Her expression smoothed. “I’m not a coroner, but his injuries appeared consistent with a fall.”
“Then I suppose that’s what it was.”
A line of cars cruised past.
“But why did you say otherwise?” she asked. “Did you hear or see anything?”
“It sounds like you’re not convinced it was an accident.”
“And you’re avoiding my question. What’s wrong, Lenore? You seem agitated.”
“Isn’t everyone?” I babbled. “The Bell and Thistle. Mike’s death. Last year’s murders. We’re all on edge.”
A hot wind rose, drying a gritty sweat to my skin. It tangled my hair and rattled the elm beside the sidewalk.
A melancholy bell tolled.
I glanced down the street. Neighbors looked fearfully over their shoulders and away, refusing to meet each other’s eyes.
She frowned. “Everyone knew someone in the Bell and Thistle. I don’t suppose we’ll ever get closure on that mystery.”
My pulse accelerated. Closure. The bitch. “Oh?”
“I’m no psychologist, but I do know a bit about loss. This town is grieving and in denial.”
“Loss? You talk as if they’re dead. They’ve only been taken.”
“Taken?” She cocked her head. “Don’t tell me you believe the UFO theorists?”
“Taken.” I looked her in the eye, and in spite of my fear, I said, “And we’ll get them back.”
She went quiet, her face as still as the grave.
I’d gone too far, and suddenly I couldn’t speak either. I froze, rooted to the spot, my knees trembling.
I felt it then. Her magic was overwhelming, electric, everywhere. The earth and sky flowed through the woman before me.
I’d only been playing at magic, dancing between the worlds, chatting with ghosts and animal spirits. I hadn’t understood magic at all. This was power. And I was small.
The world went translucent, time and space folding together, blurring. I saw men in battered hats on horseback. I saw Doyle’s low, wooden buildings vanish, replaced by a thick wood.
I wanted to fall to my knees, tell her I loved her, I’d do anything for her, my queen. She was a queen. It was so obvious now. A golden, unbearable light danced around her head – her crown.
I swayed, bending, but something snapped me upright, locked my legs into place.
Something about a queen in America seemed off. I cocked my head, thinking about that.
The twenty-first century rushed toward me, and it was just me and the doctor on a normal Doyle sidewalk again.
So we weren’t playing games anymore. Me, quiet Lenore, had been the one to break the silence and reveal my sisters’ knowledge. The doctor and I knew each other now.
I gritted my teeth. “Why didn’t you use your unseelie influence to get Alba to move? Did you have to scare her with threats of arrest?”
Her eyes glowed blue fire. Her face distorted.
The sidewalk cracked before me. The crack widened, deepened, ran up the wall of the wooden building, splintering it in two. It raced, a jagged line, across the road. The cement crumbled at my feet, pebbles bouncing into the darkness.
I should run, I thought vaguely. But my legs wouldn’t move. The street darkened. Overlapping images swirled around me, dizzying. Women in fifties dresses and gloves and hats. A deer, grazing beneath a pine. A miner whipping a donkey, driving him onward.
Out of nowhere, a rope appeared, coiling around my waist and torso. It tightened, and I gasped for breath. Something tugged me backward, away from the gap. A green maiden walked toward us, her eyes the color of ivy. Reaching into the chasm, the maiden grabbed a fold of earth and whipped it across the gash.
And then I was on the sidewalk in Doyle.
A car drove by, too fast, its wake stirring my hair.
Jayce, in an emerald tank top and brown shorts stood in front of me and glared at the Doctor. Karin stood beside me, her hand braced on my shoulder. She was pink from exertion, her blue t-shirt stretching taut against the swell of her stomach.
Doc Toeller nodded and smiled. “Enjoy your day, ladies.” She sauntered down the street.
“What the hell was that?” Jayce’s voice trembled.
I slumped against the wood-plank wall of Antoine’s Bar. “She knows we know.”
Karin’s grip tightened on my shoulder. Abruptly, she released me. “If she didn’t before, she knows after that display.” She rubbed her stomach. “Did we actually beat her?”
“No.” I swallowed. “That was a draw. She was testing us.” She’d been testing me, probing to figure out what I knew. And when I’d pushed back, she’d unleashed a taste of her magic. I was depressingly sure a taste was all it had been.
“We need to talk.” Jayce angled her head toward the door to Antoine’s.
And I did need a drink. Desperately.
I followed my sisters inside. A long, curved bar with brass fittings lined one wall. Brass lamps hung from the wooden ceiling, bare except for the water stains. We found a table in the back of the long, narrow room.
Karin lowered herself to a bench and scooted close to the wall. Before long, she wouldn’t be able to fit. I slid in beside her.
“Mineral water?” Jayce asked her.
Karin nodded.
“Cider,” I said.
Jayce went to the bar.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Karin asked.
“I’m fine.”
She gasped, her eyes widening, and clapped her hand to her stomach.
“Karin!” No, no, no. She had to be okay. We died in childbirth, and she was only six months along, and—
She blinked rapidly. “She moved. She kicked!” Karin grabbed my hand and placed it on the gentle swell of her baby.
I didn’t feel anything beyond the gentle rise and fall of her breath, and then something small thudded into my palm.
Her eyes grew watery. “She kicked.” She shook her head. “It’s the first time I’ve really felt her. I was starting to think… You felt it, didn’t you?”
There was another shift beneath my palm. “I felt her,” I said, grinning, and took my hand away.
“What’s going on?” Jayce slid in across from me and passed a glass to Karin. She handed me a brown bottle, moisture glistening on its sides.
“The baby kicked,” Karin said.
“No way! Lemme feel!”
I changed places with her, and Jayce pressed her hand to Karin’s stomach, an expression of sheer joy on both their faces. My heart squeezed, and I had to look away.
Jayce laughed. “I felt her! She’s amazing!’
Karin ducked her head and sniffed. “Now. What exactly happened?”
I told them.
They glanced at each other.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“I didn’t see the history of Doyle on parade,” Karin said. “All I saw was you standing in front of Toeller. You were pale and sweating. There was an energetic cord between you, so black it seemed to absorb the light around it. And I could feel...” She shuddered. “You’re right, we didn’t beat her. She walked away.”
Jayce took a swig from her beer mug. “I didn’t see a cord, but I felt her magic. Yours too. And it was cold.” She shivered and rubbed her bare arms.
I looked around the bar. No one was near enough to overhear, but I leaned across the table anyway and lowered my voice. “There’s something else,” I said. “Alba Pollard.”
Karin’s face creased with sympathy. “What about her? You said she left the street under her own steam.”
“She’s not like the rest of us,” I said.
Jayce raised a brow. “No kidding.”
“Her skin,” I said. “It’s aged differently. She doesn’t have the Doyle glamour.”
Karin bit her lip. “Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I got an up close and personal look today,” I said. “Her skin is normal for a woman her age who doesn’t take much care of it.”
> “But why wouldn’t we have noticed earlier?” Jayce asked.
“Because no one looks at Alba directly,” I said.
“And we should know better,” Karin said bitterly.
“That’s not the point,” I said. “Alba grew up here. If anyone should have the glamour, it should be her. But she doesn’t. And another thing… Doc Toeller scared her. I mean really scared her. It wasn’t just the threat of calling the sheriff.”
Karin rubbed the lip of her water glass. “There are theories that the mentally ill can see the truth behind unseelie glamours.”
“Or maybe the unseelie is the one who drove Alba crazy,” Jayce said.
“Alba told me the unseelie needed a sacrifice to stay in this world,” I said, “that the Bell and Thistle wasn’t enough.” What more would she take from us? When would it be enough? My bottle slipped between my fingers, and I caught it before it hit the table.
Karin nodded. “It’s said fairies take human sacrifices every seven years. Some of the legends say the humans are sent to hell, but it’s more likely they go to the unseelie world. That would explain why some managed to make their way home last year.”
“They didn’t last long though when they got back,” Jayce said.
“No,” Karin said. “But they did return.”
“So what’s changed?” I asked. “If Toeller was taking one person a year every seven years, why take twenty-two people at once and an entire pub? Why make it look like the pub never existed? Seven years haven’t passed since the last hiker disappeared.” I put the last word in air quotes.
Karin cocked her head, and a lock of auburn hair slid off her shoulder and onto her breast. “The Bell and Thistle must be different somehow. It was always important to the unseelie, wasn’t it?”
“Right,” I said. During Prohibition, Doyle had been split and a new town, Arcadia, built nearby. The Bell and Thistle should have fallen within Arcadia’s town boundaries. Instead, the property had become a special island of Doyle. That had to mean something. “And the old wellhouse. Toeller fought to keep it from being developed.”
“She succeeded,” Jayce said.
I nodded. The Historical Society, which the doctor spearheaded, was trying to get the old wellhouse declared a historic monument. I hated to agree with them, but the old stone folly did deserve preservation.
“Maybe she doesn’t like change,” Karin said.
“No,” I said. “The wellhouse has a meaning too.” Once while exploring it, Jayce had seen a crumbling castle and tangled garden in a vision. Jayce wasn’t prone to visions. Unfortunately, we still had no idea what any of it meant. The more we learned, the more ignorant we became.
I didn’t like that I was getting used to that feeling.
CHAPTER SIX
I stood at the kitchen island and sliced mushrooms. My hair brushed against the drying herbs, hanging from the iron pot rack. Outside the open window, the light dimmed, the sky turning dusky blue. It was too hot to bake, but I warmed the old-fashioned gas oven anyway, kneaded dough, cooked tomatoes and garlic on the stove top for pizza sauce.
I punched the dough. I’d walked past the bookstore again today. Its doors had been locked. Mike would never have closed the bookstore on a Friday.
I hadn’t called Peter to find out what was going on or if I could help. His message had been clear: don’t call us, we’ll call you... When hell ices over.
I should have spent the rest of the day job-hunting, but I hadn’t the heart for it. So I’d lost myself in my books and my poetry and the soft silence of the garden. But my nerves were as hot and electric as the summer day. The words wouldn’t flow. The spirits wouldn’t come.
Now it was Friday evening in the kitchen, and the pizza dough wouldn’t rise. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I’d been careful not to make the water too hot. It was certainly warm enough in the kitchen for the dough to rise naturally. The yeast wasn’t past its sell-by date. And yet the dough sat there, gray and lifeless.
Someone hammered on the door, and I started.
I wiped my hands in my apron and removed the saucepan from the heat, slopping tomato sauce across the stove. It sizzled on the burners, the smell acrid, and dripped into crevices the depths of which I’d never probe.
The pounding grew louder, more demanding.
Annoyed, I strode to the front door and wrenched it open.
Gretel Gallin stormed past me, her shoulder banging into mine. She wheeled around, her sandaled foot catching in the rag rug. Her short brown hair stood in angry spikes. Her denim cut-offs and faded orange t-shirt were tight enough to make Jayce proud. “You conniving bitch!”
I gaped, stunned. “What?”
The ghost cat trotted down the steps. Whiskers twitching, he crouched beside the door and readied to make his getaway.
Gretel poked me in the chest. “I warned Peter you were up to something!”
Too shocked to fight back, I rubbed my breastbone. Why did people keep poking me there? “Your husband? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play innocent! I never trusted you. Never!”
Because I’m quiet, people think I’m a pushover. But sometimes, I push back. My voice hardened. “Tell me what you’re upset about or leave.”
“Leave?” Her brown eyes blazed. “This isn’t even your house!”
The cat growled, a warning only I could hear.
“It is–” I shook my head. One third of it belonged to me, but I wasn’t going to argue with Gretel about that now. “Please leave.”
“I’m not leaving until I get what’s mine.”
“What’s yours? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Gretel!” Her husband leapt up the porch steps and hurried inside. He scowled at me, his soft, babyish mouth thinning. “Let’s go.” He grasped her narrow arm, and she twisted away.
The dead cat hissed.
“I’m not leaving until I get what I came for,” she snarled.
“Gretel, this isn’t helping.” He raked his hand through his shaggy blond hair.
I gaped, nearly as shocked at his wrinkled chinos and button up shirt as by Gretel’s outburst. It was the first time I’d seen him in something other than a t-shirt and jeans. Had I missed Mike’s funeral?
“Helping what?” I asked. “What’s this about?”
“Let’s go.” He tugged his wife’s arm.
“This isn’t over,” she said to me. I guess when you’re really pissed off, only clichés will do. “You won’t get away with this. I’ll make sure of it!” Leaving a few choice curse words in her wake, she let her husband draw her from my house.
I trailed after them. “Peter...” I said helplessly. “What can I do?”
I stopped in the doorway as they walked down the porch steps.
He glanced over his shoulder. “You’ve done enough.”
I closed the door and locked it.
The ghost cat sneezed.
“Thanks,” I said, flattered the cat had stayed to defend me rather than bolting outside. He didn’t seem to know he was incorporeal and could leave whenever he wanted, doors be damned.
Pensive, I walked to the kitchen and resumed slicing and dicing mushrooms. But indignation and worry sent my nerves jittering. What the hell had that been about?
Finally, I grabbed a lavender and sage bundle from my workroom and set a match to its end. The lavender had come from Karin’s garden, where we’d built a labyrinth out of the bushes. The sage was from our aunt’s garden – now ours. When the tips of the bundle were burning, I blew the flames out and carried the sage bundle through the house. Peter and Gretel’s energy hadn’t been left behind, but my emotional attachment to her fury was still here. The ritual helped me detach. A little.
The cat followed me through the house. I guess burning sage doesn’t work on animals, at least not the dead ones.
When I finished, I ran the end of the smoldering bundle beneath the tap in the kitchen sink, extinguishing it. Beneath the
cat’s watchful gaze, I hung it from the pot rack to dry out and returned to my pizza.
The dough still hadn’t risen, but I rolled it out anyway. The pizza was just for me, so I didn’t care if it wasn’t quite right. But I still cared about Gretel’s cryptic rant. She’d seemed to think I knew what she’d been talking about. What had I done now?
I drizzled cheese and mushrooms over the crust and slid it into the oven, set the timer. “What about Mambo for a name?” I asked the cat, now atop the refrigerator. He’d hissed at Gretel. He’d earned a real name.
He yawned.
“Jupiter?”
No reaction.
“Okay, how about Hex?”
The cat met my gaze.
“I’ll take that for a ‘yes.’ Hex it is.”
I washed my hands and searched for my cell phone. Finally, I found it wedged between the fat, white sofa cushions in the living room, its walls painted a pale blue. My aunt’s sapphire-colored witch ball turned slowly in the window.
A message awaited me from an unknown number – never good news. Frowning, I dialed voice mail.
“Hello, Ms. Bonheim,” a rough, male voice said. He coughed, phlegmy, and I imagined an older man. “My name is Harold Pivens. I was a friend of Mike’s, and I’m the executor of his estate. Would you please call me when you can?” He added his phone number and condolences and urged me again to call as soon as possible.
I checked my watch. It was six o’clock – a bit late for a work call, but curiosity had me in its teeth. I dialed Mr. Pivens.
He answered on the fifth ring, just as I was about to hang up. “This is Harold Pivens. How may I help you?”
“Hi, this is Lenore Bonheim. I got your message. I hope it’s not too late for me to call?”
“No, no, not at all. I’m glad you did. And my condolences again on your loss. I know you and Mike were quite close. He spoke of you often.”
“He did?”
Hex strolled into the room, his tail high.
The man chuckled. “But I don’t suppose you know about me. Mike liked to compartmentalize his life. I’m his attorney.”
“But you’re not from Doyle,” I said. I would have known him if he was.
“Correct. I’m in Angels Camp. I know this may seem rather sudden. Poor Mike isn’t even in the ground yet. But there is some urgency. Mike’s bookstore is a going concern, and the longer it’s closed, the more damage to its value.”
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