Dewdrop was bustling with activity, there were families and tourists everywhere, dozens of potential suspects he could nonchalantly investigate without being noticed. But he kept following the one witch that knew he was watching, the witch that had found that body. Lucky ol’ me.
When someone visited Dewdrop and drove off the highway, the Museum was the first building they saw on the main drag. From my perspective, it was the farthest away because my family’s land sat at the other end of town. I rarely came down here on foot, but often appreciated it from the window of Dot’s van whenever I visited Woodshade for convenient and affordable human goods.
It was an astoundingly beautiful building, standing three stories high not counting the observation tower at the top with immaculate white clapboard siding and ornate woodwork on every eave and shutter. Certain small sections of the copper roof sparkled in the sun, kept untarnished by its owners’ enchantments to stand out against the rest of the lovely blue-green patina that had matured over the past two centuries. Unknowing humans probably marveled at the amount of scrubbing, vinegar, and meticulous care it must have took to keep those details shining brightly.
Under that gorgeous roof sat an extensive collection of family knowledge, artifacts, and historical documents, along with three of the smartest women that called Dewdrop home. The porch was also a favorite hangout for ghosts. And cats. One of those swatted my ankles as I turned with the officer trailing not far behind.
I started up the wooden steps, taking a deep breath when I reached the top. What should I say when I got inside? Just ask one of my distant cousins who I rarely spoke to that I needed her to cast a spell or that I wanted to sit in on the one she was already casting? This was one of those moments when I hated being from the wrong side of town.
The hiss of a cat pulled me out of my philosophical ruminations. I spun around on the porch, hoping and half expecting to see Not-So-Secret Agent Man fighting off three cats clawed into his deliberately casual worn blue jeans. Instead I saw a group of tourists, a middle aged woman with dark hair holding a stapled packet of printed out pages and two red headed identical twins around fifteen who seemed more concerned with their spotty cell phone reception than they were with rediscovering their roots.
The eldest woman looked up and saw me, grinning. “Do you know if this is the Museum?”
Aw, crap. Why didn’t I just go inside right away? Not-So-Secret Agent Man lingered behind them, fiddling with his own malfunctioning phone. “Yes,” I finally responded.
“I wonder why there isn’t a sign. There was a sign in the picture I found online.”
I couldn’t help but automatically chuckle, covering it in a cough. I wanted to say, Because Belinda burned it to the ground last year, hoping it would deter the tourists. A lot of our cousins were upset, but it had only been around since the 1970’s and wasn’t historically significant enough to bother reconstituting from the ashes. But I didn’t say that, of course, instead telling her, “A lot of us never liked the sign to begin with. The building kind of speaks for itself.”
“Oh.” Her dark eyes sparkled as a big grin crossed her lips. “So… you live here?”
“I do.”
“Girls, pay attention!” At that moment I knew for sure she was their mother. “She lives here.”
“So what?” Both of the teens spoke and rolled their eyes at the exact same time, though one put a hand on her hip and the other crossed her arms. Still, goosebumps rose on the back of my neck as I thought of my favorite synchronous cousins.
“So what?” the mother repeated in an outraged tone. “So she’s our cousin!” It was all I could do not to groan and they’d better not want a hug. “And she’s a… Well, you know…”
“She doesn’t look like a witch to me,” one of the twins said.
“Are you a…” the other girl trailed off and all three of them looked at me, expecting an answer.
“Do you have any special abilities?” the mother asked.
What the heck should I say? I’d heard my fellow residents of Dewdrop recount awkward conversations where tourists told them they were cousins as if that was a big deal and asked if they had magical powers. So far, no one had come up with an ideal way to dissuade the outsiders from asking unwanted questions, though I had heard some rather colorful ideas about how to handle their presence in general.
“Um… You know, we’re just like a lot of small towns. And our, uh, beliefs…” Just fall back on the Wiccan thing like you did in college. “Well… you’re not going to find a lot of people around here who want to discuss that in detail because it’s brought us trouble in the past, so—”
“Like getting burned at the stake?” a twin cut me off.
“Yeah. Well, no, not exactly, but…”
“The inaccurate preconceptions that the outside world has about witchcraft have caused the families here a great deal of a strife,” a lyrical voice rang out behind me. “Strife that has been handed down through the generations. Pain that may have driven your own particular antecedent away from her ancestral land.”
I spun around to watch Acantha in action. She was by far one of the most beautiful, statuesque witches that lived here standing tall at 5’11” with an hourglass figure and long flowing ash blonde hair. With a flair for both dramatics and soothing sentiments, Acantha was a master at quelling family squabbles and leaving everyone’s feathers equally ruffled, and for finding the right words to tell the truth without giving too much away. That particular quirk made her the default spokeswoman over the other museum curators, her bookish first cousin Ariadne and Acantha’s similarly mousy daughter Amethyst.
Why so many quirky ‘A’ names? Because they were from Air side of family. It was, or course, tradition. These particular airy witches even had Aer as a last name.
Not that the museum actually needed a spokeswoman, until recently anyway. Once every decade or so, Woodshade’s local newspaper would do a story on the history of their neighboring unincorporated community and in the late 90s an architectural magazine had done a piece on the roof, but other than that the place was typically devoid of outsiders.
The only reason the museum even had official hours was because Ariadne rarely left home and wanted an official schedule when distant cousins were allowed to interrupt her. She was our primary genealogist, but few witches needed research help. We were all raised to know our individual family history in detail by the time we could read and write, and had to learn how our own lineage related to every witch family in town.
The only time anyone really dropped by was to check out a family heirloom that they wished they could keep in their own house, but was unfortunately jointly owned by several of the original creator’s progeny.
And yes, I did say ‘check out,’ like a library book. Want to use your great grandmother’s special tea kettle to boil rosewater for a potion? Only on the third week of every other month, unless you want to negotiate with your second cousin that you avoid talking to. There was an enchanted copper cauldron made by Hetty’s granddaughter was so popular and jointly owned by so many witches that one could only have it for 48 hours at a time. 48 hours exactly, at which point custody was exchanged in the museum parking lot, sort of like how divorced human parents pick up their kids at neutral territory like a McDonalds. Regulated heirloom custody was the entire reason the secretive witches of Madison County even started a museum.
“Can anyone go into the museum?” the mother asked Acantha as I seized the opportunity to scurry away.
“Oh, yes of course,” she replied. “But we do require a three dollar donation for all non-residents, as the recent increase in traffic is really doing a number on the antique finish of the chestnut floorboards.”
Three dollar donation? For the chestnut floorboards that were as enchanted as the copper roof? That was the first I’d heard of it. Acantha’s sister, Avery, who didn’t even live here but definitely got a say in how things were ran, was in fact tacking a freshly painted sign up next to the door. Clearl
y it was a new policy.
The mother opened up her pocketbook and started rifling through it, emerging with a ten dollar bill for which she requested no change. But by the time she’d found it, Not-So-Secret Agent Man had slipped ahead of her and paid the entrance fee and followed me inside.
Truth be told, even without the law enforcement tail, this place was a bit of a sore spot for me. It was for a lot of the witches from my side of the road. Very few of the artifacts within came from our part of the family, even though some of the amazing objects crafted by my predecessors easily outstripped some of theirs. Especially my Great Aunt Rhiannon’s rune-carved oversized wooden ladles. They weren’t considered valuable enough to be showcased.
Who knows how amazing my aunts’ Concentration potions would turn out if they were brewed up in that coveted copper kettle? We never would. Even though Luna and Soleil technically could, their cousins would lose it if they knew they’d ever loaned it out, even if we shared the spoils. Their loss. Didn’t stop the Daughter’s Daughters from asking to borrow a powerful ladle every so often. We typically loan them out for 10% of whatever is brewing since they’re just hidden up in the museum’s attic anyway.
My jaw nearly dropped when I crossed the threshold. I’d never seen the place so crowded, especially with people who didn’t live here. The main floor of the museum housed all of the showcased artifacts, the stuff that we wanted to show off and was innocuous enough to allow the outside world to see. Were they ever seeing it now, every other case had some tourist standing in front of it. And I doubted that so many members of the curators’ family had ever been here at the same time, unless they were having one of their infamous arguments.
At least this branch of the Aer’s were a united front at the moment; united against the tourists walking off with something they were charged with protecting. The witches of Madison County would have their heads if anything went missing.
I was a bit overwhelmed at the number of unexpected patrons and change in the décor. The last time I was here, there wasn’t any glass on the front of the display cases, let alone any locks. Was that a camera behind the cash register? Wait a second. When did they even get a cash register?
The drawer slid out with a bell ring and I watched in amazement as a girl no older than fourteen rang up three little vials of dirt and put them into a paper bag for that group of three annoying girls that I’d seen taking selfies the day before. Apparently the murder hadn’t chased them away.
“Thank you so much!” the cashier said, chipper as she could be. She didn’t even seem like she was faking it. Those Airy witches always did like new company. That’s probably why there were so many of them, more than half of Dewdrop’s population.
I sauntered up to the counter and looked over the wares they were peddling. “Dewdrop dirt?” I read aloud. “You’re selling our soil?” As a farmer, I was taken aback. “I bet the Earth side of the family wouldn’t appreciated that.”
“Eliza said we could,” my far younger distant cousin informed me. I didn’t know her name and wasn’t in the mood to ask her awkwardly.
“Magical River Stones?” I said, picking up a rock that barely contained any energy at all, surely not enough to cast a spell of any significance. “Whose river did you get these from?”
“Obviously not yours or you would know, so why do you care?”
I was about to turn away from the teen when I spotted a stack of threefold pamphlets. “Are you giving away copies of the family tree?”
“Official copies from the official Dewdrop Museum.”
“For only one official US dollar,” I sighed. “You know, the family tree circulating everywhere is what caused all this trouble.”
“Well, the whole thing is already on the internet for free, and this is just the first four generations in a fancy font. Besides, it’s just a picture of that genealogy graph on the wall in the Hetty Room.”
“That stupid graph is how that website started!” I glanced over at the room in question and saw another new sign and a green velvet rope across the arched doorway. “You’re charging an extra two dollars to get in there?” I balked, watching as the woman with the twin daughters I met outside gladly paid the fee.
“Yeah, we are. The great aunts voted on it last week. Again, why do you care?”
Gee, I was only a murder suspect being tailed by an undercover police officer because the town was overrun with a bunch of dimwitted tourists, and the museum was rolling out the red carpet for them for whatever change they could scrape from the bottom of their purses. “Where is your mother?” I snapped, vaguely aware that I sounded like an old crone.
“Who the heck are you anyway?” the teen shot back.
It wasn’t that unusual that we didn’t know each other. There were over a thousand of us in our not-technically-a-town and the only people who knew everyone’s name lived on the third floor of the museum. My cheeks flushed red. I didn’t want to tell the brat my last name and reveal my lesser-side-of-the-road heritage.
“Gemma!” a voice whispered from the staircase behind me. A timid face poked her head down from the step closest to the ceiling and farthest from the crowd. “Amy said you were on your way.”
“She did?” I replied. Amethyst was one of most gifted Seers Dewdrop had seen in three generations and she was only eighteen.
“We’re all waiting for you,” Ariadne said with a panicked look. She was more of a hermit than the backwoods witches that left never left their shacks and jumpier than Dot. I had no idea how she handled living here. “Did you bring it?”
“Bring what?”
“The, um…”
“She doesn’t know she has it,” another little voice remarked. Amethyst ducked down beside her aunt and grinned at me. “Come on! We need you.”
That sure was a change. Normally the only people who said they needed me worked at a magic shop and really just needed the river hyacinth. My chin lifted as I stood straighter and shot a grin at the cashier. Her eyebrows raised up as her shoulders sagged, making her appear as young as she was despite the heavy eye makeup and dark lipstick. The poor thing probably thought she’d just been questioned by someone important and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her any different.
I ran my fingers under a purring ginger kitten’s chin sitting on the counter, probably the cashier’s familiar. It didn’t swat at me for a change, lifting my spirits even higher as I walked toward the staircase. I ignored Not-So-Secret Agent Man, passing him by without even glancing. He followed close behind me anyway, so close that he’d run into me if I suddenly stopped. The nerve of this guy!
“Sorry,” I said over my shoulder. “Only Dewdrop residents are allowed access to the second floor.”
His eyes narrowed and his lips parted slightly as if he was about to speak. The muscles in his jaw tightened as he decided against it. I couldn’t resist smirking at him as I pulled the solid silver hook of the velvet rope across the stairs free of the loop securing it to the wall and stepped on the other side. The cop pretended to ignore me and crouched down to look at a case filled with crystal points that had been used in historically significant spells.
Chapter 9
The babble of witches arguing got louder as I climbed higher. Eliza’s voice was definitely among them and my stomach bubbled in anticipation. Ariadne was grinning ear to ear at the top of the steps. She was probably more excited about the accuracy of Amethyst’s prediction in front of Eliza than she was about my actual appearance.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.
“Um, me too. I was hoping you could do me a favor, actually.”
“I know. Amy told me. But you’re the one doing us the favor.”
“I am?”
Ariadne nodded, leading me past rooms filled to the brim with meticulously cataloged artifacts that any witch worth her salt would love to get her hands on. I followed her down the hall to another staircase that was enclosed in the house’s outer wall. It went up two more stories, bypassing the th
ree witches’ home on the third floor and up to the observation room where they cast their spells.
“Finally!” Eliza exclaimed as I stepped into the room. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry,” I murmured. Now running over to a window to get a better look at the roof around us would be awkward, but I was still tempted. I hadn’t been up here since I was a child.
“She got derailed by the police officer tailing her,” Amethyst explained before I did.
The girl was standing in the corner, the pupils of her pale eyes clouded white. Seer’s eyes always fascinated me when they did that. Amethyst’s were interesting enough in their normal state, a blue so light they sometimes appeared violet from the increased blood flow behind them when she was excited or upset.
“So he is an undercover cop,” I said.
Resting Witch Face Page 9