Normally, she enjoyed a nice gallery opening, a chance to see and be seen, to shop and chat, and she usually always ran into someone she knew. But tonight she couldn’t help but search the crowd, trying to find Jill, who so far was nowhere to be seen. The same for Claudia and Mara. Where are those guys?
Lindsay checked her watch. Six-fifteen. The opening only lasted until eight. What could be keeping them?
The front door opened, and Lindsay’s head snapped around as it had the last several times, but it was just a young, twentysomething couple wearing their trendy 1970s clothes.
“I think I’m going to go shopping,” Lindsay said to James. But she wasn’t really interested in buying any art; she wanted another glass of wine, something to help take the edge off.
“Just save us some money for cab fare,” James said before turning back to his loft-condo conversation.
It wasn’t unusual for Claudia to be late. Lindsay didn’t know why it was upsetting her so much. But where was Mara? Lindsay worked her way around the groups of people, looking for anyone she might know. She glanced over Jill’s paintings while taking little sips of her wine, then went to refill her wineglass.
A few sculptures, not Jill’s, were placed here and there, and Lindsay was intrigued by them. The one she’d spotted when she walked in the door had raised her eyebrows. She thought it might be fun, a lesson in psychology, to stake out that “flower” all night, to watch the reactions of those who went by, to see who saw it for what it was—and who didn’t.
“I don’t know where Jill is. I can’t believe she’s missing it,” Lindsay overheard a woman’s voice behind her.
“Maybe she wants to make a dramatic entrance,” a tall, dark-haired man answered, “or maybe she’s not coming at all.”
Lindsay pretended to be admiring another of the glass flower sculptures, walking around it slowly, trying to make it appear that she was more interested in seeing the sculpture from all sides, than in overhearing the conversation going on behind her.
“No way. She’d never missed an opening. She loves the attention. Maybe I should try to call her, to see if she’s okay.”
The man shrugged. “If you must.”
“Oh, Davis, you’re probably right. I’m being silly.” The woman was laughing now. “Jill’s probably just being moody. Her father used to tell me her mother was difficult like that.”
The couple drifted away and Lindsay was tempted to follow them, but that would be too obvious. Is Jill not coming at all? Blowing off her own opening night? What is going on with her?
Lindsay looked back toward the front of the gallery, scanning the crowd for Claudia or Mara. I am going to kill those two, talking me into showing up here to confront Jill, and then both of them just blow it off without so much as a phone call. At that thought, Lindsay flipped open the top of her purse to check her cell phone. Nothing.
She continued her wandering and found several small paintings hanging on the back wall. They weren’t abstracts and obviously weren’t part of Jill’s show, which had turned out to be surprisingly small. Lindsay walked slowly past them, contemplating each one absently with a sip of wine.
A narrow hallway led to an office in the back. A solitary artwork hung on the brick wall at the end of it. Lindsay edged closer, turning down into the hallway to get a better look at it, sensing somehow that this area was off limits. It was a painting—and strangely quite a lovely one—of factories. Its palette was gray and black and rust, but there was something in the way the smoke rose from the chimneys and in the color of the sky, with the stars. It was compelling. I wish I could go there, Lindsay thought while staring at it, and at the moment she had that thought, much to her surprise, she swore the paint shifted around—almost playfully—making stars twinkle and smoke waft up. She shook her head and looked into her wineglass to see if maybe someone had slipped something in there when she hadn’t been looking. Perhaps she simply had drunk too much.
When she looked back at the painting, the paint was, of course, very still. She stared at it for a while longer, waiting to see if it would happen again, wondering how a painting could make her want to go visit a factory.
“That one’s not for sale,” a woman’s voice said from behind her, and the soothing tone of the words let Lindsay know she wasn’t in too much trouble for being back here.
“Oh. It just caught my eye. I hope you don’t mind. I wanted a closer look.”
“Not at all,” the woman said calmly. “I just wanted you to know, it’s not for sale.”
“It’s very unusual.”
The woman’s expression carried a hint of a smile, as if she knew Lindsay had just hallucinated moving paint. “Oh, it is indeed. My mother was the artist. She was an unusual lady,” she paused. “Magical.”
“You know, this is going to sound crazy,” Lindsay decided to confess, the wine loosening up her judgment. Plus it already seemed to her that this lady knew anyway. “But I swear I thought I saw the paint move.”
The woman’s expression was serene. She made no comment and appeared to be waiting for Lindsay to continue.
“There isn’t some special kind of, I don’t know, holographic paint in it, is there?” Lindsay asked, turning back to look at the painting.
“Holograms? No.”
Okay, I guess I won’t be able to come back to this gallery. Lindsay tried to console herself with the thought that she probably wasn’t the first guest here who’d had one too many Chardonnays at an opening.
“There’s magic in it, though,” the woman said. And when Lindsay turned around to see if she had heard her right, the woman’s serene expression had changed into a smile.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“So the paint moves?” Lindsay asked.
“It can. But not everyone sees it.”
Lindsay was speechless for a moment.
Then, for lack of anything else to say, she held out her right hand. “I’m Lindsay. Lindsay McDermott.”
“Tate,” the woman said, shaking her hand.
Lindsay was confused. Was the woman’s name Tate? Because that was Lindsay’s maiden name, but it had sounded like she was being corrected. “Your name is Tate?” she asked when they had shaken hands.
“No dear,” the woman replied, “yours is.”
Lindsay’s eyes narrowed on this odd person. Mentally she was trying to shrug it off. A lot of people knew who she was. After all, Lindsay Tate-McDermott was a woman about town. A person could have heard of her, could know her maiden name was Tate, that she often went by Tate-McDermott.
“Where are my manners?” The woman laughed at herself. “I’m Greta Craven.”
“Pleased to meet you, Greta.” Lindsay thought about asking how Greta knew her name, but instead asked, “Are you the owner?”
“I am.”
Lindsay turned around to look at the painting again, watching it closely. “Well, like I said, it’s a most unusual painting.” Lindsay stared hard at the stars. “How often does it, uh…move?”
“It only moves for those who are willing to see it move.”
“Oh? And who can see it? Anyone?”
“So far, the only other person I know of that has seen it, besides me, is you.”
Lindsay was unused to being rendered speechless twice in one evening. She kept her back to Greta as her mouth went dry. She tried to swallow but couldn’t make the back of her throat close. A nervous smile had frozen on her face as she stared at the painted factories. When she realized she still had some wine in her glass, she took a drink and it helped bring her voice back.
Lindsay turned to face Greta. “Just me?”
Greta nodded.
She was a slippery one, this Greta. A woman of few words. Her silences reminded Lindsay of an interviewing technique James used, just nodding silently at the end of an interviewee’s response. He said they always felt compelled to fill the silence and that it was always amazing to him the disparaging details with which they chose to fill it.
Wel
l, Lindsay was not going to fall for that trick. She turned and quietly watched the painting even though she was dying to pump this woman for more information, ask a million questions, such as, How come I’m the only one who’s ever seen it move? Or, What do you put in your Chardonnay here, anyway?
“I think only people who believe in magic are willing to or able to see it,” Greta answered her thoughts. “They’re the ones who are able to recognize it when it’s right in front of them. It’s rather sad, really. There’s so much magic in the world and not many can see it for what it is, preferring to believe in luck instead, or maybe in nothing at all.”
Lindsay was flattered. “Oh, I absolutely believe in magic. I think I’ve always believed. In fact, sometimes I think we all have the ability to do magic, to make our wishes come true.”
“Do you now?” Greta sounded mildly amused.
“Some of my friends and I have been able to do it. We’ve gotten together and helped each other wish for things. At first we had just amazing results—” Lindsay stopped there, realizing too late that the Chardonnay had started talking again and she shouldn’t have blabbed so much about Wish Club to a complete stranger. She felt the beginnings of a headache coming on.
“What sort of things have you wished for?” Greta asked. Now she seemed seriously interested, her brows scrunched together over the thick plastic frame of her reading glasses.
Pick something lame, Lindsay thought to herself. Think of a little one. But for some reason the only wish that came to her mind was the one for the rain.
“Well, one time we made the rain stop.”
Greta’s eyes closed, her shoulders dropped abruptly, and she exhaled while a look of complete understanding washed over her face.
When Greta opened her eyes, the expression on her face said this explains everything. She looked at Lindsay, gently shaking her head up and down. “Of course you did.”
The door buzzer blared in the hallway and it startled both of them awake. Granted, it was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and they probably shouldn’t have been sleeping, but it was a much-needed recess from their weekend of sex and they hadn’t been expecting company.
“Don’t answer it,” Dan said.
Claudia sat up on both elbows and looked out the bedroom door toward the buzzer. He wrapped an arm around her and tried to pull her back down under the covers. The door buzzed again.
“I don’t know,” Claudia said. “It might be Lindsay.”
“All the more reason not to answer it.”
“She’s already called twice today. It might be urgent.”
Dan flopped his face down into his pillow. Claudia picked up her jeans and sweater from the floor and put them on, grateful that the pillow had made the last thing he’d said about Lindsay unintelligible.
“You’d better get some clothes on, too,” she said. “Just in case.”
Lindsay and Claudia were on the couch when Dan finally emerged from the bedroom, his hair sticking out in odd directions. Apparently, it wasn’t until she saw Dan and his hair that Lindsay realized she’d interrupted something.
“So anyway,” Lindsay continued, watching Dan walk across the hall to the bathroom, “I really am sorry to barge in on you like this.” She said that a little louder, Claudia knew, so that Dan would hear it.
Lindsay touched her finger to the tip of her nose and popped her eyes at Claudia, who felt herself flush ten shades of red.
Lindsay lowered her voice before continuing, “Claude, I’m sorry—I didn’t realize.”
“It’s okay, never mind.” Claudia looked down the hallway toward the bathroom with a smile. She turned back to Lindsay. “What else did she say?”
“She said we need to get everyone who was there both nights back together at the next meeting, in order to undo the spells.” Lindsay contorted her face into a wry smile. “And what that means is—”
“We need Jill.” Claudia groaned. “Great. How are we going to get her back? She didn’t even show up last night—”
Lindsay just looked at Claudia. She didn’t need to say that wasn’t her problem. She’d already complained ad nauseum about how none of them had shown up at the gallery.
Great, Claudia thought. I get stuck with Mission Impossible. She was already having second thoughts about even trying to undo the spells. And now she was supposed to somehow make Jill show up at the next meeting? How was she going to do that? What was in it for Jill?
“What reason could Jill possibly have for wanting to come back?”
“Well, for one thing, Greta is going to make us promise not to do our wishing thing anymore.”
Claudia raised her eyebrows.
“That’s one of the conditions she has for helping us. She said if we still want to make wishes or do magic, she’ll teach us. She’ll train us in the Craft, show us how to be real witches.”
“Oh, that’ll get Jill to the meeting,” Claudia said, but her mind had already started turning. Real witches? Making wishes come true—successfully? No more turning lives upside down. No more chaos? Hmm. Now that could make trying to talk Jill into coming back for one more meeting a challenge worth accepting.
Everyone told Lindsay they’d be able to make tonight’s meeting, the second Emergency Meeting of Wish Club. For whatever that was worth, Lindsay thought. They’d told her they were going to be at Jill’s opening three days earlier, too.
She put the cookies in the oven and was rinsing her hands in the sink when the door chimes started ringing. Lindsay carried the dish towel with her to the front hall, drying her hands as she went. She looked through the peephole. It was Greta, right on time.
In the time it took Lindsay to hang up Greta’s cape-like coat, she’d already entered the living room and was taking a look around. Greta’s outfit was a cross between professional gallery owner and hippie-witch. She wore a long, dark, almost black, purple velvet skirt and a long-sleeved black silk T-shirt. Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun and held together with a black velvet scrunchie.
When Lindsay turned around, Greta had her head tilted up, as if she were trying to get a sense of the place, as if she were sniffing it. “What a lovely home you have,” she said, and it gave Lindsay a pleasant chill to think this woman thought her home was lovely.
“Oatmeal raisin cookies?” Greta asked.
“Yes, how—?”
“There is nothing else that smells quite the same as homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. They’re my favorite.”
Lindsay was not much of a baker, but this afternoon she’d decided to make something for Wish Club, as a way to keep herself busy, to calm her nerves until the meeting. She’d pulled out her cookbooks, settling on oatmeal raisin cookies. Plopping scoops of dough onto the metal sheet, she’d tried to tell herself it wasn’t that strange that she’d suddenly felt compelled to bake something. Now she wasn’t so sure it wasn’t so strange.
Greta bent over the coffee table to examine a book. “I’ve always been a fan of Mapplethorpe.” She quickly moved on from the table and the Mapplethorpe book, over to the bookshelves.
“Me, too…well, obviously.” Lindsay wrung the dish towel in her hands. Now I’m acting as confounded as Claudia when she’s in one of her states.
Greta scanned the bookshelves, running her hand along the spines on a shelf that was at about chest height, and Lindsay got chills again.
“Oh my, such loss. Such terrible loss,” Greta said, never taking her eyes off the bookshelves. “It must have been a very difficult time for you.”
What? Could she know? I never told anyone. Lindsay did a quick scan of the bookshelves herself. She felt dizzy, almost faint. Not again! Her heart thumped in her chest.
“I suppose by now you realize your destiny lies elsewhere,” Greta said.
Lindsay opened her mouth to reply, but just closed it again. What on earth would she say? Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?
Greta slowly finished her scan of the bookshelves, then turned her attent
ion to the rest of the room. She moved around gradually, checking out a few paintings on the walls, the view from the windows, the bric-a-brac on an end table. Lindsay got chills again when she watched Greta pick up a small paperweight from the table and gaze inside its bubbled glass.
Then suddenly Greta was finished. She put the paperweight down and turned back around to face Lindsay, raising her watch and her eyebrows simultaneously. “I suppose everyone is always fashionably late to these things?” She walked over and sat in the middle of the couch, folding her hands in the middle of her purple lap. She sighed, looking straight ahead, a resolved expression on her face.
“I still have a little finishing up to do in the kitchen.” Lindsay pointed over her shoulder with the dish towel. The timer from the oven buzzed as if on cue.
Greta looked at her and smiled, but didn’t say anything.
“I’m just going to go take care of that, then.”
“Oh yes, of course, dear. Go right ahead.” Greta didn’t move from the couch, made no offer to help. She spoke as though she knew Lindsay had a lot to think about.
Mara stabbed the point of the wine opener into the waxed top of another cork. “Now, that was just weird.” She tried to keep her voice low, even though there was a good distance between Lindsay’s kitchen and the living room, where Greta was still sitting alone on the couch.
She pushed the opener farther down into the cork and began to twist it, while Lindsay arranged vegetables on a tray. “How did she know about Dr. Seeley? That he’s so mean? Did you tell her?” The little silver wings of the wine opener rose up crankily.
“Of course not,” Lindsay said. “I get the impression that Greta is just like that. She knows things sometimes.”
“She’s psychic?”
“I don’t know, maybe. She just knows things.”
The cork popped as Mara pulled it from the bottle.
“She just knows things,” Mara repeated. She twisted the frayed cork from the opener.
Wish Club Page 27