by Madelyn Alt
“Well, there you have it,” Tara said. “Maybe that’s the guy. Maybe their argument continued later on, after you left.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure, though. I happened to run into him awhile later at Annie-Thing Good, when Lou stopped there to pick up dinner for you and your mom. And . . . as it turns out . . . this Hollister guy has connections to her niece. Annie’s, I mean. I sure hope it wasn’t him. Annie seems pretty fond of him.”
“So you don’t think it could have been him?”
“I just don’t know. I don’t want to think so, because I like Annie a lot, and I’d hate to see her hurt by something like this.” The very thought made me feel gloomy. And then I remembered something I was going to ask them. “Oh! I almost forgot. Do either of you know a girl named Abbie Cornwall?”
“I do.” Evie waved her hand. “She’s in the grade below me.”
“Yeah,” Tara said, “isn’t she going out with JJ?”
Evie nodded. “Perkins,” she confirmed. “Since last spring.”
“JJ and Charlie hang out sometimes,” Tara put in.
They both looked at me suddenly with a question punctuating their brows. “I was just wondering,” I told them.
Neither one of them looked as though they believed me.
“All right, fine. I ran into her yesterday. Or should I say, she ran into me.”
Dual puckered brows deepened.
I sighed. “While I was looking at the apartment. She was hiding in the closet of the apartment I was looking at and nearly ran me down when she burst out of it to run away. I didn’t know who she was, but we saw her just down the road with a boyfriend—”
“JJ,” Evie said helpfully.
“JJ,” I echoed, “and Lou recognized her. Evidently she and her boyfriend are both on his track team. Or they were last spring. So,” I said, “any ideas why she might have broken into an empty apartment?”
“Blond girl, pretty thin, great taste in eye makeup?” Tara clarified.
I had to laugh at the last. Tara’s taste in heavy mascara and eyeliner was a source of contention between her and Marcus and Lou both. “Yes. Same girl.”
“I think they used to live down close to Marcus’s place. Is it that old apartment building down south?”
I nodded. “New Heritage. They have been renovating it for a while, from what I understand. Everything is pretty much new, except for the outside.”
“That might be the place. I don’t think she and her mom have a lot of money.”
“Lou said her mom was a single mother. And the apartments were reasonably priced, even without a special discount on the monthly rent.”
Evie waved her hand at me. “I have JJ in my Spanish class. I could ask him tomorrow.”
“Or we could do that right now,” Tara said, arching her brow meaningfully and patting the laptop. “I have him on my Friends list.”
A customer approached the counter just then with a question about whether the wooden benches crafted by fellow N.I.G.H.T.S. member Eli Yoder could come in other finishes or wood selections, which required me to track down Eli in order to find the answer. No, not by driving out to his farm. By cell phone. It never failed to amuse me that Amish Eli was business minded enough to own a cell phone . . . but then, I suppose in this day and age, even the Amish have to be reachable in some way by their customers. Technology waits for no businessman. In the meantime, I chased the girls off to the office to log in the day’s new inventory receipts.
By the time I was finished with the customer and had said my good-byes to Eli, Evie had poked her head out from behind the deep purple velvet curtain that separated the front of the store from the back office and was waving at me to come back. After looking around to be certain no customer would be left stranded, I met her at the doorway.
“JJ was online. He wants to know why we want to know.”
“Know what?” I asked, still distracted by my previous mission.
“Why we want to know about Abbie.”
Flustered, I frowned. “What did you two do, ask him straight out?”
“Well, we really didn’t think it through for long,” Evie admitted. “I’m sorry, Maggie. But what should we tell him?”
“He says yes.” That was Tara, aka the girl behind the purple curtain, who evidently had taken matters into her own hands. Evie pulled the curtain back so that we could talk to her. “I told him a friend of mine might be moving to the apartment building, and wasn’t that where Abbie lives? He said yes . . . and no.” She made a face then to make it clear just what she thought of cryptic responses.
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
“Yes, that is the apartment building, and no . . . meaning not anymore . . . because she and her mom were kicked out by some jerk in the front office without any warning.”
The information jibed with what Locke had said about evicting the previous tenant . . . and hadn’t the other tenant, Alexandra Cooper, said something about Abbie? Oh, but . . . “Something isn’t making sense here to me. Abbie wasn’t eighteen. Locke had been very clear with me, stating that children under the age of eighteen were not allowed. It’s supposed to be an adult community. Even the brochure he gave me said so.”
Tara tapped something out on the laptop keyboard, then waited. “I don’t know anything about that, but it was definitely the same place,” she said after the laptop dinged at her with a response from JJ. “He says . . . first the guy was always hanging around, pretending to change lightbulbs or wash windows outside, until Mrs. Cornwall told him they could do it themselves. Then Abbie accidentally broke the mirror in the room they shared, and he showed up at their door and started threatening to add the replacement of the mirror to their month’s rent. Mrs. Cornwall,” she read, “told him that he should stop peeping in their windows and pay attention to the other pretty girls he rented apartments to. I guess he didn’t take that very well.”
None of it made much sense, other than it seemed that JJ was saying that Locke liked to rent to pretty young women, which was something I had already noticed. But why would Mrs. Cornwall’s comment have brought about their eviction? Something wasn’t adding up.
“So she lived at the apartment and was evicted. Why would she have broken into the apartment yesterday?”
“Maybe she left something in the apartment that was important to her and she wanted to find it,” Evie suggested.
“There didn’t appear to be anything in the apartment,” I told her. “At least nothing I saw.”
“Maybe she’d already retrieved it?”
“Maybe.” But I wasn’t convinced.
“Do you want me to ask JJ?” Tara asked.
“Um, you’d have to explain to him how you knew she was there,” I reminded her.
“Good point.” But she was typing something in anyway, I noticed. “I’m asking him whether he heard about the manager being murdered,” she explained even though I didn’t ask. And then there was a blip and she sat up straight in her chair. “Hey!”
“What’s wrong?” Evie asked her.
“He just logged out. Without a word!” She shook her head, making her choppy pixie hair sway. “So rude. What is the world coming to these days?”
What indeed.
Chapter 11
Before I left work for the day, I consulted with Liss about the components I needed for a good Home Finding Spell. She had completed her protection ritual and looked a bit tired, but was glowing with light. She started tucking small bits and bobs into little paper envelopes: a polished amethyst crystal, a tiny stopper with individual usage amounts of patchouli oil, rose hips and buds, and cinnamon sticks. “These should do the trick,” she told me. “Dress your candle with the patchouli oil, and make sure it’s not so large that it takes more than a day to burn down. Did you work on your intentions?”
I held up a piece of paper I had printed off. “I’ve got my list of wants right here. I know what I want; I know what I need. I’m just worried I won’t find anythin
g that fits into those guidelines and is affordable.”
“Tut, tut! None of that, now. Lending energy to your fears just makes it more difficult to get past them in your reality. Focus on what you want, and keep that light burning brightly. It will bring you more of the same. Focus on what you don’t want, and . . . you’ll get more of the same. Most people learn that the hard way. Some never understand it at all.”
It was the Law of Attraction that she was referring to, and it was something I had always understood on a certain, nebulous level but rarely had paid attention to until a situation got so extreme that I had no other choice but to listen because I was out of other options. Like attracts like. Positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative. Change your outlook, change your day-to-day experience, change your future, change your world. Now that I was more conscious of it, I was working to enact it more into my life by making better choices and opening myself to the change that appeared for me to reach out and experience. That was key, too—being open to the change and allowing it to happen. Not being too afraid to experience something different and unfamiliar. Allowing yourself to stretch and grow in new ways of being. Change was scary, but it was exciting, too. It all comes back to you and your outlook.
Meeting Liss had been the first, sparkling moment of change hovering like a firefly on my spiritual horizon. The question at the time had been, would I be courageous enough to accept? I was, and I did. Each change brought more coming along on its heels, a slowly accelerating flow of them. Slow, to allow me to get comfortable with the idea of how each one fit into my life and made it better before another one came along to begin the process of expansion all over again. I didn’t start out a full-blown sensitive. I had abilities, yes, that I had denied almost into oblivion. It was the act of opening to even one of the abilities that allowed me to open to even more. And I was opening more all the time. Accepting more all the time.
The Law of Attraction at work.
But how did the Law of Attraction apply to Stony Mill? Did that mean that a large number of the normal, everyday, churchgoing folk of Stony Mill had a nose for darkness beneath all their goodness and light? Is that why all of these murders kept happening? Were we drawing the darkness, unwittingly or not, to ourselves on a large scale? Because things that happened on a broader scale had the energies of the masses contributing to them. Which is what made predictions on a large scale easier than on a personal level. One person could change their life in the course of a single day. A community, however, couldn’t change so quickly. It had the energy threads of any number of people feeding into it, so to revise a course already set into motion by countless individual actions long before would require coordinated change on a mass level. Much more difficult to enact.
I just hoped it didn’t mean the town was doomed by its own dark secrets.
And I still wasn’t sure that the Stony Mill community’s own sinister energies were the underlying cause of all the tragedies the town had suffered in the last year. A part of it, certainly. But all? I just didn’t know. And what you don’t know, in a situation like this, can hurt you.
Casting a spell for a nice new home was unquestionably a simpler proposition.
“Last, but not least,” Liss said, tucking in a tiny satin pouch in a bronze color, “a charm bag. What herbs you don’t use will go in here, and you’re to carry it on your person as much as possible to charge it with your energy and intent. Now remember, you don’t have to rhyme your spell if you don’t want to. Sometimes that makes it easier to repeat, but it isn’t necessary. Besides that, just visualize, visualize, visualize. Oh!” Taking me affectionately by the shoulders, she looked into my eyes and beamed at me. “I feel like a proud mama whenever you take it upon yourself to do one of these.” She chuckled at herself. “Without the labor pain. Naturally.”
I laughed.
“You know . . .” Liss’s face took on a thoughtful expression. “I might just have to cast one of these myself. Not for a new home, but a new car. That’s another story. Never, ever buy a car during Mercury Retrograde,” she cautioned. “I’ve certainly learned my lesson. From now on I will wait until Mercury is once again firmly and irrefutably direct in its orbit.”
Liss’s Lexus had been giving her fits for as long as I had known her. For such a lovely luxury vehicle, it had come with more than its share of problems.
“What kind of car are you going to look for?” I asked her.
“I have no idea. Perhaps I shall let it find me instead,” she replied with an airy wave of her hand. “Just like your new home will find you.” And she smiled. Knowingly.
Well, I had no idea how that would work, but I knew enough about Liss that it would all the same. Just. Like. Magick.
Marcus came to pick me up just then, so I said my good-byes and left to go off and do a little magick of my own.
I was silent most of the trip home, my mind full of the events of the day.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
“Hm?” I glanced up to discover that we had pulled up to the curb, and the truck motor had been switched off. “Oh. We’re home.”
“Uh-huh. At least I am. I think you’ve been somewhere else, though.”
I smiled at him. “I guess I have.”
“Worrying?”
“Maybe.”
But he knew me better than that. “Worrying, definitely. I thought I told you not to do that,” he teased.
“I know, I know,” I groaned. “I can’t seem to help myself. Liss and I had a chat about it today, too. Lending energy and focus to negative things. I’m going to try harder not to do that. I know it just makes matters worse. Sometimes the execution is more difficult than the good intentions.” I glanced over at him shyly. “Marcus . . .”
“Maggie . . .” he said, the lilt in his voice meant to lighten the air. But I had something to say, and I needed to be sure he heard me.
“I really want you to go back to finish up your degree as planned,” I blurted.
“I know you do.”
“And I’m really afraid that I’m messing that up for you. Because of”—I reached down and rapped my knuckles on my flamboyant cast—“this. Stupid bad luck and bad timing.”
He took off his sunglasses and sighed. “I know. It’s no big deal for me to postpone it a little while,” he said, taking my hand, “because I know myself and I know it really is only a temporary deferral. But . . . it seems to mean a lot to you—”
“It does,” I said quickly.
“—so . . . I give you my word, Magpie, we’ll find a way so that I can start classes Monday as previously planned. All right?”
“All right.” And I knew he meant it, which meant the world to me. “I’m not sure how, but I know if anyone can make this work out, you can. I, uh”—I felt a blush heating my cheeks—“I even talked to Liss about it. She recommended a Home Finding Spell to bring the perfect place my way. I have the stuff for it right here.” I patted my handbag, which I’d been holding protectively against me.
He raised an eyebrow, and a slight smile touched one corner of his mouth. “You’re willing to go the spell route? Wow. This must be serious.”
I made a face. “You aren’t the only one who can spell.”
“Evidently.”
“And besides, it isn’t for anything dire, something I could fumble,” I explained further, “with my shortage of experience.”
“Well, why don’t we take your . . . stuff . . . inside and work it together? If that’s okay with you.”
Okay? It was more than okay.
He came around and helped me inside, carrying my things for me. As we crossed the porch, it hit me all of a sudden just how much had happened in the last twenty-four hours. It felt more like days. “Wow.”
Marcus, who had been in front of me, nudging open the screen door with his elbow, tossed a saucy grin over his shoulder. “Thanks. I try.”
I giggled. “Not you.”
“Oh. Break my heart. No, don’t worry. The crumblin
g edifice of my ego will recover. Eventually.”
“I’ll be the first to admit, you’re pretty wow, too. But I was thinking about the day,” I said as I clumped my way through the door he held for me and across the threshold. Minnie came running around the corner, meowing up a storm, and wound her way around my feet and crutches. I stopped so that I wouldn’t trip over her and reached down to scratch her behind the ears.
“Why don’t you go sit down and put your feet up—doctor’s orders,” he said when I made a face, “and I’ll pour us some iced tea.”
I had to admit, putting my casted foot up high on a pile of pillows and leaning back felt really, really good. Much better than I would have thought before Danny laid down the law. Maybe the good doctor did know what he was talking about. Who woulda thunk it? And it was even better when Minnie launched her fat little body up onto the sofa, pranced all over my prone and inert figure, and then settled herself down on my chest, purring in my face with her eyes closed blissfully. Aw. The little rascal missed me.
“Hey!” Marcus protested when he came around the corner with two glasses of tea. “She took my resting spot.”
“I guess you two will just have to work out a schedule,” I told him, laughing.
He set the tea down on a coaster on the glass tabletop and then brought me my bag. “In case you want to set up on the table.”
I took out the bag of goodies Liss had sent home with me, as well as the piece of paper that stated my wishes. After asking me about a candle, Liss had decided to assume I wouldn’t have one at my fingertips and had included a small white votive in with the rest. Marcus slid the table closer to me so that I wouldn’t have to reach so far. I opened the bag to take things out, but Marcus said, “Hang on,” and went off down the hallway, returning a moment later with a silky cloth that he spread out over the glass surface of the coffee table. “Altar cloth,” he explained when I turned questioning eyes upon him.
