STREGA
KAREN MONAHAN FERNANDES
Copyright 2013 Karen Monahan Fernandes
Ebook Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
Mink Publishing
P.O. Box 664
Bolton, MA 01740
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, people, historical events, situations, and places are the product of the author's imagination or they are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-0-615-93856-1
www.StregaSeries.com
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
DEDICATION
To Rui and Blake, the loves of my life.
The dream's here still: even when I wake, it is
Without me, as within me; not imagined, felt.
Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene II
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV
XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
L
LI
LII
LIII
LIV
LV
LVI
LVII
LVIII
LIX
LX
LXI
LXII
LXIII
LXIV
LXV
LXVI
LXVII
LXVIII
LXIX
LXX
LXXI
LXXII
LXXIII
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
I stepped out for a morning run, leaving a trail of frosty breath behind me as I cut through the quiet streets. One. Two. Three. Four. Pounding heart. Pumping fists. Meditatively, my feet struck the hard earth and lifted my body into weightlessness again and again. Puddle. Pavement. Grass. Running was the one thing that made me feel in control. Strong. Powerful. Focused. Always moving, never idle. Shift. Dodge. Bend. Never trapped, always free. With each stride, I pushed out of my mind troubling thoughts, determined not to let them ruin another day.
The unseasonably crisp air delivered an early taste of autumn as the warmth of summer slowly faded. It was late August. Soon enough, pumpkins would be carved into creepy faces, crisp Macintosh apples would turn into pies, and fiery oak leaves would blanket every New England town until Thanksgiving.
In just over a week, I would be back at Newburyport High School for my senior year. I was only one year away from starting over again in a new city, far away from all the things I longed to escape here.
I moved to Newburyport to live with my grandmother when I was seven, after my parents died. Together, she and I picked up the pieces of our shattered hearts and built a new life. Gram was my best friend and the last of my family. Almost two months had passed since I lost her too.
After Gram died, it was hard to care about anything. She was the single thread that kept my broken life together. Her death was even harder to accept because she was murdered. Finding her the night she was killed left me with a vision I could not erase. One that haunted me every single day.
I could hardly eat. I barely slept, and when I did, a terrifying dream that had tormented me as a child tore me from my sleep. It returned just after Gram died, and it was fiercer and more disturbing than I remembered it. Only now, Mom and Dad were not there to protect me. I couldn't crawl into Gram's bed and hide. I was on my own.
My aunt Ruth was the closest thing I had to family. She and Celia both, though neither was actually my aunt. They were Gram's best friends. The three of them were like sisters. Celia owned a little shop downtown where we always gathered. And Ruth's house was only a mile from ours. We saw them all the time.
Ruth's house was on my way home from school, so I'd stop in often. She always made me a cup of tea and forced me to eat something. In the summer, her kitchen table was laden with bowls of more fresh vegetables than she and her husband Jack could eat. Gram and I never left without a bag of tomatoes or an enormous zucchini. I voluntarily traipsed through their massive garden to help them keep up with the never-ending abundance. Inevitable encounters with spiders and slithering garter snakes made me toss what I'd gathered and frantically run from my tiny foes. Despite my fears, I loved digging through the layers of green leaves to reveal a hidden squash, a glowing red tomato, or an endless sea of snap peas.
Ruth's place felt like home long before I moved in. Strangely, I knew that if anything ever happened to Gram, I would come live with Ruth. Gram reminded me of it often, as if it was not a mere backup plan but a definitive arrangement.
II
That morning started out like every other. I stepped out on the front porch and adjusted my small earphones until they rested perfectly in place. As my foot hit the bottom step, I pressed play. The quiet, clean guitar chords began just as I reached the corner and turned onto Willow Street. Then the fast drumbeat started and my pace quickened. Soon, the words I waited for each morning whispered to me again like they were meant for me alone.
As I focused on the empty street ahead, navigating the same neighborhood course I did every morning, the frustrated cries of longing poured into my ears and I ached. My chest tightened as if a hand, strong yet gentle, reached in and held onto my soul with a tight, unrelenting grip.
This hauntingly beautiful song was my only connection to someone I barely knew but could not forget no matter how hard I tried. Vince. Just his name had the power to awaken me like a bolt of lightning. The song was one I'd heard many times before, but the night I met him, when I heard his beautiful voice utter its desperate words, I fell under his spell. Nothing and no one had ever done that to me before, and I vacillated between wanting him and cursing him for it.
We spent only a few short hours together, but our connection was undeniable. In his presence, a longing that tormented me for so long with no reprieve began to quiet. But after that night, he just disappeared without a word. He'd been gone for months, but his voice was fresh in my mind as if only moments had passed since I last heard it. And ever since, whenever I played this song, it was his voice that I heard singing it.
By the time my run ended, the morning sun had warmed the air to a seasonable 70 degrees. I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point running had become an obsession of mine. I was the only long-distance runner on our track team. When I was running, I was alone, at peace, and for those precious minutes I could ignore that nagging feeling inside me that wouldn't rest—the one Vinc
e was somehow able to quiet.
This agonizing feeling was like a mix of desire and desperation for something that I feared I would never find. It had gripped me for as long as I could remember, and the hunger to quench it only grew stronger with time. I searched the hallways, lunch tables, basketball courts, and grassy fields for a face, a word, anything to quell it. But I soon realized that I wouldn't find what I was seeking within the walls of my high school or among my peers. All I could do was hold onto my memory of the way Vince made me feel, and hope that one day I would feel that way again.
In the meantime, I did my best to evade the trivial politics and dramas that were the inevitable plague of my teenage existence. I savored moments alone when I didn't have to explain myself or otherwise pretend that I was content. I avoided my friends, who wanted more than anything for me to lose myself in the superficiality of our age and spend every moment gossiping about other girls or ogling the unappealing boys in our class. When I did succumb to their whims, usually out of guilt or desperation, my sarcasm would inevitably surface. I earned the silent treatment often. Unfortunately it never lasted.
***
I peeled off my sweaty clothes and showered before getting ready for work. It was my last week working summer hours. Once school started, I'd be back to afternoons and weekends. The Waterside was one of the busiest restaurants in the area. Our organic and local menu was wildly popular. In the morning, it was all about our skinny breakfast wraps. At lunch and dinner, it was our brie and blue stuffed sandwiches, killer cobb salad, and fresh guacamole. And the steady line for dark roast iced coffee often ran out the door.
I walked to town as I did most days that summer when it was not raining. The Waterside was only a mile and a half away, and trying to find a parking spot downtown was next to impossible during the warmer months.
Work that day was business as usual. I poured endless cups of coffee, took orders, and delivered food so quickly that my head spun when I stood still. Rena called a half hour before my shift ended, desperately begging me to take hers that afternoon because she was at the hospital with her boyfriend Max. He'd just broken his arm tripping over a dumbbell at the gym. It was not the first time I got stuck working a double to bail her out, but it was okay. I owed her. And she was my best friend so I would have done it anyway.
It was ten o'clock when we finally locked the doors. I sat down with a tuna sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk. I ate fast, anticipating the walk ahead of me. Had I known I was going to be stuck there so late, I would have driven in that day.
After processing the last of the credit card slips, I said goodbye to Paul and Ricky and the rest of the night crew. Knowing that I'd been there since eight o'clock that morning, they sent me home before we shut down for the night, sparing me the extra half hour it took to complete the end-of-shift to-do list. I grabbed my things and stepped out onto the sidewalk, exhausted and looking forward to curling up in bed with a book and a steamy cup of tea.
Water Street was unusually quiet at that hour. A thundershower had recently come through, leaving the streets shiny black. Small pools of water reflected the golden light of the streetlamps above.
By day, Water Street and the rest of Market Square was a beautiful splash of creativity. Art galleries, leather handbag boutiques, coffee shops, and trendy restaurants faced the marina and energized the area with their colorful personalities. Celia's shop was one of them. Celia's Natural Marketplace. As I walked below the hanging sign past the storefront, I looked through the glass hoping to see a light on in the back. Sometimes Celia stayed late, after she closed up. But it was dark. Nobody was there.
From as far back as I could remember, even before I moved to Newburyport, I'd gone to Celia's shop with Gram. More often to chat with Celia and Ruth in the back room than to shop. As soon as Ruth stretched out her long, thin legs and rested her heels on the coffee table, I knew we were going to be there awhile. Celia would buzz around gathering plates and cups, and she'd slice a cake and make tea—she always put an ice cube in mine. When the conversation was about to enter territory too mature for my little ears, Gram would send me up front to browse the candles and pick a new one to burn. As I smelled the incense and dried herbs from the sidewalk, I ached with these memories.
Downtown was so safe and familiar by day, crowded with visitors spending a leisurely day shopping and dining outside along the welcoming brick sidewalks. But all its charms were hidden under the blackness of night, and the streets filled with an eerie silence as I passed stacks of empty chairs outside each darkened window.
The last sliver of the waning moon had slipped away, and the towering streetlamps flickered as if weakened in its absence. The burgeoning sun of midday was long gone and the dark sky cast its shadow on me, threatening to swallow me whole. I thought of my car parked in Ruth's driveway, which seemed a million miles away. I walked that familiar stretch all the time, I reminded myself. It was no big deal. But never at night in complete darkness, my instincts boldly interrupted.
That night, those familiar roads seemed different somehow, almost foreign, and altogether strange. This strangeness, like a budding ember ignited in my consciousness, grew ever more compelling as it fumed against the walls of my mind, caged and desperate to escape. It was like a dream that you remember only vaguely, but that leans on each quivering nerve within you, making you long to bring forth every rousing detail. Whatever this strangeness was, it remained just out of reach, hovering below the surface continuing to provoke me but refusing to reveal itself.
***
At that hour, Sovana's was the last open establishment that I passed as the streets of Market Square crawled farther and farther away from the water. The smell of stale beer, sweat, and freshly baked bread boldly took over the street and mingled with the scent of wet asphalt. The thick wooden door was always propped open to let the billows of body heat escape. With it drifted the sound of scratchy Italian records and the grumblings of drunken patrons itching for a fistfight.
I was intimately familiar with the place. On top of my shifts at The Waterside, I worked as an intern at the Newburyport Press that summer. Journalism was one of my favorite classes, and an internship at the newspaper was great experience to include on my college applications. Though it was an unpaid job, I loved my assignments and it didn't even feel like work. One of my very first assignments was to write a local business feature article on Sovana's.
Even in Newburyport, a small haven with all the charm of an old New England town, steeped in history with its vintage colonial homes and brick buildings, Sovana's still stood out like an ancient relic. Surrounded by all the trendy shops that dominated the area, Sovana's possessed an old world flavor that drew me in. Signor Sovana opened the place decades ago soon after arriving from Italy. His niece Luciana had recently come to town and taken things over, allowing him to retire. In his early nineties, he was finally ready.
The old, wide-planked floorboards were worn. The sturdy bar and its mismatched stools proudly displayed the scars they'd earned over the years. In the more civilized corners of the place, Luciana, addressed by all as Signora Sovana, laid out her handmade tablecloths on a handful of old wooden tables and placed a small vase with a single flower at the center of each.
"Flowers bring balance," she said in her heavy European accent. She pointed her strong finger, thick and swollen from years of labor, toward her adoring patrons at the bar before letting out a heavy laugh. "Without it, these brutes would tear the place down!"
Signora Sovana hadn't been there long, but those brutes instantly loved her like she was their own nonna. She was just as bold as she was soft and gentle. Her build was strong and solid, and proportionally soft and round. She was a bit shorter than me, but her presence made up for it. Her hair was cut straight at her chin and almost fully black with only a few streaks of gray at her temple. I guessed her to be in her early sixties, about the same age as Gram.
Even after writing that first article for the paper, I returned to Sovan
a's often for Signora's amazing pesto dishes and her stories of life in Italy. She grew up in the remote northern mountains, but studied English in Rome. She spoke it so eloquently that, if not for her accent and the occasional insertion of an Italian vocabolo, I would have thought English to be her native tongue. We hadn't known each other long, but there was something about her that kept me coming back. And her face lit up each time I walked through the door.
The day of Gram's funeral, Ruth and Celia took me out for dinner. Right away, I suggested Sovana's. I was drawn to its comforts. It was broken in. Welcoming like an old home, with the scent of fresh garlic and herbs always wafting out from the kitchen. And Signora's warm, curative arms were there waiting for me.
My uneasiness grew as the familiar commotion of Sovana's faded to a distant hum behind me. One after the other, dark alleys that had always been benign suddenly threatened to suck me into their shadowy recesses. I weaved through the downtown streets past Brown Square and Town Hall, and made my way around the old inn on the corner and into the quiet neighborhood tucked behind the center of town. I followed the narrow brick sidewalks of Titcomb Street past the tightly packed houses, each with its own little fence of black wrought iron or white picket. Lush purple and pink hydrangeas lined the short little walkways to welcoming front doors. But all I could think about was the dreaded stretch that was still ahead of me. Before I reached Ruth's neighborhood, I had to cross through the park and pass the cemetery.
I dug through my purse and pulled out my phone to call Shaun. I'd canceled our plans for the night when I took Rena's shift. I'd half-expected him to show up at The Waterside since he knew I was stuck there all night, but he didn't.
I'd been seeing Shaun for a couple of months. He came to town late spring, just as the school year ended. I first met him at The Waterside shortly after I switched to my summer schedule. Gram never got to meet him.
Every morning at eight o'clock, he'd come in and sit at the corner table, and browse through the New York Times or thumb at his phone. He'd always order a cup of coffee, but whenever I came by with a fresh pot, his cup was untouched.
Strega (Strega Series) Page 1