer, let alone putting their hands on her.”
“But you did.” Mary’s back straightened. “You knew that she was seeing other men. She was changing. Drifting away from you. So, you tracked her down when she was alone and…”
“She would always take the candy I offered her. It was like a game to us.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to play games with you anymore.”
Ray’s face contorted as if a bad odor has assaulted him. “You need to shut your mouth.”
“Maybe Summer had second thoughts. Maybe she realized what had been going on was a mistake.” Mary stood still.
Ray was paralyzed with rage. He stood a mere eight maybe ten feet from Mary and she watched as his body started to shudder.
“That’s why you did it. She didn’t want to play the games you played at the summer house together anymore. She had grown up. Grown out of you. Didn’t she?”
Just then the overhead interior light attached to the garage door opener winked out. It was on a timer. It stayed on for two minutes, allowing a person to safely get into their home. Then it winked out to save electricity. When it did, Mary tore toward the door to her home and yanked it open.
The movement caused the light to blink on and off, as that was what it was programed to do. Ray bolted toward Mary and grabbed a hold of her right arm just as she threw the door open with her left.
Without warning, Alabaster leapt at Ray’s face, his claws extended with every strand of hair on his back bristled and straight, making him look three times bigger than he really was. His nails dug through Ray’s sk
in like pins into a pincushion, leaving behind three bloody scratches on his face.
Screaming in surprise and pain, Ray let go of Mary to grab hold of Alabaster by the scruff of the neck and hurl him into a stack of plastic tubs with the words Christmas Decorations written on the sides. The cat hit the tubs with a solid thud. Even though he landed on his feet, his dash out of the open garage door was sluggish and wobbly.
But Alabaster’s bravery bought Mary enough time to get into the house and lock the door to her mudroom. Ray began to pound wildly on the wooden door. With enough effort, he could easily kick it in. But would he continue pounding and risk a neighbor hearing and coming to investigate or calling the police to report the disturbance? Mary couldn’t count on that.
With lightning speed, she turned off every light that had been left on. In the pitch blackness, she went to the kitchen and withdrew the butcher knife from the block. She didn’t want to use it.
Then, suddenly, she remembered something from her childhood. Like the memory of her mother and her tending the flower garden, Mary remembered her mother standing at the edge of their yard on a night much like this one. The sky was dark. The air was cold. The moon was just a sliver of light with tiny stars dotted along the black backdrop.
There had been a raccoon or an opossum tearing up the garbage as well as the grates over the back porch that led to the space underneath the house. If it got in there, it would undoubtedly set up housekeeping and before anyone could do anything, the raccoon or opossum would have babies, not to mention aunts and uncles and second cousins and other neighboring animals tearing up the foundation of the house while dragging their food down there to eat. Not to mention what goes in must come out.
Mary’s mother sought out the creature that had intentions of squatting on her property and forced it away with a disorientation incantation. She didn’t want to hurt it. It was only doing what it did by nature. The raccoon or opossum didn’t know any better. But Mary’s mother didn’t want it in her yard, tearing up the trash, leaving its droppings all over and reproducing underneath her back porch. It could find another domicile.
“But what were the words she used?” Mary muttered as Ray kept pounding on the door. She didn’t want to hurt him. A severe case of confusion, a little disorientation, maybe a pinch of vertigo for good measure was all Mary thought she’d need to get Ray subdued enough for her to make a dash to the Deitzs’ house to call the police.
Like a line from a movie she was trying to remember, Mary clapped her hands together and as she visualized Ray’s face and cried in a loud voice:
“An nak nathrad. Ook dath bethod. Dok heal yenvi. The interloper….”
Ray was using his shoulder, his foot, all his weight to force the mudroom door open. It was only a matter of time before he’d get in. What then? Was she prepared to use the weapon in her hand if he came at her? Mary hoped she wouldn’t have to find out.
The words her mother had chanted wouldn’t come to her. She had a big chunk missing from the middle. The spell wouldn’t work if she didn’t get it right.
“This is stupid,” she grumbled. “A witch with a bad memory. It sounds like the punch line to a joke.”
She tiptoed two steps closer to the door.
“I’ve called the police, Ray!”
BOOM!
“You better go before they get here!”
THUD!
“I mean it!”
CRACK!
The door jamb had split. One or two good poundings and he’d be inside. That was when she heard the police sirens. They were tearing through the air so fast that Mary was almost sure she heard the tires squealing against the pavement.
“Ray! Get off my property, and I’ll forget everything happened!”
There was no other sound. Mary was afraid to get any closer to the door for fear that if he gave it one last kick it would fly inward, catching her and pinning her beneath its weight.
It felt like she stood there for ten minutes, straining to listen as the approaching siren got louder and louder. She could barely hear her own thoughts, let alone the sinister movements of Ray.
Within seconds, Ray’s car was replaced by a squad car from her son’s police department.
Running back to the garage, Mary carefully unlocked the door and stepped outside with her hands raised.
She put her hands up to her eyes to block the bright headlights and red and blue rollers on top.
“How did you know?” she asked the officer who was getting out of the car. But before she could give him her story and point in the right direction to follow Ray, Mary felt her stomach fall. Lying underneath a bush, his tail still and eyes closed was Alabaster.
“No!” she cried and ran to the cat, scooping him up in her arms. His body was still warm but he was not responding. Mary snuggled him close to her, tears forming in her eyes. “Come on, my poor kitty. You’ve still got eight more lives. Don’t leave me.”
“Mrs. Tuttle? Are you all right?” Officer Higgs jumped out of the squad car and nervously approached Mary.
“I’m all right.” She rubbed the feline’s head to her cheek. “But Alabaster is hurt.”
The swirling red and blue lights brought Mary’s neighbors out of their houses, including Grace and Henry, who anxiously ran to their friend’s house.
“Mary?” Grace gasped, pulling her snake skin printed robe tight around her. “Mary? Oh, my gosh! Are you okay?”
“I am but he threw Alabaster against the wall.”
“Who did?” Grace asked, putting her arm around her friend.
“Ray Hulka?”
Grace looked at Mary and then at her husband, who stood in bare feet, gray sweatpants and a t-shirt that read World’s Greatest Dad on it.
“What?” Henry looked confused. “Why would he do that?”
Just then a gray unmarked car came to a screeching halt behind the two other cars.
“Mom!” Andrew yelled. “Mom, are you all right?” He towered over most of the people there and spotted his mother immediately. Relief fell over his eyes as he approached her but just as quickly vanished as he saw Alabaster in her arms.
“Honey!” Mary cleared her throat. “How did you know to come here?”
“We got a call from Hillary Hulka, saying her husband was on his way to your house. She said he had been drinking, and she was afraid he was going to hurt you.” Andrew looked at his mother. “Did he hurt you, Mom?”
“No, honey. Not me.” Mary couldn’t stop her bottom lip from trembling.
Andrew stepped closer and took Alabaster in his arms.
“He’ll be all right, Mom.” Andrew held the cat in one arm and protectively draped his other arm around his mother’s shoulder to lead her back into her house. “Higgs, get these people off the lawn.”
Mary, Andrew, and the Deitzs all entered Mary’s house. Andrew pulled out his cell phone after he sat his mom down at the kitchen table. He refused to put Alabaster down.
“Reggie. Hi. It’s Andrew.” Reginald Hyatt was the Morhollow veterinarian and a high school buddy of Andrew’s. “We’ve had an accident. I need your help.”
Grace put on some hot water for tea. Henry went to the mudroom door and began to work on the frame. Like most men when there was a crisis, he helped the most when using his hands. As Mary retold everyone what had happened, Henry removed the cracked frame.
“I know I’ve got something that will work perfectly at the house. I’ll be right back. Grace, you stay.” She nodded to Henry’s instructions.
“That cat took off after Ray as if he were made of catnip,” Mary sobbed. She stood up and walked to Andrew, who was doing everything he could to stay in control of his emotions. Like his father, Andrew was a pillar of strength when people needed it.
Reggie arrived at the house just as Henry returned and they both came in through the garage.
“Andrew.” Reggie extended his hand but saw Alabaster in his arms. With the kind eyes of someone who truly loved all animals, Reggie instructed A
ndrew to bring him to the room with the best light in it. They retreated to the upstairs bathroom.
“He’ll be just fine,” Grace said, sitting down with Mary and taking hold of her hand.
“You should have seen him. I don’t think a Doberman could have done a better job.” Mary chuckled through her tears.
“Do you think Ray has left?” Grace asked.
Mary tilted her head.
“Do you think he is trying to get out of Morhollow? You know. On the lam?”
“He’d be stupid not to. Not just for this but I think he’s guilty of a lot more than just trying to break into my house.” Mary stood and wrung her hands. “I know it sounds stupid and there are a lot of people out there who’d say it’s just a cat but I can’t focus on anything until I know Alabaster is going to be okay.”
“That’s not stupid,” Henry piped up as he secured a new piece of frame, replacing what Ray had cracked.
Henry had a dog several years ago. Just a mangy mutt he picked up as a puppy for the kids when they were little. They named it Haus. As the kids grew up, Haus became more and more like Henry’s shadow. He followed him all around the house, through the yard, and in the garage. Henry would talk to Haus, having some real down-to-earth-heart-to-hearts. Sometimes, there’d be a scratch behind the ears or a solid pat against the ribs as a show of affection. Haus never jumped on Henry, never climbed on his lap or slept in his bed. But instead had a sort of respect for the man who had saved his life as a young pup. That dog looked around as if he was always ready to spring into action and save his master should the occasion ever arrive. The beast’s tail waged contentedly at every motion, every word, every glance Henry gave him. Then one day, after being part of the Deitz’ family for over fourteen years, Haus fell asleep outside Grace and Henry’s bedroom door and breathed his last.
Grace told Mary she had never seen a man as heartbroken as Henry. He cried openly as he dug a small grave in the yard. He took care to wrap his best friend in his blankets, put every single toy and bone the dog possessed in the hole with him and covered him up. Then he stood there, for all of thirty minutes, just staring down at the mound of fresh dirt, leaning on his shovel.
