“I’m returning your pie pan,” Gina was saying.
She’d put it on top of Jim’s oat-crop file, which he’d left on the kitchen table in the morning, planning to work on it after church. Thinking back on the scene later, what Jim remembered most clearly, more even than Chip’s anger, was his own annoyance that Gina hadn’t cleaned the dish properly: a finger of caramelized sugar had dribbled down the side, making the pan stick to his spreadsheet.
She noticed his glance and peeled the paper away. “I’m sorry. I took the pie to Autumn’s and I thought she’d washed the pan.”
“You didn’t eat any yourself?” Susan was hurt.
“I did; it was delicious. I’d put it in the freezer, actually, so I could make it my contribution for Christmas dinner—don’t worry, I made sure everyone knew you baked it.”
“Oh, please—” Susan made an embarrassed gesture. “I don’t care about that, as I hope you know. We hadn’t seen your car for a week. Did you go back to New York for the holidays?”
“New York—it’s not an easy place for me to be right now.” Gina made a face. “I stayed in Lawrence with Autumn Minsky—I thought I owed myself a break in a house with real heat.”
Jim got up hastily and took the pie pan, which Gina was still holding, to put in the sink. He found her mug, which he had carefully washed and put aside, and handed it to her. Those slender white thighs, which he couldn’t quite put out of his mind, embracing plump, pugnacious Autumn—he quickly returned to the table and busied himself with his oat-crop data.
“How do you spend your time?” Susan asked. “Are you doing any work on the house?”
“Me?” Gina laughed and looked at her slender fingers. “I think I know which end of a hammer you hold, but I’m not sure how to swing it. I worked in public relations before my marriage. I’m trying to reconnect with old clients, see if I can build up some kind of private business so I don’t have to live in mold and ice forever. That isn’t going too well, so I’m dabbling with writing a book. Like every other college English major, I always imagined I had a big novel in me.”
“It’s a pity you can’t use the fireplaces,” Susan said, ignoring the biting self-mockery in Gina’s voice. “What’s your novel about?”
“Oh, romance among the Wiccans. Nobody writes about us as if we were real people. I thought I could write a love story with Wicca as the backdrop. As if you were going to write a love story with Christianity as the backdrop.”
Susan’s eyes sparkled. “No, I’d make the anti-slavery days my backdrop. I’d set a romance in the Fremantle house. After all, the Victorians fell in love, just as we do.”
“Why do you care so much about that house?” Gina asked. “I can see it used to be wonderful, but it’s falling apart, and smells of cat pee.”
Lara, attracted by the talk, came in, her iPod earpieces dangling around her neck like a stethoscope. Pee, Lara thought. Gina and her friend are obsessed by pee. That was how she would casually introduce the word into conversation with Kimberly and Melanie at lunch tomorrow.
She covertly eyed Gina’s clothes. She was expensively, even exotically, dressed, in a bloodred jacket with fur trim and fringed cavalier boots. The leather was soft and clean, except for a few mud spatters Gina must have gotten walking from her car to the house. Boots like that wouldn’t survive five minutes if you really walked through snow in them, Lara thought scornfully, wondering at the same time how much they cost and whether they would make her look as sophisticated as they did Gina.
“It’s the pee and the mold, and everything, that makes me care about the house,” Susan was saying. “Things like that don’t seem repulsive to me. Just sad, the way a person who used to be, oh, maybe a great athlete, seems sad if she’s falling apart.”
“But why does it matter to you?” Gina repeated.
“It’s the history of the time!” Susan leaned forward, with her coffee mug between her hands. “The Fremantle house is beautiful, but it’s what it meant to the valley back then, that’s what I feel when I walk through it. That’s why I’d like to set a book there, except I can’t write. Where is your story set?”
“I put it in New York, because that’s what I know, but, listening to you, I’m wondering if I should write about Uncle John’s house instead. After all, we’re going to have an Imbolc ceremony there, which I could never have done in the city—at least, not with a real fire.”
Susan, always eager for new experiences, peppered her with questions about her ritual.
“It’s a fire festival. We cleanse ourselves to be ready for spring. You know the Swedish festival, where a girl wears a crown of burning candles?”
When Susan and Lara shook their heads, Gina smiled. “They do—take my word for it. It’s a sort of Christianized version of the old goddess ritual. You should come see what we’re all about.”
“When is it?” Susan asked.
“February second. If you do decide to come, you need to bring a gift for the fire, something to burn that will bring you good luck in the harvest. Come to think of it, Imbolc was originally a farmers’ holiday—they’d beg the Earth Mother for a good harvest. I’d think every farmer around here might want to do that.”
“No, because then Myra Schapen would write them all up on her website,” Lara put in.
“Myra Schapen?” Gina repeated. “Isn’t that the family you said lived on down the road? Is Myra in school with you?”
Lara blinked, trying to imagine a teenage Myra. “She’s about a hundred years old, and she’s like a witch! I always expect to see her with a corncob pipe when she’s out on the tractor. It’s her son, Arnie, who’s the sheriff’s deputy. He came—probably he’s the one who came over to spy on you when you moved in. Myra—Nanny Schapen, I mean—she drove his wife off, and now she and Arnie—Mr. Schapen—they live with her grandsons. Junior is the biggest bully—”
“Lara!” Susan cut her daughter off. “You cannot be talking about the Schapens like that. Just because you can’t get along with Junior and Robbie doesn’t mean Gina won’t find a way to talk to them. And you know your father and I don’t want you using Myra’s and Arnie’s first names.”
“If Gina does a witches’ bonfire, you know the only thing Myra—Nanny Schapen—will say is that Gina and her friends are going to hell!” Lara said stubbornly. “The Schapens have a website, and she’s always writing up stuff about us or other people around here in a really mean way.”
“But if she’s a witch, as you say, she and I are kindred spirits, and she belongs at our ceremony,” Gina said in the aloof, mocking voice she’d used when Lara and Susan first saw her. “Perhaps I’ll call on her and issue a formal invitation.”
Lara turned away, embarrassed both by her own blunder in calling Myra a witch in front of Gina and by Gina’s ironic inflection.
“There’s no privacy in the country,” Jim said to cover the awkward moment. “You may think because you don’t live near anyone that everyone minds their own business, but if you have a bonfire the whole valley, from the Kaw to Highway 10, will know what you’re doing.”
“I know,” Gina said, laughing with real amusement. “Remember, I’ve already had a Peeping Tom and the witch’s son calling on me.”
“That reminds me,” Jim answered. “I talked to Clem Burton. He’s going to keep an eye on Eddie, in case it was Eddie up your tree. And I spoke to Hank—Hank Drysdale, the sheriff—casually. But it wouldn’t hurt for you to have a dog over there.”
“A dog?” Gina said blankly. “What would I do with it when I left?”
“Take it with you, leave it for the next tenant—I don’t know.”
“Since I don’t know, either, I think I’d better rely on locks and bolts. But, Susan, I wish you would consider coming to our Imbolc ceremony. I think you’d enjoy it.”
Jim, seeing his wife’s face light up, found himself tensing. She would enjoy it. Witchcraft would become a new passion with her. Arnie and Myra would have a field day, writing about the hell-bo
und Grelliers. He realized that Gina was asking him something and jerked his attention back to the kitchen.
“That building that’s collapsed out behind the barn,” she repeated, “can I use that for the bonfire?”
Jim hesitated. “A boy was killed when that place burned down. I’m not sure if they ever brought his body out. Maybe you should leave it alone.”
“Jim! They must have brought him out,” Susan protested. “Liz Fremantle wouldn’t have let a boy rot in there, you know that as well as I do.” She turned to Gina and explained the history of the commune, the fire, the bucket brigade.
“Were you here?” Gina asked her.
“I was a schoolgirl,” Susan said, “living in—I can’t even remember what town we lived in then. My father never could hold a job more than two or three years; we were always moving. That’s why I was so thankful to marry someone who was rooted to a single place, whose family had a long history there. No, I just used to hear Jim and Doug—Jim’s brother—talk about it. And Gram and Grandpa, of course, so I feel as though I had seen it, that’s all. Right before the fire, someone put weed killer on the marijuana crop. The kids were out grieving over the damage—in the moonlight, I can just picture them—when the house went up in flames.”
“And you never knew who died?” Gina asked.
Jim shook his head. “I wasn’t quite ten. I don’t remember the details that well; I just remember forming part of the bucket brigade the night of the fire. And Myra Schapen, she always terrified me. And she came over to watch the fire, with Arnie and his dad. The Ropeses and the Wiesers, even the Burtons—everyone helped except Myra and her husband. I looked up and saw her watching the fire. The expression on Myra’s face, that made a believer out of me!”
“A believer?” Gina said.
“I knew that’s what would be waiting for me in hell if I died without Jesus,” he said, laughing to cover his embarrassment at mentioning God to this sophisticated woman who practiced witchcraft.
Fourteen
THE COVEN GATHERS
TWICE A MONTH, Lara’s church youth group helped stock the shelves and fill bags at a Lawrence food pantry. In January, after school had started up again, Lara came home from her Saturday stint and announced that Elaine Logan had been at the pantry. The rest of the family was already sitting down to lunch. Lara grabbed a bowl of soup and took it to the table, blurting out information through a mouthful of bread.
“What? Is Elaine back in town? I thought she was living with her sister or someone in Chicago,” Jim said.
“Didn’t I tell you? Curly said she showed up at New Year’s drunk as a skunk,” Chip said.
Naturally, Curly knew. Even though Curly and Blitz worked in town in the winter—Blitz as a mechanic for the school system, Curly for his cousin’s construction business—Chip hung out with Curly. Lara was pretty sure Curly took Chip drinking, but she knew it would really piss off her parents if she shared that suspicion so she kept it to herself.
“Poor Elaine,” Susan mourned. “What a terrible waste. She was a wonderful student, could have done anything with her life.”
“She says she was a wonderful student,” Chip corrected impatiently. “You know the kind of lies that old bag tells.”
“Etienne! I will not have you using language like that, especially not about someone as unfortunate as Elaine.”
“But, Mom, she really is ghastly, not unfortunate,” Lara said. “Like today, I offered to carry her groceries for her, and she said, ‘Aren’t you Jesus’ favorite little lamb,’ in the nastiest way possible. And she makes stuff up, so you can’t tell whether it really happened or not. Like, do you believe she really turned down a scholarship to medical school?”
People change with time, Jim thought, but his daughter was too young to know you could start out filled with promise and end up worse off than Clem Burton. It was hard to believe it of Elaine—fat, leering, drunk more often than she was sober—but maybe she really had been a student bright enough to get into medical school thirty-five years ago.
“You’d better warn Gina Haring,” Chip said.
“That’s right!” Susan said. “It didn’t occur to me, even when we were telling Gina about the bunkhouse, because Elaine’s been away for over a year now. But maybe she won’t try to come out. You know, after Liz Fremantle died Elaine did stop her visits.”
“All the more reason she’ll do it now,” Lara said. “She’ll hear the gossip about Gina and want to check her out.”
“And what gossip would that be?” asked Jim in his coldest voice.
“Just that someone’s renting the house,” Lara said hastily.
“And that she’s a dyke who practices witchcraft,” Chip added.
“Etienne! You’re not to use that word,” Susan said. “If you mean that Gina is a lesbian, say that. But you don’t know—”
“Mom, I’ll promise not to use the word dyke if you’ll promise to stop calling me Etienne. You know I hate it.”
“You’ll grow into it,” Susan said. “One of these days, you won’t want a child’s nickname any longer and then you’ll be glad you’re used to hearing your real name. Anyway, we don’t know that Gina Haring is a lesbian.”
“Come on, Mom, everyone knows.”
“By which, I take it, Lara talked to you and you talked to Curly, and now everyone in Douglas County knows Gina and Autumn Minsky have spent a night in the same house,” Jim said drily.
Chip scowled and turned his head away. Lara said, “Dad, it’s not like it’s some secret. She announced it right here in the kitchen, like she wanted us to know.”
“She didn’t announce she was a lesbian, Lulu. And if that’s what you’re telling everyone—”
“I didn’t tell everyone. I asked Chip and Kimberly their opinions, you know, after I saw Ms. Minsky in bed that day we went over. I asked if that meant her and Autumn were—”
“She and Autumn,” Susan corrected.
“Okay, she and Autumn. So I wondered, did that mean she was a—you know. I tried to ask you, Dad, but you got that wooden-statue look on your face you always get if I talk about anything even remotely concerned with sex, so I had to ask someone else.”
“And Chip is an expert?” Jim gave a ghost of a smile, trying not to be annoyed by the criticism.
“Ask Janice Everleigh,” Lara said pertly.
Chip made a violent gesture. “Dad is right. You should mind your own business for a change.”
“Sor-ree!” Lara said. “Can’t you take a joke?”
Brother and sister glared at each other as if they were four and eight, not fourteen and eighteen. Jim sighed and tried to change the subject, asking Lara if she knew where Elaine Logan was living.
“Mmm-hmm,” Lara said through a mouthful of peanut butter. She swallowed. “You know, it’s Ms. Carmody who takes our youth group to the pantry, and she was asking Elaine how she was settling into New Haven Manor.”
“New Haven?” Jim was surprised. “How long will that last? They have a strict no-alcohol policy.”
“Rachel Carmody is on the board,” Susan said. “She might have persuaded them to give Elaine a trial.”
“Rachel does a lot, between the youth group and being on the church’s board of directors, besides teaching high school. I’m surprised she’d take on another board.”
“Yes,” Susan said, “but that’s who people always want, someone who’s shown she’s responsible. Anyway, when I see Gina on Monday I’ll explain who Elaine is and that she sometimes hitches a ride out to wander around the property. I do hope Gina won’t mind—Elaine got into the habit when Liz Fremantle was alive.”
“What are you doing with Gina?” Lara asked.
“She asked me to stop into Between Two Worlds to look at a book on the Imbolc ceremony.”
“That shop is such a heap of New Age horseshit,” Chip said. Then, catching his father’s expression, he quickly edited himself: “Horse doo-doo, I mean. The girls go there to get their fortunes told off the t
arot decks. I went with Janice one night, and it is so bogus. Why do girls go in for that kind of crap?”
“Why do boys go to the Storm Door and get drunk on three-two beer?” Lara demanded. “At least we don’t throw up and stink after we have our fortunes told.”
“Okay, you two, enough,” Jim said automatically, adding to his wife, “Why are you looking at this Imblog ceremony?”
“Imbolc,” Susan corrected.
“Mom, you’re not going in for Gina’s witch stuff, are you?” Chip demanded.
“No, of course not, but I do want to see her fire. This is the year we’re getting full organic certification for the X-Farm. We could use some good luck for our sunflower crop, so some seeds will be my gift to the fire.”
Jim’s lips tightened. “Suze! You’re on the board of directors at Riverside, remember?”
His wife smiled provocatively. “We’re an open-covenant church, Jim. We start every service saying, ‘Wherever you are on life’s journey, we welcome you.’ Of course I’m not going to become a pagan. But a party with other women, a bonfire—we’ll throw in leftover evergreens from Christmas for luck, I’ll add some sunflower seeds, they’ll dance and have drums, I’d love to be there.”
“Mom, don’t do it!” Chip said. “You know it’ll be in Myra’s ‘News’ column by Monday morning. Don’t get involved with that bunch of crackpots. I can’t take the fallout from another one of your weird ideas.”
“Just what do you mean by that, Etienne? What ‘weird’ ideas of mine have bothered you so much?” Susan’s voice trembled.
“Come on, Mom. Don’t you know everyone around here thinks you’re nuts, that you’re a Communist? What are they going to say if you dance around a bonfire with a bunch of dykes? Arnie and Myra and Junior will be telling the whole valley that you’re a dyke, too!”
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