by Tegan Maher
“I don’t even know for sure how many properties she manages,” he said. “It was so late that I couldn’t reach anybody at her office.”
“Then get some rest,” I said, tucking my news away for later. Right now, he needed sleep more than he needed something else on his mind. Tomorrow would be another day. “The night’s almost gone already, and there’s nothin’ else you can do now, anyway. Worryin’ won’t solve anything.”
“True,” he said, giving me a kiss before he rolled over. “Night.”
“Night,” I replied, and snuggled in next to him.
I was in that soft place between sleep and awake where dreams and reality merge. My mind drifted, and I found myself in the woods between the back pasture and the lake. The unicorn strode beside me as the sun dappled through the leaves, making fluttering patterns on the ground and turning his long mane to gold where it touched it.
“Hey, boy,” I said, putting my hand on his muscular neck. “Here you are again, huh? You know unicorns aren’t real, right?”
“Of course they’re real,” a familiar voice said. I jumped and turned to find my father walking on the other side of me. “Or at least as real as I am.”
That irritated me because I hated riddles. “What does that even mean? I’m asleep, and you weren’t magic. And you left us, so no offense, but I’d appreciate it if you stopped popping into my dreams. I don’t know why my subconscious is summoning you, but I wish it would stop.”
His lips curved up in a small smile. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“Damn straight, you do,” I said, the calm of the idyllic scene fleeing. Now I was just mad.
“Listen, Noelle,” he said, his voice taking on an urgent edge. “I don’t know how long I have here, so I need to say what I came here to say. You need to watch out for your sister and Raeann. Beth, too. The council didn’t get everybody and neither did Shelby and her crew at the Academy. There’s something brewing, and this time I don’t think I’ll be able to help. You’ll see them coming. At least I gave you that.”
“What do you mean? Who?” I snapped. The unicorn became antsy, dancing and snorting, and slammed into me with his shoulder. The semi-darkness that precedes a storm settled over us as the sun disappeared behind a bank of roiling clouds. Goosebumps popped up on my arms as the temperature dropped and lightning crashed across the sky. The wind whipped raindrops into my face so hard that they felt like shards of glass, and by the time I caught my balance and shoved my wet hair from my face, my father was gone.
“Noelle!” Hunter’s voice cut through the storm and woke me up.
“Yeah,” I said, breathless. “I’m okay.” I swallowed and willed my heart to slow.
“It was just a dream,” he said, putting his arm around me and pulling me close. “You’re all right. I’m here.”
The residual anxiety left behind from the dream or vision or whatever it was dissipated, and after a few moments, I sank into him.
“Wanna talk about it?” he asked against my hair.
I shook my head. “Not really. It doesn’t make any sense anyway.” That much was true. I needed time to think, and I needed to talk to Camille and Shelby, but that was gonna have to wait ’til morning, too. I was too exhausted to deal with dreams about unicorns and dead parents and witches who wanted to kill me. As much as I hated Gone With The Wind, I was going to take a page from Scarlett’s book. Tomorrow was another day.
Chapter 8
I’d set my alarm for eight, figuring that would give me an hour to get caffeinated and presentable before Anna Mae showed up, but when my alarm went off, I couldn’t help but punch the snooze button.
“No way, sleepyhead,” Hunter said, rolling over and pushing to a sitting position. “I want to shut it off as badly as you do, but we have stuff to do today.”
I burrowed deeper into the covers. “I don’t want to. I’m going to cancel with Anna Mae. It doesn’t feel right to go to sales when a woman was murdered.”
“Why?” he asked, tugging at the quilt. “Will she be any less dead if you stay home? Go do your thing. I’ll be dealing with mostly paperwork for the first few hours anyway. I have to look up numbers and find out who owns the buildings she manages, check her financials, and go to her house to see if there are any clues. I don’t even know if she has any relatives. Nobody knew last night, and she didn’t have an emergency contact listed anywhere. Go.”
He swatted me on my blanket-covered rump, and I growled. I was awake, though, so I scooted to the edge of the bed and sat up.
“What?” I said when I caught him trying to contain a smile.
“Nothin’,” he said. “I’ve been on this planet long enough to know never to tell a woman she looks like a cute little raccoon.”
I scowled at him and scratched my arm, but I knew he was probably right. I hadn’t taken my makeup off before I’d gone to bed, and I was an ugly sleeper. He was no doubt being generous in his assessment. I slid off the bed and padded to the bathroom, raising a brow when I saw the sea hag in the mirror staring back at me. Yeah, he’d been being generous.
“You’re off the hook because you threw in the cute part,” I said, summoning a smile. “And because you have to investigate a shady dead lady. Just don’t expect such latitude in the future.”
He wrapped his arms around me from behind and gave me a quick kiss on the neck. “Noted. Have a good day, and if either of you thinks of anything that might help, or if you hear anything, let me know.”
I shuffled toward the stairs so he could get ready, noting that Raeann’s door was still closed. Since she so rarely slept in, I decided to leave her to it. Levana was opening, so Rae didn’t have anywhere to be, and there was no reason for all of us to stumble sleep-deprived through the day.
It was my morning to feed the horses, so I made a latte and poured it into my to-go cup and stumbled to the barn to get the chores over with. As always, Mayhem, a horse who lived up to his name, was full of himself, bobbing his head over his stall and rattling his feed bucket as soon as he saw me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I called to him, smiling. I stopped to scratch my mare, Missy, on the nose on my way past her stall, and she nibbled at my hair. “Aww, I’m glad to see you, too, beautiful, but I don’t have time to play today.”
I took a slug of coffee and caught a flash of light from the corner of my eye coming from the direction of the opposite end of the barn. When I turned to see what it was, I almost dropped my cup. For the briefest moment, Bella, a quarter horse so light-grey she looked white, had a long, alabaster horn. I blinked hard, and the horn disappeared, and all that remained were the dust motes drifting through the air in a shaft of sunlight shining in through the rafter windows. Bella shook her head, sending her long forelock bouncing, and Shelby’s image shot through my mind.
“Addy!” I called in a near-panic.
“What? What is it?” My aunt appeared instantly, her wild gaze shooting around the barn in search of a threat.
I held out my hands, willing my heart to slow. “Nothing. I’m okay. I think. But I need you to go check on Shelby.”
She didn’t even hesitate before she disappeared. I began my chores on autopilot. I’d done it thousands of times, so the tasks didn’t require much brain space. Once I’d dumped feed into a few buckets and downed half my coffee, I was feeling silly. I’d been half asleep and still weirded out by the dream and had let a trick of the light freak me out.
Addy popped back in, relief etched on her wrinkled face. “She’s fine. I didn’t bother her because she was in the middle of a training exercise, but she was fit as a fiddle. I did talk to Emma, and she said they’re on a break because there’s not been any chatter from the grapevines in the last week. You know if anything was going on at all, they’d know about it.”
“I figured,” I said, dumping feed in Bella’s bucket. “I’m being an idiot. I had another weird dream last night and thought I saw something.”
“What do you mean, another weird dream?” she asked, floati
ng beside me as I went back to the front of the barn to Missy’s stall. She’d finished eating, so I unlatched her stall and let her out so she could follow me to her pasture. I told Addy about the first dream as well as the one I’d had last night as I turned the horses out.
“Hmm,” she said, her expression thoughtful. “I’m not sure what to make of any of this. I need to check on some things.”
With that, she disappeared before I could tell her not to worry about it. Even if I had squeezed it in, she would have worried anyway. It was what she did.
Chapter 9
By the time Anna Mae got there, I’d finished my chores and managed to make myself estate-sale chic.
“Mornin’,” I said as I pulled my ponytail through the loop in my Bulldogs hat.
“Yes it is,” she said with a wan smile as she shuffled bleary-eyed toward my Keurig.
The dark circles under her eyes were twins to mine, and I hoped she’d gotten at least a little more rest than I had. Given the fact that she had the baby, I wouldn’t have laid money on it, though.
“What time did you guys get out of there last night?” I asked as she popped an espresso pod into the maker and shoved her to-go cup under it.
“It feels like about thirty minutes ago,” she said, yawning. “If I weren’t desperately low on inventory, I would have canceled this morning.”
“Yeah, Hunter talked me out of it,” I said. “I need to go, too. I don’t have anything at all that I can piece together into a big project, so it’s either go or take this week off, and I don’t want to do that.”
I refilled my to-go cup when she was done, and we hooked up the horse trailer and took off. We were both quiet after we hashed over the details of the night before, but that was fine. Anna Mae and I had the sort of friendship that allowed for comfortable silence.
“So tell me about this dress you’re all googly-eyed over,” I said, kicking up the AC a bit. The day was getting hot fast.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” she said, her expression dreamy. “It has a scalloped Queen Anne neckline and lace panels at the waist, and the train is like four feet long with butterflies and pearls up either side. The sleeves are poofy at the top and tight from the forearm down, and they have butterflies and pearls from the wrist to the elbow. It’s like it was made for me.”
It did sound that way for a fact. She was nuts over butterflies, and if ever there was a woman who screamed pearls and lace, it was Anna Mae.
“That sounds perfect,” I said, smiling as I flicked on the blinker to turn into a drive that had a giant sign advertising the sale. There weren’t many cars there yet, so I maneuvered the truck and trailer around so that it was both close to the barn and situated so that I could pull straight out.
“Ooh, look at that bedroom suite,” she said, pointing at a Victorian-style headboard, footboard, and dresser. “That has promise.”
From a distance, they looked a little rough, so I crossed my fingers for her that it would be one of those diamond-in-the-rough finds that everybody else passed on.
“Let’s go check it out, then,” I said, jumping out of the truck.
There was a ton for sale—everything from furniture to farm equipment to boxes full of costume jewelry. Some of that could be valuable depending on the era and whatnot, but that was more Anna Mae’s forte than mine.
I wandered back into the recesses of the barn and did a mental fist pump when I spotted four barn doors with cross-sections leaning up against a back wall. There were no sales stickers on them, which meant I’d have to track somebody down and ask about them, but that wasn’t uncommon. Most people didn’t want to buy barn doors, old hinges, or odds and ends like knobs and locks, but that was what made my job profitable. Their trash was my treasure.
I picked my way through boxes and around a tractor to check them out and was happy to see that they were in decent shape. There were also six ladder-back chairs stacked beside them. Three of them had broken front legs, but that was fine. I could make three nice French-style benches from them, and those sold well, too.
I meandered back toward the front, taking the time to look for other items that had missed the cut and been shoved out of the way. I lucked out again and found a beaten-up writing desk that I could convert to two nightstands.
“Find anything good?” Anna Mae asked when I made my way back to where the auction was about to start.
“Yeah,” I said. “I actually did. You?”
She nodded. “Yep. As a matter of fact, if I manage to score all of them, I don’t even need to go to the next sale. We can skip it if you want to. I’m sure there will be more next weekend, and I’m beat.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said, my knees going weak at the idea of taking a nap. It was already hot, which only added to the feeling that I was wading through sludge with every step I took.
“Okay, folks!” Who’s ready to get this show on the road?” the auctioneer, a portly sixty-ish guy in a cowboy hat and bolo tie asked. I knew from experience that it was better to wait until after the sale to approach anybody about pieces that weren’t tagged. At that point, they just wanted to be done and get out of there, so I’d get a better price.
Anna Mae won all the items she placed bids on, and even though an older couple bid her high on a couple items, she got the dusty old bedroom suite and two boxes of fifties-style dresses for next to nothing.
“Score!” she said when she won. It was the last sale, so we picked our way through the crowd as the announcer thanked the crowd and invited all of us to his next auction the following weekend. “Now let’s get your stuff, load up, and get out of here. I need a nap.”
I tracked the owner down and negotiated a price on the doors, desk, and chairs. The first number he threw out was so low that I almost felt guilty countering him, but I did it anyway. After all, it was business.
Thankfully, there were enough people there that we managed to fly under the radar and load everything ourselves. That meant she grabbed an end, I grabbed an end, then slapped a spell on it to make it light. The hardest part was making it look like we were struggling a little.
“Good times,” Anna Mae said as we pulled back onto the road.
“Good deals,” I replied, offering the second half of our after-sale ritual. “Are you hungry? Because I have some ham beans and cornbread left from supper last night if you’re interested.”
“As good as your beans are, sugar, I just wanna go home and relax. Amelia was up at six, and even though Matt got up with her, I heard her cryin’ and that was all she wrote. I either had to get up and feed her or flood the bed. I swear, I’m like a milk dispenser with no off switch.” She shifted her weight and frowned when I grinned. “You laugh, but it’s a serious design flaw.”
We chatted about wedding plans for the rest of the trip. I’d never been a maid of honor, but had a new respect for the role. I was grateful Anna Mae was easy to please because if I’d had to keep track of so much and deal with a bridezilla, one of us wouldn’t have lived to see the wedding.
The stress of the last couple of days drained away as I drove up the drive. The sun filtered through the giant oak trees that arched over the drive, causing little dapples. A pair of squirrels scurried across the road, and I smiled as they chased each other up a tree. It didn’t matter how many times I made the drive, I never got tired of it.
As I drove, I kept an eye on the fence to make sure there weren’t any rails down. It wasn’t something I did consciously; I’d lived there most of my life, and it was just a habit that came with having horses. It was a whole lot easier to fix a rail than chase fourteen horses over Hell’s half-acre. It was bad enough that we had one that enjoyed letting himself and all his pasture mates out anytime a gate wasn’t locked. I wasn’t about to make it easier for them.
Skeeter’s old towtruck was parked in front of the barn when I pulled in front of the house. I smiled when I saw the beat-up old beast. Skeeter’s Garage and Appliance Repair was painted on the faded blue doors, and it look
ed like it was just this side of a junkyard, but I’d have bet good money it was the best-running truck in town. Nobody knew more about vehicles—or appliances—than he did.
“Oh, cool,” she said when we pulled in. “Gabi’s here, and so is Skeet.”
“Yeah, wonder what Skeet needs,” I replied, pulling up in front of the porch.
“Hey, guys!” I called as we hopped out of the truck. Gabi was sitting in the porch swing with one bare leg underneath her, pushing herself with the other foot. Skeet was playing porch chess with Max, our talking donkey. A small bowl with a generous pour of what was surely Glenlivet in it sat by the door where nobody would kick it over, and Max eyed the chessboard, shifting his weight back and forth.
“Are you gonna move or just stare at the board all day?” Skeeter asked as he took off his NASCAR ball cap, swabbed his forehead with a blue bandana, and slapped the hat back on.
Max gave him a donkey-glare. “This is chess, not some juvenile game of Mousetrap. It requires contemplation and forethought.”
Skeeter grinned. “Contemplation about what? Gettin’ beat twice in a row?”
I smiled at Max’s glower as I stepped around the oversized board and relaxed into one of the rockers a few feet from Gabi.
Anna Mae gave Gabi a hug. “Hey, y’all. I can’t stay, but I didn’t just want to leave without saying hello.”
“Hello, yourself,” Gabi said. “Sorry I missed girls' night last night. I hear y’all had quite the exciting evening.”
“Yeah,” Anna Mae replied, shaking her head. “Not the good kind, though. We did have fun up ’til then, but you know what they say—it’s all fun and games ’til somebody gets bashed in the head with a rock.”
I raised a brow at her.
“What?” she said, tilting her lips into a half-smile. “Too soon?”
I laughed. “Maybe a little, but as tired as I am and as mean as she was, I’m havin’ a hard time not finding it just the teensy-weensiest bit funny.”
