Wisteria Wonders

by Angela Pepper

  “You got a haircut,” I commented and then I turned my attention back down to my seat belt. The tremor in my hand was making it difficult to get the belt fastened, but I clicked it on the third try.

  “You must be rattled,” Chet said, eyeing my hands. “I've never seen you like this.”

  “Then you've never seen me when the pizza delivery guy calls to say he can't find the house.”

  He snorted and started the engine. “There's the ballsy Zara I've grown to know and love.” He coughed abruptly as he realized what he'd said. “And by love, I mean... Well, it's an expression.”

  “Love thy neighbor,” I said. “That's also an expression.”

  He smiled and kept his gaze on the road ahead. “Good fences make good neighbors.”

  “And no beauty shines brighter than that of a good heart.”

  He whipped his head to face me. “What did you just say?”

  I repeated the saying. “No beauty shines brighter than that of a good heart.”

  He nodded and returned his attention to the road. “True enough.”

  Our conversation felt familiar, as though we'd played the game of exchanging clichéd expressions countless times. I'd been living next door to Chet and the rest of the Moore family for only a few months, but our history went back at least sixteen years. He'd been a fan of my website during my Zara the Camgirl days. I was internet-famous for a while, part of the first wave of people broadcasting their lives over the Internet. I hesitate to call myself a “camgirl” because it means something different these days. Back then, being a camgirl hadn't involved stripping off clothes for strangers, except for the one or two times I'd forgotten the webcams were running in a room.

  Chet had been a regular visitor to my Zara the Camgirl page, plus we'd talked in the chat room. It was a great little community of nerds and self-named oddballs. This was all right before YouTube took off and people started having their own channels, before the first YouTube star had been christened. Back in the “olden days,” you had to be a computer nerd to handle the technical side of broadcasting your life.

  Chet didn't seem like such a nerd now that I'd met him. He was quiet at times, but I wouldn't call him an oddball, either.

  He glanced over at me. “How have you been feeling?”

  “Discombobulated. Thanks for asking.” I smoothed the folds of my skirt, touching the plastic bag in my pocket to make sure I still had the feathers. I could feel the large quill, so the feathers hadn't disappeared or shifted back yet. “How's Frank?”

  “He's at the hospital getting checked out.” He glanced my way. “What do you mean, you feel discombobulated?”

  I rubbed my palms together. “When your buddies turned into giant birds, something happened to me. I got the blue lightning in my hands, just like that time we were attacked in the forest.” I fidgeted with my fingers. “How well do you know those guys?”

  He snorted. “Rob and Knox are like brothers to me. No, better than brothers, because I can always count on them.” He paused, clenching his jaw hard enough to make the hollows in his cheeks catch a shadow. “Zara, I assure you, it wasn't either one of them who attacked us that day.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “It could have been anyone. Or anything. Before we destroyed the Pressman house, we found plans for biomechanical creatures that would give you nightmares.”

  “Great,” I said. “Because more nightmares are exactly what I need.” I looked out the side window to catch a street name. Elm Street. “Where are you taking me? We're going to see Frank, right?”

  “Not yet.” He pressed some buttons on the control panel of the van. The radio came on, playing classic rock. Chet bobbed his head with the music—not in a fun, road trip way—more like he was giving the music his approval to continue.

  I leaned forward and pushed another button at random. The station changed to modern pop.

  He switched it back to the classic rock and held his hand above the buttons to block my access. Again, not in a fun, road trip way. More like a controlling, withholding jerk.

  “Chet, have I done something to offend you? You haven't even talked to me since that night in the Pressman house, when I saved your bacon.”

  “You didn't save anyone's bacon. My backup arrived, as planned. If anything, you were in the way. My team knew exactly what we were doing.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you telling me you went up there on purpose to engage in slimy tentacle action with that monstrosity? It was all part of your cunning plan to enjoy some quality time with a life-sucking, parasitic, googly-eyed, bug-infested, slurpy-noise-making Erasure Machine?”

  “We got the situation under control,” he said evenly. “And the Erasure Machine didn't have eyes, let alone googly ones. That's why it was using Perry Pressman.”

  “Right,” I said with an edge. “Since you know everything, tell me, who was the impostor in my body? The big boss whose orders Dorothy Tibbits was following?”

  “That was Perry Pressman,” he said. “And now that he's dead, the case has been closed.”

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head. “Perry was a decent man who got caught up in something. The person in my body was pure evil.”

  Chet sighed. “I don't know what to say to reassure you.”

  “I don't want reassurance. I want the truth. You guys should question Dorothy Tibbits. She's the link.”

  “Tibbits came out of her coma,” he said.

  “And?”

  He glanced over at me. “We sent agents in to question her. She was exhibiting extreme memory loss. She didn't even know who she was, let alone why she was being tried for the murder of Winona Vander Zalm. She might not be fit to stand trial.”

  I groaned. “She's faking.”

  “The case is closed.” His voice wavered.

  Outside of the van, tires screeched and a horn sounded. I looked up to see the red light we'd sailed through without Chet noticing, let alone tapping the brakes.

  Chet swore and checked the mirrors as we drove away from the intersection.

  “It's fine,” he reported. “Nobody got hit.”

  His near-accident at the red light told me more than his words or his body language. It takes more cognitive resources to lie than to tell the truth. He'd lost his focus on driving because he was telling me a story, a fictional one.

  “You don't believe the case is closed,” I said. “Deep down, you know something's up. Maybe it was an inside job, someone within your organization.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No way. The intel about the Pressman operation came from investigators within the DWM. We started a file when Wick brought us the erased books. It wasn't one of our projects.”

  “Did the DWM put their top agent on the case?”

  “It was a junior...” He trailed off. “What are you getting at?”

  “Sounds to me like a cover-up. The junior investigator wasn't supposed to unravel the mystery until it was too late. Even so, you guys barely made it there in time. And you weren't prepared at all, because the Pressmans immediately disarmed the three of you and started feeding you to their machine. I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn't shown up there to save your bacon.”

  He was quiet, driving well under the speed limit and checking both directions at every intersection.

  “Chet, they were working on a machine for erasing people. Can you imagine the damage another machine like that could do? Think about evil impostors snatching the bodies of everyone from regular citizens to top-level figures.”

  “No comment,” he said.

  “They could impersonate anyone.” I thought about recent international news events. “Maybe they already have?”

  He pursed his lips but said nothing.

  I'd been fidgeting with my hands and the fabric of my skirt the whole drive. Now I found myself making the hand gestures for casting the convincing spell. Would it work on Chet? He wouldn't appreciate being manipulated, but was already annoyed at me, so what harm
was there in trying?

  I cast the spell silently. The air between us sparkled with tiny points of light that only I could see.

  “Chet, being a single parent is difficult,” I said. “You don't want to burden your child with your problems, but you don't have a partner to confide in.”

  Softly, he said, “I don't.”

  My spell seemed to be working. “Chet, you can unburden yourself. You're not alone. You have me. I'm your friend, and your neighbor, and I'm here for you.”

  He sighed. “I want so badly to tell you about Chessa.”

  “Chessa?” The sparkling in the air between us brightened. Was this a person at the DWM who'd been acting suspiciously? It was a woman's name. Was she the impostor who'd been in my body? I sounded her name in my head. Chessa.

  The name rang with familiarity, the way the Pressman name had resonated with me after I'd met the spirit of Perry Pressman.

  My convincing spell was still active, so I pressed on, sounding like a cheesy stage hypnotist. “Yes, you want to tell me about Chessa.” Again, the ring of familiarity. “You're calm and relaxed, and once you tell me everything, you'll keep feeling calm and relaxed.”

  He slowed down the van, checked the mirrors, and did a U-turn. Now we were heading away from our homes, away from the center of town.

  “Tell me everything,” I cooed.

  “I'd rather show you,” he said. His voice sounded flat, unguarded.

  I didn't want to break the spell, so I let him drive in silence.

  Chapter 3

  The twinkling lights of my spell were fading when we turned onto a quiet residential street. Chet slowed the van and parked in front of a house the color of gingerbread. The front hedge was a row of cedars that had been trimmed into rounded shapes like green gumdrops. Flower beds along the front of the house were dotted with three shades of allium blossoms, looking very much like blue and purple lollipops.

  Chet got out of the van without speaking. I did the same and then followed him along a walkway across the lawn. Bright-hued butterflies fluttered around our heads. I slowed and held up one hand. A butterfly flitted down and perched on my finger. It was a western tiger swallowtail, with scalloped wings of yellow and black tiger stripes, dotted near the tail with a sash of blue and a spot of orange.

  In Mayan culture, butterflies were said to be ancestors returning for a visit to physicality. The winged visitors were said to bring wisdom, bringing order to the universe by balancing the old and the new. Many cultures associate butterflies with souls and transformation, including the Irish, who say butterflies are the souls of the dead waiting to pass through purgatory.

  The swallowtail took to the air and climbed the summer breezes. When my daughter was younger, she'd called butterflies “fancy caterpillars.” It always made me laugh. Thinking about Zoey snapped me out of my butterfly daydream.

  Chet was nearly out of sight, letting himself through a wooden gate at the side of the house. I ran to catch up with him.

  Behind the brown house was a surprise—a smaller, cottage-sized version of the house in front. Unlike the big one, which was the color of baked gingerbread, this house was a pale green. The paint had a frosted appearance, like the pocked surface of beach sea glass.

  The walkway leading to the house was bumpy, made of big, round river stones embedded in concrete. I stumbled over one particularly large rock. I loved the look of big river stones around a fireplace, but they were too whimsical for a walkway. I felt like I was tripping along a dried creek bed. And then, surprisingly, I had a sense of every stone in the path. I stepped on the smoothest spots, perfectly balanced all the way to the front door.

  Chet turned toward me, his dark eyebrows drawing together in confusion. His green eyes looked at me then through me.

  He spoke for the first time since we'd parked. “It makes me sad to be here,” he said.

  The twinkling of my convincing spell was fading. I silently cast it again to refresh the effects.

  “You'll feel better the more you talk about it,” I said. “Does Chessa live here?”

  He turned his head left and right, scanning the area robotically. The front of the green cottage was tidy, the lawn between it and the main house recently mowed and weed free. The cottage had no porch, but it did have a flagstone patio decorated with urns of red geraniums and three stone statues of wild animals—a three-point buck, a rabbit, and a raccoon—in lifelike poses. The stone animals were so lifelike, in fact, they appeared to have been turned to stone while fleeing some unseen predator.

  Turned to stone.

  Did Chet's friend at the DWM, Charlize, live here? During my brief moments of consciousness in the underground hospital's coma ward, I'd caught a glimpse of Charlize's golden curls writhing like snakes. Once you suspect someone of being a gorgon, it's hard to shake the thought. Was the name Chessa a nickname for Charlize? Were we about to knock on the door of a creature descended from Medusa?

  Chet was in motion again, looking through the keys on his keychain, so I held my question lest I break the spell.

  He used a key on his own keychain to open the cottage's front door. Nobody was home. I let him enter first and kept my gaze down on the scuffed hardwood floor until I was certain we were alone.

  The interior of the cottage was as white as an erased book page. White walls, white denim sofas, whitewashed wooden furniture. The entryway and adjoining living room glinted with hints of silver accessories—silver door handles and silver picture frames. The centerpiece of the room was a fireplace framed with more of the rounded river rocks I'd seen on the entry path.

  Whose house was this? It all felt incredibly familiar, as though I'd been there before. In a sense, I'd been there plenty of times—in my imagination. When I'd been raising an energetic child in a cramped, run-down apartment, I'd escape into glossy magazines filled with page after page of perfect living rooms—living rooms that weren't strewn with plastic kids' toys, unopened mail, and stained hand-me-down furniture. As I surveyed the ceiling of whitewashed beadboard, I imagined it overlaid with a text headline in a magazine. “Dream Cottage By The Sea,” the text would read, and it would be the color of green sea glass.

  Chet walked over to the archway leading to the central hallway and kitchen, the soles of his combat boots making clunky footfalls that felt wrong in the pristine space. This was the kind of home where you took your shoes off at the door, and the hostess offered you white slippers. Chet stood in the doorway with a blank expression, like a robot on power-saver mode.

  I asked him, “Why are we here?”

  He didn't respond to my question. My question. My spell was for convincing, not for questioning.

  I took a different tactic and said, “You want to tell me why we are here.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, and at the same time, I cast the spell a third time for good measure.

  “You want to tell me everything,” I said.

  The charge in the air changed with an audible crackle. He closed his mouth and blinked. He furrowed his brow, deepening his two and a half frown lines.

  The sparkles of my spell changed color, from pastel to a rich violet. I'd known even before the sparkles changed color that I'd screwed up the spell in my eagerness. It was like hitting the wrong note in a simple piece of music. You might not know what you did wrong, but you know it was wrong.

  Chet looked at me through the glittering violet sparkles. His eyes were focused now, and gleaming.

  “Chessa? I've missed you so much.”

  “What?” I turned and looked over my shoulder. Was she standing behind me? No, there was only the open doorway leading to the lawn.

  His boots scraped on the wood floor, and he was in front of me. He leaned in, and his hands were around my face, his eyes locked on mine.

  I lost myself in those green eyes.

  His face moved in, looming closer. He was going to kiss me. I froze, my desire for him to kiss me at war with my logical side—the one that knew I didn't want it like this
, with him under some botched convincing spell.

  My logical side won, and I managed to push him away, both of my hands on his broad chest.

  He took a step back but kept his large, warm hands on either side of my jaw.

  Gruffly, he said, “Don't push me away.”

  “Chet, it's me, Zara. Look carefully, and you'll recognize me. Pale skin, freckles, bright-red hair.”

  He quirked one eyebrow and growled, “Your hair's not red at all. It's the color of honey wheat.” Then he gave me a look I'd never seen on Chet's face, though I'd imagined it more than once. His gaze flicked over to the nearest soft furniture, a white sofa accessorized with satin pillows—pillows that were about to get knocked on the floor.

  He tilted his head and gave me a questioning look. “Our life was so perfect. Why did you have to leave?”

  I decided to play along for now, but if he tossed me on the sofa, I'd have to reconsider—slowly and carefully reconsider.

  Breathily, I said, “I did leave. Yes. How long have I been gone?”

  “Too long. A year now.” He shifted his hands down my jaw and ran one fingertip over my mouth. My whole body trembled. I glanced over at the sofa, then back into his eyes. I lost myself in Chet's gaze, lost myself in the green of his eyes, glowing like backlit emeralds. I was at the bottom of the ocean, peering up at the sky through green, plankton-rich waters.

  I gasped for air and took a step back.

  Chet stood there with his hands in the air where my face had been. He murmured, “It's been so long.”

  I snapped my fingers, trying to “snap” him out of the spell. The violet sparkles remained, and he continued to make dreamy eyes at me.

  I leaned forward from the waist and swatted his cheek. He caught me by the wrist and kissed my fingertips.

  “You romantic beast,” I said. “No wonder I wasn't getting anywhere with you. You're hopelessly in love with someone else. Some blonde named Chessa.”

  At the sound of her name, he wrapped his free arm around my back and yanked me toward him.