“What?”
Reaching for the laptop, Sahara clacked keys. “I’ve been surfing for references to magic on the Web.”
Astrid sank to the bed. “Find any?”
“About what you’d expect. Fake psychics, UFO nuts.”
“Anything about the blue goo?”
“Not yet. But that word you keep using—chantment—I found it in one discussion thread.” She began reading: “‘I have a stickpin that makes people feel happy, but whenever I use it, I have to eat big meals over the next few days. It burns me up like firewood.’”
“Firewood,” Astrid repeated.
“Then another poster, Eldergodz, answers, ‘I’m always hungry and exhausted, I’m losing weight like crazy.’ That leads to a bunch of off-topic stuff about dieting, but after that a third person—Marlowe she calls herself—says she has a bookmark that can answer tough questions.”
“What kind of questions?” Astrid asked. “Does it say?”
“Yeah.” Sahara flipped ahead. “How can my brother keep from losing his house, where did my neighbor’s missing cat get to, what do I tell the IRS when they audit me?…”
“Wish we had that one,” Astrid said.
“Yes, except Marlowe says she was wasting away from helping her friends with their various problems. She was having fainting spells and seizures. She couldn’t eat enough to keep up. It sucked the life right out of her.”
“Makes sense.”
“Happypill—the one who has the magic stickpin—seems to know the most. She’s the one using the word chantment, and she refers once to an ‘angel’ who gave her the pin.”
“Great. Does that mean Dad was getting the chantments from angels?”
“I don’t know,” Sahara said. “Hopefully we’ll find out. This Happypill person seems to think there’s another way to power the chantments.”
“Is that something the angel said?”
“It doesn’t say.” Sahara scowled. “Doesn’t it seem unfair that magic takes energy? Always a catch, huh?”
“It’s why I’m sleeping in,” Astrid said.
“I’d hoped I was so hungry because of Jacks—the crappy food, you know? But it must be my little mermaid.” Brushing on blush and eye shadow, Sahara selected a plum lipstick a shade darker than her own lips, and completed her transformation into a polished job seeker.
“I’ll keep reading the thread,” she said. “Information is power, right?”
“Definitely. The more we know, the better.”
Turning to the mirror again, Sahara nodded in satisfaction and reached for the mermaid.
Astrid caught her hand. “Seizures and fainting fits, remember? Matt will give you the job.”
“It’s not for him. I’m going to sell the gold dust to a jeweler today.”
“But—”
“How else can we launder it here in the boonies?”
Launder, Astrid thought uneasily. A crime word. “You’ll be careful?”
“Soul of discretion, I swear.”
“Don’t you think you’d better check on Ma first?”
“What—make sure I haven’t fried her brain before I do someone else?”
“Exactly.” Astrid searched her friend’s face, to see if she was offended by the insinuation, but Sahara nodded.
“Right. Ev first, then—if she’s okay—the jeweler.”
Astrid hugged her. “Thanks. Tell Ma I’ll call, okay?”
“I’m just keeping busy. Jacks made me swear I’d leave the blue goo alone until after you’re both off work—”
“Work! Dammit, now I’m late.”
“Then get out of here,” Sahara said, smacking Astrid lightly on the backside to send her on her way.
The gardening business, like much of her life, was something she had fallen into. Dad had been a high school dropout too, unemployed and unemployable until he got married. Ev was widely pitied for having saddled herself with him. As soon as she fell pregnant, goodwilled Springers began trying to redeem Albert with job offers.
By the time Astrid was old enough to crawl, her father was tending a handful of lawns and yards around town. He had been little more than an odd-job man at first, a mower and weeder, a clearer of debris. Then he’d discovered a natural flair for landscaping. From cursory gardening for old ladies who couldn’t keep up with their yards, he slowly built up a client base.
Albert’s real break in the direction of legitimacy came when he landed a caretaker’s job for a row of cottages at Great Blue Reservoir. When he began, the sad row of weather-beaten cabins looked half-ready to collapse into the scrubby meadows of long grass and dandelions that surrounded them. Albert slapped a careless layer of paint on the structures and got to work. A few years later they were flower-strewn and verdant. The abundant blooms and greenery gave the cottages an air of noble fatigue.
By then Astrid was sixteen and working for Albert part-time, mowing lawns in town and helping with the gardening. But something was already nibbling at Albert’s marginal success—his mania for antiques had worsened. Junking devoured his time, drawing him farther from town and clients. Astrid raced to keep up with his workload, cutting classes to hang on to jobs. Her B grades dropped to C’s, then shivered on the edge of a real nosedive.
The idea that she had to preserve the business—that Dad would come to his senses one day—kept her going. But then Ma realized Albert had stopped paying Astrid’s wages, and their marriage finally died.
Astrid dropped out of school then, splitting her time between her divided parents and the business. She managed to hang on to most of Dad’s garden contracts, preserving his business for the day he recovered from his compulsive antique collecting. She couldn’t accept the permanence of his change, even when he got himself jailed. Prison will turn him around, she promised herself.
But when he got out, Albert didn’t even try. He got into debt instead, borrowing every cent Astrid could give. When she was tapped out, he’d married Jacks’s mother.
Her father vanished into junking, leaving her his vocation as a warped consolation prize.
Astrid’s first client today was one of the town matriarchs, a woman who had hired Dad in the early years and never ditched him, even in bad times. Leeda Flint had five acres of land just off the highway to Wallowa. Most of that was pasture for her horses. Expensive warmbloods, seven of them: Leeda loved those horses so much, she kept a donkey too, so none of her precious babies would be at the bottom of the equine pecking order. She was sixty-two, and rode every single day.
Her yard was simple, with beds of flowers bordering the property and walkways. The rest was lawn, an expanse of green wide enough to accommodate trench warfare and—thanks to Astrid—meticulously groomed as a golf course.
Astrid unlocked the lawn mower and began working careful circles around the grass, keeping an eye out for weeds or other blemishes and returning to check suspect areas after she mowed. Two precocious dandelions were scouting out the territory near the driveway; Astrid, wielding a long plucking fork, ripped them out by the roots.
As she picked them off the fork and tossed them into a bucket, another Albert memory tickled her consciousness. Vitagua, Astrid thought, stopping short. The blue goo is called vitagua.
She closed her eyes, trying to remember. Her and Dad, here…when?
Nothing.
“Now who’s going nuts?” She fetched some border plants from the truck and knelt at the edge of the flower beds, reaching out to pluck a chickweed that had stretched into the sunlight from its nest underneath the tulips.
As her fingers closed over the stem of the plant, brushing the topsoil, words slid through her mind like oil: chantments, vitagua, the unreal, the Spring.
She placed her hand flat on the ground and a string of memories unspooled:
Dad had been showing her how to weed a stand of foxgloves and dahlias. Working her fingers down to the shaft of the unwelcome plants, tugging to gauge how loose the soil was before the slow progressive pull…
She’d plucked her first dandelion successfully, bringing up the whole root, sprinkling dirt everywhere.
“Let’s take a break,” Dad said, holding out a cupped hand.
Astrid bent, peering into his palm and seeing a drop of vitagua there. She reached for it, but Dad pushed her fingers aside.
“Don’t touch it,” he said. “Not until you’re ready to chant it into something.”
“Is it poison?” she asked, glancing at the foxgloves—she knew they were toxic.
“Sort of. Could make you sick.” Dad tapped his skull.
“Head sick?”
“Worse. You know how, in stories, princes get turned to frogs?”
Shivering, Astrid lifted her hands from the ground so she could rub her forearms. The flow of memory faded. How could she have forgotten?
Magic, of course.
Deliberately this time, she began to garden again, sinking her hands into the soil. The memories were waiting.
“Don’t be afraid,” Dad said. “Vitagua is just like bug spray, campfires, gasoline, or anything dangerous. Nothing to be afraid of, if—”
“If you’re sensible,” Astrid said.
“You got it.” He poured the blue droplet from his palm into a small glass vial, sealing it carefully before handing it over. “I’ll initiate you soon.”
Astrid flipped the vial over, watched the fluid slide around. “What is it?”
“Spirit blood,” he said. “Liquid magic. Vitagua. I used it to make your kaleidoscope.”
“Vitagua,” she said, savoring it. She liked grown-up words—she had a collection of them. Oscillate, idiosyncrasy, germane, ignition, propagate, iridescent…
Dad tucked the vial into his toolkit. “Astrid, this is a big secret, okay? Nobody can know. Not your mother, not your friends…”
“Secrets are bad,” she said, quoting Ma.
“Magic grows best in the shade, Bun. Only way to keep it safe is to hide it from daylight….”
The whinny of a horse broke Astrid’s reverie. She straightened, briefly disoriented as Leeda, grinning cheerily, came up beside her, her white hair loose and wind-tangled.
“Been here long, Astrid? Garden looks beautiful.”
“Um, not long.”
“Come inside,” Leeda said. “You wanted to jaw over what you’re buying from the greenhouse for me, didn’t you?”
She nodded, stunned. Don’t touch the fluid, Dad had said. She and Sahara had splashed it all over themselves.
Princes into frogs…
“I’ve got a check for you too,” Leeda said, offering her a hand up.
Astrid drew away, as if she might infect the older woman by touching her. “I’m dirty,” she said by way of explanation as she scrambled to her feet.
“Hell, girl, I’ve got horse spit all over me.” Crooking a finger, Leeda sauntered back to the house.
Astrid followed, struggling to find a place for this latest piece in the puzzle that was her father’s life.
• Chapter Ten •
“I got away from Leeda as fast as I could,” Astrid tells me. “Even as we talked, I was thinking about my client list, trying to figure out who’d been around longest. To remember, I’d need to work in gardens where Albert and I had been together.”
“You wanted to know more,” I say.
“I had to know more. All I’d learned was that you weren’t supposed to touch vitagua.”
“But Sahara had gotten a pint of it in the face.”
“Exactly. I had to find a way to clean her up.”
“You were exposed too. Weren’t you worried?”
“Not as scared as I was of having my best friend go crazy.”
“You always worry about others first, or just her?”
She hunches over the coffee table and does not answer.
“Don’t you know? Or is it that you don’t want to say?”
“What do you want, Will? I give you one answer, I’m some kind of saint. The other, I’m obsessed with Sahara.”
“Aren’t you?”
She looks down, face sulky. A jumble of containers has been brushed onto one playing card. I see the jar of magical blue fluid and a plastic tub full of gold flakes. There’s a bottle of plant fertilizer too, and tubes of acrylic paint. Water surrounds this stash: tin cans, buckets, teacups, and brimming pots. The picture’s shadows are tinged bloodred.
“Watch this.” She lays out the completed cards in a block and they begin to form a mural in miniature, a series of illustrations that flow into one another. The greater image has a grandness to it; it ought to be enlarged a thousand times, not confined to scraps of paper.
“Jackson Glade is very talented, isn’t he?” I say.
Her tone is sad. “He should’ve left town, gone to art school. Staying in Indigo Springs…”
“Why didn’t he leave? I’d have thought, given his relationship with his father, he’d be dying to get away.”
“He was attached to his friends.”
“His friends? Or one friend in particular?”
“You’re asking if he stayed because of me.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. Are you the reason he never left town?”
“No.” Her tone is certain. “Jacks tried to leave, but stuff kept getting in the way. Colleges losing his applications, funding drying up. Olive got hit by a car one year, and needed him to run her bookstore.”
“Bad luck.”
She grunts. “Finally Jacks struck a deal with his dad. He’d give the Fire Department a try and after a year if he still wanted to paint, the Chief would pay for school.”
“Seems fair.”
“Funny thing was, my dad was always after Jacks to go—spread his wings, he’d say. I think that’s why he gave him the watch, to see if he could save him….”
“Save him from what exactly?” Was Albert Lethewood the sort of father who hates competing for a daughter’s love?
Covering her mouth, Astrid takes a shuddering breath. “Jacks wasn’t bitter. He had his painting, his buddies—”
“And you.”
“No rush, he’d say, the world wasn’t going anywhere, and he’d always come back to the Springs anyway.”
“Didn’t that seem odd?”
“Indigo Springs is home for us both.” Her hands clench. “You can get up and stretch if you want, Will.”
“Pardon?” I realize my neck is sore, that one of my feet is nearly asleep. The furniture is too hard.
I decide to take her up on the suggestion, walking slow circles around the room, swiveling my head to get the kinks out. I half expect her to yank me back to the unreal. But she doesn’t grow fur or sing an aria or even squirt vitagua through the whites of her eyes again.
Instead, she tilts her head, speaking wistfully. “Patience must be in a TV station by now. Holding court.”
“Probably.” Patience’s cult smacks of the sort of devoted fandom celebrities have always garnered. She preaches common sense: Don’t panic about the magic, don’t take everything Sahara says at face value. Along with her overwhelming loveliness, the wisdom and authority with which she speaks makes people take her seriously.
An electronic shriek issues from the foyer.
“That’s for you,” Astrid says. She is watching the latest card—the picture of the containers. Crimson paint flows between the bottles, pooling underneath them.
“I’d forgotten you have a phone.”
“My own personal hotline. Why should Roach come all the way down to my cage for a two-minute conversation?”
I follow the sound to the foyer. I must have seen the phone when I came in, but its normalcy made it invisible.
“Yes?”
“Like the lady says, it’s me,” Roche says. Reminding me, none too subtly, that he’s listening in.
Arthur Roche and I met in college, around the same time I met Caroline; the three of us took a few psychology courses together. For a time we were close; we’d hung out, gone skiing and camping. We’d st
ayed in touch, a little, after he was posted overseas. I’d e-mailed him when he was caught in an explosion in Afghanistan; he’d sent a card when Carson was born.
“We missed Sahara at the highway.” Arthur was always a bit terse, but his hearing was damaged when he was wounded. Ever since, he has spoken in clipped sentences, with precise diction. A hearing aid adequately compensates for what he has lost, but he seems to have a dread of seeming, in any way, disabled. “No idea where she is now.”
He seems to want an answer, so I say, “Astrid said Sahara was headed here.”
“We scared her off. Got one of the followers, though. The one you saw in the car. Burlein.”
“Good.”
“You should tell Astrid we’ve captured Sahara.”
“You must be joking.”
“Give it a try. If she thinks we don’t need her, she’ll be more forthcoming.”
“She’s showing signs of prescience,” I murmur.
“If she laughs it off, blame me and go on with the interview. I want a better sense of her capabilities.”
“She’s capable of hearing my half of this conversation from the living room.”
“She’s in the bathroom,” he says. “Maybe she hasn’t seen that Sahara’s escaped. Maybe she won’t know for a couple days we haven’t captured the little psycho.”
“Maybe she’s known for weeks. I’m not going to lie, Arthur—it’ll alienate her, and she’s finally cooperating.”
“Relax, Will. It’s just a suggestion.” Backpedaling, I think. Good. “We have an advantage; I want to exploit it.”
“What you have is another prisoner. Go exploit her. Don’t ask me to jeopardize the relationship I’m building.”
I wait out a long silence.
“The braincrackers up here say Astrid’s encouraging you to think I’m stupid, Will.”
“Please. Give me a little credit.”
“There’s got to be a reason she’s opening up now.”
“There is—I know what I’m doing.”
“She wants your sympathy.”
“She’s a murderer,” I say—though I am not sure I believe it. We don’t know the whole story yet. “My sympathy is more limited than you think.”
Indigo Springs Page 9
