Enchanted

by Barbara Bretton

  I unwrapped the ice bandage to give her skin a break from the extreme cold. The ankle didn’t look great but at least the swelling hadn’t gotten any worse.

  “You’re not going to be able to drive on this today.”

  “I’ll bandage it up tight. I think I’ll be fine.”

  She stood up, yelped, then sat back down again.

  “I see what you mean,” she said.

  “I’ll phone the Inn and have them send your bags to my place.”

  “I couldn’t let you do that. If she has room for me, I can stay there for the night.”

  “I’m doing it,” I said. “I walked to work this morning. We’ll take your car to my place, okay?”

  “The last thing you need today is to have a stranger on your hands.”

  “The last thing you needed was a sprained ankle.”

  “Good point,” she said. “That means I’m in your debt.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, patting her shoulder, “You’re family.”

  Chapter 12

  WENDY

  * * *

  I don’t know how Chloe managed it, but one hour later I was sitting at her kitchen table with my right foot resting on a wooden toy box with unicorns painted on it while four curious cats watched me from the doorway. The baby’s nanny, Elspeth, had wrapped my ankle in cloths soaked in herbs and who knows what else and, combined with the ibuprofen, I was already feeling better.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said as the Betty White clone bustled around the room. “Thank you!”

  She grunted something I didn’t understand and hurried off in a cloud of what I’d swear was essence of burned waffles.

  “Don’t mind Elspeth,” Chloe said as she poured us each a tall glass of iced tea. “She’s not big on the social graces but she’s as loyal as they come.”

  “I really appreciate this,” I said as I gratefully accepted the cold drink. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “You would have figured something out,” Chloe said, sitting down opposite me, “but I’m glad I was able to help.”

  “You don’t have to babysit me,” I said. “You’re getting married tomorrow. There must be a million things you need to do.”

  “And I don’t feel like doing any of them,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess I wasn’t born with the bride gene.”

  “Cold feet?” I asked. “That’s not uncommon.”

  “Not cold feet,” she said. “Just I already feel married to Luke and all of this craziness seems to be for everyone else.”

  “From what I heard, Bunny’s loving every minute of it.”

  Chloe nodded. “That’s part of the reason we didn’t have a ceremony for just the two of us. It means so much to his mother.”

  “My ex’s mother would have thrown a party if I’d changed my mind at the last minute.”

  Chloe looked at me, her golden eyes serious. “Is that why you divorced?”

  I shrugged. “That and the supermodel replacement he had lined up.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, touching my hand. “That must have hurt.”

  “It still does,” I acknowledged. “I was blindsided when he said he loved someone else.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  I thought about that or a minute or two. “No,” I said, to my surprise. “I’m not sure when I stopped, but I’m finally over him. Only my pride still hurts.”

  We talked a little about our romantic pasts. Mine was limited to Gary. Chloe’s boasted a long line of single dates with non-starter candidates for happily-ever-after until the day Luke showed up in town to investigate the death of a politician’s mistress.

  “And that was it,” she said. “I finally understood what that love-at-first-sight stuff was all about.”

  It had scared the hell out of her but in the end love conquered all.

  “And then Luke decided to put down roots in Sugar Maple,” I said.

  “He’s our chief of police,” she said, not without a touch of pride. “And I’m de facto mayor. It’s worked out pretty well for all three of us.”

  The baby. I had almost forgotten about the baby.

  Even though I had my misgivings about the town, I could see where it would be a wonderful place to raise children.

  “I’m dying to meet my—“ I stopped. “Is Laria my cousin?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe said. “She’ll be waking up pretty soon. She’s not shy about asking for a diaper change at the top of her lungs. You may not want to claim kinship.”

  Maybe it was the ibuprofen, but my eyes filled with tears.

  “Are you okay?” Chloe asked.

  “Sorry. Babies are my Achilles heel.” A fact I had hoped to keep to myself another decade or two. Not even my BFFs back home knew the depth of my longing for a child. I told her in as few words as possible about my inability to get pregnant and what it had done to my marriage. I thought I had done a pretty good job of keeping the emotional drama to a minimum but her eyes filled with answering tears when I finished, so maybe not.

  My story wasn’t a new one and it wasn’t all that uncommon. Some women are luckier than others when it comes to the reproductive sweepstakes.

  “There are a lot of options today,” she said. “IVF. Surrogacy. Adoption.”

  “Or a fertile second wife,” I said.

  She gave my hand a quick squeeze. There really wasn’t much else to say. We pretended intense interest in sipping iced tea and listening to birds chirping outside the kitchen window. For two virtual strangers, we had shared a fair bit of emotional baggage in record time and it was taking its toll.

  We were probably both relieved when the back door swung open and a bubbly Bunny MacKenzie blew into the room with two of her daughters in tow and we were all rainbows and unicorns.

  Bunny gave me a bear hug of epic proportions. She instantly sensed that Chloe and I had hit it off and was more than willing to take full credit for the situation.

  Except for my ankle.

  She switched quickly into nurse mode and after palpating my ankle and foot thoroughly, declared it was a minor sprain that would take care of itself. She even pulled a pair of crutches from the back of her minivan and propped them against the nightstand.

  “Use them,” she ordered. “Even if you’re just getting up to use the bathroom.”

  I wasn’t about to argue with the woman.

  I liked Bunny. Her daughters were okay, if a little distant. Talk shifted to the impending nuptials and escalated swiftly to a fever pitch. Chloe seemed overwhelmed by the pre-wedding talk and accompanying chaos.

  I knew exactly how she felt.

  All I wanted to do was escape.

  Somehow Chloe picked up on it and minutes later I was blissfully alone in her tiny guest room. Alone, of course, is a relative term. Her four house cats were watching me from their various perches but since they didn’t want to talk about flowers, bouquets, boutonnieres, white carpets, bridesmaids, or cakes, I was fine with their company.

  I considered texting my friends with an update but my thumbs weren’t up to it. I leaned back against the flurry of pillows and closed my eyes. I wasn’t a napper by nature, but the day had been long and stressful and surprisingly emotional. Sleep seemed like the only choice.

  I was drifting off when I heard baby sounds from across the hall.

  I burrowed deeper into the pillows.

  The sounds grew louder, more insistent.

  Chloe had live-in help but it didn’t seem like Elspeth was doing much of anything to calm the baby.

  Stay out of it, I told myself. The baby was fine. There was a houseful of real, live mothers on hand, including one who was a retired nurse. Unless the floors could use a good scrubbing, they didn’t need my help.

  But the baby didn’t stop crying. She was crying for a reason. I knew at least that much about babies.

  I swung my legs off the bed, ignored the crutches (sorry, Bunny!), and hopped my way across the hall to Laria’s ro
om.

  I swung open the door and my heart seemed to stop. The crib was empty. The baby, clad in an adorable yellow-and-white onesie, was across the room, trying to pull herself up by hanging onto a tall whitewashed dresser with moons and stars and planets painted on it.

  A wobbly dresser that clearly wasn’t attached to the wall.

  I probably should have questioned why the baby was no longer crying but I was too worried about the dresser falling on her tiny body to follow that train of thought.

  “Laria,” I said, as calmly as possible. “Come here!”

  The baby looked at me, wide-eyed and watchful.

  “Don’t tug at the dresser, honey. Why don’t you come to me?”

  Of course she didn’t have a clue what I was saying. I was trying to divert her attention from trying to pull herself up by the unanchored dresser.

  Unfortunately I wasn’t half as interesting. She turned away from me and, babbling to herself, began to climb up the front of the furniture.

  The dresser wobbled violently.

  She grabbed for one of the drawer pulls and moved up higher.

  The dresser swayed wildly.

  What happened next is a blur. I remember hurtling myself toward Laria as the dresser tilted forward on two legs and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, cradling the baby with my body, while Elspeth pulled the dresser off my back.

  Adrenaline flooded my body as she reached down and snatched the baby from me. I scrambled to my feet, oblivious to the ankle sprain.

  “Where were you?” I shrieked. “She could have been killed!”

  “The wee one is unharmed.” She seemed totally unperturbed by the near-tragedy.

  Relief almost dropped me to the floor. But I was still seriously pissed off. “What about me? That stupid dresser could have broken my back.”

  “No harm come to you, missy,” she said, her bright blue eyes pinned on me like twin lasers. She was old as the hills and smelled like burnt waffles, but she had the gaze of a much younger woman. “You are as you were.”

  It wasn’t until I was back in the guest room that I realized my sprained ankle was no longer sprained.

  CHLOE

  * * *

  “What in hell were you thinking, staging an accident?” I bellowed at Elspeth the second Luke’s family left to get ready for dinner in Burlington. “You might as well have waved a magic wand while you were at it!”

  “She is all she should be as kin,” Elspeth said, totally unfazed by my outrage. “She rose to the challenge and protected the wee one as we would.”

  “You had no right to issue a challenge, Elspeth! Why would you risk exposing all of us that way?”

  “I do what I need to do and nothing less.”

  “This isn’t the seventeenth century!” I exploded. “We don’t speak in riddles any longer.”

  “She is here among us, “ Elspeth said with a remarkable degree of calm, “and here she will remain.”

  “Until after the wedding.”

  “Until the spirits wish otherwise.”

  “I think Wendy might have something to say about that.”

  “And she will,” Elspeth said, “when the time to say it comes.”

  “Maybe it’s time you went back to Salem,” I said, shaking with anger. “I can’t have you here compromising our safety.”

  “Watch and wait,” she said, neither apologetic nor cowed. “When the trouble has come and gone, I will take my leave and not before.”

  “Great,” I snapped, reluctant affection battling with white-hot anger. “I’ll be counting the days.”

  Elspeth pulled one of her disappearing acts and I was left alone in the kitchen to try and figure out what in the name of everything magick I was going to tell Wendy when she asked what the ancient troll had been up to.

  Except, of course, I couldn’t tell Wendy that the butter yellow-haired Betty White clone was a troll. I couldn’t tell any of the humans even a small part of the truth about Sugar Maple. I had expected the wedding weekend would be a tightrope walk but so far it was exceeding my worst nightmare.

  And since when was Elspeth a fortuneteller? I don’t recall ever seeing her bent over a crystal ball, gazing into the future. She was a troll. She had the abilities that came naturally to trolls, both Norwegian and other groups. But there was no doubt that she had issued a warning. When the trouble has come and gone… What trouble? When was it coming? Where was it going? Why did she have to speak in fortune cookie riddles?

  “A few answers might be nice,” I said to the empty kitchen.

  Chapter 13

  WENDY

  * * *

  Chloe and I were sipping wine out on the back porch later that evening when her husband-to-be Luke came home from dinner with his family.

  He was big and strong without being bulky, the classic tall, dark, and handsome hero authors wrote about. He was blessed with unusual dark green eyes that gave me the classic dead-eyed cop look when Chloe introduced us.

  “So you two are related,” he said, cracking open a beer and joining us on the top step.

  “Second cousins a whole lot of times removed,” Chloe said, gesturing toward him with her wine glass.

  “You come by your detecting skills honestly, Luke,” I said, switching the sleeping Laria to my left shoulder. “I don’t know how Bunny put the clues together, but we’re definitely family.”

  He nodded but I had the distinct sense he was less than happy that I was there.

  “We’d always heard that Chloe didn’t have anyone.” His tone was even and non-threatening but there was something darker behind his words. “Funny that you’d turn up now.”

  I felt prickles of anger scratching up my spine. “Funny that your mother would ask me to.”

  Chloe leaned forward and put a soothing hand on his knee. “Actually Wendy was about to turn around and head back home when she hurt her ankle.”

  Luke’s eyes went immediately to my ankles.

  “It was my right ankle,” I said icily. “And it feels a whole lot better now.”

  He nodded again but said nothing. Poor Chloe looked embarrassed and annoyed.

  “We see a family resemblance,” she said with mock cheer that fooled no one. “We both have our fathers’ noses.”

  “Better than DNA,” he mumbled into his beer.

  I was very glad I wasn’t the one marrying him day after tomorrow. The cop thing must be an acquired taste.

  “How’s this for a segue: since we’re talking about fathers, I have something for you, Chloe.” I ducked back into the cottage for my purse.

  Luke wasn’t smiling but at least he didn’t look like he was about to arrest me when I handed Chloe the envelope.

  “I’m sure you have tons of photos,” I said, “but I had copies of this one made just in case it’s not in your family album.”

  Chloe and Luke exchanged glances. What those glances meant was anyone’s guess.

  I noticed that Chloe’s hands shook as she opened the envelope. Pre-wedding jitters maybe? Too much caffeine?

  She reached inside and pulled out the shiny color snapshot and, to my surprise, she started to cry.

  The photo was your average, run-of-the-mill buddy picture. Chloe’s father Ted was about twenty; my dad closer to thirty. They were both in jeans and t-shirts, arms draped across each other’s shoulders. They were young and healthy, aiming big smiles toward the camera because life was going to last forever and this was just the beginning.

  Luke stared down at the photograph, then put his arm around Chloe. She leaned into him, burying her face against his side and sobbed as if her heart were breaking.

  Luke looked over at me and for the first time I could see the man Chloe had fallen in love with.

  “This is Chloe’s only photo of her father,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “You don’t know how much this means.”

  He was right about that.

  This was America, where your every move was caught on camera from first breath t
o last. Our fathers were both baby boomers, probably the most photographed generation up until that time. Christenings. Communions. First day of school. Proms and engagement parties, bridal showers and bachelor parties and sunny days at the beach. Instamatics. Polaroids. Disposable cameras. How was it possible that this was the only photo in existence of her father?

  I watched quietly while the emotions played themselves out. I knew I should go back into the cottage and give them some privacy but I didn’t want to miss a thing. I had grown up on a diet of Kinsey Milhone, Spenser, and reruns of Murder, She Wrote. I knew a good mystery when I saw one.

  To be honest, a lot of things hadn’t made sense since I arrived in Sugar Maple. The weird feeling that I was being talked about in Fully Caffeinated even though nobody said a word. The feeling I was being watched as I walked down the street. And what about the cloaked man in front of Sticks & Strings? Explain that one, if you can.

  The only explanations I could come up with bordered on the insane. I glanced down at my right ankle. My perfectly healthy, unswollen, and unsprained right ankle. I mean, what was going on with that? Ibuprofen and ice can work wonders but they can’t undo the damage. But moments after the drama with Laria and Elspeth, my ankle was good as new.

  “You are as you were,” Elspeth had said.

  She was wrong.

  I wasn’t sure I would ever be the same again.

  CHLOE

  * * *

  At some point Wendy slipped back into the cottage for the night, leaving Luke and me alone on the front porch. The baby was asleep in her room, the sound of her breathing drifted through the baby monitor on the railing.

  “I think she suspects something,” Luke said as I finally slipped the precious photo of my dad back into the envelope.

  “I know,” I agreed and brought him up to speed on her adventures in Sugar Maple. “We used to be a lot better at keeping our secrets secret.”