Where There's a Witch

by Alt, Madelyn

  While I was lost in my reverie, Tom decided enough was enough and bid Pastor Bob farewell. By the time we made it back to the cruiser (after retrieving Minnie and giving her a drink) we were arguing again. I couldn’t help it. Tom went right back to voicing his opinion about the situation with Liss and how it would really be helpful to him if I could just find another job or at the very least convince Liss to scale back on the woo-woo factor until things settled back to normal—which just went to prove that he didn’t consider anyone with “those kinds” of abilities to be normal. Which would include me lumped right in there by default. Things escalated from bad to worse pretty fast. By the time we got to my car back at Enchantments, we’d been giving each other the silent treatment for a good seven minutes. I got out of the cruiser without a word and put Minnie safely in the passenger seat. I was going to just get in my car when he stopped me.

  “Maggie.”

  I turned stiffly back and lifted my brow in implied inquiry.

  “At least think about what I said, okay? The pressure I’m getting from the chief . . . it’s coming from all quarters, and it’s not going to be getting better anytime soon.”

  He drove off, leaving me to fume in irritation, annoyance, and not a little bit of unease. I knew the backlash he was worried about might be forthcoming. I knew this town and its people like a person knows her family’s dysfunctional quirks and foibles, and the thing with the petition and the newspaper could very well be the tip of the iceberg. Even the Titanic tried to reverse engines. Too late, but it did make the attempt. On the other hand, I’d always wondered what would have happened if they’d just rammed the damned thing and been done with it.

  Maybe it was time I did that with Tom, too. So to speak.

  Long past time?

  I didn’t realize until I got home minutes later that I still hadn’t broached the topic of his weekend . . . date.

  Chapter 14

  Nothing much happened for a couple of days . . . and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. The store’s business had slowed to a crawl since Margo’s op-ed piece came out. Tara, Liss, and I had done our best to keep ourselves busy updating inventory records, following up on errant merchandise orders, dusting, sweeping, polishing the crystal, and any number of other necessary but mindless duties. But a little bit of light had gone out of our day with Evie missing, and by Wednesday afternoon we were all floating around the space looking for things to do. When a customer did come in, Tara and I nearly knocked each other over to be the first to offer our assistance. Most left quickly. I wouldn’t be surprised if our overexcited zeal scared them off.

  Not even Marcus was around to break up the monotony. “Maybe if someone gave him a reason to be,” Tara snarked when I casually asked about him.

  Everyone’s a critic . . .

  Then she relented. “He had to go meet with someone about some contracts for his knife stuff. Said he’d be gone a couple of days. He’ll be back by Monday for sure.”

  Which meant the rest of the week and the weekend itself would be a bust. Thank heaven for girlfriends on standby.

  Through the ever-active grapevine, Tara had heard whispers that Reverend Martin had something brewing, but for the most part the offensive phone calls had died down. Unfortunately the diminished calls took away our last-ditch hopes for outside entertainment as the score-card sat idle by the phone, gathering dust. It also gave me no excuse whatsoever for avoiding my mother’s calls, and she did finally get through when I let down my guard.

  “Good afternoon, Enchantments Antiques and Fine Gifts. How can I help you?”

  “Well, for starters, you can stop avoiding your mother’s calls. How many would you say that is this week?” she complained into my ear.

  “Hi, Mom. How are you? I’m fine, Maggie, how are things going for you? Great, fantastic, just wonderful,” I intoned, mocking up a representation of the kind of phone calls most girls receive from their mothers. We’d been doing better for a time, especially while I was helping out with Mel. Maybe that’s what this was all about. Maybe she blamed me for Mel’s decision to bring the home nurse in. Mel had told me that Mom and the nurse had clashed more than once.

  “Don’t get smart with me, missy. I’m in no mood.”

  That would make two of us. I was still smarting over my argument with Tom, whom I’d seen neither hide nor hair of since Monday evening.

  “I’ve been thinking, Margaret—”

  Oh no. Not that.

  “—that it might be nice to get you in to see Father Tom for some . . . family counseling.”

  Wait . . . what?

  My grip tightened around the phone receiver. “I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about, dear. But since you seem so determined to remain by the side of your boss—who, it has not escaped my notice, has been enjoying a bit of notoriety in the past week, wouldn’t you say?—I feel it’s important that you hear the truth about her occult practices from a man of God.”

  Man of God? Father Tom was the last person I wanted to hear “truth” from. I had lost all respect for him years ago. How he still remained at the helm of St. Catherine’s, I would never understand. I mean, I’d heard of forgive and forget, but that was ridiculous.

  “So I’ve made an appointment for you.”

  “You what?” My explosion was loud enough that Tara paused in the middle of her lotus meditation on top of the checkout counter and looked over to see what I was doing. Minnie stopped running with the strip of satin ribbon she’d found and jumped up on the bookshelf I was trying to dust to gaze intently into my eyes, her whiskers twitching.

  “Next week. Wednesday.”

  “Mom, you can’t just go around trying to run my life. I can’t go to your family counseling session.”

  “Do you want me to talk to your boss for you?”

  Exasperation, full-blown, did not allow much room for niceties. “No, I do not want you to talk to my boss! Jeez, Mom. I am not sixteen years old. Nothing that Liss is doing or not doing is causing me emotional distress or trauma. And I’m not going to your meeting with Father Tom, so you can get that notion right out of your head. I know what your feelings are on the subject, and I respect that, but there is nothing in the Bible that says that I have to feel or believe the same as you. Now, I’m going to have to say good-bye. I really have to get back to work.”

  There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “You hurt me, Maggie. You really do. But we can talk about this more on Sunday.”

  You see, that was my mother. Woman of a thousand sneaky tactics. When one didn’t work, she’d switch gears on a dime. Guilt was always a fave. Probably because it was so effective.

  Still fuming, and because I had nothing better to do, I decided a little sisterly commiseration might be in order. It was a long shot—sometimes Mel just didn’t get the whole sisterly support thing—but there was always a chance. Yes, I was still exasperated with her for spilling the beans about Liss and Marcus to Margo and thereby getting us into the mess we were now facing . . . but a part of me blamed myself for that, too. I knew Mel’s propensity for gossip. I should have known she’d view her spook situation as an opportunity to reassert herself as High Queen of the gossip chain. Besides, blood was thicker than water, as the old saying goes, and since the Ouija board spirit had spelled out the word “sister,” and Mel was still lying preg gers and vulnerable on bed rest under doctor’s orders, I was determined to understand what it had meant. I didn’t see how Mel could be a further threat to be careful of; hadn’t she already done her worst?

  I dialed up her home number and waited. Mel picked up on the first ring.

  “Margo?”

  “Um, no,” I replied flatly. It still irked that Mel had taken up with Margo. Sometimes I wondered if Mel—or Margo, for that matter—was using the friendship as a way of being a thorn in my side. Probably not, but that thought made me feel better on days when I saw Mel and Margo together, thick as thieves, and I was forced to grin a
nd bear it. Today, though, I had other things on my mind. “How’s Mommy and baby?”

  “Oh. Hi, Maggie. Good, good. Bored as all get-out, but I guess that’s to be expected. Not much longer now; I keep telling myself that. I hear you’ve been in a little trouble lately.”

  “Oh?” I asked, playing dumb. Of course, I was in trouble because of Mel. Still. Here was another reason I wanted to talk to Mel. Her friendship with Margo might be a cross I’d have to bear, but maybe I could use it to my advantage in this situation. “Just what have you heard?”

  “Plenty,” Mel said with a smug tone in her voice that made me sigh. But then she switched gears and did something completely unexpected. “You need to watch your back, Sis. Seriously. Courtney AnneMarie Craven, get down off that chair this instant, or I’ll have to call Grandma upstairs to have her get you down, and I’m pretty sure you won’t be happy about that.”

  “What are you talking about, Mel?” I asked, trying to get her back on track. “The whole Gazette opinion piece? Yeah, that was a surprise. But after the first rush, things have quieted down here.” Boy, had they ever. A little too much for my comfort.

  “I have a feeling it’s only a lull.”

  “A feeling?” Mel didn’t do feelings. Really. She had the sensitivity of a teaspoon, without even a drop of honey to sweeten the deal. “Or a scoop?”

  “Does it matter? The important thing is, you need to take care of you. Have you talked to Mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not good?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “Well . . . I knew it wouldn’t be good. She’s really been on a warpath lately. Between you and me, I think she’s feeling displaced here since we brought the nurse in to help.”

  I agreed. “She’s come to the conclusion the only option is a full-on occult intervention.” It sounded so ridiculous. I started feeling giggles bubbling up. “She wants me . . . to go to family counseling . . . with Father Tom.”

  The laughter proved contagious, crossing longtime barriers and boundaries, bridging the great divide. The two of us burst out in a fit of giggles in a way we hadn’t since we were preteens playing a trick on our older brother, Marshall. Before teenage squabbles over boys, clothes, and attention came into play.

  It felt good.

  “Father Tom needs an intervention of his own,” Mel said once she could breathe again. “Seriously. He doesn’t have the right to give counsel to anyone else. Why doesn’t Mom see that? She would defend him with her last breath, despite his . . . proclivities. That being said, you should go to mass more often. It would smooth things over with her.”

  That was just the thing. I didn’t want to be forced to do anything purely for the sake of smoothing things over. I wanted to make my own decisions, live my own life, and I wanted my mother to accept me for myself.

  “Mel . . .” It had to be asked. “You haven’t been telling Margo anything else, have you? About Liss and Marcus and that night?”

  “Oh, you know me. Just a couple of little things. Nothing earth-shattering. I mean, they did help me out. I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt them, and . . . well, you know.”

  Just a couple of things. The evasiveness gave me the answer I had been seeking. She’d told Margo everything. Every last detail. It was my fault. I alone knew Mel’s nature, her inherent inability to keep from spreading the scoop every time she got near one. And the secret about Liss being a witch . . . that was a biggie. There was no way she wouldn’t have passed that around the second we were out of sight. I should have known. I should have . . .

  That must be the meaning behind the Sister clue the Ouija spirit had given us. Be careful, it had also said. Point well taken. I had to make sure that whatever came, Mel was kept out of the loop.

  That was if there were any more secrets to keep out of the public eye.

  I rang off with Mel feeling even more uncertain than I had been before.

  I wandered over to where the girls—well, Liss and Tara, at least—were now seated at the counter. Liss had apparently decided to coax Tara out of her ever-deepening state of mourning over Evie’s absence with a bit of controlled exploration using Tara’s favorite tool of late, the homemade Ouija.

  “Hey, Maggie, guess what,” Tara said.

  “What?”

  “We got your Elias back again.”

  “Did you, now.” I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about the fact that some nebulous energy from a hole in the ground was playing follow-the-leader with me. I’d really been hoping it was just a fluke, a fly-by spirit that had dropped into the home and life of a sensitive for a little look-see. At least if he had been loitering around me at home, he wasn’t making a nuisance of himself. Or maybe it was Minnie that was keeping him at bay. I couldn’t know for sure, but I made a mental note then and there to buy a white sage bundle from Liss’s herb stores to do a cleansing this weekend. A little bit of spiritual housekeeping certainly wouldn’t hurt.

  “Uh-huh. Check it out.” Tara beckoned me over. “Elias, I have Maggie here. Do you know Maggie?”

  The pointer moved to the sticky note marked “yes,” then slid through a sequence of letters to spell out my name, one letter at a time.

  “Yes. Maggie,” I read. Wonderful. I glanced up around the tall, tin-plated ceilings, wondering where the energy was lurking. I held up my hand and waved weakly. “Hi, Elias.”

  “Oh, there’s more. Look.”

  M-A-G-G-I-E, the glass spelled out again.

  Maggie, yeah. We got that part.

  But then it spelled out something entirely different.

  U-N-I-C-E

  “Aww. How cute. He thinks you’re nice. Isn’t that sweet? Something tells me our Magster has an admirer.”

  Sweet. Not only did I live in a basement apartment, I now had a spirit who had decided I was his very own bright light in the darkness.

  S-I-S-T-E-R

  “I just spoke with Mel,” I told Liss and Tara. “She swears she’s not making more trouble for us here.”

  B-E-C-A-R-E-F-U-L

  “Of course, there’s always the chance that she could be downplaying her role,” I conceded. “But what can I do except keep an eye on her?”

  U-L-C

  Unfortunately, none of this was helping us to understand.

  The bell at the front of the store jingled, heralding the arrival of a customer—at last! And with Tara behind the counter, this one was mine. I went over to issue a welcome and found to my surprise that the fey wife of Pastor Bob had walked through our front door, looking ever so pallid and drab in a gray-and-white checked shirt-dress and sensible shoes, her only spot of color a quilted Vera Bradley handbag in paisley swirls of blue and yellow. Onto her other arm clung a short, somewhat rough-looking woman whose skin and hair had seen better days. I’d never seen the woman before, at least that I knew of.

  “Oh, hello,” said the pastor’s wife. “I remember you from the other day. You probably don’t recognize me without my towel and robe.”

  I nodded, holding out my hand in greeting. “Of course I do. You’re Pastor Bob’s wife, yes?”

  “Emily Angelis, yes.”

  I shook her hand. “Maggie O’Neill.”

  “You’re exactly who we were coming to see. You and the young ladies and the gentleman who were with you the other night when Ronnie Maddox was found.”

  “Oh?” I transferred my attention to the woman by her side, who was intently sizing me up through big eighties-style plastic lenses, her pursed lips cratered by smoker’s lines.

  “This is Veronica Maddox’s mother,” Emily said gently. “Harriet Maddox.”

  Instantly I felt my heart melt for her. “Oh, Mrs. Maddox. I’m so sorry for your loss. Here, come sit down, both of you. Have a cup of tea, my treat.”

  Thankfully Tara heard me and managed to have every last sticky note cleared off the counter before I escorted the ladies over.

  Harriet Maddox sat down with a sigh and ran her hands through her thinning, fr
azzled gray hair. Her grief was weighing down upon her like a heavy barbell balanced on her shoulders, crushing, crushing. I turned away from her, stricken as the sheer force of her emotions nudged at my own personal energies, and tried to catch my breath as I muddled over the shelf of teas, trying to decide which would be best. My hand hovered over the canister for chamomile, a good, all-around soothing tea. Then Liss’s hand was there, guiding my own to one shelf above to the canister for borage.

  “For grief,” she murmured for my ears alone, “and sadness.”

  I prepared a nice, big cup the usual way, then set it down steaming in front of Mrs. Maddox. For Mrs. Angelis I chose a fruity herbal blend that smelled as good as it tasted. She smiled as I placed it before her.

  “Thank you. You’re too kind.”

  I slid the honeypot out to let them drizzle to their heart’s content. Off by the cleanup sink, I saw Liss measuring out several teacups’ worth of borage and scooping the herb into a small cheesecloth bag, which she tied with a pink satin ribbon. A gift for Mrs. Maddox, no doubt. I felt a rush of warmth for my bighearted boss, who never let sadness go without kindness to counter it. I had a sneaking suspicion she was saying a few words over the herbs as well.

  “Now, what can I do for you ladies?” I asked once they’d had a chance to sample their tea.

  “Mrs. Maddox,” Emily Angelis said, “wanted to thank you—”

  “I can do the talking from here, Emily, thanks,” Harriet Maddox rasped, clutching the cup in both hands and staring up at me over the rising steam. “I wanted to come in and thank you, girly, for coming forward to speak to the police about what you saw that day. Some people wouldn’ta done that, so I thank you for doing your civic duty. Mrs. Angelis here said she’d met you out at the church that very night, and then with the article in the paper and whatnot, well . . . when Mrs. Angelis offered to bring me over to pay my thanks, I jumped at it. So thanks.”