Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "Well, the old way of dealing with that was to cull the litter of pups, kill off the runts and defectives until the fittest son was the oldest son. Back around Ephraim's time, we went soft. These days, if you are deemed unfit to wear the crown, you disappear. The Dragon rejected me. I fell overboard and was lost at sea."

  Gary stared at a pile of books shoved to one corner of the workbench. "Dad wrote about that. Crazy stuff, myths or songs or science fiction. People don't change into seals."

  "Believe it, boy. Polish up your Latin and check some of the older journals. I failed, and Dan passed. That meant he got to be the big cheese. The Morgan."

  "Is that what happened between you and Mom? You had to 'die' and leave her?"

  Damn. Ben had thought he'd hidden how he felt about Maria, and he'd hoped the kid was too young to know how tightly linked love and hate could be. "Close enough. And if you mention anything about this to your mother, I'll strangle you."

  The boy nodded.

  Close enough, Ben thought. Only thing was, son, you got the sequence reversed. I was already 'dead' when I met your mother, so I couldn't marry her whether I wanted to or not. The man she thought she loved didn't exist.

  Chapter Ten

  Alice was playing her Piaf CDs again. That was a bad sign. Kate glanced down from her scaffolding on the highest gable of the old house. Alice was just standing there, a foreshortened figure in an oversized man's dress shirt and faded jeans, staring glumly at a stunted juniper in a stoneware pot. Kate shook her head and went back to chipping dead mortar off the chimney stones.

  You could judge Alice's mood by the music she chose. Loreena McKennitt and Tori Amos helped settle her mind for witching; J. S. Bach at the keyboard meant she was trying to disconnect from a long day in the ER; Cream or Hendrix were for manic laughter and cartwheels across the lawn. She had a sound system Jackie would kill for, speakers about the size of a small truck and an amplifier that required the electric co-op to kick in a standby generator. Crank up the volume and she could shatter windows clear across the bay.

  When Alice pulled out the Little Sparrow and started whispering to herself in French, Kate knew she was seriously depressed. This morning she was repotting a bonsai to the background of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" — about as bad as it could get.

  Kate picked up a stone, checked the number she'd scrawled in pencil on the backside when she'd chiseled it loose from the chimney, and verified the location on her detail photo. This job was finicky, historic preservation, putting each piece back where she'd found it. When she finished rebuilding the chimney, she intended it to look exactly the same as when Abigail Haskell first set the stones over two hundred years ago.

  Same materials, too. The lime mortar had a consistency all its own, greasier than Portland cement. Kate set the stone, worked it into its bed, and tapped it down with the heel of her trowel to drive out any air and seal the bond. She checked against the photo again, gauging the mortar line and fit against the adjacent stones. This chimney was going to be here for a while; she might as well take the time to get it right.

  She paused for a moment, resting the ache in her left arm, and gazed out at the bay. Pretty as hell. Deceptive as hell. Just this morning, it had swallowed Maria Morgan and spat back a drowned corpse. No mystery hung over that one — suicide. Kate shook her head and turned back to studying stonework.

  Maine winters took their toll. Water trickled into any crack, even soaked into the face of the rock if you made the mistake of using sandstone. Water crept in wherever it could, froze and thawed, split the bond of the mortar joints or the rock itself, levered chunks out of the chimney, set them teetering loose for wind or gravity to snatch and dump down through the attic into your lap while you sat eating supper. Kate tooled the joint to drain, to shed water, guide it down to the lead flashing and onto the slates of the steep roof.

  She flexed her arm again, measuring the pain against remembered hurts. It barely made the scale. The mental pain, though, that ranked up next to the crash, or falling off a roof.

  Jackie. Motherhood. Where the hell did I go wrong?

  Kate shook her head. She didn't want to think about that. Sure didn't want to talk about it. Back to stone — she understood stone. Two more to go. These were the long capstones, the full width of the sides and at least a hundred pounds each, flat tops and dished bottoms to settle in with a locking wedge that the sea wind couldn't nibble loose. Glacial rocks these were, gray chunks of the Canadian Shield hauled down to the Maine coast during the last ice age.

  Kate muscled each into its own bed, making sure she relied on gravity to hold the masonry rather than the glue of the mortar. Mortar only sealed the work. The stone had to stand on its own, or time would tear it down.

  She finished the chimney with a mortar wash across the top, thick enough to hold together and beveled to shed water so it couldn't pool and seek the cracks that would form with summer sun and winter ice. Lime mortar healed itself that way, water leaching lime from each side to flow and seal the cracks, just like building stalactites in a cave. She'd mixed the mortar for the top courses a little rich for that reason, an extra measure of the burned seashell powder slaked with water from the cellar spring.

  Kate stepped back to the edge of her scaffolding, tilted her head, and compared the chimney with her photos. She climbed around, carefully, all four sides — identical to the pictures. Only then did she allow herself to sit, and think, and admire the view.

  The house sat in the heart of Stonefort, the focus of the rounded hills and ever-changing bay. Alice nattered on about feng shui; Kate saw it more as organic growth. The house, the deep indigo of the bay with whitecaps showing in the morning breeze, the fresh spring greens of the hills — there was no way they could be other than they were. God had built the house when She sculpted the land.

  Every time Kate worked on this house, it tried to seduce her. Each project was a lesson, each part was the way it had to be. It wouldn't permit her to make a mistake, use a wrong technique or material.

  So much for mysticism. Kate shrugged, loaded her tools into a white plastic bucket, checked the knot on the rope, and lowered them to the ground. The leftover mortar followed in another bucket. Cleanup time. Once again, she flexed her left arm, judging the constant ache against her memory. She hadn't stressed the stitches.

  She backed her way slowly down the ladder, checking slates and flashing as she went. Keep an eye on a slate roof and it would last forever.

  Down in the side yard, Alice was still torturing her bonsai, still listening to Piaf's whiskey-voiced ballads about faded love and the Paris street-people. Kate walked the ladder away from the eave and laid it down carefully. "Okay, Lys, that's done. I'll leave the scaffolding up until I come back for the acid wash. Give the mortar a chance to cure for a couple of weeks before I clean off the slop. Good weather for it, cool and damp."

  Her only answer was a grunt. She glanced over at Alice, saw the small woman studying bare roots and snipping here, snipping there. A redwood box waited, lined with green copper, half filled with dirt and surrounded by selected rocks and clumps of moss. Alice was building a new setting for a tiny tree older than she was — some of her bonsai were well past the century mark.

  Kate shook her head, concentrating on rinsing the last traces of mortar from her trowels and pointing tools. She glanced up at Alice. "You know, watching you do that gives me the willies. I see you persecuting those poor plants and wonder how they ever trusted you with a nursing license."

  "Huh?"

  "For a healer, you sure can be sadistic."

  Alice shrugged and brushed potting soil from her hands, the job done. "That's part of medicine. Sticking needles in people, forcing them to strip naked in front of strangers, feeding them measured doses of poison — you don't want to even think about tracheotomies."

  Kate went back to washing tools and buckets. She thinned the leftover mortar into a soup of lime and sand, then dumped it on a patch of garden dirt that Alice had said
was too acid. Everything worked together. Too bad the rest of the town couldn't say the same.

  "I'm just glad you didn't try pruning my roots to keep me small. You're like that Procrustes guy in Greek myth, cut people's legs down until they fit his bed. No thanks."

  Alice shrugged off Kate's attempt at a joke. "Speaking of cuts, you going to let me take another look at that arm?" She rinsed her hands with the hose, then shut off the water. Kate grimaced and rolled up her left sleeve, revealing white gauze from just above her wrist to just below the elbow.

  "Some people have enough sense to rest a day-old wound." Alice picked up the same surgical tools she'd just been using to snip juniper roots and delicately cut the bandage off Kate's arm. Peeling back the gauze revealed a slash about four inches long, neatly stitched, with the yellow of iodine mixing into the bruising of trauma. One stitch showed the red of fresh bleeding, but Alice nodded faint satisfaction.

  "You'll live." She rinsed and dried her hands again, pulled a pack of sterile gloves out of her bag, and rolled them on through the peculiar gymnastics that never touched the outside surface with unclean fingers. Deft hands patted fresh antiseptic along the wound, ripped open sterile pads, and wrapped a new bandage into place. "You check your shot records like a good girl?"

  "Yeah, tetanus booster just last year. The knife was clean, anyway."

  "Ain't no such animal," said the nurse who had just been using her EMT bandage scissors for garden work. "Still wish you'd taken that to the ER or walk-in clinic rather than bringing it to me. Get me in trouble, playing doctor without the proper sheepskin."

  "You know they've got rules about knife and gunshot wounds. I'd just as soon not write this up."

  "Well, she's your daughter. Just remember, my malpractice insurance doesn't cover this."

  The CD player swung a new round of French melancholy into position and started playing. Kate wrinkled her nose. "Hey, what's bugging you, anyway? Whole damn morning, you've been looking like a candidate for a suicide watch."

  Alice tossed used bandages and gloves into her burn pile. "Look, I've had four patients die on me in the last week, and your daughter tries to gut you with a switchblade. I think I've got a right to be depressed!"

  "I told you, she wasn't trying to hurt me. I just got careless taking the knife away from her."

  "Bull. Kid carries a switchblade in her backpack, I'd question her motivation. You ready to talk about it?"

  "No." Kate didn't want to even think about it, but the Haskell Witch had special rights.

  "Okay, maybe." Kate shook her head and settled her bulk into a garden bench. The bench complained, and then didn't even notice when Alice perched lightly on the other end.

  "She's taking English again, summer school, making up that failed class. She still isn't working at it. She said something, I said something, we started yelling at each other. You know."

  Alice made a non-committal noise, nodding for her to go on.

  "I grabbed her backpack from where she'd dumped it, going to pull her books out and wave them at her, throw them at her, something. I dunno. She screamed at me, snatched it back, next thing I knew she had this knife in her hand. After I'd gotten it away from her and broke the blade off, she noticed the blood and turned white as a sheet. She didn't mean to do it."

  "Yeah. And Dixie didn't mean to kill that chipmunk she left on my pillow this morning. Just sorta happened. You seen the kid since?"

  "No. I think she skedaddled over to Lew's, looking for a bomb shelter. Another day or so, I might not bust her head before I say 'Hello.' Yesterday, I was too pissed to even call and check on her."

  "Quick question: Did she take the backpack with her?"

  "Yeah."

  "Shame. I'd like to sneak a look inside. I've got a nasty suspicion that knife wasn't all she wanted to hide from you."

  Kate closed her eyes and sighed, sagging against the bench. "I try to avoid thinking about that. You're probably right."

  "You want the name of a good treatment center or a shrink?"

  "Can't afford it." Kate slammed her left fist on her leg, then groaned as the pain slashed up from her forearm. "Dammit, Lys, it's all my fault, anyway. Lew got fired for showing up drunk at work, we got divorced, I spent ten, fifteen hours a day working to meet payments on the trailer and keep us fed. Never had any time for her. If I'd moved in here like you offered, she wouldn't have had a ghost for a mommy."

  "Bull. That kid tried to kill you before she was born. Been a downhill slide ever since."

  Kate trembled on the edge of losing it. She'd been holding it in, being strong. She'd played that role for too many years to give it up and throw hysterics. "Lys, what am I going to do?"

  Alice made a face. "Change the locks on your doors and send a note to Juvenile."

  "Can't do it. You've never been a mother."

  "Don't think I missed much, judging by what I see around town. Cancel that. Caroline always was a good kid."

  Caroline was Alice's niece, twenty, likely the smartest kid ever graduated from Stonefort schools, and the next designated Haskell Witch. The contrast with Jackie couldn't be worse. Kate grabbed hold of her emotions with both hands. If she didn't change the subject damned fast, she was going to be all over the place and Alice would have another patient for the funny farm.

  "Hey, patients . . . you said you'd lost four patients this week. What gives? I haven't heard anything."

  "Charlie Sickles and his family. Maria Morgan."

  Kate grimaced, reminded of Charlie. She was going to miss the old fart. Not that he'd ever earned his pay, but he'd been so real. He'd been an anchor and a touchstone, reminding her that Larry Beech and his type were empty shells. Charlie was Sunrise County. Or had been.

  "Patients? Every single one of them was dead before you pulled up in the meat wagon! Saw the M.E. report on Charlie and the others yesterday, straightforward, natural causes. Maria went and drowned herself, jumped off that damned point at high tide in her nightgown. You gonna take the blame for that?"

  "I knew people were going to die, Kate. I tried to protect them. I tried to protect you. It didn't work."

  And suddenly tears glistened on Alice's cheek. Kate felt like the earth had cracked open at her feet — Alice was invincible; she had a core of case-hardened steel. She couldn't cry.

  "How the hell can you protect a three-pack-a-day smoker from dying of emphysema? And God appointed you guardian to a whacked-out Italian widow who wanted to join her husband in the Big Sleep?"

  Alice shook her head. "Maria wasn't a widow, and she knew it. She had no reason to kill herself. There's evil walking around this village, Kate. I feel it, but I can't see it. I'm trying to fight it, and I'm losing. People are dying!"

  Kate made a soothing mommy-gesture, and suddenly Alice was in her arms, in her lap, just like Jackie at age seven with a skinned knee, crying on her shoulder. Alice was still small enough to fit. Kate smoothed her friend's hair, rubbed the back of her neck, made soothing noises, hugged her. That's what mothers did.

  The sobs stretched on, softened, quieted to a slow murmur — Alice whispering something she didn't want the world to hear. Kate felt the tears soaking hot through her work shirt. She bent down and kissed her friend on the top of her head, just like she was a child. Alice's hair smelled like fresh hay with a touch of lilac.

  Kate kissed her again, on the ear, and then on the side of her neck against the pulse. Suddenly, she was very aware that the body pressed against her was no child and it had been a long time since she'd shared a bed with anyone. Alice lifted her head from Kate's shoulder, inched back far enough to study her friend's eyes, and blinked.

  "You serious?"

  Kate paused for a moment, then answered by pulling Alice into a long kiss that melted the pain out of her arm. Damn, she tasted good. Twenty years of caution vanished downwind. Small hands roved over Kate's body, gentle but insistent. She trapped one and pressed it against herself.

  A timer started beeping from the kitchen window
. Kate winced at the sound, then remembered Alice setting it before she started work on the bonsai. The small woman pulled back, cussed, and then wrapped her arms around Kate even more fiercely than before.

  The beeping rose about ten decibels in level, and Alice broke their clench. She climbed down from Kate's lap, breathing hard, her dusky face flushed.

  "If I was even five years younger, I'd toss that damned thing in the bay, haul you inside, and lock the doors. I must be getting old." She elevated both her middle fingers to the sky in a gesture of defiance.

  "You know, sometimes I think God really does hate queers. I finally reach the moment I've been dreaming of for twenty years, and I've got a client due in ten minutes. Can I take a rain-check on this?"

  Kate couldn't trust herself to speak. She nodded, reluctantly, smoothing down her hair and catching up on oxygen. She'd better leave: Whether or not she believed in witchcraft, they sure as hell didn't need an audience.

  At least she didn't have to worry about lipstick on her collar. Neither of them ever used the stuff. She checked to make sure all her clothing was in place. She filled the plastic buckets with her tools, took two steps toward her truck, and turned back. Alice was standing in the door, a brown waif with smoldering eyes. Somehow her shirt had come undone, and the bra under it.

  "C'est l'amour," Kate quoted, from the Piaf album still playing.

  "Tell me about it."

  "Don't let me go back to being stupid, okay?"

  "Not a chance."

  Kate concentrated on turning off the fire under her boiling hormones. She loaded her tools in the back of the truck. Climbing into the cab, she ran her fingers through her short hair again, and checked the mirror for any traces of passion other than her flushed cheeks. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, taking a long drag and savoring the smoke. Did that tradition hold for lesbians, too, a cigarette after sex?