by Holley Trent
The clan leaders were still trying to work out which children who came into the community during the time were from Fallon. A few had quietly self-identified and confessed that they couldn’t quite knit themselves into the psychic web the same way as their peers. Having no way of knowing better, they’d believed themselves to be Afótama. Dan’s adopted daughter, Erin, was doing a lot of work to sort those people out, unbeknownst to Dan. She’d probably never forgive him or Mrs. Petersen for all the lies they’d told her.
“Nan has a way of asking people questions without instilling suspicion as she does it,” Jody said. “She’ll put the Mollers at ease before explaining why she’s asking all the questions.”
Ótama moved to the coffee table and peered down at the tidy stack of magazines atop it. “The Mollers…they had a daughter go missing? That was why they adopted Lora?”
Jody nodded. “Eleanor Moller.”
“She eludes Contessa.”
“Yeah. Tess is scattered right now, though. I guess after she has the baby, she’ll be better able to locate people. She’s pretty frustrated because finding people and herding them back into the clan is part of her job as queen. She’s better equipped to do it than anyone because she’s at the center of the web. Lately, she can’t even tell where Ollie or Harvey are, even when they’re only a room away.”
Ótama giggled. “Pregnancy does that. My mind was always in a fog when I was pregnant. Pregnancy mixes poorly with magic, I suppose. A dangerous circumstance for a queen of our kind, but…usually, our clan queens are well past their childbearing years.” She shrugged, and the motion was sad. She always did that when she thought of the missing link—April. Jody did, too. His missed his mother terribly.
“That being said, I believe Eleanor will be home as soon as Tess’s fog clears,” Ótama said. “It’s simply a matter of…” Furrowing her brow, she looked to Lachlann. “What was that term they used?”
“Triangulating.”
“Ah.” She said the word as though it’d delighted her tongue. “Yes. Thank you.”
Lachlann performed a shallow bow—his usual way of saying you’re welcome.
Jody made his way into the rear of the apartment again, expecting Ótama to remain in the front with Lachlann, but she followed in her usual slow, careful way, her gaze dancing about as she went, taking in everything.
“She tries so hard to appear that she’s not about anything,” she murmured.
“She’s about few things,” Jody said. “She doesn’t generally have strong feelings about most topics.”
“Is that her natural personality or something she’s trained herself to do?”
“You really hate that you can’t get a handle on her, huh?”
Ótama shrugged gracefully and perched on the edge of the settee in Lora’s office. “I’m the conduit here. I bind the web together so Tess doesn’t have to, and I can’t help but feel a little possessive over everyone in it. I struggle with the fact that someone I’m so fond of is off-limits to me in that way.”
“I imagine her parents feel the same way. They can probably sense that Eleanor is out there somewhere, but they’re totally in the dark about Lora.” Furrowing his brow, Jody riffled through the stack of books Lora had left on her desk. She normally put everything away. Everything in her home had a space, and books always went back onto their shelves when she was finished for the day. “To answer your question, I don’t believe that’s her natural personality. I can’t understand her the way one witch would understand another, but I can on a human-to-human level. My human instincts say it’s just a coping mechanism. Order makes her comfortable.”
“And yet she’s with you.”
He smirked. “She is, but she sets the terms, right?”
He pulled back the cover of a large binder and read the top page. Family Tree and Descendants of the Chieftain Alfarinn. “This is your father’s,” he murmured.
“Mine?” Ótama glided over and peered at the book. “Ah. Yes. I believe she and some of the staff at the mansion were using that to track magic lineages.”
“But why is this flagged?” He tapped the name of one of Ótama’s multitude of sisters—Astrid.
“I couldn’t say,” she murmured. “If they’re tracking magic lines, they won’t find many clues there. My father had scarcely any at all. My mother had some, I had some, and the eldest of my little sisters had a little. The rest of my siblings had nothing of note.”
“So, only the one sister voyaged with you?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, Yngvild never had children of her own, as far as I know, so that line is a dead-end. We left the rest of the family in Iceland. I didn’t even tell them we were leaving. They would have told my father, and he would have certainly tried to stop us. There’d been a long debate about who I should marry—whether I’d be with someone like me or someone from the clan who didn’t have any magic so that we could suppress the squabbling and mistrust by letting the magic in the line breed out.”
“You went with the latter.”
“Well, yes, but not who they’d chosen for me. A complete outsider. Love is funny that way.”
“Did he know what you were?”
“Gods, no,” she said with a rueful laugh. “At least, not at first. I thought he’d leave once he did. He was terrified, as you might expect, but I think I’d grown on him too much for him to send me away.”
Jody heard a fairy grunt boom in the living room.
Lachlann’s ears were better than most, and he probably had some distinct opinions about Ótama’s heroic late husband.
“She wouldn’t have flagged this name if it hadn’t been important for some reason,” Jody said, looking back to the book. “And if she left these books out, I have to believe she meant for me to find them. She knew I had keys to her place. She knew that I’d come to look.”
“What else did her letter say?”
Jody set his teeth together and chose his words carefully. The letter had said a lot of things too personal to repeat, which was why as soon as he had five minutes, he was going to pin Nadia down if he had to and wrestle the damned thing out of her pocket. Lora knew all of his secrets. Unfortunately, the reverse obviously hadn’t been true.
“All I can say about the letter is that she wished things had been different. At no point in it did she say not to look for her, neither subtly nor overtly.”
“She’s not one to hold her words.”
“No,” Jody said.
“She’s in trouble.”
Jody pulled forward another of the books—a fragile, ancient manuscript recently acquired from the estate of a deceased private eye from Fallon—and lifted the cover. “I hate that I want to believe that, but I can’t stand the idea of her leaving me for any other reason.”
“So to find the woman, we have to find the trouble.”
“If there is any.”
“There has to be some.” Ótama pressed her hand on his shoulder consolingly. “Perhaps I am vain to speak these words, but…who would leave of my own without good reason?”
He gave her hand a squeeze and said, sardonically, “Indeed.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Lora
Lora had spent two hours asleep on the cool linoleum bathroom floor after having grown weary of the nauseated trek back and forth to the toilet. She’d finally given up and stayed put, only to close her eyes for “a minute” and to wake up to find her body aching with misuse and hard retching.
She stared at the face of her watch, an out-of-place accessory. Mannish. Probably was a man’s watch. It looked as though someone had added an extra hole in the leather band, and recently. The hole was still somewhat snug and not stretched from constant use.
“Did I buy this?” she murmured, fiddling with the knob. Buying something too large that she could just as easily buy in the appropriate size didn’t seem practical.
Pulling herself up at the bathroom counter, she waited until the swimming sensation in her head ceased and turned on the water
in the sink to splash her face. A shower would probably improve her mood and help her clear the cotton out of her brain, but so would food. She suspected her nausea was being exacerbated by her hunger.
“No more bananas.”
Drying her face on a scratchy hand towel on the way into the kitchen, she paused in front of the sliding glass door. She watched the tractor creeping forward out in the field. From that great distance, she couldn’t make out who was driving it. Perhaps Mr. Callahan. She needed to find that man and talk to him. She put her hand on the lock to raise it right as her stomach gave another cramp of warning.
She backed away, grimacing.
The refrigerator turned out to be fully stocked. In a sealed plastic container, she found a pasta salad that didn’t smell too strong. She grabbed that and a sleeve of saltines from the box on the counter.
As she ate, sitting at the cluttered kitchen table with all of her opened luggage around her, she thought aloud.
“What could I be hiding from myself? Why couldn’t I just say in the note why I’m here? Maybe there’s a reason I can’t know.”
That made sense if that omission was the information that had gotten her into trouble in the first place.
“Am I in trouble?”
She very nearly choked on her crackers when a plump blonde appeared at the glass door and knocked.
Lora clutched a hand over her heart, and the woman grimaced and mouthed “Sorry!”
After a huge swallow of water, Lora made her way to the door and slid it open a few inches. Hot air wafted in. The temperature outside must have been truly oppressive. The house wasn’t air conditioned, but Lora wasn’t bothered too much by that for some reason.
“Wanted to make sure you got up!” the lady said in a friendly Midwestern twang. “Can never tell what those herbs are gonna do.”
“Herbs?” Lora asked, perplexed.
“The tea you drank.” The lady waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, you probably don’t remember.”
“Did you…talk to me yesterday? Were you here when I arrived?”
“I sure was. Kinda had to be.”
“And why is that? For that matter, who are you and where am I?”
The woman, who Lora pegged at around forty, twisted her lips to one side of her face and squinted toward the heavens. “Lemme see what I can tell ya. Been a while since we’ve done one of these.”
“One of what?”
“I’ll explain everything at the right time if he tells me to.” She produced a paper from her jeans pocket and a sealed pill bottle which Lora quickly identified as being prenatal vitamins. “This doctor here knows your situation,” she said, tapping the nail of her index finger against the folded paper. “I made you an appointment for tomorrow. I’ll take you into town so he can check you out and find out what’s what.”
“Did I tell you anything?”
“Oh, yes. You were very insistent on telling me that,” the woman counted off on her fingers, “your estimated due date is sometime in January.”
“What month is it?”
“August, sweetie. Man, when I was pregnant, my gut was hanging over my waistband by six weeks. You’re barely showing. Musta worked out a lot, hmm?”
“I have no idea.”
“Oh, of course you don’t. I forgot about that.”
“Why am I still vomiting if I’m that far along?”
“You told me. I can’t pronounce what you said. I’ll see if I can look it up, though, so you can tell the doctor.”
August.
Lora furrowed her brow. There was something important about August—something was going to happen that she had some role to play in, and she couldn’t remember what it was.
“The confusion about everything will phase out in time. Usually takes a couple of days,” the lady said. “Here, take these and let me go get your dinner out of the truck.”
Lora noticed then that the late-model pickup truck parked in the driveway to the right of the house. There were two driveways, actually, with a yard in between. The one at the right ran beside a cornfield. The one on the left was a barrier between the yard and railroad tracks. The two intersected about a hundred yards away just behind a wide clothesline, beyond which was more corn.
“Lora?”
“Sorry.” Lora snapped out of her daze and unlocked the screen door. “Who are you?”
“Mrs. Callahan, sweetie.”
Mrs. Callahan put the bottle in Lora’s hand and slid the paper onto the nearby shelf. “We’re like, oh, two-hundredth cousins through marriage or something like that. That’s what the DNA says. Hopefully, one day we can get a real good look at your genealogy.” She giggled. “I guess everyone’s related if you dig deep enough.”
“Are you joking with me?” Lora honestly couldn’t tell with the woman’s voice being as chipper as it was.
“Nope. Glad my mister’s folks found you when they did. Makes me sad when they find folks too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Oh, honey, I can’t tell you all that. The mister will say when I can, I guess. Gosh, you’re so pretty.” She grabbed Lora’s cheek and pinched it affectionately. “Must get it from your mother.”
She leaned away from the odd woman, unsettled. She didn’t know why, but there seemed to be grief beneath that compliment. Was her mother dead or alive? Did she even know her? “I have no idea.”
“Well, of course you don’t.” Mrs. Callahan reached for her again, as if to comfort, but stopped herself before touching. She twined her fingers in front of her belly and looked at Lora with expectancy. Lora certainly wasn’t going to squander the opportunity to ask another question.
“Do you know who my father is?”
Mrs. Callahan grimaced. “Nope. Sorry. Go sit down. I’ll be right back.” Mrs. Callahan bounded over to her open truck.
Lora carried the pill bottle and doctor information to the table and started tidying up the unfamiliar belongings on it. “Purse,” she said. “And phone?”
Two highly personal things. She’d forgotten all about them due to distraction from her persistent nausea. She could probably get some clues from searching those.
She rooted through the bag on the table, and then got impatient and dumped nearly everything out.
Nude lipstick and lip balm. A pack of mints. Some crackers. A multitude of pens in various colors. Sunglasses. A boring little orange notebook with nothing on the first page and an uncracked spine. A small vial of sunblock. A sleek black billfold.
She took that and nearly ripped the closure tab as she wrenched it open.
The contents had been picked clean. If there’d been a driver’s license inside, it was missing from its place behind the clear plastic panel. No credit cards. No checkbook. Just a couple of grocery store discount cards and various receipts.
As Mrs. Callahan carried a covered casserole dish into the kitchen, Lora sorted through the sales slips.
“New Mexico,” she muttered, looking at the store addresses on all of them. “I was in New Mexico?”
Mrs. Callahan grimaced and set the dish atop the counter. “I always forget the receipts.”
“Is that where I’m from, New Mexico?”
“I guess there’s no point lying about it. Yes.”
“Where am I now?”
“Nebraska.”
“How did I get here?”
“I ca—”
“Right.” Lora put up her hands and then shoved everything back into the purse. “You can’t tell me anything. Was I aware that would be the case?”
“Yes.”
“When can I speak with your husband?”
“Oh, probably not today, you know? He’s got a ton of errands to run in town and some meetings he needs to poke his head in at.”
“Tomorrow then.”
“Well, I’ll ask him,” Mrs. Callahan said in that voice that positively dripped cheer.
Lora didn’t see the point of arguing. “Would you happen to know where my phone is? I had t
o have had one.”
“You gave it to the mister yesterday.”
“When can I get it back?”
“You ask him.” Mrs. Callahan shrugged. “Honest. I don’t know what agreement the two of you made. He asks me to help out, and I do all I can for folks, and I don’t need to ask too many questions. He always does the right thing, and I trust that he will this time, too.”
Lora let out a frustrated breath and settled into the nearby chair. “I don’t like being in the dark.”
“Oh, sweetie, no one does. It’s scary, but you have to trust that you knew what you were doing when you came here and accepted the help. He always tells folks to write themselves a note so they’ll believe it, but I guess if you’re skeptical enough, that wouldn’t be good proof of anything. You just have to give it some time.”
“When will my memory come back?”
“How long is a piece of string?”
“What?”
“Honey…” Mrs. Callahan put her hands on Lora’s shoulders and stooped down to her level. She was at least six inches taller than Lora. “The herbs work different for different people, but usually, folks take just enough for their memories to come back slowly over time. That amount of time depends on the person’s fears and needs. The mister is usually pretty good at helping folks figure that out.”
Lora nodded reluctantly and turned her gaze to the dish. “What is that?”
“My mama’s special scalloped potatoes with ham. Hopefully, you can tolerate it.” Mrs. Callahan’s eyes suddenly went wide. “Has all that milk and cheese and whatnot. Should be okay, right?”
“I…don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll see, okay? You just stick the pan in the oven at three fifty when you’re ready to eat. In the meantime, make yourself comfortable. You’re going be here for a while, so you might as well unpack and look around a bit. Feel free to go outside and take a walk if you need some air.”
