“Suzanne Marsden.” She extended a perfectly manicured hand and I thought I caught a shiver of Scotch on her breath. “I think you might have saved my life.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I asked.
I’ve dealt with lots of life-or-death emergencies at Sticks & Strings, but most of them included dropped stitches and too many margaritas at our Wednesday Night Knit-Ins.
She laughed as Janice and Lynette exchanged meaningful looks I tried very hard to ignore.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t seat me early at the Inn. I thought I could flirt with the bartender until my boyfriend arrived but no such luck.”
It was probably the first time anyone had ever refused her anything, and she looked puzzled and annoyed in an amused kind of way.
“The Weavers can be a tad rigid,” I said, studiously avoiding eye contact with my townie friends, who knew exactly why the Weavers acted the way they did. “I promise you the food’s worth the aggravation.”
“I left my coat in the car so I could make a big sweeping Hollywood entrance, and now I not only can’t get into the damn restaurant, I locked myself out of my car and would probably have frozen to death out there if you hadn’t taken pity on me and opened your door.”
“Honey, you’re in Vermont,” Janice said. “You can’t go around like that up here. You’ll freeze your nipples off.”
“She said she has a coat,” I reminded Janice a tad sharply. As a general rule I find it best not to discuss politics, religion, or my customer’s nipples in the shop. “It’s locked in her car.”
“With my cell and my skis and my ice skates,” Suzanne said with a theatrical eye roll. “All I need is to use your phone so I can call Triple A.”
“Oh, don’t bother with them,” Lynette said with a wave of her hand. “They’ll take all night to get up here. My daughter Vonnie can have it open in a heartbeat.”
Suzanne’s perfectly groomed right eyebrow rose slightly. “If it’s not too much trouble, that would be great.”
Clearly she thought Vonnie was majoring in grand theft auto at Sugar Maple High, but that was a whole lot better than telling her that the teenager could make garage doors roll open three towns away just by thinking about them.
There were some things tourists were better off not knowing.
I shot Lynette a look. “So you’re going to go call Vonnie now, right?”
We both knew she had already put out the call to her daughter, but we’re all about keeping up appearances here in Sugar Maple.
“I’m on it,” Lynette said and went off in search of her cell phone.
I turned back to our visitor, who was up to her elbows in a basket of angora roving waiting to be spun into yarn, while Penelope, the ancient store cat who shared the basket, ignored her.
“This is glorious. I’ve thought about learning to knit but--” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”
Well, not really. I’ve been knitting since I was old enough to hold a pair of needles.
“I’ll be spinning that next week,” I told her while we waited for Lynette to return, “then knitting it up into a shawl.”
She wandered to the stack of shawls on the shelf and fingered a kid silk Orenburg I had on display. “Don’t tell me you made this?”
“Chloe knitted everything in the shop,” Janice volunteered.
“Impossible!” Suzanne Marsden looked over at me. “Did you really? I love handmade garments and this is heirloom quality.”
She might have been lying through her porcelain veneers but it was all the encouragement I needed. I whipped out the Orenburg and was treated to the kind of adulation usually reserved for rock stars.
“Amazing,” Suzanne breathed as I laid the shawl across her slender shoulders. “You couldn’t possibly have made this without divine intervention.”
I started to spout my usual it’s-all-just-knit-and-purl shop owner spiel when to my surprise the truth popped out instead. “It almost put me into intensive care,” I admitted to the background laughter of my friends, “but I made it to the other side.”
And then I showed her the trick that either sent prospective knitters running back to their crochet hooks or won them over forever. I slipped my mother’s wedding band off my right forefinger and passed the shawl through the small circle of Welsh gold.
“How much?” Suzanne asked.
“It’s not for sale,” Lynette answered before I had the chance to open my mouth. “Chloe never sells her Orenburgs.”
“In my experience there are exceptions to every absolute.” Suzanne favored me with a smile that was a half-degree away from flirtatious. “Name your price.”
“Dangerous words to use in front of a shop owner,” I said lightly, “but Lynette is right. The shawls on that shelf are for display only.”
Suzanne met my eyes, and I saw something behind the smile that took me by surprise.
Pretty people aren’t supposed to be sad. Isn’t that the story you were told when you were a little girl? Pretty people are supposed to get a free ride through this life and possibly the next one too.
That was the thing about running a shop. Every now and then a customer managed to push the right buttons and my business sense, shaky at the best of times, went up in smoke.
I swiped her platinum AmEx through the machine and slid the receipt across the counter for her signature.
“Would you like me to wrap it for you?” I asked while Lynette and Janice kept the other customers amused.
“No, thanks,” she said, pirouetting in front of the cheval mirror in the corner. “I’ll wear it.”
Lynette popped back in. “Vonnie texted me,” she said to Suzanne. “Your car’s unlocked and the Inn is open for business.”
Suzanne flashed us a conspiratorial grin. “My boyfriend always keeps me waiting. It wouldn’t hurt him to do a little waiting himself.”
But she didn’t keep him waiting long. She signed her receipt, made a few polite noises, then hurried back out into the darkness.
“I’d give anything to see the boyfriend,” one of the Pennsylvania sisters said after the door clicked shut behind Suzanne Marsden. “I’ll bet we’re talking major hottie.”
“Johnny Depp hot or George Clooney hot?” the schoolteacher from New Jersey asked, and everyone laughed.
The rocket scientist gave out a cross between a snicker and a snort. “That woman has future trophy wife written all over her. Odds are he’s old, wrinkled, and rich.”
“Maybe she loves him,” I said then immediately wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.
Janice and Lynette exchanged glances and I didn’t need extrasensory powers to know exactly what they were thinking. I shot them my best “don’t you dare” warning look. One thing I didn’t need was another lecture on love from Sugar Maple’s two most dangerous matchmakers.
Blocking lace seemed a little anticlimactic to me after Suzanne’s mini-drama. I was seriously tempted to excuse myself for a minute then race up the street so I could peek through the front window of the Inn and eyeball the guy she was meeting, but that wasn’t how Sticks & Strings had maintained its ranking as the number one knit shop in New England two years running.
So I stayed put, but that didn’t mean I was happy about it.
It was a little before ten by the time everyone exchanged names and phone numbers and e-mail addresses. I handed out goodie bags of knitting gadgets and yarn samples and smiled at the oohs and ahhs of appreciation. Welcome to the dark side, ladies. Before long they would need an extra room to house their stash.
I let out a loud sigh of relief as I sank into one of the over-stuffed chairs near the Ashford wheels. “I actually broke into a sweat blocking that shawl.” I flapped the hem of my T-shirt for emphasis.
Janice rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me. Try giving a full body wax to an overweight eighty-five-year-old man with more wrinkles than a shar-pei. Now that’s a workout.”
Too much information. What went on
behind the closed doors of Cut & Curl was none of my business.
“Seriously. I thought that shawl was going to get the better of me.”
“Our visitor is the one who got the better of you,” Lynette said. “You barely recouped the cost of the yarn.”
Lynette was always trying to give me business advice, and I was always doing my best to ignore her. “I thought we had a great group tonight. Definitely better than the carload of mystery writers who drove in for the finishing workshop last month. Now that was a big mistake.”
Leave it to mystery writers to wonder why the Inn flashed a NO OCCUPANCY sign but didn’t have any visitors.
“I’m talking about the shawl. She practically stole it from you.” Lynette could be like a dog with a stack of short ribs.
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“You must have spent twice that on yarn.”
“I didn’t spend anything. That was hand-spun from my mother’s stash.” When my mother died, one of the things she left me was a basket of roving that remained full to overflowing no matter how many hours I spent at my wheel, and another was a love of all things fiber.
“Good gods,” Lynette shrieked. “It’s worse than I thought.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said, slightly annoyed. “Lilith checks the roving twice a year to make sure it’s free from any traveling spells.”
Lynette was mollified, but just barely. “You really should drive down to Brattleboro and take a class in small business management,” she went on. “Cyrus said it’s the best money we ever spent.”
Lynette and Cyrus were owners/operators of the Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse at the corner of Carrier Court and Willard Grove. Cyrus was one of the SMAP’s favorite performers, which, considering the fact that he was a shapeshifter, made casting a snap. Lynette and their daughters Vonnie and Iphigenia were also shapeshifters and had been known to round out Cyrus’s repertory company on more than one occasion. Their sons, the unfortunately named Gilbert and Sullivan were occasionally pressed into service too, but Gil and Sully were quickly reaching the age where it would take cash to turn them into orphaned pirates.
“So you’ll think about it?” Lynette pressed. “If you sign up before the end of the year, Cyrus gets a fifty-dollar rebate.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, “but it’s pretty hard to get away these days.”
“You don’t want to get away,” Janice said as she rinsed out the teapot.
“That’s right,” Lynette observed as she swept crumbs off the worktable and tossed them into the trash. “You’re all about the work lately.”
“It would do you good to take a little trip.” Janice reached for the coffeepot. “I can’t remember the last time you went away for a night or two.”
“I can,” Lynette said as she fluffed up the pillows on the leather sofa near the fireplace. “It was when she was seeing that lawyer from New Hampshire.”
Janice frowned. “That has to be--what? Four, five years ago?”
“Almost six,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You can’t possibly still blame us for that.”
“Putting a spell on our car wasn’t very funny. We could have frozen to death up there in the woods.”
“We moved the relationship along,” Lynette broke in. “You should be grateful.”
“Lynnie’s right,” Janice said. “We saved you from making a terrible mistake.”
“Howard was handsome, smart, and independently wealthy. Where’s the mistake in that?”
“He was human,” Janice said. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“I’m human,” I reminded her.
“Only half,” Lynette said. “Your mother was a sorceress.”
“Yes, she was, but we all know I take after my father.” I had his height, his hair, and his humanness. There wasn’t the slightest bit of magick about me and there never had been. I couldn’t see into the future or shapeshift or bend spoons with the power of my mind. I was as solid and earthbound as one of the maple trees in Willard Grove.
“Nothing good happens when magick meets human,” Janice went on. “Don’t tempt fate, honey. Stick with your own kind.”
What they meant was, “Your mother fell in love with a human and see what happened to her.”
I was six years old when my parents died in a car crash not far from the Toothaker Bridge. The car skidded on black ice and slammed into a towering maple tree. My human father had been killed instantly. My sorceress mother lingered for two days while Sorcha and Lilith and all the people who loved her did everything in their power to convince her to stay, but in the end Guinevere chose to leave this world to be with the only man she would ever love.
My memories of that time were all in soft focus. Mostly I remember Sorcha, who had opened up her life and her home to me and made me her own.
Sometimes I hated my mother for making that choice. What kind of woman would choose to leave her daughter alone in the world? Depending on the time of day and how much wine I’d consumed, I either found her decision achingly romantic or the act of a supremely selfish woman.
“You’re not listening,” I said to my friends. “I don’t have magick and I probably never will.”
“You never know what might happen,” Janice said. “You always were a late bloomer. You were the last in your class to start wearing a bra.”
I was also the last in my class to score a date to the senior prom, something that still stings even now, thirteen years later. If it hadn’t been for my pal Gunnar, I wouldn’t have gone at all. “And your point is?”
Lynette leaned forward, all dark-eyed intensity. “My mother told me that your mother didn’t come into her full powers until she fell in love.”
“But she had some powers before she met my father,” I reminded my friends. “I remember the stories. Why can’t you both accept the fact that I’m never going to be more than I am right now?”
They exchanged another one of those knowing glances that reminded me of the housewives of Wisteria Lane.
“No matchmaking,” I said, barely stifling a yawn. “Absolutely, positively not. I am way too old for matchmaking.” Okay, so I was only thirty, but blind dates aged a girl in dog years.
“But he’s perfect for you.”
“That’s what you said about the last one.”
Janice had the decency to look a tiny bit sheepish. “I’ll admit Jacob was a mistake.”
“Jacob was a troll.”
Literally.
“Midge Stallworth forgot to mention that. We thought he was vampire like the rest of the family.”
“If the Universe wants me to find someone, they’ll send me a hot alpaca farmer who likes to spin.”
“Honey, you know we’re only thinking about your happiness.” Lynette patted my hand.
Maybe they were thinking about my happiness, but they were also thinking about the accident just before Christmas last year. A bus carrying a high school hockey team en route to Brattleboro blew a tire and careened down an embankment near the Sugar Maple town limits, killing the goalie and the coach.
Things like that weren’t supposed to happen here. Accidents, crime, illness, all the things that plagued every other town in America, didn’t happen here. Or at least they hadn’t up until recently.
Over three hundred years ago one of my sorcerer ancestors cast a protective charm over the town designed to shield Sugar Maple from harm for as long as one of her line walked the earth and--well, you guessed it. I’m the last descendant of Aerynn, and if you thought your family was on your case to marry and produce offspring, try having an entire town mixing potions, casting runes, and weaving spells designed to hook you up with Mr. Right.
“The accident was random chance,” I said, trying to ignore the chill racing up my spine as I remembered the crowd of reporters who had flooded the area. “The weather was terrible. It could have happened anywhere.”
“But it didn’t happen anywhere,” Janice said. “It happened he
re and it shouldn’t have.”
“Jan’s right,” Lynette said. “The spell is growing weaker with every year that passes. I can feel the difference.”
Janice nodded. “We all do.”
I didn’t but that was no surprise. I could only take them at their word on this, same as I did on everything else I couldn’t see or hear or understand.
“Cyrus met a charming selkie named Glenn at the Scottish Faire last week,” Lynette went on.
“She already dated a selkie,” Janice reminded her. “It wasn’t a good match.”
“I dated a selkie?” The parade of recent losers had mercifully blurred in my memory.
“You said his breath smelled like smoked salmon.”
I shuddered. “I’ll skip the selkies, thanks.”
“You get used to it,” Janice, who was married to a selkie, said. “Truth is, you’d skip them all if we let you.”
She was right about that.
“Just keep Saturday nights open,” Lynette said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
As far as I could tell, my Saturday nights were open from now until the next millennium. I nodded and stifled another yawn. “No trolls, no selkies,” I said. “And he has to be at least six feet tall before the magic kicks in.”
“Not a problem,” Janice said. “Tall is good.”
“Human might be nice for a change.”
They looked at me, then at each other, and burst into raucous laughter.
“Honey,” Lynette said as she patted my arm, “around here human might not be your best choice.”
I wasn’t usually prickly about their wariness about humans, but that night it got under my skin. It wasn’t like I actually thought Mr. Right was going to show up at Sticks & Strings one snowy winter day searching for the perfect ski sweater to wear on the slopes. But I did think love was possible. It had happened for my parents, hadn’t it? Maybe they hadn’t managed the happy ending part of the equation, but for a little while I saw what real magic was all about and I didn’t want to settle for anything less.
Now you know why I had five cats, one TiVo, and a stash of yarn I couldn’t knit my way through in six lifetimes.
I mean, what were the odds that the perfect man would not only show up in Sugar Maple, but also be okay with the fact that the town wasn’t the picture-postcard New England town our Chamber of Commerce would have you believe, but a village of vampires, werewolves, elves, faeries, and everything else your parents told you didn’t really exist?
Entangled- The Homecoming Page 15