Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

Caroline watched as her aunt added a dash of this and a smidgen of that, each time referencing a line in the old book. The end result looked like pond slime and smelled about as bad. Alice glared at the mug, shuddered, and tossed it down in one long swallow. Then she rinsed out her mouth with straight whiskey and spat the results in the sink. Lab balance, jars, and book went back into the cabinet. Alice locked the door and pocketed the key.

  She stepped over to the china/junk cabinet built into one corner and took out a chunk of deep green crystal, trigonal gem-grade tourmaline almost the size of a football that had been in the family since the end of the last ice age. She set it on the kitchen table, sat down in front of it, and blinked. "Remember, take notes. Ask questions. Odds are, I won't remember half of what I see. And if anything happens, wake up the girls and head that car back to Canada."

  Caroline nodded.

  She waited. She waited some more. Fifteen minutes ticked by on the wall clock, sliced into seconds by the pendulum. Twenty. Alice grunted and shook her head, lost in the depths of the crystal. Caroline chewed on her pencil and fidgeted.

  "Anything happening?"

  "What?" Her aunt just stared into the green stone.

  "You're supposed to be Seeing. Looking for the Pratts' brujo. That Peruvian spook Ben told you about."

  "Brujo. Spanish noun, masculine gender. Sorcerer, magician, wizard."

  "Don't bother with the definition; I've got a perfectly good Spanish-English dictionary. You're supposed to be looking for the man, not the flaming word!"

  "He's with Kate."

  "Huh?"

  "I can't see his face. He's smallish, well-dressed, Latino or Native, but I can't see his face. Fog."

  "Where is he? What are they doing?"

  "Kate's trailer. At the door. Kissing goodbye."

  "Look at his face. Describe it."

  "Fog. Nothing but fog."

  Tears streaked Alice's face, and her eyes were closed. She sagged back in the chair, asleep. Caroline picked her up like a child and carried her featherweight aunt upstairs to bed.

  Cool it with a baboon's blood, then the charm is firm and good. Well, that gave us the square root of minus one. Does that mean this Peruvian is stronger than we are?

  She stared down at her sleeping aunt. Great. Now I've got to stay awake. She stretched, unkinking her shoulders again. How much coffee is in that pot?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kate crawled out from under the truck and stowed the ratchet drive and sockets in her toolbox, leaving everything tightened down after the final DC smoke test. She stretched the crinks out of her shoulders and glanced at her hands with a wry smile, counting new scars in the making — not a Jergen's ad, by any means, blackened nails, missing fingertip and all. This had been a two-knuckle job, replacing the battery and the starter.

  She shook her head as she stepped back inside the trailer to wash up. Those replacements had not been in her budget. The starter was a junkyard special, pulled off a wrecked truck of the approximate year and tested good, but she couldn't dodge the cost of a new battery. Damned truck had to start, February cold or not.

  The soap stung her scraped knuckles, and she cataloged the damage. Right thumb was the old bolt twisting off, whacking a knuckle into the rear engine mount. The one on the left was the sharp lip of the oil pan nibbling away while she tried to hold the replacement starter with one hand and align the bolts with the other.

  Scars on top of scars on top of scars. That was the story of her life. Some of them were physical — like her hands, and her belly from the emergency C-section. Others were mental, like Alice on top of Jackie on top of Lew Lewis falling off the wagon. Again. Gossip said Caroline Haskell was suddenly back in town, proving that Alice was there but not answering messages. So Kate had made a damned fool of herself. Again.

  Then there was that other thing gossip reported. If Kate went over to talk to Alice, smooth things out face to face, her Town Constable hat might have to officially notice the two orphan minors living with a woman who was not their relative. The DHS frowned on stuff like that. Adoptions and fosterings were supposed to be formal and blessed by tons of Official State of Maine paper — not a traditional specialty of the Haskell House. So far, nobody had asked embarrassing questions.

  Well, Alice Haskell could go screw herself. The whole lesbian thing had been her idea in the first place. Antonio, now, he looked intriguing. Smooth, well-mannered and gallant and darkly handsome, even if he did come well short of her shoulders. She hadn't finished up her plan to drink Jackie down the drain. The rest of that night had been kind of vague, though. She'd never met a man with that kind of charisma before. When you focused on him, the rest of the world got blurry.

  Come right down to it, he could be as potent a drug as the bourbon he'd replaced. No aftereffects, though. That had helped considerably when she'd had to take a sledgehammer to some stone patio walls over at Larry Beech's place the next day — not a job you wanted to tackle with a hangover already banging away on your head.

  He'd said to call him Tony. That seemed out of character to Kate, as if Louis XIV had asked her to call him Lew. Antonio Estevan Francisco Juan Carlos da Silva y Gomes was a born aristocrat. His family probably had a silver coat of arms tucked away somewhere on the wall of a castle in Spain.

  She dried her abused hands and headed back out the door. Work called, and she had to earn that battery back. She climbed up into the truck, ducking and shoehorning herself into a space meant for someone six inches shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter. The starter just whined at her, as its recycled pinion gear found nothing to crank. Easing the brake with clutch engaged rolled the truck forward a foot or two, and the starter locked into the few teeth left on that stripped ring gear that she didn't have to replace. Yet.

  She contemplated the cost of junkyard flywheels and where she could steal the day or so necessary to pull the engine. Really should replace the clutch, pressure plate, and throw-out bearing at the same time, though. Those would have to be new parts. That exercise in fiscal folly carried her across past Morgan's Point and out into the realm of Philadelphia lawyers who didn't know or care how much a new starter for a Mercedes Benz might cost. Of course, Larry Beech didn't keep a car long enough to need a new starter.

  Alice might have a ton of money, but she sure didn't make it obvious that way. Her Subaru had more than 200,000 miles on it, rusted fenders you could throw a cat through, and foam rubber leaking out of the upholstery. When a Haskell threw something out, you knew it was junk. Not like Larry Beech, replacing a hot tub because the whirlpool pipes needed a dose of Drano. Not like Jackie, who wanted to dump their old computer because "that hunk of junk" couldn't handle downloading music files.

  The road blurred in front of Kate, and she pulled over to the shoulder. Jackie. Why couldn't the little twit have waited another year or two? Didn't she have enough of an example staring her in the face, her mother living from hand to mouth because she'd dropped out of high school and run away from home when she was seventeen? Kate had come home from that state championship game, punched out her stepfather for razzing the coach, and left. Then she'd had to get a job down at the cannery, and never graduated.

  Alice's sardonic voice echoed in Kate's ears: "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." It'd been meant to describe politics and nations, but it damn sure could be applied to individuals.

  Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, the voice in her head keened. Still no word. Kate couldn't put out a Missing Person on the twit, official, not with the gun and the money missing. All she could do is ask around, friends and cops and kids she knew, and nobody who knew anything was willing to talk.

  She slammed her fist into the dashboard. The truck lurched with the impact, and she rubbed her thrice-abused knuckles as she counted the dents in the cracked vinyl padding. There hadn't been anywhere near that many before she'd found her daughter's note. She fumbled for a cigarette and her old lighter, retreating into smoke as an excuse for smart
ing eyes.

  Alice would stare into that lump of tourmaline of hers and claim to nail Jackie's young butt down to within a yard, sure as hell. Probably toss in some sidelights on just how many cornflakes the kid had poured into the bowl that morning and whether she'd changed her underwear. But Alice wasn't returning calls, and one thing Kate shared with Jackie and a long line that allegedly traced back to Plymouth Rock: the Rowleys had a well-deserved reputation for stiff necks. The next move was up to Alice.

  Stiff-necked, yeah. The only way Alice got you to take that computer was replacing it and pretending she was going to throw the old one on the dump. Damnfool woman offered to buy you a truck about five or twenty times, said it'd be an "investment."

  Lay it out in black and white like that, it looked like a bribe, almost prostitution. "Sleep with me and live like a rich woman." But Alice wasn't like that, at all. She was just too used to having enough money. It changed the way you saw the world.

  Kate stared at the smoke rising from her cigarette. It went up straight, not jiggling back and forth. Her hands had calmed down enough to find a gear. She wiped her eyes and pulled back out on the road, switch-backing her way up to Larry Beech's place.

  Jeff's mountain bike leaned against one of the garage doors. So her "crew" was here already. He'd bought the high-end bike used, well-tended, and it made a hell of a lot more sense than any car the kid could have afforded. Just keep his toolbox on the truck as well as hers. He was starting to use his brain instead of frying it with chemicals. Another year and she could kick him out of the nest, ready to fly free.

  Why hadn't it worked with Jackie? Mother-daughter thing, instead of mother-son? Would father-daughter have worked out better? Might the little twit have made it if Lew hadn't kept diving through the neck of a bottle?

  Her sometime-punk assistant sauntered around the corner of the garage, swigging a bottle of soda. His tee-shirt-of-the-day was flat black, red-lettered editorial proclaiming "Death: Enjoy the Ride." Maybe that was a music group.

  And then she remembered that Charlie wasn't going to gimp around the corner after him. Damn. She'd never realized how much she'd counted on him. And now he was dead. Damn, damn, damn.

  She'd woken up last night, black thoughts in the hour of the wolf, and wondered just what she'd done to piss God off. Alice. Jackie. Charlie. Isolation.

  She grabbed hold of herself and put her "boss face" on. "Jeffy-boy?"

  "Yo!"

  "You get those flagstones set like I told you, over on the side patio?"

  "Yes'm, boss-lady. Want to check it out?"

  "Take your word for it. That's done, then we'd best get the new tub leveled and nailed down, ready for Perly to hook it up. He told me he can come out tomorrow."

  Kate grabbed her four-foot level from the gun rack of the cab, Jeff hoisted his toolbox and work belt out of the truck bed, and they both headed around to the south deck. Mr. Philadelphia Lawyer Beech had decided the view was better there and thought nothing of dumping ten grand for the change. Now he and his trophy wife could bask in the afternoon sun rather than greeting the sunrise with a hot, relaxing soak and a little cuddle in the clean sea breeze. The rich are different from you and me.

  Except for Alice — she wasn't.

  The new tub was set flush into the deck, six feet deep and damn near big enough for swimming laps. Jeff crawled under the redwood deck and fitted a wrench to one jackscrew. Kate squinted at the bubble of her level. "Up a turn or two." The bubble shifted. "Up two more." It shifted again. "Got it."

  She heard him setting the lock nuts and whacking the strut a couple of times to make sure the jackscrew base was firmly bedded. Good kid, paid attention to details. Then she heard scuffles and muttered cussing as he started worming his way around to the second strut, dodging the boulders under the deck that had dictated just exactly where the tub could go. Jeff was down there because he was the designated gopher, yes, but Kate wouldn't have fit anyway. Sometimes, scrawny was an advantage. She shifted her level to another side of the tub.

  "Hey, Jeffy-boy. You hear anything about Jackie?"

  Silence. Then he started crawling again, without answering.

  "Jeff?"

  He stopped again. "Miz Rowley, you promised."

  When she'd hired him, he'd been worried about her being a cop. There'd been a long talk, both of them sitting out on rocks and staring in different directions down the bay, and she'd finally agreed that she could be two people. The contractor wouldn't ask questions, and the cop wouldn't do construction. As far as either the contractor or the cop knew, he'd been straight since then. But she wasn't supposed to ask.

  "Jeff?"

  "Yo."

  "I'm her mother, Jeff," she went on, softly. "This isn't cop stuff."

  Silence reigned for a minute or two, and then she heard the clinking of his wrench on the second jackscrew. "Down half a turn." The bubble shifted.

  His voice filtered up through the redwood decking: "Pratts."

  She swallowed. Suspicion confirmed. "Down another half." The bubble shifted again, a bit past level. "Back a quarter." The bubble jiggled to dead center. "On."

  He set the lock nuts and tested the bearing, again, then squirmed on to another support. Damned tub was big enough, it had three a side, and they all had to be set firm or the fiberglass would break when you loaded it with a few tons of water. She kept an eye on the bubble, but Jeff seemed to have a deft touch with the wrench. He set up jackscrew after jackscrew, and the level barely quivered.

  "What's she doing, Jeff?"

  She could hear him puffing as he crawled around the far corner, but he didn't answer. Kate moved the level again. The bubble stayed centered.

  "I need to know, Jeff."

  "Miz Rowley, I want to keep working for you."

  Kate blinked. "Jeffrey Burns, I ain't the kind of boss to fire a good worker because he tells me something I don't want to hear. Not long as it's true."

  He set one jack and moved on to the last. She heard the scratch of the threads as he turned it down, and then the slight hum of the rod as it took load. She didn't even bother to look at the level; Jeff was tuning those jackscrews like a fiddle.

  The sound stopped. Then she heard a quiet shuffle, as if he was rolling over on his back and looking up through the slats of the deck. "Miz Rowley, I haven't had anything to do with the Pratts since you busted me. I'm done with that. But back when I was doing stuff, I didn't need to worry about where to get it. Just ask Jackie. She never carried stuff, she never sold it. But she always knew where I could get it. I ain't the only one she told." Then she heard the wrench again, tightening the lock nuts.

  Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Worse than an addict, worse than a street pusher — Jackie was a frigging dope dispatcher. The girl's voice echoed in her mind, heavy with scorn: "Users are losers." I've raised a frigging vampire.

  She stood up, fumbling a cigarette out of the pack in her shirt pocket. Her eyes were burning again. "You get done down there, come back up and trim out the lip of the tub. Use the table saw and rip the stock you need out of the scrap decking we pulled up. Try to keep all the fresh edges hidden — that way the wood'll match." She lit her cigarette and wandered off, half blind to the world, shaking her head. Jackie, Jackie, Jackie. Where the hell did I go wrong?

  Complications Jeff didn't know, stuff that hadn't hit the papers yet, might not even be on the streets. Bernie the Narc had called, professional courtesy, they'd had a tip . . .

  If the little twit had been at the Pratts' when last night's raid went down, why hadn't Kate heard by now? Should have been a phone call from the jail, hours ago. Should have been something. She paced out to the driveway, turned back onto a flagstone walkway, lit another cigarette, and paced some more.

  A muttering came over the salt breeze, breaking into her thoughts as it grew deeper and louder. Harley, she thought, out on the point road. You can tell one of those hogs five miles away. The rider downshifted for a curve, and then again. The rumble faded
and then grew again, swelling up through the spruces. She dropped the butt end of her smoke and ground it out on the flagstones, shredding the paper and tobacco until they disappeared. Couldn't do that with filters, but she'd always figured that if she was going to take a shot of poison, she'd take it straight.

  A Harley, coming up the driveway — that would be her favorite undercover ex-state-trooper. Maybe Bernie had word on Jackie and had brought it in person, to soften the blow. Scars on top of scars on top of scars.

  He pulled up about six feet away and studied her with a peculiar expression on his face, the big V-twin thumping away. Then he busied himself with shutting down his hog and leaning it over on its stand.

  He stepped off and straightened up, staring out over the trees. "What am I going to do with you, Rowley?"

  Kate gritted her teeth, wondering what the hell was so bad that he was avoiding her eyes. Had some damn fool started shooting? Nothing on the cop radio, no ambulance calls . . .

  Hot metal ticked between them, cooling, like the motorcycle was a time bomb. Finally, he shook his head. "You're not stupid enough to do it."

  "Huh?" Brilliant repartee, but she didn't have a clue what he meant.

  "You're not stupid, and I don't think you're a crooked cop. If I did, I'd be talking to Her Royal Highness instead of you."

  Bernie didn't think much of the Sunrise County District Attorney. The woman had bungled a couple of important cases, year or so of good work trashed and two real hard-asses back working the streets.

  Kate decided to just dig out the splinter. It hurt less in the long run. "She's not really a bad kid, Bernie. Maybe getting busted will straighten her out. It worked for Jeff. What's the bail?"

  "Bail?" He snorted and shook his head again. "Ain't nobody going bail, Rowley. That's why I'm here."

  Kate blinked. "Didn't you guys get the warrant?"

  "Oh, yeah, no problem with the warrant." He spread his hands. "A kilo of pure heroin is pretty solid 'probable cause.' And we tied the car in with somebody visiting at the Pratts, so's we were golden. The boys went in last night, just as planned."