by Deirdre Dore
“I’ll think about it,” he conceded finally, as they pulled into her driveway. The small one-story patio home with a screened-in porch looked as friendly as ever, with daisies planted on one side and a big oak in the front yard.
“Yeah?” She looked up from her phone. “Awesome.” She leaned over her dog to give Tyler an enthusiastic hug. The dog bent his head back and tried to lick them both.
Tyler fended them both off. “All right, all right. Get outta here. Say hi to your mom and Bill.”
She laughed, a happy innocent sound, and grabbed her bag off the floorboard.
“Bye, Tyler, love you.”
She opened the door to the truck and bounded out, her ridiculous mutt following.
“Love you, too, kid,” he told the girl, who was already running toward the house.
He tapped his fingers on his steering wheel for a moment, watching until Christie made it inside.
Ever since he’d become Christie’s de facto father, he’d understood a little better what it must have been like for Tavey when Summer went missing, how horrible it must be to always wonder what had happened to her friend. That didn’t excuse the accusations she’d hurled at his uncle—the man was afraid to leave his house—but he understood now. If Christie disappeared and he suspected, even for a moment, that someone he knew was involved, he would hound that person to the ends of the earth.
3
FROM THE Fate-Journal Constitution:
THE HAVEN FAMILY—FATE’S LOCAL LEGENDS
There is a new twist in one of our town’s most compelling local legends. The Haven family, well known to Fate as a family that practices witchcraft, has lost one of their own. Their daughter, Summer Haven, eight years old and blind since birth, has disappeared in the woods surrounding the Havens’ land. She and her friend Christina Pascal, who was found in the woods on the nearby Collinses’ property, had gone exploring that afternoon. Ms. Pascal was in shock but otherwise okay. The police haven’t released any additional information, but apparently Ms. Pascal doesn’t remember what happened.
She is hardly the first girl to disappear from our town, nor is this scandal the most sensational. The Collinses are no strangers to scandal, either. The death of Charlie Collins, his wife, and their driver has remained a subject of discussion since their car slid off a bridge and into the river in 1981. Some people believe that Charlie planned the accident, that he wanted to die to escape his gambling debts—debts his grandfather refused to pay.
His body was never found.
The strangeness of this latest disappearance is only increased by the strangeness of the Haven family. Their belief in witchcraft has caused some friction over the years.
Summer’s older sister, Jane Arrowdale, and Mark Arrowdale, Jane’s husband, have requested their privacy at this time, and that any flowers or gifts be left at the mailbox at the end of their drive. It doesn’t seem strange that Jane would want to avoid town, since she’s rarely interacted with any of us, nor is it surprising, in light of his association with Robert Carlson, that Mark Arrowdale would want to avoid any more notice. He was cleared of any wrongdoing in the real estate scam that has Carlson awaiting trail and in the disappearance of his niece, but he’s a newcomer to town, only been here a year, and his hasty marriage to the reclusive Jane Arrowdale has done little to quell the gossip.
The Havens’ neighbor, Abraham Jones, was also questioned in her disappearance. He’s known to be unstable and has been calling the sheriff lately to report that there are “people” in the woods doing drugs, but the sheriff’s department hasn’t found any evidence of people in the woods.
It’s a strange case, hopefully one that will be solved quickly, with Summer found. There seems to be little hope, however. These woods—dark, deep—have haunted this town since the beginning, and of all those who’ve gone missing in its history, none have ever been found.
November 3, 1986
THE CANDLE WOULDN’T LIGHT. Circe pressed the button on the lighter again, but the flame just spluttered. She pressed it again, scowling, and when nothing happened this time, she threw the lighter in the corner of her shop, Aspect, where it clattered against an iron statue of a dragon.
“Cheap crap,” she muttered. She smoothed down her skirt with both hands and looked out the front window, past her display of honeycomb calcite lamps and custom high-fragrance candles, at the grassy circle in the center of town. Students from the college were sitting on the big stone fountain that Tavey Collins had donated several years before, and the Alcove café in the circle to her right was packed with people eating lunch, enjoying their day. Only a handful of customers had come into the store, most of them to buy essential oils and bath salts after dropping off their mutts at Dog with Two Bones, Tavey’s grooming salon next door.
“Ugh.” She threw up her hands in the general direction of outside and turned away from the window.
“Jane, what’s wrong with you?”
Old Ninny was playing solitaire on the small table draped in velvet where she read the cards for the silly students and tourists who came in looking for adventure. The wrinkled old woman did not look like a fortune teller. She was wearing a rhinestone-covered tank top, jeans, and cowboy boots, and her gray hair was knotted in a tight bun.
“Nothing,” she snapped at Ninny, who was her cousin, or perhaps one of her aunts, or maybe no relation at all. She’d just been there, really, all of Circe’s life. “And I told you to call me Circe.” Jane Arrowdale no longer exists.
Ninny snorted and snapped an ace into place at the top of her cards. “Yer no Circe, Janie girl.”
Circe shook out her long black hair, enjoying the feel of it against her back. Unlike Ninny, she’d dressed for the part she played, wearing a Grecian-style olive green dress and gold armbands. It suited her tall, curvy frame and long, slender neck.
She ignored Old Ninny’s comment. She was Circe—she insisted on it. It didn’t matter what the old woman thought.
She rubbed one of the bangles on her arms, impatient that she had to be here, trapped in the store, while Mark stayed at the house. She still couldn’t believe he’d come back.
He’s come back. He’s come back. The horrifying words echoed in her head.
She wanted to be with him right now, wanted to touch him again. She hoped he wasn’t angry with her. She’d done what she’d thought was best at the time. He’d said he was proud of her.
He didn’t seem proud, the small voice in her head argued.
She stamped her foot and swung around again, pacing back to the window. A man wearing a gray suit that looked too big for him was standing outside. He looked hunched, his eyes red, but he was reasonably good-looking. He saw her watching and crossed the street that separated the shops from the circle in the center of town.
Circe stepped back, unnerved without exactly knowing why. Something about the man was familiar in a way that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.
The chimes over the door jingled as he made his way inside. He hesitated in the doorway, as if overwhelmed by the color and sparkle and smell of the place. Circe had designed it that way, to be beautiful and slightly overwhelming—like her. She wanted customers to walk in with the intention of buying some dried herbs, or soaps, or essential oils, and walk out with a dragon-carved bracelet, an expensive candle, or custom perfume. She sold items for the practice of witchcraft as well, or bullshit-TV-witchcraft as Ninny called it: spell books, pendants, charms, and tonics.
But this man didn’t seem like the type to bother with any of it, barely seemed to notice the store, really, after that first glance. His gaze was fixed and focused—on her.
“Jane. It’s been a long time.”
She corrected him automatically, making sure her shopkeeper’s voice remained polite. “It’s Circe now.”
He nodded absently, as if someone changing her name was nothing. “I heard tha
t.” He rubbed his face and looked her up and down. “You’re still beautiful.”
Old Ninny snorted and laid another card down with a snap. “You don’t need to tell her that. She tells herself all the time.”
Circe studied him. He was familiar. He reminded her of the smell of jasmine. And just like that, she knew who he was.
“Robert Carlson,” she said simply. In her head, the voice mocked her, Robert? Call him Robbie, like she did. Sing it, like she did. Raaaahhhhhbie, like she did. Raaahhhhbie and Chaaarrlie.
She ignored the voice. She didn’t like remembering that far back. Didn’t like thinking about the woods, about the sweaty sex in the dark, the drinking, the smoke, the crying. “Black Magic Woman.” That’s what Gloria Belle would sing to annoy Jane, her head dipping and tilting, her dark skin blending in with the night, only the sequins on her shirt and the smell of jasmine giving her away as she danced in the moonlight.
None of the memory was in her voice when she addressed Robert again. “It has been a long time. Can I help you find something?”
He started to chuckle, but the throat that issued the sound cracked and broke. He coughed. “Yeah, Jane, as a matter of fact, there is.”
“Circe,” she corrected automatically. I wonder where he’s been? The voice in her head sounded curious, not afraid. Robbie had never been frightening, just weak. Like we are, the voice mocked.
Circe had always lived inside Jane—before Mark. Jane was smart and practical, mostly. Jane knew how to make healing potions and keep books. Jane liked to read and work in the garden. Circe, on the other hand, was beautiful, so beautiful that she deserved better than this small town, so beautiful that she should have been famous. Rich and famous. Mark had told her. He’d promised her.
She waved Robbie toward the back of the shop. “Come with me,” she ordered. “Ninny, watch the store for a moment.”
“Watch it what,” the old woman muttered, eyeing Robert.
Circe ignored her, leading Robbie to the back room where she kept the stock.
Herbs hung from a drying rack in the center of the room, and the built-in shelves on the walls were filled with baskets. Below each basket, a small white label written in a neat hand identified the contents: rosemary, lavender, soap, lye, dried roses, saffron, wild sage, and others. These were the common ingredients, the safe ones. Circe kept the rest hidden in a storage closet. She wore the key around her neck.
The air smelled strongly of the herbs, but there was also a hint of musk, almost as if a skunk had gotten into the shop. Robert wrinkled his nose but didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t. Before he’d gone to prison, he’d been a wealthy man, cosmopolitan and always polite, if not always honest. Next to the Collins family, his had been one of the wealthiest in Fate, in all of Cherokee County. He’d gotten caught in a real estate scam in the mid-eighties. He’d been selling investors on the idea of a golf resort on the property of the abandoned Cherokee Paper Mill, the same one that had harbored a serial killer and his kidnap victims the previous fall. The golf resort had never existed, of course. He’d been foolish—he’d endangered them all.
He’d gone to prison and had been released almost ten years ago. He hadn’t set foot in Fate, however. Circe didn’t even think his daughter, Chris, who had a yoga studio on the second floor of the building next door, had seen him. Circe knew why he’d returned; she was surprised it had taken him this long to come back.
She closed the door to the storeroom, her skirt swirling around her as she turned to look at him.
“What are you doing here?” Circe asked.
His lips twisted, emphasizing the graying stubble on his chin. “I heard where they found my daughter.”
Circe nodded. “Have you talked to her?”
He scratched his chin. “Chris?” He laughed. “She won’t talk to me. Not a surprise, I suppose.”
“You never had much time for her before you went to prison,” she pointed out, wondering why they were dancing around the obvious questions: Have you seen him? Is it safe? Will they find out?
“Have you seen Gloria Belle?” he asked, his voice faintly hopeful. He’d always loved her, as much as Charlie had, or more. Circe had never understood their fascination. Gloria Belle was a junkie, and even when she’d been young, she hadn’t been beautiful—not like Circe.
“No,” she answered shortly, and moved away from him, picking up a box from the floor and setting it on the wooden table beneath the hanging herbs. A box cutter with a red plastic handle sat open on the table—her nieces had probably left it out—and she used it to slice quickly through the tape holding the flaps closed. It was a shipment of apothecary bottles, the glass faintly blue-green in the light—the color of Summer’s eyes.
Jane unpacked them, lining them up neatly while watching Robbie from the corner of her eye.
“What about your husband? Have you seen him?”
Circe paused. She’d forgotten about her husband. He’d been gone so long. Now he was back. He was back. He would want to search for it.
“No,” she said finally. Mark hadn’t wanted her to tell anyone he was here. He’d planned to return, of course, long before. When they’d killed the courier, when they’d told the leader that Charlie had taken it, they’d had to be careful. They’d planned to hide it—just for a few years—and come back when there wasn’t so much interest. It had been longer than that, though. Mark hadn’t returned until now, almost thirty years later. He was tanned. He’d said he was going to a different country for a while. Something had kept him there.
“Why didn’t you take it?” she asked quietly, knowing that Old Ninny was probably listening on the other side of the door. “You’ve been out for nearly ten years.”
He looked offended. “I wouldn’t try to cut you and Mark out.”
Yes, you would, Circe thought, and Jane agreed.
“Why didn’t you take it?” he countered.
Circe kept her face still. Jane wasn’t good at lying, but she was. “I promised Mark I wouldn’t. I don’t need it anyway.”
He put his hands on the table, knuckles down. “You couldn’t find it, either, could you?”
CIRCE CLOSED THE store early, over Old Ninny’s protests.
“I’ve got clients coming in to see me, Jane. What’s got you all riled up? That man today? Or the man waitin’ at home?”
Circe didn’t ask how Old Ninny had known her husband had returned. Old Ninny always knew things. She was talented in ways that Circe was not—would never be. “He is my husband,” Circe pointed out. It doesn’t matter that he was gone for over twenty-five years.
Old Ninny shook her head as she walked to Circe’s car. Circe had parked in the back alley behind the shops as she always did. “Some husband. He ain’t no good, never was. And the one in here today. That’s Miss Chris’s father, isn’t it, the one tossed in jail all those years ago? Where’s he been? Why’s he coming by now?”
“I told you already. I don’t know,” Circe hissed. The old woman and the voice had been badgering her about it all day.
“You know something,” Ninny said with certainty as she opened the door to the Taurus and tossed herself inside with the agility of a much younger woman.
Circe clenched her teeth and crossed to the driver’s side and sat behind the wheel, adjusting the skirt of her dress around her legs. Ninny thought she knew everything. She always did know more than you. More than anyone except Summer. And now the Triplets.
The Triplets were her nieces. Three chubby, annoying teenagers. Circe found their plainness offensive, especially now that they’d called so much attention to themselves by getting kidnapped last fall. They were enjoying it, she was sure of it. They’d ridden into town with their mother this morning, but they usually rode home with Circe after their yoga classes.
“Are the girls at the library?”
Old Ninny nodded. “They’re rid
ing home with their mom after her meeting. They called a little while ago. I swear that woman wishes she’d never married into this family. Poor girl still misses John.”
“Once a Haven, always,” Circe said automatically, though she’d changed her name. She’d been Jane Arrowdale. Now she was Circe. Or was she Jane again now that Mark returned?
“They don’t usually like to be in town so long,” Circe murmured, wary. They were up to something, those girls. She hadn’t been able to control them for years.
Ninny muttered under her breath, “Don’t know that I want them to come around with that man in your house. They can come to mine.”
Circe glanced at her sharply. “Don’t say that,” she snapped. “There’s nothing wrong with him.” The voice laughed, Ha ha ha ha.
“Nothing that a bullet wouldn’t cure.”
4
TAVEY’S SHOULDERS DIDN’T relax until she’d turned onto the winding gravel path that led to her family home. Small rocks crunched beneath her Range Rover as she eased her way through some potholes that had developed over the winter. She needed to attend to them, and made a mental note to take care of it this week.
Dixie, who’d been snoring in a crate in the back, barked at the familiar sounds of home, and her tail began thumping the walls of the hard plastic that kept her safe on long drives.
“I know, girl, we’re almost home,” Tavey agreed.
They rounded the curve that marked the end of the forest and the gravel evened out to the paved lane that she’d had put in over a decade ago.
Rolling green hills interspersed with huge spreading oaks rose in terraced layers to the house. Tavey rolled down the window so she could smell the blooms from the rose garden as she drove up to the porte cochere in front of the three-car garage and parked. Built by her grandfather in the 1970s, the walls of the garage were made from Georgia river rock, the doors of dark-stained wood. Garden roses climbed ornate iron trellises on either side of the porte cochere. It looked little like the main house, which was white with Doric columns supporting a large porch. It was lovely; it was home.