Witch on Second: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 5 (The Jinx Hamilton Novels)

by Juliette Harper

  Mom drew herself up in preparation for a major lecture, but Gemma laid a calming hand on her arm. “Down girl,” she said lovingly. “The kid is right. You can ruffle your feathers and defend me all you like, but I have been lying to Scrap for years. I lied to you, too. I told you I wasn’t practicing magic, and that wasn’t the truth.”

  “If you hadn’t kept up your powers in secret,” Mom said loyally, “we could never have faced a sorceress like Brenna Sinclair. She would have killed us both. You were doing what you thought you had to do to protect these girls and me.”

  Gemma nodded sadly, “Yes, but that doesn’t get around the lying part.”

  Still treading carefully, Tori asked, “How did you and Dad leave it?”

  For just a fraction of a second, I thought Gemma was going to cry, but then she got a hold of herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “He hasn’t been home all week.”

  Tori looked like she had been hit with one of her father’s two by fours. “He hasn’t been home?” she echoed in a stunned voice. “Where has he been?”

  “Sleeping in his office at the lumber yard,” Gemma answered, her lips quivering slightly as she spoke the words.

  Mom looked stricken. “Oh, Gem,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’d have gone charging down there to have a talk with him,” Gemma said, “and I didn’t think Scrap was quite up for that yet.”

  In spite of the seriousness of the conversation, we all laughed. Mom doesn’t get mad often, but when she does, she gets mad all over.

  A couple of bottles of red wine and a good bit of popcorn later, a plan evolved to have my father take Tori’s dad on an overnight fishing trip. Somewhere between baiting the trot lines and drinking good bourbon, we all hoped Dad could talk some sense into Scrap and get him to come home.

  We’d find out the next night when Dad either showed up for the street dance alone or with Scrap in tow. Tori had been on edge about the whole thing all week, especially since her father wouldn’t take her phone calls.

  When she told me that, I said, “Why isn’t he talking to you?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want a magical daughter either,” Tori answered, her voice breaking.

  Since we’re both daddy’s girls, I knew exactly what she was going through. I pulled her into a hug and said, “Stop that. Scrap loves you to pieces. He’s just got to get used to all this.”

  “I hope so, Jinksy,” she mumbled against my shoulder. “I hope so.”

  So you see, we were both preoccupied that Friday after the committee meeting. Tori by her personal family crisis, and me by the fact that I was doing some lying of my own.

  Something else came to light that summer — a huge something that seemed beyond my control until an opportunity presented itself.

  Brace yourselves. I have a brother named Connor.

  Whom I was not allowed to meet.

  If you just had a “what the . . .” moment, join the club. My sentiments exactly.

  Here’s the deal, Connor doesn’t even know we exist. Thanks to a curse put on my mother by a Fae being called a Strigoi, Connor was exiled to Shevington as an infant and never told about his real family.

  Clearly, there is a massively long backstory. Here are the high points.

  The moms worked some ill-conceived magic in high school, and two girls wound up dead. The father of one of the girls, who was also the uncle of the other one, cursed mom to be forever parted from her first born.

  In Strigoi lingo, “forever parted” translates to “dead.”

  Myrtle and Barnaby saved the baby’s life by arranging a deal.

  When Mom turned up missing during the whole mess with Malcolm Ferguson, Dad blurted out the Connor story, assuming there had to be a connection.

  Since we still don’t know if someone hired Ferguson to come after us, I can’t say Dad was right or wrong on that one.

  At any rate, when the dust settled after Festus killed Ferguson, the Hamiltons held a family conference. We all agreed that contacting Connor would put him in danger. Mom and I both promised Dad and Aunt Fiona that we wouldn’t do anything to try to contact him.

  Confession time.

  I had my fingers crossed behind my back.

  Are you freaking kidding me? I have a brother and I’m not allowed to meet him? So not how I intended to play.

  Connor works for Ellis Groomsby in the Shevington stables. That Friday, Ellis and all of his staff, with the exception of Connor, would be working in the upper valley relocating saltwater life forms to the new merfolk environment.

  I know this because I drink my coffee in Shevington in a corner shop not far from the stables. Go down the sloping street and turn right, you’re at the fairy barracks where the Brown Mountain Guard does flight drills. Turn left, and you see the stables. The big meadow north of the city sits between the two.

  The week before, I overheard a table full of workers from the stable discussing the transfer of the sea creatures. My ears perked up when he said, “Everybody’s coming but Endicott.”

  Connor was raised by an old friend of Aunt Fiona’s who posed as his grandmother. Her name was Endora Endicott. Aunt Fiona lives in what was her cottage. Endora died last year.

  “How come Endicott gets off light?” one of the men asked.

  “The unicorn mare is about to foal,” his companion replied. “She’s been so skittish during her pregnancy; Ellis can’t even get near her. Endicott is the only one who can handle her. Besides, somebody has to muck out all the stables.”

  That elicited a round of laughter as the men returned their cups and plates to the counter and walked out as a group. I left too, heading back to Briar Hollow, the wheels in my brain turning at full steam.

  I knew all about the merfolk project. In the face of worsening ocean pollution, they requested and were granted sanctuary in Shevington. The only requirement was that Myrtle and Moira, the community’s alchemist, create a place for them to live.

  Myrtle helped complete the successful design for the inland sea that would be the merfolk’s new home only days before she merged her energy with the Mother Tree.

  Whether the moms were underfoot or not, I had to go to Shevington that night. With Ellis out of the way, I could visit the stables without Barnaby finding out.

  If someone did see me in the streets and Barnaby asked, I could say I was picking something up at the book shop or the apothecary. If all went well, I would get to the Valley in time to actually stop in one of those places and then I wouldn’t be technically lying to him.

  This renegade notion of mine did not extend to some dramatic reunion with my brother where I blurted out the whole story and turned his life upside down. I just wanted to see him, to know what he looked like, and maybe to hear his voice.

  For this scheme to work, timing would be everything.

  In addition to getting ready for the festival, we had plenty to do with the moms. Tori and Gemma were right in the middle of a comparative study of divination methods. Crystal balls and tarot cards littered their work tables along with runes, I Ching wands, and currently, sacks of flour.

  Yeah. Aleuromancy. The use of flour to foretell the future. That’s how the whole fortune cookie thing got started. Who knew?

  Tonight they would be trying to mix flour with water to interpret patterns in the “slurry.” I figured worse case scenario; they wind up baking cookies.

  Mom and I planned to conduct drills with simultaneous powers. I was learning to move an object with one hand while hitting a target with energy bolts using the other. Mom was perfecting transformation and relocation spells.

  Translation: I could lift a target in the air and zap it at the same time. Mom could blink an apple out of one place and have it reappear somewhere else as an orange.

  While those specific power combinations might not ever do us any practical good, the goal was to achieve control over two or more concurrent streams of magic with equal accuracy.

  In my head, we’d do
dinner, drills, and a movie. From past experience, I knew the moms and Tori would fall asleep, which would allow me to leave a note saying I went upstairs to be with my cats. Since time runs slower in Shevington, I could get to the Valley, meet Connor, and get back before anyone was the wiser — unless I ran into Chase.

  Thus my equal parts depression and annoyance, which thankfully Tori recognized, but didn’t interpret correctly. I took that as a good sign.

  6

  As I unloaded the dishwasher behind the counter in the espresso bar, my mind was working at full preoccupied capacity. I ran through all the possible scenarios I might have to deal with to get to Shevington, and then ran them again with different variables.

  I didn’t even hear Tori walk in until she delivered a good-natured hip bump accompanied by the admonition, “Hey, let it go.”

  Startled, I covered my incomprehension with a fairly grumpy, “Let what go?” Thankfully that put her on the wrong track about what I’d been thinking.

  “Don’t even try to play that game with me, Jinksy,” she said. “You’re beating yourself up for snapping at Chase, and it’s eating you up that you didn’t ask him why he was headed to Shevington.”

  Neither statement was entirely untrue, so I went with it.

  “Okay. Fine,” I sighed. “Busted.”

  Reaching to help me put cups away, Tori said, “Look, break-ups suck. Period. Trust me, I know. Remember who you’re talking to? The Queen of Lousy Relationships?”

  I closed the dishwasher and leaned back against the counter. Even though I hadn’t been thinking about the break-up with Chase, I felt myself going on the defensive.

  “That,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, “would be the problem. We didn’t have a lousy relationship.”

  “True,” Tori said. She picked up the coffee pot and gave me a questioning expression. “You want some?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  Why not pour caffeine on top of my already anxiety-ridden secret plot?

  As she filled both cups, Tori continued trying to reason with me about Chase. “Maybe the relationship wasn’t lousy,” she said, “but you two were up against a lousy werecat taboo. The deal with Ferguson scared Chase.”

  That struck a chord and not a pleasant one. “Then he should have talked to me,” I said, an edge of anger coming into my voice.

  “Maybe he didn’t know how,” Tori suggested.

  “If that’s true,” I countered, “we had a bigger problem than Ferguson. One that I didn’t even know about. Lack of communication.”

  “Hence you not knowing about it,” Tori snarked, miming a rim shot on an imaginary snare drum.

  “Very funny,” I growled.

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee and regarding me over the cup’s rim. “You’re doing that whole fatalistic thing, by the way.”

  “What fatalistic thing?”

  “The one where you act like you’re never going to see Chase again,” she said, “which is, like, next to impossible. There’s no rule that you guys can’t still talk. In fact, the rest of us would be thrilled if you did.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, sounding guilty in spite of myself.

  “It means those of us who love you don’t like watching you come down every day with red eyes from crying half the night,” she said, “or having to tiptoe around every time you and Chase are in the same room.”

  Her words sent a flush of embarrassed heat spreading over my cheeks, but I still refused to budge. “If Chase McGregor wants to talk to me, he knows where I am,” I said. “And it’s not just him. I miss Myrtle.”

  “Myrtle would be the first one to tell you to talk to him,” Tori pointed out.

  That’s all it took for tears to fill my eyes.

  Tori plucked a tissue out of the box and handed it to me. “Okay,” she said in a softer tone, “I’ll back off. Just please don’t cry anymore. At least not until I buy stock in Kimberly-Clark.”

  That wisecrack finally made me laugh, but the sound came out as a sort of damp gurgle. Tori put a consoling hand on my arm. “Let’s change the subject,” she said.

  Excellent idea.

  “What time are the moms getting here?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat and said, “They’ll be here for supper. Mom and Darby were on FaceTime working out the meal plan down in the lair this morning.”

  “Of course, they were,” Tori laughed. “Apple needs to start paying us a commission the way we’ve been handing out iPads around here.”

  After we had outfitted Glory’s dollhouse with an iPod Touch to serve as a big screen TV, she informed us that her biggest joy in life was attending old-fashioned drive-in movies. Couldn’t we find a way to make that work for her, too?

  I’d like to say “we” answered the call, but the DIY fix was all Tori. First, she bought a pink Malibu Barbie convertible on eBay, then she picked up yet another iPad and mounted it to the wall to the left of the dollhouse.

  Add two squares of artificial grass and a couple of tiny Bluetooth speakers, as well as a swoopy vintage sign reading “MoonGlo,” and Glory had her drive-in.

  When Tori asked me for my opinion of the project, I came downstairs to survey the miniature parking lot. Rodney rode along on my shoulder. I had one question. “How’s Glory going to get the movie going?” I asked.

  “Rat remote control,” Tori replied. “Show her Rodney.”

  Giving Tori the thumbs up, Rodney ran down my arm, jumped the space to the shelf, and approached the iPad. Standing on his hind legs, he used his paw to swipe the on-screen lock. Next, he tapped the Amazon Video icon, selected a movie from the WatchList, and hit “play.” On cue, the opening titles of Blue Hawaii filled the screen.

  “Why not Netflix?” I asked.

  “No Elvis on Netflix,” Tori answered. “I bought the whole Elvis catalog for Glory, and now she’s hitting me up to get all the Annette Funicello stuff, too.”

  “And the Fifties are alive and well,” I declared, “right here in our basement.”

  Before she was done, Tori even added mini popcorn to the drive-in set up. Trust me; I never heard of the stuff either, but it’s apparently one of Oprah’s favorite things — and now Rodney’s, too.

  It would be impossible not to love Rodney anyway, but just imagine a black-and-white rat kicked back in the passenger seat of a pink convertible eating popcorn out of a red-and-white striped bag. The sight redefines adorable.

  There was, however, one unexpected complication to the whole arrangement. Darby’s hurt feelings. We didn’t expect him to look up at us with wounded eyes and ask when he would “earn” one of the “flat boxes that make pictures.”

  The word “earn” crushed us both so much that Tori instantly headed out to the mall and came back with a brand new gold iPad.

  When she handed the tablet to the elated brownie, she said, “We had to find a really special one for you, Darby, and it’s already loaded up with all the Harry Potter movies.”

  That last announcement set him to bouncing up and down with excitement. To our considerable amusement, Darby is not only obsessed with Harry Potter; he’s convinced J.K. Rowling based one of the characters on him.

  Now, granted, I could see the similarity, but we only started calling our friend “Darby” because we can’t pronounce his real name. Try to imagine a sound mix involving Festus tossing a hairball against the backdrop of a spoon caught in the garbage disposal — with a lot of consonants.

  Tori suggested the name “Darby” from an old movie our Hollywood-obsessed moms love, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. We weren’t even thinking about Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter.

  Darby, however, is completely convinced J.K. Rowling based that character on him. Never mind that when she wrote the book, Darby was still trapped guarding Knasgowa’s grave. Never mind that Darby, who is all of two feet tall, looks like an old man with the shy, smiling face of a child and bears zero resembl
ance to a house elf.

  It didn’t take Darby long to figure out all the other things he could do with an iPad, including FaceTime with my mother to trade recipes.

  Other than the committee meeting that morning, it had been a quiet Friday. I was just locking the front door when Mom came bouncing in the back holding a huge platter encased in aluminum foil. My nose instantly told me the silver wrapping concealed a mountain of her famous fried chicken.

  Tori held the door to the basement for her, and the three of us went down together. Darby already had the table set, and Beau was just lighting two tall candles in massive brass holders.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said gallantly. “Isn’t Miss Gemma joining us?”

  Beau didn’t know about the situation with Tori’s father. It was bad enough that the town gossips over in Cotterville were already wagging their tongues because Scrap’s pickup hadn’t left the lumberyard parking lot for days. Gemma asked us to keep the situation “just between us girls for now,” and we had agreed.

  “She’ll be here in a few minutes,” Mom said brightly, setting the platter down between two equally huge bowls of potato salad and beans. “She wanted to give Scrap his supper before he and Jeff go fishing.”

  Tori and I exchanged a queasy look at the fabricated story.

  “So,” Tori said a little weakly, "tonight is the night, huh?”

  Mom finished folding the foil into a neat, reusable square and put her arm around Tori’s waist. “It’s okay, sugar,” she said. “Jeff won’t let Scrap fall in the river or anything.”

  That was Mom code for, “He’ll bring him back home where he belongs.”

  Still looking worried, Tori leaned into Mom. “Is Jeff gonna send us a text or something to let us know . . . uh . . . if the fish are biting?” she asked.

  From the stairs above us, her mother answered the question as she came down balancing a pecan pie in each hand. “If the fish aren’t biting,” she said, making a supreme effort to sound normal, “I gave them permission to go honky tonkin’.”