A Familiar Tail

by Delia James

  “Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. Getting over the stutter thing. If I’m doing this, I’m doing this all the way.” I gripped the wand firmly and shouldered the door open.

  The room was dark, but moonlight streamed through the white curtains, illuminating the furnishings and the gray cat sitting in the middle of the bed.

  “Merow?” Alistair inquired, in a tone that could only mean What took you so long?

  “You know, I really shouldn’t be surprised.” I kicked the box in and shut the door behind us. “I take it this means the coast is clear?”

  “Meow.” The cat stretched out his front legs, toes spread and claws extended.

  I dropped into the cozy armchair by the fireplace. I barely had time to put my purse down before Alistair was in my lap, butting his head against my hand.

  “Okay, okay.” I dutifully rubbed him behind the ears. “So, Alistair, since you’re so eager to talk, where were you the night of Dorothy Hawthorne’s murder?”

  Alistair had been purring. Now he stopped and mewed, pitifully, painfully, like a lost kitten. He rolled over in my lap and started trying to burrow down behind me.

  “Hey, hey, it’s okay.” I pulled him out gently and gathered him into my arms. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. Really.”

  As I’ve said, I’m not a cat person, but even I know sad and scared is not a normal feline state of being. Except that’s what Alistair was. He was actually trembling in my arms.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I whispered, scratching behind his ears and under his chin. “I promise.” I had just made a serious promise to a cat. We were definitely not in Kansas anymore. “But you are going to have to give me some help. I mean, I can’t just wave that wand and say ‘abracadabra,’ right?” I paused and lifted Alistair up so we were brown eye to blue eye. “Right? I need some answers.”

  And, like it or not, I knew where I had to start. I settled Alistair on my lap, pulled out my phone and hit Grandma B.B.’s number.

  17

  “ANNABELLE AMELIA! I’M so sorry I didn’t call back.” It was three hours earlier in Arizona, so either Grandma B.B. was on her second cup of herbal tea for the evening or she’d been out gallivanting with some of her gal pals. My bet was gallivanting. “But I was out with Margie and Patty, and I’d forgotten to plug my phone in last night and, well, that’s that. Where are you this time, dear?”

  This last was Grandma B.B.’s usual opener when I called. Out of all my family, Gran was the only one who never got impatient with the extended road trip that was my life. When Grandpa C. was in the navy, he and Gran moved all around the country. Once he retired, they traveled for fun—from Belize to the Himalayas and back again.

  I could picture my grandmother sitting in the sunny little house in Sedona, Arizona, with the souvenirs of her busy life spread out across shelves, coffee tables and mantelpieces. There’d be framed photos of her children and grandkids, with the budding crop of great-grandkids in between. The last photo she’d tweeted (yes, Gran tweeted, and Pointred and said HeyLook!—she loved new tech) showed that she’d started wearing her hair in a Roaring Twenties–style bob with a sparkly orange lily barrette. That was how I imagined her now, as she leaned back on her sofa, anticipating a cozy chat.

  Sorry to disappoint, Gran.

  “I’m in Portsmouth,” I said. “New Hampshire,” I added.

  I know I did not imagine the pause, or the hollow ring underneath her cheerful answer. “Portsmouth? Really? What on earth for?”

  Grandma B.B. lived in italics. She was not a hinty, sit-in-the-dark-and-don’t-mind-me kind of grandmother. She made sure everybody knew exactly what she meant when she meant it.

  “I am—at least I was—visiting a friend,” I told her. “You’ve met Martine Devereux, right? She’s got a job as executive chef at the Pale Ale.”

  “Oh, yes, Martine, of course.” Gran’s relief was just as real, and just as marked, as the pause had been. Alistair looked up at me, blinking both eyes. Yeah, he heard it too. Never mind how. “I would have thought Portsmouth would be a bit out of the way for her, but I suppose everybody’s got to take whatever they can find these days. She should come down here to Sedona. The town is absolutely booming. Margie and I had dinner at this wonderful little . . .”

  “Gran,” I cut her off before she could really get going. “I met an old friend of yours here. Julia Parris.”

  Silence. Long and completely uncharacteristic. Silence with italics and underlinings.

  “I don’t remember you ever mentioning her,” I went on. “Or any of your other old friends from Portsmouth.”

  She took a deep breath. “I never thought you’d be interested in the little details of my past. Children usually aren’t.”

  Oh, no, Gran. You aren’t getting out of this that easy. “I’m not a child anymore, Gran. Julia told me you and she and some other women had a huge falling-out before you married Gramps and moved. What was that about?”

  “I’m not even sure I could tell you, Annabelle. After all, it’s ancient history, even to me. It can’t possibly matter to you, dear.”

  “Mer-oww,” remarked Alistair.

  “Do you mind?” I said to him. “This is a private conversation.”

  “Mer-oww,” he said again.

  “Is someone there with you?” demanded Gran. “Really, Annabelle Amelia. I know young people have no concept of privacy anymore, but your mother taught you . . .”

  “It’s just the cat, Gran,” I told her. Then I added, “His name is Alistair.”

  There was that silence again. I was starting to feel bad. You shouldn’t deliberately make your grandmother uncomfortable. It wasn’t nice. I knew that. But then again, I was pretty sure the usual etiquette rules didn’t apply here.

  “He’s kind of adopted me,” I went on. “Julia Parris says he belonged to a woman named Dorothy Hawthorne. She died recently.”

  “Dorothy’s gone?” Unlike the cheerfulness and the outrage, the shock was real and it hit me like a splash of cold water.

  “About six months ago.”

  “Oh. My. Oh. Annabelle, I’m having one of my dizzy spells. I need to hang up now and lie down.”

  “I’ll call back,” I said. “I’ll call back a whole lot.”

  “I can’t believe you’d be so inconsiderate, Annabelle Amelia, my favorite grandchild.”

  “I’m only your favorite because I’m the one on the phone with you right now. I’m also in the middle of something very strange, and I need your help. Please.” I paused and let her spin out another silence, but not for too long. “It does matter, and it matters a lot. Grandma, are you a witch?”

  I waited for her to explode, to demand to know how I could talk to my poor, aging grandmother like that. There’d be italics on her italics and extra exclamation points, and bold type.

  Except I was wrong. There was only a soft murmur of regret. “I used to be, Annabelle. I used to be.”

  “And you didn’t think maybe you should tell me about this?”

  “Well, how was I to know you’d go back to Portsmouth? You were always so happy in the city.”

  Which city? I pinched the bridge of my nose and did my best to rein that burst of temper in. To be fair, I’d thought I was happy too. A little too restless maybe, but happy.

  “So. Okay. You did know Julia Parris and Dorothy Hawthorne. What happened, Grandma?”

  “Oh, dear. Really, Annabelle, this is all too much. I can’t possibly.” I heard her drawing in another huge breath and pictured her pulling her round shoulders back and shaking her bobbed white hair. “No. No. I will. You’re right. You should know the truth.” She stopped again, and I could practically hear her deciding what that truth should be. I steeled myself to be firm. I was not letting her pull a conversational fast shuffle on me. Not this time.

  “You asked about witches,” Gran said. “Yes. It’s true.
There are, or were, a few families in Portsmouth that practiced the true craft and followed the old traditions. It was always kept very quiet. You knew each other, of course, but you never, ever discussed craft or family matters with outsiders.” I heard the soft shudder underneath that word. “Dorothy wanted to change all that.”

  “Change it? How? Why?”

  “Oh. Well. You have to understand, dear, it was a very different time back then. The war was over, everything was supposed to be back to normal—men at the office, women in the home, children all clean and happy and in bed by eight o’clock. My mother tried to be that way, even after she’d worked three years at the shipyard. But somehow, the world kept going from strange to stranger. There was rock and roll, and all these new books, and the bomb and Iron Curtain and the Red Scare and . . .” And the kids with the hair and the clothes . . . I covered my mouth. Alistair gave me a knowing look, and I stuck my tongue out at him. He very pointedly curled himself up so his face was tucked into his belly.

  “. . . and we were all so young and excited about everything,” Gran went on. “But Dorothy, she was, well, radical. I mean, we all smoked and went completely gaga when we discovered the Beatles, but Dorothy had ideas. You see, back then, if you had the old ways, the ways to get and guard—that’s what we called them; sounds unbearably quaint now, doesn’t it?—you used them strictly to look after your family. Perhaps a few close friends, but we were all taught that magical abilities were a consequence of heritage, bloodline, breeding, all those things that were supposed to make our family, well, better. Special.”

  Alistair peeled open one eye. “Merow?”

  “Don’t rush me,” I muttered.

  “What was that, dear?”

  “Nothing. So, what was it Dorothy Hawthorne did back then that got everybody so upset?”

  “Dorothy decided to break tradition. No, that’s not strong enough. Dorothy decided to shatter tradition. She started saying anyone could learn witchcraft—the real craft, the true magic—not just the songs and meditations like some of these airy-fairy New-Agey selfie-help sorts go on and on and on about.

  “Now, it would have been one thing if she’d limited herself to talking, but one day she announced she was going to actually start teaching people, regular people. It sent a shock wave through all the old families, I can tell you.”

  “What happened?”

  “The families lined up against her, of course. First they tried to shame her into silence. Some tried to threaten her, but most just shunned her.”

  She was trying to change tradition in hardheaded, granite-souled New England. Of course they shunned her. “Most, but not all?”

  “Well, she had her friends and supporters. And some of us were sure it would all blow over. We didn’t believe there’d be that many . . . seekers. True craft is internal, and nondramatic, and takes a long time to learn. It can be difficult to hold on to a belief in its possibilities, even when you do see the results. But when Julia Parris joined Dorothy’s coven . . . well, I at least knew the argument had shifted. The Parrises were the oldest of the families, and Julia was their sole heir. If she changed her mind, everyone else would too, eventually. I thought.”

  I found myself wondering how this fit in with how prickly Julia had been toward me when we met. “What happened?”

  “The worst thing possible,” said Gran. “It turned out Dorothy was right. She took in a gaggle of girls and even a few boys without even half a bloodline between them, and they successfully learned the true craft.

  “Well, there was explosion and splits right down the middle of the old families. People who had been best friends stopped talking to each other overnight. Most of the town thought it must be over men or money or something of the kind. Only those of us on the inside knew the truth.”

  “Which side were you on?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear. I’m not proud of this, Annabelle.” Which was as shocking as any confession she’d made yet. “It was very confusing. Dorothy was so confident. She was trying new things, looking at the world in a new way. She thought everyone should have a chance to excel, each according to their lights and their passion. I mean, it seems obvious now, doesn’t it? But it was so different back then. Everyone was so angry, and called her such ugly names. What they called her students was even worse. And there I was, the last of the Blessingsounds. I wanted to support my friend. I thought she was right, but my mother and my aunts wouldn’t see it; they couldn’t see it . . .”

  “Julia said you guys had a falling out before you married Grandpa C. and left. Was it because of Dorothy and Elizabeth’s feud?”

  “What? Oh, no, no. It was my mother. Mother badgered me and badgered me to swear that I would only follow tradition. That if I taught the craft, I wouldn’t ever teach outside the family, that I would only teach a daughter . . . It got to be too much. I gave up the practice and I just left. Your grandfather . . . he proposed rather than lose me.”

  She stopped. This wasn’t the drama-queen grandmother I knew and most of the time loved. This was an old woman reliving an old hurt.

  “Merow.” Alistair rubbed his head against my hand. “Merow.”

  “But you never told anyone that was why you were leaving.”

  “It seems a little foolish now, doesn’t it? But I didn’t want to air our dirty laundry in public, not even about this. I thought I might make things worse.”

  “Did you . . . ever offer to teach Dad magic? Or were you sticking with the tradition?”

  “I did offer. Mother would turn over in her grave, but I did. Once. But he . . . he didn’t believe me, at least not at first. Then, when he did start to believe, he got scared, or at least he got angry, and he asked me to never bring it up again. So I didn’t.”

  “And that’s why you never told the rest of us? You didn’t want to get Dad angry?”

  “I didn’t want you to have to choose sides, Anna, not like I had to. It was rather ironic actually. The whole battle had started over a desire to be open about the craft, and here I was unable to even tell my own family. I kept thinking I’d go back to Portsmouth one day and straighten things out for good and all between me and Dorothy, Elizabeth and Julia. But there was your grandfather and his postings, and I was always busy with my own family. I told myself I’d go back once your father, Robert, was settled, or when Charlie retired. But by then there just didn’t seem to be much point. You and your brothers and sister were all growing up, and none of you had inherited the family talents.”

  “Uhhh . . . Gran?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “That’s not quite true.”

  “Annabelle Amelia . . . do you mean . . . ?”

  “I’ve got some kind of magic talent, Gran. Turns out I’ve had it for my whole life.”

  “Oh, no! Oh, dear! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Anger bubbled up in me, left over from all those years I’d spent being afraid of walking through doorways because of my Vibe.

  “Well, it’s not like it was something I could bring up at Christmas dinner!” I snapped.

  “No, of course not,” murmured Grandma. “I’m sorry, Annabelle. I should have . . . checked.”

  “Merow.” Alistair batted my elbow with his paw. I pushed it away. I did also sit on my temper. Hard.

  “It’s okay, Gran,” I said, and mostly I meant it. “But, listen . . . do you think there was anybody who might, you know, still hold a grudge about what Dorothy did?”

  “Good heavens, Annabelle! This is small-town New England. This is families. Of course somebody still holds a grudge.”

  I gripped the chair arm. “Gran . . . Dorothy Hawthorne was murdered.”

  18

  THERE WAS ANOTHER of those pauses. For a minute, I thought the connection had dropped out. Then I heard a soft, hiccoughy sound. “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

  I swallowed. Grandma B.B. was crying. I had no idea what
to do. If I’d been there, I would have hugged her and handed her a handkerchief. Gran hated Kleenex. But all I could do now was wait for her to find her voice again.

  I didn’t have to wait that long. “Do they know who?”

  “No. So far, the police think it was an accident, that she just fell down her stairs.”

  “Oh, poor Dorothy. She was always so passionate, so interested in justice and making things right.” Justice. It was the word Julia Parris had used. “Sometimes she just refused to see how angry people could get.”

  “Grandma, Julia and some others think Dorothy used her magic to bring me back to Portsmouth just before she died. Was it possible somebody was using magic to keep you, and the rest of us, from coming back before that?” It was an idea that had formed on the ride back from the Pale Ale. I mean, if somebody could use a spell to try to make me leave, couldn’t they have used a spell to keep Gran from being able to come back once she did leave?

  More silence. Alistair jumped off my lap and paced restlessly from the door to the window and back again.

  “It could be,” Gran said at last. “Yes. It might very well be. I never thought about it. No. I never wanted to think about it.”

  “But why, Gran? Why would someone want to keep you away?”

  “Because of the seeing, I suppose.”

  “Seeing?”

  “Yes.” I pictured her nodding vigorously. “Different practitioners have different strengths and talents. As you practice your craft, these talents are uncovered. Some do run in families, like an eye for color or an ear for music. We Blessingsounds, we’re seers. We can tell what has happened to a place or person, or what will happen sometimes, or . . .”

  “Wait. Wait. You’re telling me you’ve got a Vibe?”

  “Annabelle, will you please speak standard English?”

  “When you walk into a place, you get an impression, a feeling about it.”

  “Oh, no. I can only read palms, not places. But if you can read places . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Anna. I never knew.”