The Witches of Snyder Farms (The Wicked Garden Series)

by Henson, Lenora

  “I was looking forward to meeting Eli’s father. Will he be joining us?”

  “He’s resting at the hotel. For now, it’s just me.” Diana gave Gretchel’s hand one final, viselike squeeze.

  Oh. My. God. Gretchel thought.

  ∞

  Once they arrived at the house on the hill, Gretchel kept busy in the kitchen with her mother, preparing the beginnings of a large country dinner. The house smelled of baked ham and all its delicious trimmings. Marcus helped Eli and Diana set up a screen and a laptop with a projector in the living room.

  “What the hell is she doing?” Gretchel snapped. “It’s not like we’re going to be on a prime time news show. She acts like this is some big deal.”

  “Enough,” Ella said softly, but sharply.

  Gretchel glanced into the living room, and Eli shot her a seductive glare. She grinned playfully.

  “You’re going to make me puke. Please stop,” Ame whined, folding her arms and dropping her head on the kitchen table.

  “I think it’s sweet,” Holly said, smiling at her aunt, and Gretchel gave her quiet niece a wink.

  Cindy laid down her knife and sat down next to Ame. “That, my dear, is what people in love look like. I’m sure you act like that with Peyton, but you just don’t realize it.”

  “Maybe…,” Ame was skeptical.

  “I think you’re just unaccustomed to your mother feeling good. You’ve never seen her in a happy, healthy relationship and it makes you nervous and uncomfortable,” Cindy said, rubbing Ame’s back.

  Ame looked at Cindy sideways. “Hey Auntie C, do you know what the height of conceit is?” Cindy sighed and shrugged. “Having an orgasm and calling out your own name.”

  Holly covered her mouth, and tried to stifle her laughter, and Cindy rolled her eyes.

  “That’s enough, Ame,” Gretchel snapped.

  They all looked up as Miss Poni hobbled into the kitchen from her nap.

  “Story time,” Ame said in a singsong voice, giving her mother a questioning glance.

  Gretchel took a deep breath, and started for the living room.

  Diana sat in a hard-back chair that had been fetched from the kitchen. The picture of Carlin at the cottage looked exactly like the woman from her vision. But, after decades of rejecting the idea that Gretchel had anything to do with the Solstice Twins, she was reluctant to give in. She clung to the knowledge that much of what she knew went counter to what her son had told her.

  She hoped that, by coming here, she would finally convince Eli that Gretchel wasn’t the woman he was meant to be with. At the same time, she was too invested in the Solstice Twins to simply discount the new information that her son had given her.

  She considered each family member, soaking in each personality. She was surprised to see that Gretchel had a brother. This was the first male child she knew of among the Twins’ family line. She had an instinctive liking for Marcus, though. He was a handsome man, and she could see the intelligence in his eyes. He could have done great things, but he chose farm life in an act of family loyalty. Poor thing, to have been born into a family of redheaded vixens... Oh, my. What a fate! she thought.

  His wife Cindy sat next to him. She was lovely. She seemed intelligent, too, and compassionate, but tough enough to endure life on a farm. She had a calm about her that set her apart from everyone else in the room.

  Their daughter Holly was a bit of a cipher. She was quiet, but Diana sensed depth beneath the calm surface.

  Ella sat down next to the one they called Miss Poni. The women were, temperamentally, complete opposites, but they shared an intangible quality that Diana couldn’t quite name. It was obvious that Miss Poni didn’t like being taken care of, but it was also clear that Ella would bend over backwards for the old woman. Their connection was very strong.

  Then Diana turned to Gretchel... That wretched Gretchen! Diana might never be able to forgive the woman for how she had hurt Eli, even though Diana had wanted desperately for Eli to leave her.

  Diana was seized by the strong desire to overpower Gretchel, to knock some of the wildness out of her, and she was shocked by the power of her antipathy. She should have been delighted to have found Carlin after all these years of searching, but the discovery that Gretchel was the one she had been looking for…. It rankled.

  Eli moved to join Gretchel on the sofa, but Teddy beat him to it. Diana had no idea who this fellow was, but she could tell that he knew things, and she intuited from the way he put a protective arm around Gretchel’s shoulder that he would never reveal what he knew.

  “Why are you even here?” Eli hissed at Teddy.

  “Moral support,” Gretchel whispered.

  Eli turned toward the loveseat, and sat down. He glared at Teddy. Interesting, Diana noted.

  Ame sat down next to Eli. He smiled at her, and she curled up next to him. Eli kissed her head. Ame stuck out her tongue at her mother.

  “Very mature,” Gretchel mouthed back.

  Ame scratched her nose with her middle finger.

  Diana watched this interaction out of the corner of her eye. What the hell have I gotten myself into? The group was speaking softly, waiting, but she continued to observe the dynamic between her son and Gretchel’s daughter. The teenager was a goddess in human form. She’s magnificent! But watching them.... It was almost too hard. Her heart felt like it was going to explode as she watched her son speaking softly to the beautiful girl. He has no idea. He seriously has no idea. What kind of naive idiot have I raised?

  Miss Poni thumped her cane on the floor, pulling Diana out of her reverie. Diana realized that they were all waiting for her to say something.

  Diana reached for Miss Poni’s hand. “I am so very pleased to meet you…?” Diana paused to allow the old woman to fill in the blank.

  “You can call me Epona.” As the old woman’s fingers wrapped around Diana’s hand, electric shockwaves coursed through the younger woman’s body.

  Diana looked into Miss Poni’s eyes. The matriarch held her in her stare, and Diana was helpless.

  Miss Poni winked, and the spell was broken.

  It took Diana a moment to regain her composure.

  “Epona is a very unusual name.” Her voice was unnaturally bright. “Do you know that you share it with a Celtic goddess?”

  Miss Poni laughed. “Of course I do, child.” Then she curled her ancient forefinger, beckoning Diana to lean in closer.

  Diana did as she was bid.

  “I know what my name means, and I know who I am. What I don’t know is what took you so goddamn long.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Irvine, 2010s

  Diana was speechless. Eli stared at Miss Poni, a look of shock and barely suppressed delight on his face. Mother, he thought, you have finally met your match.

  Ella broke the silence. “Ms. Stewart, I suppose we should tell you that Miss Poni and I have done a little research of our own.” She laughed softly, “And when I say ‘a little,’ that is a lie. Eli tells us that you’ve been digging for forty years. Mama’s been at it even longer. If you’re looking for an exchange of information, we’re not sure that you can tell us anything about our family that we don’t already know. We have no intention of sharing our personal documents with you, and, as for our stories, well…. Most of our stories, we’re not quite ready to tell.”

  Eli gave Gretchel a surprised look. She shrugged her shoulders. She had no idea why her mother and grand mama had let her go poking into their things if they weren’t going to let Diana see what Gretchel had found. I wonder what I didn’t find, she thought. And I wonder what Miss Poni is up to.

  Ella continued. “You came here to find proof that we’re the family you’ve been looking for, but we have nothing to prove. We know who we are, and—for now anyway—you’ll just have to be satisfied with that.”

  The room was silent, waiting. Diana, who had little experience of not being in complete control, looked utterly flustered. Eli felt sorry for his mother, and that
was a new experience for him.

  Miss Poni decided to take pity on the poor woman. “We didn’t let you come here for nothing, Ms. Stewart. I have a couple of stories for you. We know that you lost track of the family after Carlin, and we know that Carlin brought you to us. I’m ready to tell you her story—what I know of it, anyway. I’ll tell you my own story, too—as much as I can bear to tell.

  “You already know that our family is Scottish. We have plenty of Irish blood in us, too, but the part of our heritage you’re interested in takes us back to the lowlands of Scotland.

  “One look around this room will let you know that the women in our family tend to be tall redheads. I’ve been told that my Grand Mama Bridget had hair red as blood. I never saw her myself. She died young—but I expect that you know that already, and I expect you know that that’s another trait the women in my family share.

  “What you may not know is that we also seemed to have inherited a weakness for no-good men.” Miss Poni directed a pointed look at Gretchel, who lowered her head. The old woman continued with her story. “Bridget was no exception. The man she married, Bart Fitzgerald, was a real bastard. He went to the Catholic church every Sunday, but he wasn’t any kind of Christian Jesus would have recognized.

  “Bart Fitzgerald died when my mama was just about to turn fourteen. She never knew how. All she knew was that he had beaten her nearly to death the night before, and that she and her mama got the hell out of town as soon as it happened.”

  Everyone in the room was transfixed. Miss Poni had never shared this history with anyone but her daughter.

  Ame broke the shocked silence. “Your mama really never found out how her father died?” she asked. This part of the story was too close to her own experience. She needed to know more, even though she was afraid of what she might learn.

  Miss Poni gave her granddaughter a soft look. She would have spared her, if she could. “Well, Ame, Mama always suspected that Bridget had something to do with Bart Fitzgerald’s death—not that she killed him by her own hand, but…. Bridget was a powerful woman.”

  Now Miss Poni turned to Diana. “That’s something else you should know about the women in this family, Ms. Stewart. We have gifts.”

  Diana was not entirely unprepared for this revelation. “Like second sight?”

  Miss Poni laughed dryly. “Oh, that’s the least of it.”

  Diana waited for her to elaborate, but Miss Poni chose not to.

  “Bart Fitzgerald’s death was a liberation, and my mama thought that maybe Bridget had given fate a little nudge.”

  Gretchel turned white. Ame noticed. Eli did, too. They also saw Teddy tighten his grip on Gretchel’s shoulder.

  “Of course, when Bart Fitzgerald passed, he left my mama and grand mama with nothing. Turns out he had gambled everything away. The nice house in the suburbs wasn’t theirs anymore—not that Bridget and Carlin would have stayed there, anyway. They landed on the South Side of Chicago, where they rented a little apartment above a tavern. Bridget, who had never worked during her marriage, was now a barmaid serving drunken Irishmen. My mama didn’t go back to her schooling after they moved, so she was home during the day when her mother was asleep.”

  Diana tried not to look excited. Everything she had heard so far matched what she had discovered for herself, but now she was getting details no amount of research could ever produce. A tavern on the South Side was where she had lost track of Bridget and Carlin. She was desperate to know what happened to them next.

  “Poor Mama. Left all alone with her guilt and shame.” Miss Poni sighed.

  Ame spoke up again. “What did she have to feel guilty or ashamed about?”

  Gretchel had a guess, and it made the scars across her belly burn.

  Miss Poni framed her response carefully. “My mama blamed herself for her daddy’s death. She knew that Bridget could handle the beatings her husband gave her, but Bridget could not stand to see her daughter beaten. Mama figured that her own mama was trying to protect her when she conjured whatever it was that killed Bart. And the final beating that Bart delivered—the one that knocked her unconscious—happened after Carlin had been found with a boy. That’s what made her ashamed.”

  Miss Poni’s voice was small now. All of the sudden she seemed weary.

  Ella placed a hand on her mother’s knee and asked, “Are you all right? Maybe we should stop for awhile, let you catch your breath.”

  The matriarch roused herself, and sat up straight and tall. “No, Elphame. Now is the time for this story. But a cup of tea would be nice, if you don’t mind.”

  Ella headed for the kitchen. She had heard all this before.

  “My mama never knew her own worth. She knew that she was beautiful, but shame drove her to debase that beauty. She saw how the men looked at her when she went down to the tavern when there was live music. She let them buy her drinks—and Bridget let them, too, because she would have lost her job if she turned away custom. When she drank, Carlin felt loose, and, when there was music, she danced.

  “Mama told me that, when she was a girl, she and Bridget would dance out in the yard, in the moonlight, when Bart was away getting drunk. Dancing in the tavern was as close to that wild feeling as she could get.

  “Then, one night, the men started throwing coins at her feet.”

  Miss Poni paused just as Ella bustled in with a steaming mug of tea.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Irvine, 2010s

  Diana surveyed the room while Miss Poni blew at her tea.

  Marcus was agitated. He looked like he wanted to go back in time and start brawling with the men who had tossed change at his great-grandmother. Cindy’s face was sad. Holly…. Holly was impossible to read.

  Gretchel, on the other hand, was positively ashen. It couldn’t be easy to hear what she was hearing, but there was clearly more to her distress than sympathy for an ancestor she had never known. Eli had never told his mother much about his youthful dalliance with Gretchel, but Diana had made her own investigations. She knew enough about the woman—and the man she had married—to guess that Gretchel felt a terrible sense of commiseration as she listened to Miss Poni’s story.

  Diana’s reaction to this realization was conflicted. She knew that descendants of the Solstice Twins were doomed to repeat the trauma of their predecessors, so everything she was learning fit the pattern. But the fact that her decades of work led her back to Gretchel…. Well, that was intolerable.

  Diana swallowed her bile and turned her attention to Ame. If only I had known! I only wanted to protect my son! Diana was used to hating Gretchel for breaking Eli’s heart. The idea that she, herself, might have hurt him was new and unwelcome. She pushed that thought away and focused on the prophecy. How did Ame fit?

  Miss Poni set down her mug and cleared her throat.

  “Where was I?”

  Nobody wanted to reply.

  Teddy decided that he had nothing to lose by answering. “Your mother was dancing for dimes in a bar on the South Side of Chicago.”

  Miss Poni smiled. She had always liked that boy. The weariness that had diminished her was gone. She roused to her tale.

  “That’s right. Bridget wanted her to stop, but Carlin didn’t mind her mama. She was a strong-willed girl—a lot like some other women in this family I could name.” Miss Poni gave Gretchel a pointed look before she resumed. “The tavern owner didn’t want her to stop. Her dancing was good for business. She had become an attraction. Men from the nicer neighborhoods were coming to see Carlin dance. Chicago bigwigs hoping to offer visitors a bit of local nightlife took their guests to watch her shimmy and shake.

  “Once Carlin was pulling in more money than her mama, Bridget just gave up. She had always had a problem with drink. She stopped tending bar altogether and became a fulltime patron.”

  Miss Poni fell silent.

  “More tea, Mama?” Ella asked.

  “No, no. Thank you, dear. I’m fine. It’s just that this is where my daddy comes into
the story, and I’ve never liked talking about my daddy.

  “She wasn’t even fifteen yet when she met him. He was one of those wealthy travelers who stopped by to see the underage beauty dance so seductively. He came to see her every day for a week. Carlin noticed him. Of course she did. He left twenty-dollar bills for her. A whole dollar would have seemed like a fortune to her. A twenty was like something out of a fairy tale.

  “He did this for seven days. He had beautiful green eyes. He wore a fancy suit. He seemed kind of like something out of a fairy tale, too.

  “When the tavern owner pressed a key into her palm, she took it. The tips she earned dancing were the only money she and Bridget now earned, but that wasn’t the only reason she took that key. She was in love.

  “She climbed past the floor where she lived with her mother and kept going until the stairs ended. She turned the key in the lock and stepped inside. I don’t think I have to tell you what happened next.”

  Miss Poni scanned the assembled faces with her bright eyes and saw that, no, she did not. She nodded and continued.

  “Afterwards, she lay in his arms. He told her his name—Colin Ferguson III. These were the first words that passed between them. He was 28-years-old. He said he was from St. Louis, the son of a wealthy land owner. He told Carlin that he could take her away from the city, out into the country, where he owned property. He promised to build her a house of her own. He said he wanted her to dance just for him, in the open air, under the stars. He asked her to leave with him the next day.

  “She agreed, of course. She was too young to think there was anything strange about a rich man from a good family making promises to a fourteen-year-old girl who danced for money in a South Side bar. And she was in love.

  “The only problem, as Carlin saw it, was telling her mama. But her mama already knew—like I said, she had gifts—and she begged her daughter to stay. Colin Ferguson’s green eyes or expensive suits didn’t charm Bridget. She saw nothing but misery ahead for Carlin if she ran off with him.