The Catalain Book of Secrets

by Jessica Lourey

  An hour had passed like water dripping as she’d stared at the ceiling of the vehicle, focusing on an oily black stain the size of a quarter three inches forward of the interior light. Her chin trembled, and she couldn’t seem to swallow past the thickness in her throat. When she couldn’t stand being motionless for another second, she’d propped up her seat, twisted the key in the ignition, and pointed west.

  Once the car was in motion, zooming away from Minneapolis on I-94, she’d allowed the familiar scent of a Minnesota summer night to stir her memory. The peppery spice of corn silk. The clean warmth of wheat waving in the evening breeze. The elemental freshness of lake water. The smells reminded her of sailing on a tire swing over the river, the sweet and glittery crunch of watermelon rock candy, and her first kiss, stolen by Gregg Hansen during the middle school version of homecoming. She’d been 13, wearing tight corduroy pants and a flowing white blouse that felt pretty. He was two years older and just starting to fill out his faded jeans and REO Speedwagon t-shirt. His lips had tasted like sweet apple wine before his braces scraped her lip, forcing her to yank her head back. They’d stood outside the school gym. She remembered hearing the bass thump of Prince in the background and a thrill shooting through her like silver.

  Unexpected tears bubbled up at the memory. She wiped them away and rolled up her windows to fade the smell of the past, also shutting out the bewitching night air. She jabbed at the radio until she located NPR. The soothing monotony of the newscaster’s voice steadied her heartbeat. Even so, her hands appeared odd on the steering wheel as she drove, and she had the distinct feeling of staying in one spot as the road rushed past her, a set car on a child’s movable track. When the radio produced more crackling than words, she switched it off, afraid to search for other stations, to stumble across a song that would trigger the seditious tears.

  An hour out of the Cities, her head began to baby-wobble. She had to stretch her legs or she’d be asleep at the wheel. She exited the interstate, taking the St. Augusta exit ramp so fast that she almost squashed the frog hopping across the high-beam-lit road. She slammed her brake pedal to the floor. The pick-up truck behind her was forced to swerve to miss the cream-colored bug, honking his horn and flipping her the bird as he squealed past. She ignored him, stepping out to transport the leopard frog to the far ditch.

  Frogs. She’d always felt a connection with them, been compelled to save them. Maybe she was hoping one would turn into a prince. She laughed at the thought, or at least made the dry sound that passed for her laughter these days.

  She returned to her car, stopping at an all-night station before driving due north. All four pumps were open. She topped her small tank and strode inside to pay. The convenience store was empty except for the attendant behind the candy-laden counter. She tried to catch his glance, to feel real, to be seen. He never looked up from his handheld. On impulse, she walked to the rear and grabbed a frosty bottle of root beer from one of the coolers before approaching him, feeling disassociated from the cold bottle in her hand.

  He still didn’t look up. She felt the tears returning, but then the shiver of a million fingers tickled her skull. If Kallie doesn’t make it through surgery, I’m alone.

  Her defensiveness melted. The attendant wasn’t ignoring her. He was in crisis. “It’s going to be fine,” she responded. She wanted to set him at ease, to comfort the worry in his belly. “Your sister’s operation is going to go really well.”

  “What?” His head shot up from his phone, his expression a paint-bucket blend of surprise and fear. He did the same double-take most men did when they first laid eyes on her, and then his face slipped back into confusion.

  She focused fully on him for the first time, her eyes blurry from 42 corrugated hours without sleep. He hadn’t spoken until she’d addressed him, hadn’t even held eye contact with her until this moment. She wanted to make a joke to break the tension (For my next trick, watch me pull a foot out of my mouth.). “Nothing. Keep the change.”

  She slid him a twenty, her last, and hustled out the door. She had only jingle left in her purse, no paper, and a credit card that had sidled past its limit two weeks ago. She’d called in a favor to buy the London-to-Minneapolis plane ticket, a kindness she hoped she’d be able to repay. In front of her glowing computer, searching for a flight, she’d told herself that it didn’t matter where she went, as long as it was away. That had been a lie. Since the moment she’d discovered Adam’s betrayal, her world had become a pulsing black, accented by the red of fear.

  She’d been too tired to shop for groceries. She hadn’t worked in two weeks. Her friends were worried about her, begging her to leave her flat, grab a cup of coffee, meet them for lunch, smile, shower. (Hey, think how much money I’m saving on water, she’d said, but no one had laughed.)

  Muscle memory urged her to move forward, but she couldn’t remember how. The sorrow of love lost, of duplicity, of feeling like a fool on her most basic level, lay in her gut like a bitter stone. She’d swallowed it whole when she’d first found out, and it had gathered spit and blood, growing as it pushed down her throat. By the time it reached her stomach, it was a black fist, cooking in her stomach acid until it was hard and heavy, continuing to grow. She didn’t belong anywhere.

  And there it was.

  It was finally time to go home, to return to a town that she’d abruptly left fourteen years ago and was returning to just as suddenly, a town where she’d never known her father— not even his name—and where she’d grown up in a haunted Queen Anne perched on the edge of everything, complete with a witch’s workshop in the rear. Once the idea planted itself in her brain, it grew in urgency. She was being called back, finally. The relief was balm to the muscles around her heart, surging through her bloodstream, lubricating the stone in her belly, not strong enough to erode it but at least shifting it.

  The final leg of her journey home was anticlimactic. Faith Falls, Minnesota, was a nowhere town, constricting, outside the flow of life. She’d considered returning over the past fourteen years, had promised herself and her mom and Jasmine that she’d visit for Christmas, or a birthday, but then something always came up.

  Has it really been fourteen years? She shook her head. Thinking about all that time made her feel like a shit. As she tried to get a bead on the exact reason she hadn’t come back, not even for a single visit, the thought would become slippery, and she’d be left wondering what she’d been trying to remember. But, as she neared Faith Falls, she had the sensation of crossing the bubble of a force field, and whatever had called her home began to burble in her veins.

  With relief, she saw Faith Falls hadn’t changed much.

  Settled in a river valley, the first visible landmark was the Our Lady of the Lakes’ soaring steeple. The spire had been a point of pride with the Catholics who’d built it with tithe money in 1973 to show the Lutherans who was closer to heaven; unfortunately, the church itself was embarrassingly modest and so the whole structure had the appearance of an upended turtle struggling to maintain a giant erection (which the Lutherans were quick to point out, privately and in more colorful terms; you can’t beat a Lutheran for body part euphemisms). She’d had friends from both affiliations growing up and never understood the earnestness of either.

  The sky was turning a murky lavender when she wound down County Road 77 and into town. On a whim, she twisted open her bottle of root beer, the sharp kiss of released carbonation loud inside the VW. She hadn’t drunk a root beer since high school, hadn’t even known she’d missed it. It tasted like caramel and a good joke. Bubbling in her stomach, it gave her a tiny vein of hope, the first she’d felt in months.

  She continued to drive, noting the new trailer park that pocked the north side, the anonymous housing development sprung up next to the river, the fast food restaurants and box stores now ringing the edges of the town like tinfoil jewelry on a queen. She had to pass through the haunted Avignon neighborhood, the rumored site of an Indian burial ground. She held her breath unti
l she was through the neighborhood, something she and Jasmine had done since they were children to keep the bad luck at bay.

  When she motored into the heart of the old downtown, she was surprised to feel respite, an alien emotion this past year, akin to discovering she had wings. If she could hold the thought long enough, she imagined she’d left Faith Falls because it had smothered her. It was a flat dead-end, lacking the allure of the great wide world. It was fear of the town’s suffocating smallness that had kept her away, that must be it. So why did that limitation suddenly feel like an embrace?

  River Street was almost as she’d left it, three blocks of old-fashioned, sleeping storefronts, wide sidewalks, and brass sculptures of otters no taller than her knees. Bradley Willmar, owner of Willmar’s Apothecary, had convinced the Chamber of Commerce to buy the statues to liven up the downtown. Rum River was thick with otters, and reminding folks of these playful creatures would bring more people to the area and add to the village’s charm, he’d argued.

  It was no coincidence that his drugstore, in the family for seven generations, was planted in the middle of River Street, with Hobbes Theater on one side and Belinda’s Boutique on the other. Across the boulevard was a divided office shared by an accountant and a chiropractor, Juni’s Salon, Ragged Cover Used Bookstore and Coffee Shoppe, and Farmers & Merchants County Bank. Turned out brass otter statues didn’t affect the business prospects of a single one of them, for good or ill.

  Katrine had worked at Hobbes the last two summers of high school, ripping tickets and scooping popcorn. She’d loved it. She’d watched every movie that came through for free, sometimes twice, and would sneak Jasmine in on slow nights. She tried to remember what had been important to her then, what had made her heart race and lit her eyes, but she’d been a firefly in her youth, soaring from one perch to another and leaving a trail of light in her wake. Introspection and magic had not been her game. She’d left that for her sister.

  She steered past downtown, scanning the streets for a familiar face, but no one was out at this hour. She hadn’t expected anything different. She drove toward the river, turning without thinking, until she spotted it, the house built by her great-grandparents, the beautiful, restored, dignified old Queen Anne.

  Looking at it, Katrine felt as empty as a fresh-dug grave. But she’d get to see her sister. After all these years, she’d finally get to put her arms around Jasmine again. That was her beacon.

  Chapter 2

  Jasmine

  The white curtains fluttered in and out with the breath of the wind, carrying the honeydew-scented, pre-dawn August air. Jasmine watched the curtains inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. She was working during the wee hours. She didn’t have to—her accounting business was not demanding in late summer—but it was that or look at the empty spot in her bed. Up until three months ago, he’d be sleeping next to her every night that he wasn’t on the road, snoring like a sailor.

  That was before he’d left her, and their perfect life in their perfect house. She’d upped her dosage of antidepressants without consulting her doctor. They fogged her ability to reach out to the solid, humming center in each human, a talent she’d never had as strong as Katrine anyway, though her sister had always underestimated her own powers. The drugs silenced the whisper in Jasmine’s fingers and ears that had always helped her to choose the perfect ingredients for her roasts and cakes and sense just what temperature and how much time her magic required. She wanted this deadening.

  The green and white pills allowed her to live in the world like a normal person, walking on it instead of with it. The mental scaffolding she’d built over her past was shaky, but she balanced on it as best she could, fighting not to look down. Once Katrine had moved away from Faith Falls fourteen years earlier, taking hope and risk with her, Jasmine had required the anti-depressants to keep her equilibrium.

  She’d been surprised at how quick and exquisitely painful the separation from her past self and her magic had been. It took three weeks of the drug, bitter smooth capsules sliding down her throat, through her stomach and into her blood where they cloaked every bit of bright blue alchemy, leaving a brownish-gray sludge that washed out in her urine, stinking of forest decay and ink. If any power had remained, any of the cellular keys to the great mystery she’d been born into, the cotton of the drug stuffed her brain and absorbed her juices, making it impossible to concentrate on magic.

  Or to care.

  It was hard, this stigma she’d chosen, but it had its rewards above and beyond not having to look back. Her husband, for one. No way would stable, normal, average Dean Moore have married a Catalain in her full power. Not many men were that brave, and even if they were, the Catalain women seemed to attract the bad and repel the good when it came to the men in their lives. And their daughter, Tara, would have been denied opportunities if her mother was still a Catalain witch in name or deed.

  Jasmine vividly remembered her first day of ninth grade, when she and her class went from the shelter of elementary school to the jungle of Faith Falls High. Heather Lewis, two years younger than her and Faith Falls royalty, had convinced a junior boy to throw a bucket of water at Jasmine outside of the school. Jasmine, who had gotten up early that day to curl her hair and apply her make-up. She’d been excited to start a new chapter in her life. As her mascara ran with her tears, a ring of boys circled her, pretending to be flying monkeys.

  Katrine had barreled through all of them and led Jasmine away, but it was too late. Jasmine was labeled a witch. She didn’t possess the sense of humor or popularity needed to shake such a tag, and so she did the best she could to make herself invisible. It helped, but the teasing continued throughout her school years.

  She was a Catalain, after all.

  She would fight to protect Tara from ever having to bear the curse of the name, just as she’d fought to protect her sister by casting her final spell before she’d forsaken her magic, the spell that had banished Katrine to the other side of the world.

  She sighed, missing her sister with the same powerful ache that visited every day, but content in the knowledge that was safe as long as she stayed in London, away from Faith Falls.

  She would protect her sister where their mother, Ursula, had not.

  Chapter 3

  Ursula

  The nighttime smells in Ursula’s garden were heaven, sweet as basswood honey. The warmth of yesterday’s sun still radiated from the silky black earth even though it was nearing dawn. She whispered a quiet blessing, equal parts hope and gratitude.

  Sweat trickled down her neck, curling the short gray-black hair around her ears into question marks. The gardening was not strenuous, but the level of concentration required to hold the blessing while handling the enormous white flowers was considerable. And she didn’t want to lose any of the pollen. The soft yellow crystals clinging to the stamen were precious and rare. She required a great deal, at least an ounce, to brew remedies to see the town through the winter, and even that would not be enough for everyone.

  Ursula finished with one moonflower and moved to the next, the last of them, cupping the sparkling white bloom firmly, its petals great butterfly wings reflecting the starlight. She tapped it over the blue decanter. The pollen tinkled like a thousand fairy bells when it landed. The golden dust could be gathered any night the moonflower bloomed, July through September in this part of the Midwest. For Ursula’s purpose, however, only the flower dust gathered under a full moon would do. Tonight was doubly auspicious: it was a blue moon, a second full moon in a single month. Once every three years thirteen full moons fell in a calendar year.

  Ursula rested on her heels and rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of dirt-stained dew above her glasses, which had begun to slide down her nose. She was done for the night. All the flowers had been groomed, and it would be four more weeks until she could return to collect more pollen, unless an early frost snapped the blossoms before then. She held up the decanter to the moon. The pollen mott
led the sides of the cobalt glass and settled on the bottom in a soft coating of pure sweetness, shuddering in the moonlight like a newborn.

  Ursula’s knees creaked as she adjusted her weight. She’d been tending this garden, tucked on the property between the main house and her moss-covered workshop, for more than half of her 62 years. When she’d moved back to Faith Falls in 1979, pregnant, a steel-forged woman already bearing her life’s scars, she never stopped by to tell Velda she was back in town, though she knew her mother was living in the same bungalow she’d moved them all to after her husband’s death. The single thought that brought her peace was the idea of living in the gorgeous old Queen Anne her ancestors had built.

  By then, the house was abandoned, the cost of upkeep and heat proving too much. To most townspeople, the lines of the house now appeared ragged, like a photo unfocused at the edges. Occasionally, a person out walking their dog or jogging past would pause on the cracked sidewalk in front of the house, puzzling whether it was a trick of the eyes or something about the paint that gave the grand old home a blurry look. Soon, though, they’d forget why they were standing there and move on, sure they had lost something, checking their pockets for keys, wondering if they’d turned off the oven, running down a list of their ballerina dreams.

  Ursula bought the house before Jasmine was born. She’d learned young that money was the way to remain independent of her mother and to keep those she loved safe, and so she’d worked long hours marketing her elixirs during the day and crafting them in her one-room apartment at night, saving every penny she didn’t absolutely need. It was enough for a down payment and renovation materials.

  She began the painstaking process of remodeling the interior of the Queen Anne, which was more neglected and abused than she could have imagined. She started by stripping dirty white paint off original crown molding, digging out the hand-carved banisters from the attic and restoring them, knocking out walls, and peeling away flowered wallpaper, first while heavily pregnant and then with her newborn cozied to her chest. The house began to purr and preen.