Jeremy slyly closed the trunk and turned. A middle-aged man got out, unhurried, wearing jeans and a cowboy hat, of all things. Rebecca sized him up. He was tall, or just gave the impression of height because of his manly build. He seemed trustworthy, like some old-timey western movie star. She tried to shake off that impression. This was the enemy.
“Howdy,” he called over to them. Howdy? Who says that?
“Hi there,” she said guardedly.
He walked towards them, all non-threatening, like they were wild dogs or something. Slow, easy, steady. Not looking directly at them. In fact, he didn’t technically walk toward them. He got closer to them by meandering over to the edge of the quarry, where he stopped, lifted his face, and gazed out over the giant hole in the ground.
Jeremy still hadn’t said a word, so she said to him, a little like she was onstage acting in a play, “Well, I best be going, see you around,” and mounted her bike. Jeremy snapped out of it and moved towards the driver’s door.
“You kids come up here a lot?” came the voice of the lone cowboy. He still wasn’t looking at them. He could’ve been a crazy dude talking to himself.
She was tempted to ignore him, except he was a cop, and she knew that was a bad idea, or at least impractical. The long arm of the law, and all that. “Uh…not really. I used to, with my mom, we used to ride horses up here a lot.” She ended the sentence with uptalk, like a valley girl. She hated when she did that. It sounded like a question, made the conversation keep going.
He turned to them and came closer. The sideways sun hit his pale green eyes. His face was plain and unremarkable. “My name’s Tom. I’m investigating the car crash last week. Got some time to talk?”
“What about? We don’t know anything.” Jeremy said. His voice cracked a little and Rebecca winced.
“Tom” continued as if everything was casual, as if it was all timeless and nothing mattered. “Well, I’m afraid the other guys didn’t find much, so I just wondered if you’d seen anything. But, if you don’t come here that often, I don’t know if you can help.”
“Yeah, we never come here,” Jeremy said.
“Except for today,” the cop said. There was no question mark, but Jeremy caved anyway.
“Uh, we needed a private place to talk I guess,” Jeremy said.
Oh well, truth was the best policy. As long as it wasn’t the whole truth. Jeremy put his arm around her. He was acting so guilty, jesus, he was gonna make the guy suspicious. Tom had a knowing look on his face.
“But, like I said, we were just going.” Rebecca moved away from Jeremy’s embrace and paddle-walked her bike a few steps down the trail. “Right?” she said to Jeremy, who stood stock still, a strange look on his face.
“You go ahead,” he said finally.
“Jeremy!” she said. “My—my family is really looking forward to you coming to Sunday dinner. Please. Come with me so you won’t be late.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said.
What was he doing? As she biked away her face went cold, and the sides of her vision were going black, and she started trembling.
At the bottom of the hill she looked back. The two of them were outlined against the sunset, Tom slowly walking closer to Jeremy.
She had a very bad feeling about this.
* * *
“DEEDEE, HONEY,” BONNIE LOOKED at her over her reading glasses, which she’d put on to open the latest bottle of wine. “When was the last time you had your eyes examined?”
Deirdre had just finished telling Bonnie, Sally, and Lina about her frightening ride the night before, aided by a few too many glasses of wine. She had told them everything, mostly.
“Oh Dee, I don’t like the sound of this. At all.” Lina folded her arms across her chest, her black cashmere sweater with white linen popped collar shirt underneath, white skin, and dark hair making her look a bit like Snow White. Or the Evil Queen. She’d just gotten a very fashionable haircut, a super short chin length bob with a little downpeak in the middle of the bangs. Deirdre wondered what had prompted that. She’d fit right in come Halloween.
“I…I know it sounds nuts you guys.” She took a swig of her red and munched another Ritz. Wine and wafers at Bonnie’s house was much more satisfying than at church.
“What sounds nuts?” The kitchen door slammed, and Wilma was there.
Bonnie wasted no time grabbing a Coors Light from the fridge and tossing it to Wilma, who popped the top in a spray of foam. Wilma only drank Coors Light, and always only two, then she would go home to feed her rabbits and llamas. They’d tried getting her to try a Cabernet every now and then, but it hadn’t stuck. She could only come to Bonnie’s once a month, since the other three or four weeks she was either on call, away at training, or on duty at the fire station—eating, sleeping, and doing everything with all those firemen. Dang.
Anyway, Wilma got the whole story from the girls in bits and pieces, interrupted and disjointed, skipping ahead then rewinding, until she’d had it and threw her hands up. “Enough!” She turned to Deirdre. “Why…?” she stopped and took a swig of Coors. “Are you feeling okay, Deirdre?”
“Not really, I got shot at last night!”
“But you said yourself you didn’t hear anything, Dee.” Lina pouted at her.
“I think it deafened me. I was frozen, like in shock. I heard myself screaming. Or somebody screaming.”
“The Black Witch!” Lina said triumphantly, and the whole kitchen erupted in hoots and squabbles.
“But it was all so dark…” Bonnie piped up.
“Why didn’t you report it?” asked Sally. She and Wilma looked at each other and nodded, as if they were the only two with any sense in the room. Deirdre’s skin crawled with annoyance.
“Because, the last time I told the Sheriff’s Department about something I saw, they didn’t take me very seriously.” She said it pointedly, looking straight at Sally.
“Yeah Sally, why don’t you call your boyfriend?” asked Lina.
Sally frumped her chin and resettled in her bar stool, saying nothing. She’d make a good judge someday.
“Well, you know what I think?” Bonnie said, her calm demeanor returning. “I think we’ve all had an emotional week. We saw a bad accident, then the horse died, and then we discovered it may not have been an accident. Something fishy is going on, but you know what? It’s not up to us to find out, especially if it means getting in the way of gunfire. It’s not worth it. I think we need to stay away from Paraiso, the quarry, any of those places—”
“I’ll be damned if I let some gun nut keep me off of my trails,” Sally interrupted. “Why don’t we just all stay in bed all day with the covers over our heads?”
“That wasn’t what I was saying,” Bonnie sighed, setting her wineglass down with a clatter.
But Sally went on. “I’ll be out there, riding those trails, come hell or high water. Or witches, ghosts, criminals, whatever! This neighborhood is our neighborhood, we’ve been here longer than any drug dealing hooligan losers…we’ve got to protect it. They can’t run us out.” Sally’s face was deep rose pink now.
This was wine night. It was supposed to be fun, not turn into an argument.
An uncomfortable silence descended, until the only sound left was Lina humming This Land is Your Land under her breath. Now she stopped, noticing everyone’s eyes pointing at her, a convenient scapegoat for their mutual irritation.
She stopped humming and opened her eyes wide and innocent. “What?”
Later back at home, Deirdre made some tea to counteract the wine and the headache from all the fighting.
Rebecca walked into the kitchen. “Mom? Can I talk to you?”
“Of course honey.” She put her cup down. “Are you sick?” She put a hand on Rebecca’s forehead. “You’re feverish and clammy.”
“How can I be both at the same time? No I’m not sick, I’m fine.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about too. Drugs.” She burst out lau
ghing, realizing how much she sounded like a public service ad. Rebecca didn’t laugh, so she went on, “No really. I’ve heard about some bad stuff happening in the neighborhood—drug overdoses—at that low-income apartment. I know you have to ride your bike past there to get home—in fact, have you gotten a new bike?—and I just want you to be extra careful. And, like always, if there’s anything you want to talk about, I’m here for you.”
“Okay, yeah, I was going to warn you about that place too. Word travels fast.” Rebecca cleared her throat. She really did look sick.
“What was it you wanted to talk to me about honey?”
“Um. Like. I guess just guys.”
“Yeah? Any guy in particular?”
“Well…What if you like a guy that you thought you didn’t like before. And he’s trying to be a bad boy but he’s just a total dork, so it’s not that bad boy thing. You just feel like maybe he’s had a rough time.”
“Well sweetie, if there’s one thing I learned the hard way it’s this: Don’t mistake sympathy for love. You’ve got a good heart, and sometimes when you see someone in pain, it’ll pull at your heart strings. But don’t let that fool you into thinking you’ve got true feelings for someone.”
Clara walked in. Deirdre put her arms around both her girls. “You know I really love and care about you girls, and your brother. If anything ever happens to me, just remember that.”
“Mom!” Rebecca shoved off of her and looked at her hard. “Don’t get all maudlin.”
“Is something wrong with you Mommy?” Clara asked.
“No, no, of course not. I’m just saying I love you very much. Forget it!” She kissed the top of Clara’s head. “Now Clara, I want you to tell me what you know about the Black Witch.”
“Mom!” Rebecca said. “Are you sure you want to ask her about that?”
“Why not?” said Clara. Rebecca rolled her eyes, but flipped a chair around, straddled it, and put her chin on her arms. Clara loved to tell stories, and she knew so much history she could just rattle it off. She’d probably end up a professor.
Clara revved up for her recital. “Well. A long time ago…”
Deirdre and Rebecca were held rapt by her telling of the story. A gypsy queen—wait, what does that mean, a gypsy queen—Rebecca asked. Well, I guess it means she was the top female gypsy, replied Clara. Good enough.
A gypsy queen lived in Fairy Glen, they lived down in the corner of Pleasant Hollow and Fairy Glen, and there was a whole village of ‘em. They had a farm, and chickens, and horses, and they made stuff and fixed stuff for people. They had beautiful clothes, they sewed things too. And they told fortunes for people sometimes. They had brought little people with them from their home country…
“Little people? Like midgets?” Rebecca asked.
“Shhh!” said Deirdre.
“No, like fairy people,” answered Clara.
The fairy people had an identical village on the other side of the creek, just with cats for horses, and butterflies instead of chickens.
Okay…this is verging from folklore into fantasy, thought Deirdre.
It was a long story that involved trickery and switching a fairy baby with a gypsy baby at birth—“the gypsy queen’s baby was brought up by fairies, while they brought up the fairy baby. See?”
“Couldn’t they tell? I mean wasn’t the fairy baby super tiny?” Rebecca asked.
“No, of course not,” Clara said.
Then when the gypsy baby was a woman, she became the fairy queen. She didn’t know who she really was, and she declared war on the gypsies. The fairy baby thought she was a gypsy and had grown up to be gypsy queen, and defended her people bravely. She didn’t know she had magical powers. Then, the gypsy turned the fairy—wait, other way around, the fairy turned the gypsy—into a white owl.
Rebecca said, “A white owl?” Deirdre choked on her tea.
But Clara continued right on. “Now she can shape-shift, and she’s cursed to live forever. She patrols the forest on her black gypsy stallion to make it safe for gypsies, fairies, and humans."
Rebecca laughed softly. “You know, gypsies are human, Clara."
Clara looked at her indignantly, and said “I know!”
Rebecca reached over to muss up her hair but Clara dodged her and shot her a fierce glance.
Deirdre’s face was cold and her lips felt like rubber, but she managed to say, “Great story sweetie. I think it’s bed time for you.”
“Ok Mama.” Clara trundled out of the kitchen.
“I saw a white owl last night outside work,” Rebecca said, then in a lowered voice, “The story I heard, which is probably too R-rated for Clara, is that the gypsies lived in the hollow, they had beautiful horses and beautiful women, and when the Encantadinoans got too jealous, they all came in a drunken gang, and raped and burned the camp, then killed everyone, and their horses. The black witch got raped, but she escaped on horseback. Now she wants revenge. That’s all I know.”
Revenge. The word made Deirdre shiver. “All I know is there is some weird stuff going on around here baby. Promise to be extra careful.”
“You too Mom. I love you.” Rebecca kissed her on the cheek and followed Clara’s path out of the kitchen.
She looked at her phone. No answer to her multiple voicemails to Stephanie. Maybe she’d try a text. Rebecca was a texter, and she was closer to Stephanie’s age than Deirdre was.
Deirdre smacked her forehead. What an idiot I am! She had interrupted Rebecca when she was about to tell her about a boy or something. How many more opportunities like that would she get? And she blew it. She was always telling Rebecca to come to her about anything, but when it came right down to it, she’d been so distracted and wrapped up in her own problems that she hadn’t even listened.
Rebecca was special, so unlike anyone else. Sometimes she had no idea what made her tick, but in the end, she didn’t really care. She could only hope that Rebecca would grow up to be a happy, healthy, well balanced person. She could be an astrophysicist or a mechanic, just as long as she was safe, and avoided drugs and alcohol and all the problems they can stir up.
Speaking of which, after her drunken friends had gotten everything off their chests, they had actually all agreed on something. Something strange was going on in Fairy Glen.
Now, she promised herself she would find out what it was.
Monday, October 15
DEIRDRE LICKED THE LAST envelope, and set it on top of the stack. No matter what else was going on, the bills had to get paid. Next she had to invoice her clients, so she could get paid too. The money disappeared faster than they could earn it, and paying off Bowie’s surgery bill on her credit card didn’t help.
Maybe she could add another stall to the barn and get a boarder. But the last time she tried was disastrous. You can’t imagine how many people who can’t even manage their own lives end up collecting horses, stashing them at one place, not paying the board, relying on the fact that good people can’t stand to see them go without hoof and vet care and food, then sneaking them out in the middle of the night to go to the next unsuspecting boarding barn.
Speaking of horses, it was creeping up on noon, and with their winter coats growing in, the horses probably felt like they were wearing wool suits in a sauna. Clean water, and plenty of it, was vital to their well being and avoiding the dreaded colic. She shoved her feet into her work boots, grabbed the stack of envelopes, and went out the front door into the sunshine to walk down to the mailbox.
The neighborhood was still and quiet, the only sound a far away weed-whacker. Any creature with any sense would hide on a day like these—underground, in shady trees, or inside air-conditioned houses. The surrounding hills undulated in army green and the sky was a heavy opaque blue overhead. She felt alone, the last human on earth.
In California, the month of October, supposedly the start of all that’s cozy and autumnal, was the second hottest month of the year, September being the first. Not the time to put on tights, boots and
scarves, eat an apple and fall into a pile of leaves, like the Macy’s ads would have you believe.
The ongoing drought had triggered water-rationing regulations, and listening to the howls of complaint from San Amaro residents was comical. Trying to keep the deep lush green of their postage stamp sized yard—considering most of their plots were minuscule, a result of their leviathan homes bulging at the seams of their property lines—really, how could you pay that much for a house that had maybe fifteen feet maximum between it and the neighbor’s house, windows looking right into each other?—and they weren’t even trying to water livestock or keep a nursery business going. She’d heard the wastrel moms whine to each other at the supermarket while they tossed three-dollar boxes of organic mac ’n cheese into their carts to feed their little cretins.
Wow. Deirdre mentally slapped the back of her hand, the way her mother used to, for thinking such vitriolic thoughts towards people who were, after all, her neighbors. Of course, she was on edge. The nightmarish ride she’d had two nights ago was weighing on her, and she could barely run through the routines of daily life without feeling like she was in a strange parody.
She stared at the pile of bills, and the invitations to Clara’s birthday party. October 28th fell on a Sunday this year, so it was the perfect chance to have a simple (and cheap) party at home, complete with homemade cake. Real cake, not cupcakes. One single, big cake that you cut up with a knife. She was sick to death of the cupcake trend. The invitation addressed to Peter was a problem. She stuck it in her pocket, having failed to get the Fey’s mailing address. Clara could give it to him at school. She shoved the rest into the mailbox and raised the little red flag, and headed to the backyard.
Ginny dozed inside her stall, occasionally swishing her tail to knock away the pesky flies. Deirdre gave her an extra spritz of fly spray, and the old mare nodded appreciatively.
October's Fire (Fairy Glen Suspense Book 1) Page 22
