by Melanie Rawn
It did. A couple of evenings later the four of them were sprawled on the nursery carpet, bedtime being a frangible thing at Woodhush, when Holly suddenly announced, “Bella.”
“What?”
“Bella.” She scooped their daughter up from the floor and held her out for examination. “That’s her name.”
He looked the baby in the eyes and thought it over. “Bella?”
Holly nodded. “Susannah’s middle name was ‘Dolcebella’—for which she had as many reasons as you have stories about those damned cowboy boots.”
Evan tried it out. “Bella.” And damned if the pudgy little arms didn’t wave at him. Complete coincidence, of course. “Hey,” he said to his wife. “Five bucks.”
Both of them were rather unlikely children—and this was clear to Evan even though he was their father. It never failed to amuse him that his genes and Holly’s had combined in two such radically different ways—as if their DNA had undergone nothing so organized and stately as the regular process of reproduction, and had instead been tossed into a blender, all the traits of coloring and character whirling around in total chaos until things spliced together and produced these small, amazing persons. He recognized himself and Holly in both kids, plus a lot of stuff uniquely their own. Elias Bradshaw had summed it up neatly during his June visit this year for the twins’ birthday party—to which he had brought enough paint to supply an art college, half a library of books, and a closetful of clothing they would grow out of by October. Watching them play with their new goodies, Elias had said, “They’re timeless. Practically archetypal. Can’t you see them in the ancestral caves? He’s happily painting away, creating Lascaux, and she’s pacing outside, trying to invent grammar.”
Lachlan had to admit that at times it was unsettling to look into his son’s eyes. Kirby was completely self-possessed, uncannily self-aware, yet not at all self-absorbed. His smiles were rare and sudden, enchanted with the discovery of some new sight or sound or flavor in his world—or with the rediscovery of his father’s arms holding him safe as he was carried up to bed, or his mother’s voice singing him to sleep. That the carrying and the singing happened almost every night did nothing to lessen his delight in them, a kind of half-surprised wonder that such good things could happen again and again with only slight variations. It was as if he expected but never took for granted the security of his father’s arms and the beauty of his mother’s voice, greeting each night’s repetition with renewed pleasure and gratitude.
As for Bella—she was an even more unlikely child for a cop and a writer to have produced. Her hands and pockets were always stuffed with one thing or another—from smooth creek stones to mostly dead bugs, all sorts of feathers to samplings of different grasses. A scrap of broken eggshell meant to be compared with a similar souvenir earned equal reverence with the four types of pine cones (and matching needle clusters) conscientiously laid out on a shelf. That she could not yet pronounce the scientific names of things in all their polysyllabic splendor was an inconvenience of youth that frustrated her terribly. It was as if she found nature so compelling that she had to have it with her at all times, so fascinated by the world that she couldn’t bear to let go of even its smallest manifestations. Evan called it collecting evidence; Cousin Clary Sage avowed that it was the mark of an Apothecary. It would be many years before they’d find out if either prediction was true.
Evan was content to have it so. In spite of all he’d seen and done—and had had done to him—before his marriage, there had yet been a portion of his mind that didn’t quite wrap around the magical aspects of his life with Holly. She was a Witch from a long line of Witches, but she had no magic other than her Spellbinding blood. His experiences of magic had not been of the everyday kind. In truth, some of them had been horrific. But then he’d come to live at Woodhush Farm, where Lulah McClure would flick a finger to keep a spoon stirring the spaghetti sauce (always clockwise), or murmur a few words to activate a spell that whisked the dust from the paintings hung along the staircase. All Holly ever did was light a candle or the hearth fire.
So when he contemplated his children, Lachlan felt himself torn. Magic was part of their heritage, and if they were gifted with it, they would have excellent teachers and role models. But magic was also a dangerous thing that could threaten and even kill. So he was never quite sure whether he wanted Kirby and Bella to be Witches or not.
“I’m not walking down to Lulah’s in these,” Holly warned as she descended the stairs. Evan spared a moment, then a few more, appreciating hair, makeup, dress, and especially shoes; it wasn’t often these days that he saw her all put together the way she’d always appeared for a night out in New York.
Not that he was complaining. Nope, not him. He gave her a courtly bow from the waist to make her laugh, then escorted her out the door, down the front steps, and into the dark green Chevy SUV with a five-pointed gold star and Pocahontas County Sheriff painted on its doors.
Renovation of the overseer’s house at Woodhush should have been easy. Clear out the accumulated junk, have somebody inspect it from shingles to foundation, get the hardwood floors sanded and polyurethaned, paint it inside and out, and hang new curtains. What no one had counted on was that the laws of physics were about to take their revenge for having been toyed with for so many years. Unused since the late 1930s except for storage, the house turned out to be held together with hundred-year-old plumbing, two-hundred-year-old beams, and magic.
Research done during the winter of 2004 had yielded fresh magic that kept the old place upright long enough to fix it. Concoctions, decoctions, gemstones, Holly’s blood, and some plain old crossed-fingers wishing were employed throughout the spring and part of the summer as workmen virtually gutted the place. The huge stone sink in the kitchen and the graceful oak banister were all that remained of the original dwelling. The three bedrooms upstairs were transformed into one large and one small, with a bath between. Nothing was kept of the other furnishings, which, after more than sixty years of neglect, consisted mostly of wormholes or rust, and sometimes both.
It became a tidy, creak-free, comfortable little home, finished three weeks after the twins were born, and as familiar to them as their own sprawling house two hundred yards up the gravel drive that meandered among oddly spaced apple, pear, peach, and apricot trees—stubborn leftovers from attempts by various generations to establish orchards. For all the magic in their blood and bones, assiduously applied, farming on more than a for-the-table basis had never paid off for the Flynns. It had taken an infusion of McClures to pay off the last of the mortgages, and this had left Lulah free to pursue horse breeding as a profitable occupation.
She spent a lot of time baby-sitting, too. Before she even moved into the redone cottage, two days of intricate, esoteric magic had made both houses childproof. Or so they had all thought. About half an hour after Bella learned to walk, she figured out how to circumvent the baby gates. Every one installed in both houses had to be spelled so she couldn’t do it again and it took Lulah a week to get it right; baby gates were not of her generational experience. When Kirby outfoxed her by scaling instead of unlatching them, their doting aunt was compelled to contribute thirty bucks to their scholarship fund—and respell the gates yet again.
As Evan got out of the SUV, boots crunching on the drive, he heard Holly cussing him and the gravel and the Fuck Me shoes—but under her breath, mindful of her bank balance, because from within the house came two ecstatic little voices: “Mommy!”
The Progeny pelted from the house, alarmingly coordinated and wickedly swift for being only twenty-seven months old, wearing denim pants and t-shirts given by their adored Uncle Elias. Kirby’s shirt was green, Bella’s was yellow, and each bore the words Warning: I Am Two.
His Honor believed in truth in advertising.
“Mommy!”
“Munchkins!”
Steps negotiated at a breakneck pace, Bella and Kirby raced for Holly, four little hands covered in chocolate reaching for
her skirt. Lachlan fell in love with her all over again when, instead of leaping back and warning them off, she laughed and crouched down to seize the twins in her arms.
“Chocolate fingers!” she exclaimed. “My favorite!”
By the time they noticed their father, and were duly tickled and kissed, the mess had pretty much been transferred from them to Holly’s clothing. But why scold them? The kids were washable; the dress was washable; she was washable; what was the point?
It was a measure of Evan’s adjustment to the ambiance of his Virginia home that he didn’t jump two feet in the air and draw his Glock when he heard a miniature roar, and then another, and then a high-pitched shriek from inside the house. Lulah was indulging herself again.
All the plants were gathered into a jungle in the parlor. Across a hundred-year-old Moroccan carpet, through cacti and succulents, herbs, flowers, and the two potted palms from the dining room, prowled a throng of dinosaurs. Lulah McClure, past sixty and still as supple as a teenager, sat cross-legged on the floor, flicking a finger here and there to direct a splinter of magic to this or that plastic rendition of an extinct creature, seeming not to notice that her playmates had abandoned her. Evan ducked instinctively as a winged whatsis swooped up to perch on a curtain rod, and heard a frustrated roar from the t. rex near Lulah’s right knee. She used a careful finger to coax a lumbering herd of long-necked herbivores toward a pot labeled catnip—while Brigand, the plant’s rightful beneficiary, watched from an armchair and yawned. The cat had played this game before, and knew from experience that soft, furry prey held infinitely more promise of amusement—not to mention flavor—than cold, hard plastic.
It had come to Evan’s attention rather slowly—because nobody talked about it in the open, and he’d had to piece it together from hints and casual remarks—that Lulah was one of the most gifted Witches of her generation. She hadn’t turned her back on it, and indeed enjoyed using her talents, but the power she might have had outside Pocahontas County was considerable and she had never pursued it. Principally because of Holly. After Tom and Margaret McClure died, Lulah had been happy to raise their only child. Evan—and not a few others—wondered sometimes if Holly hadn’t provided her with the perfect reason not to take a more prominent place within the community.
As for Holly—it must have been like growing up the slight, bookish son of a five-Superbowl NFL-Hall-of-Fame linebacker father. No matter how much you were loved, no matter how much you were valued for your own abilities, no matter how proud you knew your dad was of you, there was always the knowledge that you could never compete in the eyes of the rest of the world. Lulah’s prodigious magic was treated quite matter-of-factly within the family; Holly never seemed intimidated by it; but the awareness of it was always there.
Evan grinned suddenly as Kirby scrambled across the rug to pluck a wayward dinosaur from the predatory reach of something with a lot of white plastic teeth. The linebacker-and-son scenario was not one he’d ever worry about: not only was Evan not exactly the intimidating type in any area of endeavor, but if a vote had been held, Kirby would be unanimously elected Least Likely To Be Intimidated In This Or Any Other Lifetime. Certainly not by his parents, and not even by his formidable great-aunt.
At the moment she was admonishing him to pick up the stegosaurus by her bony spine plates and spiked tail, please—otherwise the tail would lash out and the spikes would do what they’d been meant to do, and they’d do it to his hand. There was some sort of esoteric follow-up about useful evolutionary adaptations and medieval weapons. Lachlan tuned it out. He’d learned how to do that. Holly on her own was pedantic; put her together with Lulah, and a man could be up to his neck in trivia and swimming for his life before he knew it.
“We’ll be back by midnight or so,” Holly told her aunt. When Lachlan turned a look of outraged betrayal on her, she added, “There’ll be a lot of hands to shake, and you know very well that Mr. Warren will want to talk about putting in a traffic light over in Flynton, and—”
“I thought that was the kind of conversation you’re supposed to rescue me from. Don’t political wives do that?”
“Nah, we just let the major donors cop a feel.” She knelt and finished wiping off Bella’s chocolaty fingers with her skirt. “No, sweetie, I don’t think the Diplodocus wants a peanut butter cup. She might get a tummy ache.”
“But, Mommy—”
“Maybe some of that nice oregano. Go see if she likes it.” As Bella set off to investigate, Holly straightened up and surveyed her skirt. “I have to go back to the house and change. You take the SUV, I’ll follow in the Beemer.”
“It’s gonna take you more than five minutes to put something else on?” When she gave him a look, he shrugged. “Yeah, stupid question.”
“Yow!”
“Bella!” Lulah admonished. “Did you hear what I told Kirby about the tails on these animals?”
Evan bent to inspect the scratch. “You’ll live, Bella mia.” His daughter looked up at him with an expression that clearly said, Thank you, Daddy, but I figured that one out for myself, reclaimed her hand, and carefully set the steg down. Then she went about coaxing the flying whatsis out from behind a palm frond to perch on Lulah’s third-best willow wand.
“Speaking of donors,” Lulah said, “Alec and Nicky sent a check. Not a penny over the legal limit, the cheapskates. They know we could’ve cooked the books. There’s a note for you, Evan. On the hall table.”
He went to collect it. From within a sealed envelope he drew a note scrawled on dove gray stationery left over from Nick’s bookstore days.
Dear Evan:
Alec orders me to mention at the outset that we were only a little drunk at the time. A day or two ago we had the gemstones and teacups out, practicing for our biennial Election Prediction Ritual, and something curious came up. The gist of it is that at some point in early September one of your children will be at risk. At risk for what, of what, why, exactly when, and which one, we have no idea. These things can be maddeningly vague. Alec (who insists that we weren’t really that drunk) is asking if perhaps you’d send along a few strands of hair from our niece and nephew so that we can get a clearer read. You probably won’t want to mention this to Holly or Lulah.
As ever, with love to all,Nicholas
Lachlan chewed his lower lip for a moment. Had Nick and Alec been really worried, they would have sped down here from Connecticut. But had they felt it nothing more than an oddity produced by mild inebriation, the letter would never have been sent. So he’d raid the kids’ hairbrushes tomorrow, and not tell Holly or Lulah.
“Anything interesting?”
He slid the envelope into his breast pocket and turned to his wife with an easy smile. “They want to know if I want the next check drawn on Simon’s account or Kate’s. I’m wondering if I’d have a better chance of winning by outspending my esteemed opponent or doing it the way everybody’s gonna suspect me of anyway.”
“Physical intimidation?” she suggested. “Parking tickets?”
“Magic.” He grinned.
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t smile. “There’s not a single person in this county who ever thought Jesse McNichol ever won a single election any way other than merit. We have rules. We stick to them.”
“Hey, relax! I was just kidding.”
“It’s not funny, Evan. I thought by now you’d understand.”
“I was kidding!” he repeated. “Geeze, Holly, downshift it from fifth gear, would you? I wouldn’t want to get elected for any reason other than that the county wants me as sheriff.”
“I know. So let’s go to this thing and make sure everybody knows what a prize you are.” She went back into the parlor to say goodnight to the children—who ignored her, too busy helping Lulah construct a watering hole out of a saucer and some sphagnum moss. The triceratops family looked interested.
On the short drive back to the main house, Evan brought out his olive branch. “Y’know, being a mother agrees with you.”
She picked at some of the dried chocolate on her skirt. “Kirby and Bella agree with me. Mothering as an abstract concept, however—let’s just say it’s a good thing I’m raising Kirby and Bella, and not abstract concepts.”
“I forgot to ask—are we getting anything besides nibbles at this thing?”
“You’re getting free booze. What more do you want out of life?”
“A great-looking girl to bring home and fuck through the floorboards.” He paused. “Oh, and world peace.”
Holly gave up and laughed.
THE STEGOSAURUS THAT HAD infinitesimally wounded Bella wandered off unnoticed out a slight gap in the screen door. Being very tiny, it took the creature all night to traverse the porch, drawn by the scent of flowers in the lavishly planted beds surrounding the house. Sometime around dawn, the steg tumbled off the porch and broke its neck.
Thereby was possible ecological disaster averted when a real dinosaur—a real dinosaur—might have found its way to the nest of a snake or a lizard or a bird (though this would be unlikely; stegosaurs were not known for climbing trees), fertilized its eggs or had its eggs fertilized (it was unclear whether the formerly plastic animal had been male or female), and all genetic hell would have broken loose.
The dead stegosaurus eventually slid into the mud caused by that night’s rain and slowly decomposed in the flower beds. The next spring, when the soil was troweled preparatory to planting more flowers, missed entirely was the tiny skeleton with its unique row of plates like sails along its spine and spiked tail.
More importantly, perhaps, it was not discovered that night that Susannah Rowan Lachlan was indeed a Spellbinder, just like her mother.
Three
BACK AT THE HOUSE, Holly set her dress to soak in something Clary Sage swore was the sovereign remedy for stains from red wine to spaghetti sauce to chocolate, and went upstairs in her underwear to dig out something to wear. Remembering what she’d decided earlier about the weather and the venue, and her husband’s dictum about the Fuck Me shoes, she made several selections, threw them all onto the bed, and stood there staring at them. Five minutes later she was dressed in nice, conservative, wife-of-the-candidate slacks and a tailored blouse.