Topaz Dreams

by Patricia Rice

  Sweet of Kurt to register the phone in her shop name. She lifted her eyebrow and he shrugged.

  “It’s a shop,” Lonnie said in irritation. “I’m up here in Hillvale, and they still don’t have cell reception. You still have that old plywood with you painted next to my wagon?”

  Lisa didn’t answer immediately. Upstairs, it sounded as if the wind was rattling the windows. A glance outside verified that no dust blew—the day was dead calm and sunny.

  Apparently, even Lonnie heard the rattles. He glanced at the ceiling and edged toward the door. Aaron and Harvey leaned against the jamb, pretending nonchalance by mock-fighting with their sticks, while deliberately blocking the exit.

  In the light from the front window, the dark crystals in Daisy’s guardians began to glow white.

  “Yeah, I’ve been using it out in the garage as a shelf, why?” Lisa finally replied.

  “Well, it could be worth a lot. Think you can get it in the truck and bring it up here?”

  Apparently greed won over cowardice, Teddy noted with interest. Did that mean the honesty stone worked? She really wanted to shut down her Monitor, but she needed to know what Thalia was doing. She leaned on the wall next to Kurt’s reassuring presence, in direct line of Thalia’s fire at the bottom of the stairwell.

  Teddy was as aware of Kurt physically as emotionally. He was blocking the worst of his fear and fury, but he was a huge stew of conscientiousness under all that macho attitude. All these years of shouldering responsibility had probably left him thinking it was his duty to make this scene come out right.

  She elbowed him. “Relax. What happens, happens. You can’t control everything.”

  He shot her a grim glare that disagreed.

  The speakerphone rattled off Lisa’s irate response to Lonnie’s request.

  Walker sidled over to whisper, “I have men zeroing in on her house now. Keep him talking, if you can.”

  “Thalia’s about to add her two cents,” Teddy warned. “Be prepared to take cover.”

  He nodded and passed the warning on to Amber. Her bracelets clicked as she eased over and whispered to Cass. Kurt’s aunt nodded and gestured regally at two Lucys to attend her. Gradually, as word spread around the room, walking sticks rose in defense. Their crystals gleamed in the sunlight from the front window.

  Satisfied she’d done all she could to warn the others about Thalia, Teddy squeezed Kurt’s arm for reassurance, then stepped up to Lonnie and the phone. “Hi, Lisa, it’s me, Teddy Baker. You probably don’t remember me, but maybe you remember my mother? She owned the house Lonnie and Thalia lived in here in Hillvale.”

  The wind abruptly shrieked. Harvey’s harmless consignment staffs chattered. The Lucys murmured their chants under the howl, keeping their sticks in defensive positions.

  Lonnie’s expression reflected terror, not of Thalia, but of discovery—and he emitted a cyclone of guilt. Good, Teddy thought in grim satisfaction. But he couldn’t be convicted for guilt. She needed evidence.

  “Thalia?” Lisa asked warily on the other end of the line. “What’s she got to do with the price of eggs?”

  How unsurprising. Lonnie had lied about his girlfriend sending him up here looking for Thalia’s share of the imaginary lawsuit. He’d meant to keep the money for himself. He was so easy to read.

  Teddy studied him contemptuously as she replied to Lisa. “She’s my mother’s cousin. We’ve been sending her cards and hadn’t realized she’d died.”

  In fear of his depredations being exposed, Lonnie backed toward the door, but he was glued to the phone receiver, where Lisa was demanding that he return home immediately.

  In a sudden furious gust of wind, Teddy’s books flew off the shelf. Kurt caught her elbow and dragged her up against the wall with him. She held her staff in front of both of them. The red crystal pulsated with dangerous energy.

  With everyone edging toward the walls, Lonnie was suddenly isolated in the center of the shop. Thalia took advantage. The display of rock crystals on the oak table flew at him. He ducked, wide-eyed in surprise.

  “Look, babe, what else was I supposed to do?” He argued with Lisa as rocks whistled over his head. “How do you think I had the deposit for the shop?” He glared at Teddy.

  He’d sold her mother’s property for money to start his own business! He was so Null, so wrapped up in himself, that he couldn’t even see the supernatural warning signs coming right at him.

  “Have you already forged Thalia’s death certificate?” Teddy asked, giving up on subtlety. “The way you forged the deed you sold to the Kennedys?”

  Lonnie finally had the sense to look alarmed. “Look, babe, I’ll call you back. I’ve got to go.”

  Lisa screamed, “You don’t hang up on me now, you bastard! Tell me what you’re doing. I swear, you don’t have the brains of a mongoose. Why would you fuggin’ go back to Hillvale? Are you out of your mind?”

  Lonnie hunted for the speaker button, but a book flew at his head. He dodged under the table, then finally pried the phone out of his hand. Dropping it, he jumped up and ran for the door. Two large tree branches blocked him.

  Teddy could almost see the leaves and sticks emerging from Harvey and Aaron’s walking sticks, but she figured it was an illusion.

  Lonnie staggered backward. “What the freaking hell?” He glanced around frantically while the phone still squawked.

  Kurt helpfully spoke up. “Hey, Lisa, Lonnie is a little occupied right now. Want to tell us what happened to Thalia?”

  The squawking shut up. In the silence, urgent knocking could be heard over the line.

  “That’s probably the cops,” Kurt said helpfully. “You might want to tell them what you know. It will probably get you off easier.”

  “Lisa did it,” Lonnie shouted, fear escalating over greed. “She and Thalia had a knock-down, eye-scratching cat fight!”

  How could she know if the honesty stone had made him confess that? She couldn’t. The wind shrieked, and Lonnie staggered to one side, as if unable to withstand a gale.

  “You knocked her out, you bastard! You punched her, and she fell. I didn’t push her, I swear! You’ll fry in hell if you say anything different, Leonard Thompson!”

  “Kill him,” the dead speaker in the ceiling cried in a hiss of electric sparks. Rocks and crystals flew, slamming into Lonnie. He covered his head and ducked under the table, but the guardian statues flew off the shelves in his direction, battering his back. “Kill him!”

  “And whose idea was it to cremate Thalia in the kiln?” Kurt asked conversationally as Walker edged around the wall to pick up the phone. Not walking into a maelstrom of flying crystals and guardians was a wise idea.

  “His, all his!” Lisa cried. “I was stoned and didn’t know what I was doing. He said he needed to bury her in the cemetery and make a burial marker and everything. We didn’t have no money, and that made sense, you know?”

  Stoned—oh the irony, Teddy thought as Daisy’s rock guardians picked themselves up and flung themselves repeatedly at the man huddled beneath the table, making himself as small a target as possible.

  “So how did she end up in the attic?” Kurt asked conversationally.

  Teddy aimed her staff at Lonnie. To her immense surprise, he answered.

  “The ground was too damned hard. She’d been grinding all those rocks, jinxing us with them, so I dumped them on her when I stuck her in the kiln, tried to get rid of all of it, but the kiln cracked. We had to fix that upstairs wall where she hit it, so I just put the remains in the attic and used the plaster to cover it up. She would have killed us,” Lonnie bleated. “What the hell is with these damned stones?”

  “Thalia,” Teddy said cheerfully. “She’s still trying to kill you. How does it feel?”

  Lonnie screamed as the guardians all gathered power at once and hit him from every direction.

  “Do you have enough, Walker?” Cass asked wearily from her protected corner.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.” He held up
the phone, but Lisa apparently had just answered her door. An official voice emerged from the speaker, “You have the right to remain silent. . .”

  As the cop on the other end of the line read Lisa her rights, Cass gave a signal Teddy didn’t quite catch. The Lucys lifted their staffs and spoke their exorcism spell—again.

  Thirty

  Kurt almost felt sorry for the bastard battered by ghostly flying sticks and stones and reduced to gibbering under a table, except Lonnie started whining excuses for all his foul deeds. Thalia needed to take a big stick to his fat head.

  In disgust, Kurt pried Teddy off the wall and led her outside. She was practically shaking in her shoes, and he wanted to cradle her and haul her far, far away. Let the Lucys chant and Walker cuff the weeping culprit, he was taking care of Teddy—because he’d finally admitted that she was a gem he wanted to keep.

  He didn’t feel the least bit of anxiety in thinking that. Theodosia Devine-Baker was many, many things, so many it might take him a lifetime to understand, but she was also reliable, honest, and courageous, and that’s what he craved. With her, he could be himself without fear. Even when the world around them was insane, he could relax his defenses knowing she would hand him the sword he needed, when he needed it.

  “Stoned,” she cried, almost hysterically. “They were all stoned. I’m never touching pot again. And I’m having second thoughts about alcohol.”

  Kurt would be amused if ten thousand unanswerable questions weren’t spinning in his head. Were the Lucys creating the chaos back there with their weird wands? Or was Lonnie’s dead wife really tearing his head off? He hoped it was the latter, but either was too far-fetched for logic.

  “We need to get you and your sister somewhere safe from flying stone men,” he said decisively—the only rational reply he could offer. “I’ll have Xavier open one of the rentals if you don’t want to stay at the lodge.”

  He hated saying that. He wanted her in his house—but after today’s inexplicable events, he was willing to accept anything she told him about evil, or wicked, foul, and negative—whatever word they wanted to use. Lonnie Thomas was all of them and a murderous prick as well. So if she said the lodge was evil, he’d have to cope.

  Teddy sank into his embrace. Kurt relished just holding her close, knowing this courageous, brilliant woman believed he could help. He simply held her, waiting until she regained control.

  Abruptly, she straightened and spun around, looking up at the fire-scarred mountain, the towering redwoods, Sam’s colorful planters—and the road out of town.

  His heart sank.

  “I can go anywhere,” she announced. “Syd needs to get over her fear and go home. I can set up shop in any tiny tourist town while I experiment with crystals. Give me one good reason to stay here with looming evil, maggots crawling from the woodwork, and only one Null cop to stop them all.”

  “I’m applying for Dinah’s liquor license,” he answered nonsensically, because he was only a dull male and no matter how much he wanted to say the right thing, he didn’t know what she expected him to say after a morning like this one.

  To his amazement, she laughed.

  “I get that,” she said, turning to hug him. “You’re overwhelmed, don’t know what to say, and you need a drink to think about it. And you can’t go up to the lodge and drink because you’ll be on duty. Am I close?”

  She understood. Gratefully, Kurt wrapped her in his arms, kissed her hungrily, then shoved her toward his car. “Thalia can have your damned shop. My mother can have the lodge. I want a place just for us.”

  “Can Dinah still have her liquor license?” she asked in amusement, following his lead.

  “Restaurants should have liquor licenses,” he agreed as he took his seat, having no idea how they’d settled on this topic with all the other things needing to be said. “Drunken Lucys could be our Friday night entertainment.”

  She nodded as if that made sense. “If Hillvale is going to have crystal art, it should have a crystal expert.”

  Kurt played around that notion as if it were a sore tooth, looking for the hole. As far as he was concerned, she was their crystal expert. He drove past the shop and down the main highway, turning up a driveway right below the Treasure Trove.

  “Crystal art?” he asked cautiously. He didn’t think she was having hysterics, but experience had taught him that drama often led to bombshells exploding in his face.

  “We’ll call it that,” she said cheerfully, not sounding as if she would explode. “We’ll play the crystals up as the magic behind the commune’s success, get scientists to identify the elements in the compounds, psychics to extol the virtues. . . It will be fun.” She peered through the windshield at the stone and wood cottage they approached.

  Kurt gripped the steering wheel and studied the structure, but his thoughts weren’t on the vacant rental. He wanted to be certain he was interpreting correctly. “You’re staying?”

  “Are you?” she asked a shade too brightly. “Because I’m pretty certain you or Monty will end up killing your mother if you hang around her too long.”

  “I can handle her,” he said stiffly. “Someone has to keep her honest—” He bit his tongue on the implication.

  She nodded as if in understanding—as she always understood. He didn’t have to speak his fears to Teddy, she knew them.

  He should beat his head against a wall and hope for logic to return, but he inexplicably felt lighter as he got out of the car, believing Teddy read the emotion he couldn’t voice.

  “I can’t explain Hillvale either,” she said, taking his hand and following him up the flagstone walk. “But there is something inherently wrong in the land around the lodge. And it affects those who stay too long. You know the history better than I do.”

  Even dismissing the legends of the early settlers being haunted and burned out of their ranch, Kurt knew the unhappy history from this past quarter century. His father had succumbed to greed. His mother was slowly descending into the same pit. Her chauffeur, the security manager, even poor Xavier had been corrupted. And then there had been the developer who’d tried to crush the Lucys. . . could all that venality in one tiny town be coincidental? Maybe it was something in the water.

  “Thalia and Lonnie and Lisa?” he asked, unlocking the cottage door with his master key. “They didn’t live or work at the lodge.”

  “They stayed at the commune most of their lives. From what I understand, the crystals they worked with carried pollution from the lodge up to the farm. But that’s where Sam and I step in. We need to get Thalia’s crystals back to study them and compare them to mine and Harvey’s. Are they all bad? Can Harvey’s sticks be carrying pollution? Daisy said Lucinda liked the blue ones—would the famed Lucinda Malcolm use corrupt crystals?”

  Not giving him time to ponder any more insanity, she stepped inside the cottage and smiled at the sunlit room. “Gorgeous!”

  “One of our better houses. We’ve just had it cleaned up after the last tenants left.” He steered her past the granite and steel kitchen down a short hallway to the master. The cleaning service kept clean sheets on the beds, just like a hotel.

  “Sam and you?” he asked, half-reluctantly, pondering her comments. Why did he have such difficulty translating?

  “Sam’s the scientist. She can help me design the experiments.” She didn’t seem to pay attention to what she was saying but examined the bland hotel headboard and high-end comforter with interest.

  At least she wasn’t running.

  “This place has potential,” he suggested, hope rising, as well as other parts south, as she dropped his hand to tug her tank top over her head. He’d had all the drama for one day that he could tolerate.

  “You need to let off steam before you explode,” she said with a teasing grin, nailing his problem.

  “Steam potential, yes,” he said solemnly, flinging his t-shirt toward the dresser. Her lacy bra barely covered her substantial assets, and steam would pour from his ears just lo
oking at her. “There’s a science to steam power. Want to help me explore it?”

  “If you promise I won’t get burned. That’s a pretty big responsibility. Are you sure?” She wrapped her arms around his neck, all amusement gone.

  Kurt closed his eyes and let bliss envelop him. The day’s weirdness didn’t seem so peculiar when he held her like this. Anything seemed possible. All he had to do to gain all this passion and pleasure was offer commitment.

  He drank in her sensual jasmine scent, the press of soft flesh, and the honesty and understanding she offered. This wasn’t as difficult as he’d feared.

  He let down his walls and lifted her into him. “I’m in more danger from you than you are from me. I will never burn you or let you be burned. I want to give us a chance.”

  There, that only hurt in about a thousand different places. He carried her to the bed, praying fervently but expecting nothing.

  She wrapped her legs around him and whispered, “So do I. A Null who believes in me is rare and valuable and I want to learn you from the inside out.”

  Filling with light and air and pride, Kurt laughed and covered her with his body. “Then I’ll learn you from the outside in. We’ll make beautiful bubbles together.”

  “Bubbles?” And then she laughed. “Steam bubbles!”

  Which made as much sense as anything else that had happened that day.

  July 2: evening

  * * *

  Standing in front of her beautiful periwinkle door, admiring the purple petunias in the planter by her doorstep, Teddy drank in the wonder of this moment—one so different from her arrival barely a week ago. Hillvale had a way of accelerating and magnifying life so it could be examined from all angles at once.

  The man with his hand at her back opened the door just as he had in their first encounter as adults. They’d just spent a blissful afternoon in bed, and she wasn’t ready to let him go.

  He was still protecting her, though, only in a different fashion. Instead of warning her away, he was checking to see if it was safe to enter.