***
“Yep, looks personal to me.” The detective, a man named Kroner, stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips and surveyed the mess. Other officers walked around, gingerly making their way through the debris, taking pictures and making notes. “You piss anyone off lately?”
“Apparently,” Liza muttered.
“Anyone specifically?”
Detective Kroner had whistled and laughed a little when he’d first walked through the door. Liza had not appreciated that. It might have just been a few candles and oils to him, but to her it had been the beginning of a new life.
“I just moved here. I don’t know enough people yet,” she replied. She sat on the stool by the counter, the safest place in the room. If she’d stood anywhere else, she would have been ankle deep in wreckage. “I haven’t been here long enough to make anyone this mad.”
Detective Kroner looked down at his tiny little notepad, grumbled something to himself, and made a note. He did that after everything she said. She was thinking about saying a bunch of really random things, just to make him have to write more. So far, she had not been impressed by the justice system in Kudzu Valley.
For starters, it had taken two hours for the police to arrive, despite the fact the police department was across the street and she could literally see it from her front window.
And then there had been the laughter.
“There was a waitress who wouldn’t serve me a drink,” Liza offered helpfully. “But she just glared at me. I don’t think it was her.”
“Anyone else you can think of?”
“Cotton Hashagen,” she answered at once. “I saw him lurking around out back when I got in my car. He looked like he was up to something.”
“Cotton?” Detective Kroner laughed and snapped his notebook shut. “Naw, I don’t think he’d do anything. I went to school with him. Good kid, great football player. Could’ve made something out of himself but hurt his leg senior year. Real shame…”
And that was how Liza’s morning went.
***
The detective’s words kept repeating themselves over and over in her mind, like a single line of a song on a broken record. “Gotta keep the temper in check, old girl,” she reminded herself. “Gotta stay calm. Stay calm. Bad things happen when you’re not calm. Bad things happen when you let it loose.”
Liza continued to speak soothingly to herself while she folded the sheets and put another load of towels in. She could feel her heart pounding erratically under her skin and her blood was all but boiling throughout her veins. When she passed a mirror and caught her reflection, she wasn’t surprised to see that her face looked sunburned, beet red from what she assumed was her skyrocketing blood pressure.
She wasn’t a child or teenager anymore, though; she was an adult.
She had to learn to control her temper. If she couldn’t, then she couldn’t do any magic anymore. That had been her rule and threat to herself and she knew it was absolutely necessary.
Liza wore her emotions on her sleeves. She was sensitive. For a long time she’d tried to change that, to be someone else. Someone safer. But then her grandfather, of all people, had told her it wasn’t necessary.
“Sugar bee,” he’d said out of the blue one day while he was reading the paper, “you gots to take the good with the bad. If you lose your bad sensitive side, you lose what makes you good, too.”
But she still needed to learn control.
Before she knew she was a real witch with real power, back when she was thirteen and full of raging hormones, she’d accidentally set fire to a hay bale. She’d been with her mother and stepfather, Gene, up in New Hampshire, at a bed and breakfast called the Wander Inn. They’d been there for a week, horseback riding and going for hayrides and such.
It was late September and her stepfather was doing some kind of Rite Aid thing. Liza Jane had met a fellow teenager, a boy named Tracy Coffey. He was also staying there with his parents and they’d bonded over mutual teenage boredom and a love of Nine Inch Nails.
By the end of the second day they’d played two games of checkers, watched an episode of “Saved by the Bell” in the common room at the inn, and exchanged phone numbers. After dinner that night she’d spent more than two hours making him a mixed tape and was out looking for him to give him the treasure when she’d rounded the barn and caught him in a lip lock with her sister.
Every emotion she’d ever been capable of had burst forth from her at once: anger, jealousy, betrayal, disappointment and, that one emotion that every teen experiences at the height of their hurt–overwhelming despair.
“Tracy Coffey!” she’d screamed. He and Bryar had looked up, guilty as rats in the cake batter. Her sister had the audacity to look ashamed as she quickly checked her blouse to make sure there weren’t any gaping buttonholes. She’d been twelve at the time. Bryar had started everything earlier than most.
They’d both started towards her then but the scene had blurred through tears and anger. She’d thought she would boil over from the bigness of it all. And then the hay bale had shot up in flames, like someone had doused it with gasoline and thrown a torch on it. It had taken fifteen minutes to get it under control. As soon as it tapered down from the gallons of water being tossed at it, it would shoot right back up again.
The fire didn’t go out completely until Liza Jane stopped her crying which, incidentally, hadn’t stopped until she’d seen the look of terror on Tracy Coffey’s face. That had, somehow, made her feel much better.
She’d received a phone call from Nana Bud the next morning.
“Liza Jane Merriweather, you need to control your feisty little britches,” the voice, old but not frail, had warned her.
“What Nana?” she’d asked, still a little uncertain as to what her actual role in the event had been.
“I seen what you did to that hay.”
Liza had felt her face flush with embarrassment. “They said someone put a cigarette out in it, that it was dry.”
“Horseshit,” Rosebud had scoffed. “You got yourself in a tither and directed all your energy at it. And now it’s high time to learn what you are and what you can, and cannot, do about it.”
She’d had her first lesson in control that night. It was also the night she learned that she was a witch, and not the only one in her family. She’d had a few minor lessons along the way, but it was finally time for her to sit still for the big one.
She’d had a few hiccups along the way, but now Liza tried to control herself when she could.
She still hadn’t learned much control, although she did pride herself over the fact that both Mode and Jennifer Miller and the Starbucks girl were all still alive. And human.
***
It had been a…interesting day to say the least. Liza was more than ready to get home. She’d spent hours at the police station, talking to the detective again.
That hadn’t gone anywhere.
There was a gas station before she reached the turnoff to her road and she stopped there, first. She was out of caffeine at home, which would’ve been a real travesty considering the day she’d had, and she could use bread and sandwich makings.
The icy weather had brought others out as well so the store was unusually crowded when she walked in. It had been her go-to place for essentials since moving in so she knew which aisle she needed to visit. It didn’t take her long to shop.
With arms full, Liza approached the front and stood in line. And ended up right behind Cotton Hashagen.
Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him, she chanted to herself.
But then he turned around, saw her, and flashed her a smile that was so smug, so condescending, and so much like Mode’s that she’d lost it.
“I know it was you, Cotton,” she exclaimed, not even bothering to keep her voice down.
“What?” he asked innocently, looking around at the rest of people who were starting to stare and giving them a “women, what do you do?” look.
�
�You trashed my store! You ruined my things!” she screeched. “I saw you hanging around outside my door!”
Cotton’s face reddened and his eyes darkened as he stepped back from Liza. Everyone else had already taken their own steps back and were looking at her a little nervously. She was unaware of the fact that the hair around her face was flying outwards in her anger.
“If you come near my business again Cotton, I will kill you. Do you understand? I will kill you.” Though she said the words softly enough, someone standing behind her gave an audible groan and there was a massive shudder that went through the crowd.
Then, forgetting her snacks and drinks, she left the building.
It wasn’t until she was back in the car and turning onto her gravel road that she realized she’d shoplifted.
***
“We’re just going to pretend that most of that didn’t happen today,” Liza Jane grumbled to herself as she turned onto her road. It was five miles to her driveway from there. Her driveway was nearly a mile long itself, and gravel. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get out when it finally snowed. Shit. She really hadn’t thought about that. How was she going to get out? How had her grandparents managed it?
“They didn’t,” she answered herself as she passed by a yard inexplicably full of topless toddlers. Shouldn’t they have been cold? The toddlers, that was, not her grandparents. Although they’d probably gotten cold as well. “The older people knew how to do it right. They froze enough meals for three months, chopped firewood, and hunkered down.”
She wasn’t going to be able to do those things. Plus, she had to get out. She enjoyed her own company but she’d go stir crazy. And she’d still have to earn money to pay the bills.
Liza went over recent events in her mind.
First, there was the phone call from Mode. That had gone…swell.
And then there had been the visit from her neighbor, Jessie. Jessie seemed like a nice enough girl but Liza was afraid she’d terrified her with the bottles. Who knew what she would go off and repeat? By the time she finished with the story, Liza Jane would probably be flying her furniture around the room while she stood in the middle and stuck pins in a voodoo doll.
Of course, if she were a different kind of witch, the voodoo doll would definitely have come in handy with Mode and Jennifer Miller…
“I should’ve just erased her,” Liza sighed, still thinking of Jessie.
It was true; there were ways that she could’ve made Jessie forget what she’d seen and heard. Liza saved those spells for special occasions, though. The universe liked to work in balance. For every one thing that happened, another thing had to occur to even it out. She’d learned that when she erased someone else’s memory of something, she herself lost a memory. If she were lucky it would be something like ever having married Mode in the first place. She was never that lucky though. More than likely it would’ve been a nice memory.
Like when she lost her virginity after prom on the picnic blanket on Revere Beach when she was seventeen.
(It was a lot more romantic at the time.)
Then she’d lost her temper at the library.
“I ought not to have done that,” Liza sighed with regret. “Way to network with the locals. And get my business trashed.”
“I promise I’m not always this moody and unstable!” she shouted at the scenery that passed her by. “I’m usually pretty normal!”
Then her business had been trashed.
Of course, there was also the lake that wasn’t really there. In hindsight, she was embarrassed and a little upset that she hadn’t known about the not-there lake as soon as she turned onto the road. Her senses weren’t as sharp as they used to be. She needed to fix that.
Then again, she had met Colt. That was something. Those cowboy boots, those eyes, those hands…
“Too soon, Liza Jane, too soon,” she warned herself as an image of Mode, smug and self-assured, flashed before her eyes. “You’re not even divorced yet.”
Like that had stopped him, another little voice spat.
Well, she was going to take all the time she needed to get her act together. She’d settle into the town, make some friends, re-open her business, and then she might start thinking about dating again.
“The detective is useless but I guess the day could’ve been worse,” she admitted as she took the last turn onto her gravel driveway. “At least I have a little bit of money, my health, my house, and a car.”
Her car bounced a few feet over the tiny rocks before giving a shudder, making a loud “popping” noise and coming to a complete stop. She listened in horror as the engine died and went silent. Nothing surrounded her but the overgrown dogwoods and sycamores and the sounds of birds calling to one another (probably making fun of her, she thought).
Liza Jane knew nothing about vehicles. She couldn’t fix things she knew nothing about, not even on her best day. Still, she tried to envision the car starting, tried to see it rolling smoothly towards her house. Despite her ignorance, it did sputter for a moment but then went dead as a doornail again.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Letting out a string of curses that would’ve made a sailor blush, Liza grabbed her purse, keys, and light jacket and jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her in resentment.
It was a mile to her house. She wished she was wearing better shoes.
Welcome home, she thought wryly as she began the long walk, her thin spiked heels disappearing in the gravel, sending up clouds of white smoke.
Welcome home.
Chapter Seven
“DRUGS,” BRYAR ROSE declared with authority. “Had to be. He was probably waiting for a pick up or something. Then he saw you and trashed your store as a warning. You should carry some mace with you.”
“The other day I was wondering if I should get a gun,” Liza admitted.
“A gun?” Bryar scoffed. “You’d blow your damned foot off.”
“I’ll probably just start parking around out front from here on out,” Liza sighed, hating the fact that she’d let someone spook her so much. “I know it was him…”
“I can take a look if you want,” Bryar suggested. “Let you know what I see?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
Long ago both had promised to stay out of the other’s business, at least where their magic was concerned. If they wanted to know something then they’d have to do it the old fashioned way–pry. They were close to one another, but boundaries were important. So was trust. Liza knew that her sister wouldn’t do anything unless Liza told her she could. And vice versa.
“Although I still think you should’ve let me curse Mode,” Bryar grumbled on the other side of the phone.
They might have promised not to involve the other in any ritual work or violate any boundaries where their thoughts or dreams were concerned, but they were still sisters.
“If you’d done anything to him it would’ve come back on you, and even worse,” Liza said. “Need I remind you of Emily Tingly in the seventh grade?”
“Yeah,” Bryar shuddered dramatically. “Let’s not do that again. I’m even more attached to my hair than I was then.”
When the middle school basketball star had dumped Bryar for Emily, the only girl in school with breasts, Bryar had taken her revenge female-style. Knowing that she was getting her hair permed the next day, Bryar thought she was being clever when she’d locked herself in her bedroom and thought up a hex in which the perm not only left poor Emily with a big ball of frizz on her pretty little head, but had turned most of it into an extremely unflattering shade of orange.
Emily had been mortified, inconsolable to her friends.
But Emily hadn’t been half as upset as Bryar was when her alarm went off three days later and she discovered that more than half of her hair stayed behind on her pillow when she crawled out of bed.
It had taken more than a year for it to grow back, and according to Bryar, she still had a few bald spots.
“It is going to be a good day today!” Liza Jane lectured her reflection in the bathroom mirror later that morning. “I don’t care what happens. It’s going to be a good day.”
Yes, someone had tried to ruin her. Yes, she’d somehow made an enemy and didn’t know why. But she was determined to be positive, to have a new outlook on life.
The fact that she didn’t have a vehicle to get her to town was a problem, of course. She’d walked back down the road to Christabel again, hoping for some wild reason that letting it rest overnight would somehow rejuvenate it, but the car was still as dead as it had been the night before.
“Stupid,” she’d muttered to herself on the long walk back home. “It’s not like the car just needed a little nap.”
First things first, after she brushed her teeth and put on her makeup she used her phone to call information for a local garage. Of course that had gone over like a lead balloon. It was the automated operator and her combination of country/northeastern accent.
“City and state please?”
“Kudzu Valley, Kentucky.” (It started out well enough.)
“What listing?”
“A garage.”
*Pause*
“You’re looking for ‘Garden City.’ There are currently no listings for Garden City in your area. Would you like to try another option?”
“Not ‘Garden City.’ Garage. Mechanic.” (Now she was growing impatient.)
“Thank you. One moment please.”
Liza Jane had waited.
“There is one listing for Mayfield Landfill. The number is–“
“No!” Liza had shrieked. “A mechanic.”
“One moment please.”
Liza started pacing around the room. –
“There is no listing for Mountain Knife Works. Would you like to–“
“Operator! Operator!”
Even with a live person on the phone it had taken several tries to get what she needed.
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