witches of cleopatra hill 07 - impractical magic

by Christine Pope

  A young man standing in a parking lot, shooting blue fire from his hands at a murderer and rapist.

  All right, Alex Trujillo was definitely not a McAllister, but there had to be a connection beyond his marriage to Caitlin. Just as there was some sort of connection between the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters, something Colin hadn’t quite been able to figure out yet.

  Back in college — before he’d met Shannon — Colin had briefly dated a girl he sometimes referred to in his mind as the “woo-woo queen.” Her real name had been Brittany, and she’d earnestly believed in just about anything and everything paranormal. Psychic powers. UFOs. Witchcraft. Ley lines and vortexes and God knows what else. Their relationship had by necessity been short-lived, since he’d always considered himself a natural-born skeptic, but Colin couldn’t help but think of Brittany now. He knew if she’d been confronted by this evidence, she’d be swearing up and down that the McAllisters were obviously witches. Well, and warlocks. And she’d probably be saying that the de la Pazes and the Wilcoxes were, too.

  “There’s so much going on that you know nothing about, Colin,” she’d told him one time in that horribly earnest way of hers, the one that seemed so persuasive until you stopped to really analyze what she was saying. “Going on right under your nose. And everyone else’s, too. The world is so much bigger than you could ever imagine.”

  In a way, he’d kind of admired her airy-fairy world view, because it was a lot more hopeful than his own. Not that he’d ever suffered any kind of severe trauma in his life, unless you could count his marriage, but still, working as a reporter, or even studying journalism, did tend to expose you to the darker side of things.

  Anyway, he had no doubt that Brittany would have gone marching up to Jerome, equipped with her PKE monitor or whatever the hell she called it, bent on discovering how much psychic energy was floating around the former mining town.

  The image of Brittany, in her tie-dyed skirts and beaded earrings, running into the goddess-like Jenny McAllister and demanding of her whether she was a witch, amused him for a second or two. There was something about Jenny that seemed eminently down to earth. No airy-fairy there, that was for sure. Or witchy.

  Then again, even Jenny had claimed that Jerome was populated by ghosts. Colin doubted the phenomena was ghosts — more like creaking old buildings and earth subsidence — but stories like that were the sort of thing that tourists got off on, and Jerome needed tourists for its very survival. Besides, Jenny had sounded earnest, but for all Colin knew, she’d been teasing him, trying to see if he’d fall for her tall tales or not.

  Or maybe the former mining town really was haunted. And populated by a family of witches.

  Jesus.

  He scrubbed a hand over his face and wished he’d brought a bottle of water in with him. There was one sitting in the cup holder in his car, getting warm in the sun, no doubt, even though the temperature up here in Prescott was at least a good ten or twelve degrees cooler than it had been in Tucson. But no, he doubted that he would have been able to bring water in here, even if the documents he’d been given to read were only facsimiles and not the real thing.

  Better to look at all this rationally. He took a breath and shifted in his seat so he could see the oak tree outside the window, decked out in autumn gold, but with definite bare patches where its leaves had already begun to fall. Usually, looking at nature calmed him — maybe because he spent so much of his life shut up inside, whether it was in the office or at his apartment — but right then he could almost feel the tension ratcheting up in his neck.

  He was already hiding a huge secret from Jenny. Or rather, it hadn’t been that big a secret in the beginning, but in the days since Colin had told her that one lie, it had begun to balloon and take on massive proportions, like a tumor you hoped would go away on its own. And now he was supposed to go to her and say, “Oh, yeah, let’s put all those lies about why I was there and what I do for a living aside for now. What I really want to know is whether your family is a bunch of witches and warlocks.”

  Either she’d want to kill him, or she’d laugh at him. Probably both.

  Attempting to distract himself, he paged through the rest of the materials Anita Lincoln had gathered for him. Clearly, she’d just plucked anything that had the name “McAllister” prominently mentioned in it. Colin doubted she’d actually read any of the entries, or she might have heard her own alarm bells. At any rate, he didn’t find anything nearly as spectacular as the letter from Mrs. Church or the diary entry from the unnamed young woman who had been so in love with Charles McAllister.

  Colin did find it interesting that several McAllisters had been heavily involved in setting up the Jerome Historical Society, as well as securing national landmark status about fifteen years after that. So they liked to keep a low profile, but not too low. And he supposed it wouldn’t have been in their best interests to have the town fall completely into wrack and ruin once the mine shut down. They would have had to start all over again someplace else, and he doubted that prospect would have been too appealing to a family that had been in the same place for nearly a hundred years.

  Well, they’d definitely survived. And seemed to be thriving, although there wasn’t nearly the physical evidence of their wealth as there was with the Wilcoxes. Still, Colin couldn’t help wondering how much of Jerome was owned by the McAllister family. Not all of it…but a chunk. A chunk that never left the family, apparently.

  He glanced over at his phone. Almost four fifteen. It didn’t feel as if he’d been sitting here for nearly three hours, going through the documents, taking notes, but apparently he had. No time to send out for anything else — if there even was anything else. If he really wanted to get further into the meat of things, he’d have to go to Jerome, which wouldn’t work at all. He might not have been there for nearly ten years, but he knew the town was small enough that his chances of escaping being noticed by Jenny McAllister were pretty slim.

  As he shoved his notepad and pens back into his messenger bag and then began recompiling the historical society’s documents in as close to their original order as he could, Colin suddenly wondered if that unknown young woman’s diary fragment had ended up in the society’s archives because she had in fact been banished to her Aunt Tillie’s here in Prescott.

  If so, tough luck for both her and Charles McAllister. Colin had to hope his relationship with Jenny wouldn’t suffer a similar fate.

  11

  Jenny knew she shouldn’t be this nervous. It wasn’t as if this was some kind of blind date where she was meeting Colin for the first time. Besides, they’d spoken on the phone several times since he’d headed off for work on Monday morning, and those conversations had been relaxed and easygoing enough, just trivial talk about their days and what they might do once he got to Jerome. Even with all that, Jenny found herself far too restless to simply sit and wait for him to show up, and kept roaming around her apartment, making sure that everything was in place. Was the vase of frilly yellow alstroemeria on the bookcase a bit much? She liked to have fresh flowers around, and alstroemeria were cheap and unassuming enough that she didn’t think it was making too much of a statement to have them out…but was it?

  He probably won’t even notice, she told herself. How many guys have you had over here? Have any of them ever commented on your flowers?

  Well, no. But then, Colin was different from any of the other men she’d dated. He did tend to notice things. It was a quality she respected in a person, even though she found herself worrying about exactly what he might notice while he was here in Jerome. She’d told her mother that Colin was coming for the weekend, and Jenny knew she could trust Lysette to get the word out that her daughter would be having a civilian guest for a few days. However, just because people had been told to be on their best behavior didn’t mean they actually would.

  It wasn’t that Jerome’s witches and warlocks rode through the streets on broomsticks or had magical duels outside the Spirit Room, or anything
like that. That kind of behavior just wouldn’t fly in a place that had literally hundreds of thousands of tourists passing through it every year. But sometimes people would get excited or upset, and something a little out of the ordinary would happen…and if you were lucky, the incident was something that could be attributed to ghost activity or a building settling or what-have-you. People came to Jerome expecting ghosts because the town had been featured on numerous shows that dealt with the supernatural, and a lot of tourists were actively disappointed if they didn’t have at least one experience they could blame on Jerome’s spectral citizens. Witches, on the other hand, were something completely different.

  She glanced down at her watch. Twelve forty-five. Colin had said he should be up around one, and then they could have a late lunch. The flat was spotless, and if he got here in the next couple of minutes, he might even be able to snag the parking space that had just opened up in front of the gallery. Once again her cousin Susan was watching the store, and Jenny knew she owed her cousin big-time for giving up two weekends in a row to work at the gallery. Maybe a spa day in Sedona as a thank-you? That could work.

  Standing and waiting on the porch in front of her apartment was way too obvious, so Jenny had settled for peering out the kitchen window, starting a little every time a black car appeared. Which was silly. She was acting like a kid waiting for Santa Claus to show up and claim his milk and cookies.

  It did help that the building which housed both the gallery and her flat was located in the lower stretch of Jerome, before you got into the heart of all the shops and restaurants. Parking there wasn’t as much at a premium, and so several cars went by without even slowing to take a look at the empty spot out in front.

  But there it was — that shabby old Honda Accord, coming slowly up the hill. It slowed down even more as it approached her building, then made a highly illegal U-turn to pull into the open space at the curb. Jenny had to shake her head at the maneuver, but then, Jerome was kind of a free-for-all when it came to that sort of thing. And no one had been coming in the opposite direction, so she supposed it was no harm, no foul.

  She watched just long enough to see Colin get out of the car and head back toward the trunk, then made herself step away from the window. It would look terrible for him to catch her peering out at him like the neighborhood snoop, so she went and sat down on the couch and picked up her iPad, pretending to be reading a favorite fashion site, but in reality just waiting to leap up at his knock.

  It came only a minute or so later. She laid down the tablet and went to the door.

  The quick glimpse she’d caught of him at his car had told her he was wearing a worn leather jacket, but up close, she got to see how really good he looked in it, the way it settled on his broad shoulders and gave her just a glimpse of the dark T-shirt he wore underneath. Likewise, his jeans were faded and even a little ragged around the hems, and he had on a pair of hiking boots that looked as if they’d seen some real use.

  Well, she’d told him Jerome was super-casual, and not to worry about getting dressed up. It seemed as if he’d taken that advice to heart.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey yourself,” he replied, bending down so he could kiss her on the cheek.

  It was a very chaste kiss, but even so she could feel a surge of thrilling warmth flood all through her. This whole week she’d been trying to tell herself that it was silly to be this worked up about him, and that when she saw him again she’d probably be disappointed. That didn’t seem to be the case, however. If anything, he was better-looking than she’d remembered, the effect he had on her even more pronounced.

  “Come on in,” she said, stepping out of the way so he could enter the apartment. She noticed that he held the same overnight bag he’d brought with him when he’d come to visit her at the hotel. “You can put that down in here,” she went on, then led him through the living room and up the two steps that led to the level with the two bedrooms and the bathroom.

  They went into the master bedroom. Jenny had known from the start that she wasn’t going to bother with any foolishness about him staying in the guest room slash office. They both knew exactly why he was coming up here to visit, so why bother to beat around the bush?

  He set his bag down on the floor next to her dresser and said, “I knew it.”

  “Knew what?”

  Straightening, he glanced around her room with some approval. “Somehow I knew it would look just like this.”

  A bit of a flush touched her cheeks. So Colin had been fantasizing about what her bedroom was like? She loved the space, with its warm western light and high-beamed ceilings. It was decorated with antiques she’d sourced both from relatives and from shops here in Jerome and down in Cottonwood, along with Mexican tin mirrors on the walls and block-printed fabric from India framing the windows. Eclectic, sure, but she thought it worked.

  “So, I’m that predictable?” she teased him.

  His hazel eyes were very sober. “No, just the opposite. You have a lot of sides to you, Jenny McAllister, and so I figured your room must be just as complicated.”

  Now she knew she was blushing. “Oh, I’m not that complicated,” she said lightly. “I just find it hard to pass up a sale.”

  “So I noticed,” he returned, eyes flicking toward the closet on the opposite wall. “Did you ever manage to fit it all in?”

  “Oh, yeah. I just had to donate a few odds and ends.”

  “Odds and ends?”

  “Something like that.” She wasn’t quite ready to confess that her Tucson shopping spree had resulted in her having to clear out a whole garbage bag’s worth of stuff to take down to Goodwill. “Anyway, you hungry?”

  His mouth turned up, setting off that not-quite dimple in one cheek. “I’ve been driving for more than three hours. What do you think?”

  “I think I’d better take you to Bordello’s and get a burger inside you.”

  “Bordello’s?”

  “It’s a restaurant just up the street. It’s awesome.” He still looked like he was trying to process the name of the restaurant, so she added, “Jerome had an extremely thriving red light district back in the day. I think ‘Bordello’s’ is a perfect name.”

  Colin put up his hands. “Hey, far be it from me to turn down a chance to eat at a bordello.”

  All Jenny could do was shake her head. “Let me get my jacket.”

  * * *

  It was a lot cooler up here. Colin had noticed that as soon as he got out of the car. True, Jenny had warned him about the difference in temperatures, and so he’d worn his battered and beloved leather jacket, the one Shannon had kept telling him to get rid of because it looked so disreputable. But it hadn’t really sunk in that the air here would have a definite nip to it, that it would definitely feel like fall, with Thanksgiving only a few days away.

  They had to walk less than a block to get to the restaurant. True, it was an all-uphill block, and Colin began to have a new appreciation for the way Jenny kept herself in shape. It was probably a lot easier when you had to make a hike like this just to get to the closest place to eat.

  The restaurant was small and not very bordello-like, unless you counted the hanging beads that hid the alcove where the cash register was located. And it was crowded, which made Colin wonder if they would even get a place to sit. However, Jenny threaded her way through the cramped space, heading unerringly to a small table near the back that was unoccupied but hadn’t yet been bussed.

  “Hey, Jenny. With you in a sec!” the waitress — who also seemed to be handling busboy and hostess duties as well — called out to them.

  “No problem, Eden,” Jenny called back.

  Of course they were on a first-name basis. Jenny had to know everyone in this town. The thought made Colin vaguely uneasy, as if he had just ventured into enemy territory or something. Which was foolish. Jerome was full of McAllisters, true, but not everyone there was part of Jenny’s family. A quick glance around the crowded restaurant told him th
at if appearance was anything to go on, at least half the people in here were probably tourists.

  “Sorry about that,” Eden said, appearing next to their table with a damp cloth in one hand. With quick, practiced gestures, she wiped down the tabletop, then plucked a couple of paper menus out of the pocket of the black apron she wore tied around her waist. “Something to drink to start?”

  Colin hadn’t been able to look at the menu, but he could see the small bar off to one side, which meant they must have wine and beer at least. “Something local on tap?”

  “Oak Creek Brewery brown ale.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Same for me.”

  Eden nodded. “I’ll have those right up for you.”

  Colin picked up the menu and gave it a quick perusal. Mostly burgers, as Jenny had said, but some salads, too. Not that he was terribly interested in a salad right then.

  Apparently, Jenny already knew what she wanted, because she didn’t even look at her own menu. “So…you’re in Jerome. What do you want to do first?”

  There was a loaded question. All he’d done was kiss her quickly on the cheek, and that was enough to get him hot and bothered all over again. Suggesting that they go back to her flat after lunch for a little afternoon delight sounded kind of crass, though. Anyway, they’d discussed a few things on the phone but hadn’t really hadn’t made any concrete plans. “Well,” he hedged, “I’m having lunch in a bordello. I figure that’s a good start.”

  She grinned. “True. I did make us some reservations for dinner up at the Asylum. Hope you don’t mind, but they book up pretty fast, and I figured you should see the place.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  Her shoulders lifted. “Some people might have thought I was presuming.”

  By “some people,” he got the feeling she meant some of her past boyfriends. Lovers. Whatever. He had to wonder what kind of assholes she’d allowed into her life. But at least she was single now, had scraped them off her shoe.