by Nan Sampson
“My plan was to stay in and read a good book, but the three of you boys together need supervision. Can’t have you all getting drunk on root beer, so I guess I’ll bring my book and just read there. In your central heated cabin. In your nice comfy rocking chair.” She grinned.
Per stood and placed his tea mug in the sink. “Great. Remind Charles that we start promptly at six. Any stragglers automatically lose ten points.” He paused behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Life is change, Elspeth. For good or for ill.”
“I don’t like change, Per.”
“You don’t have to like it. You just have to go with it.” He gave her shoulders a pat, then bundled up again. “See you tonight. I’m making mushroom and veggie ragout in red wine sauce. Crusty French bread straight from Jon-Peter’s shop too, with baked brie and cranberry compote.”
Her mouth watered. “Without you, Per, I’d starve. I’ll bring a bottle of wine with the baked goods.”
“Perfect.”
He bustled off into the bright morning, the wind blasting through the door as he opened and closed it quickly behind him.
Ellie didn’t want to think about anything Per had brought up, including the odious Margaret Roesch and the trouble she was causing two of her dearest friends in Horizon, and since she didn’t have a television, which she’d always used to distract herself in her pre-Horizon days, she grabbed the well-worn book Per had left for her on the table.
“On the Road” read the cover. On the back was a photo of the author, the late, great Jack Kerouack. She sipped her tea and flipped it open, past the forwards and prefaces and the table of contents.
For the next two hours she let herself get lost in the dreams and visions of another time, as Charlie and Erik dozed on the couch and the wind rattled the window panes and moaned down the chimney.
Around one o’clock, she roused herself and went into the kitchen to warm up some vegetable barley soup. She sensed, more than heard, Charlie come up behind her. He leaned over her shoulder and his proximity gave her a shiver.
“Smells good. Is that for me?” He snaked an arm out and tried to grab the mug she’d put the soup in.
Slapping his hand, she slipped away from him. “No. Make your own damn lunch, McCallum.”
She took her mug to the little table and had just realized she didn’t have a spoon when one clattered down onto the table top along with a napkin. Charlie stood over her, grinning. “Would Her Majesty care for a drink? A sparkling water perhaps?”
“You just keep pushing, don’t you?”
Did his smile slip a little? “That’s me. Pushy ‘til the end.” He stepped back into the kitchen area and warmed up a cup of the soup for himself then joined her at the table. They ate in companionable silence for a moment then Ellie pushed her cup away. “I’ll be back.”
His mother had raised him well while she’d been alive – he stood up as she did. “Where are you going?”
Irritation flared. “I’m going to check the mail, McCallum. Jeez.”
He settled back in his chair and she felt his energy shift, a sort of pulling in. For a wonder, he didn’t offer to get it for her. “Okay. If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll send out a search party.”
Rolling her eyes, she pulled on her parka and gloves and trekked out to the mail box at the end of her long drive. Then she stood there, enjoying the solitude for a moment. She’d been rude, she knew, but damn it, she wasn’t used to having someone under foot every moment. Yet, she wasn’t exactly sure she wanted him out from under foot either. Maybe it was the weather, and being so confined, maybe she just needed a little more time to herself. Or maybe he just needed to go back to Chicago.
She just didn’t know. Damn that sneaky Norwegian bastard, he’d done it to her again. Making her think about things she didn’t want to think about.
She grabbed the mail out of the box and went back inside, where she settled onto the other end of the couch from Charlie and started to sort through the mail.
Most of it went into the fire, but one item disturbed her. “Damn.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow at her. “What’s up?”
“The birthday card I sent Aunt Tabby came back undeliverable.”
“You have an aunt named Tabby?”
She shot him a look. “Short for Tabitha.”
Now he laughed. “You’re kidding me. Your aunt is really named Tabitha?”
“Yes. It’s an old family name, on the Buchanan side.”
“Is she a witch too?”
That cut close, caused her a frisson of pain. “As a matter of fact, yes. As was my grandmother, Rebecca.” She turned to glare at him, expecting to see ridicule on his face. Instead, she saw curiosity and interest. Damn him. It would have been easier if he’d been obnoxious.
“So you’re a hereditary witch. I’ve been reading up. That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?”
Ellie shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I only know what I am.”
“What about your mom?”
Ellie paused, considering just how much she wanted to divulge. Her father’s voice said, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound, Elspeth’ and she sighed. “She started in the craft, but something turned her off when she was younger, before she met my dad. She never went back to it.”
“Huh. I bet she wasn’t happy about you, then.”
Ellie remembered the fight she and her mother had had, the day she’d returned from her annual summer vacation with her grandmother and told her mother she’d spent the whole time studying the craft with Grams and Aunt Tabby. Serena Gooden’s face had gone bright red, then blanched pale white. She’d grabbed Ellie’s arm and tried to force her to swear she’d never do another spell or ritual ever again.
“’Not happy’ would be an understatement. She was furious. I never knew why, but we had a couple of rocky years because of it.”
“That must have been before I met you. When I got invited to Thanksgiving dinner that year, the two of you seemed to get along great.”
“By then it was water under the bridge. She was never happy with my choice, but she also respected my right to choose my own path. Her only words on the subject, ever, after that fight, was to be careful. I think maybe she thought I’d edge towards the dark side of things.”
“After what I saw with Lacey’s ghost – or whatever that was – I can’t say I blame her. To paraphrase the Bard, it seems like there’s more to heaven and earth than I’d ever dreamt of in my philosophy.”
She had to smile. Leave it to Charlie to find a useful way to quote Shakespeare. That he’d majored in Roman history and studied at the University of Cambridge in England simply blew her away. The man had so many sides, she wasn’t sure she’d ever uncover them all. “Yeah, well, that was Lacey. I took a different path. I think…” She felt herself start to choke up. “I think Mom would be proud.”
She couldn’t speak again for a moment, but she refused to cry anymore. The hole her parents’ murders had left in her still gaped wide, still seemed unfillable, but it had been almost a year and a half and she shouldn’t be reduced to a puddle of tears anytime she spoke of them. She needed to be stronger than that.
Charlie reached over and gently held her hand. Despite every instinct she had to the contrary, she didn’t pull away.
After a moment, he spoke quietly. “I know she would be.”
She turned her face away, brushed at the tears.
Still holding her hand, he cleared his throat. “You were saying, before we digressed, that the birthday card came back undeliverable. Do you supposed she moved? We could do a trace on her, you know.”
Ellie gave a small chuckle. “The idea of Tabby not moving would be the unusual state of affairs. Tabby is a bit of a rolling stone. Never met a new road she didn’t want to explore.”
“Well, then it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“See, that’s the thing. She always lets me know when she moves. Well, at least she used to. She was always good at keeping in touch…
”
“I sense a ‘but’.”
“No, not a ‘but’. More of an ‘until’.” She sighed. She did not want to dig all this up.
“Until what?”
“Until the…” She forced herself to say it. “Until the murders. She was in town that week, you know, and she didn’t even come to the funeral home. I tried to find her, went to the hotel where she was staying, but she was gone.” She rubbed her eyes, feeling suddenly tired. “She and mom were thick as thieves. I guess her death finally tipped Tabby over some edge she’d been skating. She was never the most stable woman.” She picked at the hem of her tunic sleeve. “I thought maybe she blamed me for not being there – I was supposed to be there that night, but I’d chosen at the last minute to go out instead. I thought maybe she’d get over it, but if she moved and didn’t give me her new address…”
“Well, I’m sure as hell glad you weren’t there, or you’d be dead too.” He paused. “So did the cops look into it?”
“What do you mean? You know perfectly well they turned the murder investigation into a circus–”
“Not that. Your aunt’s disappearance. IF she was in town at the time then rabbited before the the funeral…”
“No! That is not even… just no. Tabby would never have hurt Mom and Dad. Never. You didn’t see the bod… them, you didn’t see what those bastards did to them. The blood…”
“I did see, Ellie. I’ve gone through the file, seen the crime scene photographs. There was a lot of hatred there, a lot of rage. That type of crime is usually committed by someone who knows the victim. Knows them well. That’s why the cops looked so hard at you.”
She glared at him. She wasn’t sure which made her more furious, that he’d managed to get his hands on the case files and pried into them, that he could even consider entertaining the notion that Tabby had killed her parents or that he seemed to be siding with the cops for putting her through six months of hell. “Damn you. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about and you had no right to go snooping into my private business.” She stood and he stood with her, still holding on to her hand. She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her.
“Ellie. Ellie, listen to me. I’m not saying they didn’t bungle the whole investigation. I’m not saying they treated you right. But any cop with any tenure knows that in ninety percent of murder cases, it’s a member of the family.”
“So now that family member is Tabby instead of me?”
“No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying I’m surprised they didn’t look at her.”
She wanted to hit him. Slap him or punch him. “You’re dead wrong. Let go of me.”
He dropped her hand, and she turned to stalk away only to realize that there was nowhere to go unless she wanted to bundle up and head out into the arctic cold. “Damn you, Charlie. You had no right. You had no right to look at those pictures.” It felt like a violation. No one should have seen what those animals had done to her father, her mother. Her mother especially. She could still see her, splayed out on the kitchen floor, her skirt hiked up, her blouse ripped open. Blood was smeared everywhere, like some mad painter had used the kitchen as his canvas and Serena Gooden’s blood as his paint.
Charlie’s voice was quiet. “Someone has to solve their murder, Ellie, someone has to bring your parents justice. The local PD has already filed this one away as a cold case. I just wanted to help.”
She faced him, angry that she was crying, angry that he’d interfered, angry that he’d put a thought into her head about Tabby that couldn’t possibly be true. “If you think I’m going to fall into your arms and thank you for digging into my personal business, you’re dead wrong.”
He gave a slight chuckle. “No, I didn’t think that for a minute.” He gave her that ridiculous grin. “Although, if you ever did feel like falling into my arms, I wouldn’t turn you away.”
“Oh, shut up, McCallum.” Now she was angry that he’d made her smile when she was furious.
“Look, let’s look at this a different way. If Tabby was there, in town, when the crime happened and subsequently disappeared, and now she’s apparently vanished without telling you where she’s gone, maybe she knows something. Maybe she was a witness to something.”
She met his gaze, as something horrifying occurred to her. “Oh Goddess, Charlie. She might be in danger.”
“Now, let’s not get carried away. She could just be off the grid. You say she likes to move around, she may not have contacted you yet with her new address. All I’m saying is that it’s a possibility, something that explains why she bailed before the funeral.”
The thought of sweet, flaky Aunt Tabby being stalked by the lunatics that had brutally slaughtered her parents made her stomach clench. “You mentioned you could try to trace her…”
“I did. I can and I will, if you want me to.”
Did she? She would owe him then. But if Aunt Tabby was in danger, or even if something completely unrelated had happened to her, as Tabby’s only living relative, it was up to Ellie to find out. She pressed her lips together, stared at Charlie for a long time. He stood there radiating calm, but he never took his eyes off her.
“Fine. Yes. Do it.”
He walked over and grabbed her laptop off the table, then plopped down on his end of the couch. “As you wish, Your Majesty.” He glanced up at her again. “Now sit down and stop bristling. I’ll need a little information to get started.”
“I am not bristling.”
“The hell you’re not. You’re bristling so much, Per might mistake you for a hedgehog.” He grinned at her. “It’s a good thing I like bristles, or things would never have worked out between us.”
“There is no us, McCallum.”
“Not yet, Glenda Goodwitch, not yet.” With a self-satisfied smirk, he opened up a web browser and logged into a site. “Now, what was the last address you had for her and what’s her full name?”
She sat down, determined not to bristle, and gave him the information he wanted, reminding him they only had two hours until they were required to be at Per’s for the monthly Scrabble Challenge.
“No worries. I’m just going to get the process started. It could take a few days.”
She leaned back as Erik the Red jumped up between them and lay his big, heavy head on her knee. She picked up Jack Kerouac again and tried to recapture her former zen perspective. She could tell it was going to be a long night. Hell, at this rate, it might very well be a long spring.
The Scrabble game had run late which was nothing new, but Bill Gruetzmacher had trounced both Per and Charlie, which was. Per looked tired, and that worried Ellie. He was, after all, a man in his seventies, no matter how healthy he appeared to be. As for Charlie, not only had he lost, but it was like he was not even playing. She wondered if his mind was on finding her aunt or if he was thinking of something completely unrelated. Either way, his gaze kept straying to her, and she felt, as always, that he was somehow seeing inside her. It made her feel exposed, although recently, that exposure no longer felt quite so dangerous.
Still, his distraction, his inability to concentrate had infected her, staying with her as she made her goodbyes to Per and Charlie, and rode home in Bill’s truck in silence. Still feeling subdued, she climbed out of Gruetzmacher’s truck and with a quick wave, trudged up the drive to her cabin, Erik at her side. They had almost reached the porch when Erik abruptly stopped, sat, and gave a quiet whine. Ellie felt her scalp ripple and she slammed up her personal energy barriers, a technique she’d worked to perfect after her experiences with the aggressive ghost of her college friend Lacey the previous fall. Then, protected, she reached out, trying to better sense whatever energy it was that hovered on her porch.
The fact that Erik was wagging his tail even as he sat, looking up, reassured her she wasn’t dealing with the malevolent energy she had encountered twice now while attempting to learn to control her alleged medium abilities. Taking slow, controlled breaths, she grounded and center
ed and closed her eyes.
Immediately, she smelled a familiar scent – Christian Dior perfume. She smiled, relaxed. “Mom?”
A calm presence manifested, and Ellie almost felt as though she were being hugged.
“Mom, I miss you so much.”
Something stroked her cheek, or at least that’s the way it felt. At the same moment, the wind picked up and Erik whined again. Ellie could hear his tail swishing against the snow.
The fragrance of perfume grew stronger and the wind began swirling around her, whipping her auburn curls and blowing ice crystals and dried leaves into a snowy dust devil. As the wind picked up, the calm energy shifted, grew agitated, as though her mother was angry or frightened. Erik stood and his whine became a low, rumbling growl.
“Mom?”
Was it the wind howling or did she hear a voice crying out?
“Mom?!”
Erik’s hackles raised and he began to bark furiously, staring at a spot in the fir trees just to the right of the porch.
“No,” she said aloud. “Not again. Whoever you are, whatever you are, you are not welcome here.” Pulling a tumbled piece of amethyst out of her pocket, she took off her glove and held it tightly in her right hand. According to Harmony Ravenstarr, the owner of The Rainbow Path Metaphysical Shoppe in town, amethyst could be used to protect against psychic attacks and after Ellie’s last experience with the negative energy she’d encountered while attempting to practice controlling her medium abilities, she’d recommended Ellie carry it at all times.
The wind whipped at her, snatching her words. She concentrated on creating a protective barrier around her and Erik, using the stone to boost her energy. Once firmly established, she pushed it outward, even as she chanted a spell to banish whatever negativity was spinning around her.
As she finished up with a firm ‘So mote it be’, she heard someone shout her name, even as the wind abruptly died.
Shaking, she turned, even as Erik left her side, his tail wagging furiously, and ran to meet the figure that was running towards her.