ABRACADABRA
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Now You See Me
Other Books by Debbie Viguié
The Kiss Trilogy
Kiss of Night
Kiss of Death
Kiss of Revenge
Sweet Seasons
The Summer of Cotton Candy
The Fall of Candy Corn
The Winter of Candy Canes
The Spring of Candy Apples
Witch Hunt
The Thirteenth Sacrifice
The Last Grave
Circle of Blood
Tex Ravemcroft Adventures (with Dr. Scott C. Viguié)
The Tears of Poseidon
The Brotherhood of Lies
The Lords of Atlantis
The Psalm 23 Mysteries
The Lord is My Shepherd
I Shall Not Want
Lie Down in Green Pastures
Beside Still Waters
Restoreth My Soul
In the Paths of Righteousness
For His Name’s Sake
Walk Through the Valley
The Shadow of Death
I Will Fear No Evil
Thou Art With Me
Thy Rod and Thy Staff
Comfort Me
Abracadabra
Now You See Me
By Debbie Viguié
Published by Big Pink Bow
Now You See Me
Copyright © 2017 by Debbie Viguié
ISBN-13: 978-0990697169
Published by Big Pink Bow
www.bigpinkbow.com
Printed in the United States of America
2017901998
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to Ann Liotta, ever the woman of mystery.
1
Opal Grant stared out the car window as her aunt, Tanya Sanders, kept up a never-ending monologue.
Dad was right, she never pauses to take a breath, Opal thought. That thought alone was enough to bring tears to her eyes. Don't think about Dad. Don't cry in front of Aunt Tanya. It was a losing battle, but she fought it as long as she could. So intent was she on trying to keep her tears from falling that she didn't notice when Tanya stopped talking.
“I know it's rough, sweetie,” Tanya said, patting her on the leg. “I was just about your age when my dad died.”
“At least you still had your mom,” Opal said and then regretted it.
“I know that your mom would have been here for you if she could have.”
Opal bit her lip, focusing on the physical pain helped her regain some semblance of control. Her mom, Aunt Tanya's sister, had vanished when Opal was five. Lots of parents left home but not like that. For three months the police had searched for her, even suggested that Opal’s dad had killed her. Ultimately her car was found thirty miles outside of Las Vegas, a five hour drive from home. It had been completely torched but they never found a body. If there had been a body to find.
Eventually the police gave up looking, officially classifying her mom as “missing, presumed dead”. Things had never quite gone back to normal, though, and she was sure the stress hadn't been good for her dad's heart. Twelve years later, on the anniversary of her mom's disappearance, it gave out. Some people never let it go. One of her mom's best friends had showed up at her dad's funeral the week before, stood up, and shouted, “The bastard had it coming!” She had been drunk but that was no excuse as far as Opal was concerned.
“I thought you said we were only fifteen miles away?” Opal said, desperately trying to change the subject. “We've been driving for almost an hour.”
Tanya smiled. “Massachusetts is a bit different than California, and that goes for the roads. There's no real direct route, we have to wind our way from the airport to home, but we're almost there. That's Salem's oldest cemetery, on the corner,” she said, pointing.
Opal shuddered. She'd had her fill of cemeteries.
“So, do all the witches live in Salem?” Opal tried to joke.
Tanya laughed. “Most self-respecting witches wouldn't be caught dead here, no pun intended.”
“Oh.”
“You will find, however, a lot of people who can still put on a good show for the tourists, when necessary.”
“So, your house is the one you grew up in?”
“Yes, that's where Claire and I spent our childhood.”
“How come you still live there?”
“You mean, why didn't I move away like your mom?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Because, unlike your mom, I don't hate Salem. In fact, the older I get the more I appreciate it. It has a depth of history and culture you can't get in some parts of the country.”
Tanya was an anthropologist. Opal still wasn't sure exactly what that meant. She just knew that her aunt didn't hack her way through jungles in search of treasure like Indiana Jones. They had gotten that straightened out the first time she came to visit them in California. Opal still felt vaguely disappointed by that.
Tanya had told her then that she solved mysteries about people who had died in the past. When she came out after Opal’s mom had disappeared Opal had begged her to solve the mystery of her mom. That conversation hadn’t gone well for either of them.
Now, years later, they were stuck with each other.
They turned down a street lined with old houses. It seemed familiar to her though she had never been there before. There was a sense of time and age that you couldn't find in California. The brooding sky filled with rain clouds added to the feeling of mystery and decay.
“Which one do you think is ours?” Tanya asked.
Opal pointed without hesitation to a three story light grey house with dark grey trim.
“Very good. What gave it away?” Tanya asked.
Opal shrugged. It looks like a prison wasn't something she should say to her aunt.
They parked beside the house and grabbed Opal's bags out of the trunk of the car. Four large duffels, not much to show for a life she was being forced to leave behind. She took a deep breath and followed her aunt up the front steps and inside the house.
She had expected the inside to somehow match the austere gray of the outside. Instead the rooms were paneled in wood and filled with antique furniture. A plush red velvet couch took up a place of honor in front of the fireplace in the living room off to the right. To the left was the dining room with a mahogany table that could seat eight right in the middle of it. Straight ahead a staircase led to the upper floor.
She followed Tanya up the stairs. At the top they turned left along the landing and then left again down a hallway. The door at the far end was open and Opal followed her inside.
The room was smaller than her room back home had been, but not by much. An antique sleigh bed took up much of the space. It was covered in an old looking quilt with a flower pattern. There was a dresser with a mirror and a closet. The best part of the room, though, was a window seat with a view of the street.
“Do you need help unpacking?” Tanya asked.
“No, I’m good. I’ll do it later,” Opal said.
“This was your mom’s room when we were kids,” Tanya said wistfully, sitting down on the b
ed and running her fingers lightly across the quilt. “Sometimes I come in here when I want to talk to her.”
Tanya seemed lost in her own thoughts for a moment. Then she stood abruptly, looking uncomfortable. She smoothed out the quilt. “Anyway, yeah, so-”
“I can take a different room,” Opal said, noticing how weird her aunt was being about it.
“No,” Tanya said. “You should stay in this room.” There was a catch in her voice like she was trying to hold back tears. “It’s right that you do.”
She should just let it go. She knew she should, but her aunt rarely seemed anything other than confident and somewhat detached from everything.
“If you come in here to talk to her...then you think she’s dead, don’t you?”
She didn’t think Aunt Tanya was going to say anything. She just stood, staring down at the quilt. Finally, after several seconds had passed she whispered, “I don’t know what to think.”
Then she turned and left the room quickly.
Opal wanted to go after her, but clearly Aunt Tanya didn’t want to talk about it and she’d run up against that brick wall before. Alone in the room she looked around. She opened the closet. It was empty except for a few old wire hangers.
She moved over to the dresser which also appeared empty. She put her one bag on top of it and began to pull some of her things out and put them away. When she opened the bottom drawer a scrap of white caught her eye toward the back of the drawer.
She reached in and tugged on it. It had partly fallen into the crack between the bottom of the drawer and the side, leaving only a corner visible. She managed to pull it free and then she stared at it. It was an old picture of two little girls probably about five-years-old. She recognized her aunt from pictures she had seen of her at that age. Tanya was smiling at the camera. Next to her, though, the other little girl was frowning and she had her hands up covering her eyes.
She shivered. There was something about the picture that was a little creepy. Why was the other girl covering her eyes? And was that little girl her mother? She stared hard at the picture, willing it to tell her something about that little girl. Around her it felt like the walls of the room began closing in. Her mother had grown up right here, slept in that bed, dreamed, cried, everything. Suddenly she smelled something. Roses. Her mother had always smelled like roses.
A sudden crash from downstairs made her jump. Her heart was pounding uncontrollably. The picture still in her hand she hurried from the room and headed toward the stairs.
She found her aunt in the kitchen picking pots up off the floor.
“Are you okay?” Opal asked.
“What? Oh, yes, fine. I opened the cabinet and everything fell out,” Tanya said, sounding frustrated. She finished picking stuff up off the ground and began to cram the cookware back into the open cabinet to the left of the oven. She put them back haphazardly, and almost immediately several of them were teetering.
Opal put the picture down on the kitchen table and stepped forward. “Let me do that,” she said.
“Thank you,” Tanya said gratefully, stepping back.
“You don’t cook a lot, do you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“It’s cool. You don’t have to cook. I’m good with frozen food or pizza or whatever.”
“I was hoping to have something a little more...I don’t know...traditional? Normal? For our first night together here.”
“Really, you don’t have to worry about it.”
She rearranged things quickly, wanting to get the cookware put away fast but in a way that wouldn’t send it all crashing back out again.
“Where did you find this?” Tanya asked from behind her, voice strained.
Opal shut the cabinet and turned around to see Tanya standing at the table, the picture she’d found in her hand.
“In the dresser upstairs.”
“Oh. I didn’t know it was there,” Tanya said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Opal said, thinking it was a strange thing for the woman to say. “The little girl with her hands over her eyes, is that my mother?”
“Yes, that’s Tessa.”
“Why did she do that?”
As if with a great effort Tanya turned to look at her. “It was a game. You know...peek-a-boo.”
Memories came flooding back to Opal with such force and clarity that she felt somewhat breathless. “She used to play that with me when I was little. Only, she didn’t say peek-a-boo like dad did.”
“No,” Tanya said with a wistful smile. “She’d say ‘Now you see me’--”
“‘Now you don’t,’” Opal finished.
“Exactly. She always played that game.”
Her aunt cleared her throat. “Thank you for finding this,” she said, slipping the picture into her slack’s pocket.
Opal wanted to ask for it back. She only had one picture of her mother, taken at her parents’ wedding. It was her aunt’s picture, though. Given how she was acting Opal was beginning to suspect that she missed Tessa even more than Opal did.
“So, what’s for dinner?” she asked.
Tanya straightened. “I was going to make spaghetti. There’s hamburger in the freezer and noodles and sauce in the pantry.”
Things were awkward and it seemed like her aunt was even more uncomfortable than Opal was. She moved over to the pantry, eager to be doing something instead of just standing there.
There wasn’t much in the pantry so it was easy to find the spaghetti noodles and the jar of sauce. She pulled them both out and noticed that there was dust on top of the sauce. She looked at the expiration date and realized it was more than two years old.
“Um, Aunt Tanya? This expired two years ago,” she said hoisting the sauce jar aloft.
“Dang. Has it been in there that long?” Tanya laughed. “You were right to assume I don’t cook much. There’s a small grocery two blocks away, I can go get some more.”
“I’ll do it,” Opal volunteered as she set the items down on the counter. The house felt like it was closing in on her and it would be good to get some fresh air alone. Plus, she wasn’t ready to be by herself yet in the house her mother had grown up in.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. You said it was only two blocks away and I need to start learning my way around here.”
“Okay, okay,” Tanya said, slowly. She took a deep breath and turned to face Opal head on. “Look, we should at least talk about a couple of things.”
“Okay,” she said, not sure she liked where this was going.
“Honestly, I don’t know much about raising kids. And, frankly, you’re almost an adult. So, how about I promise not to try and mother you and you promise to just keep me in the loop about what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, where you’re going when you go out. Deal?”
Opal stared at her. A lot of her friends back home would kill to have deals like that. After what had happened to her mother, Opal’s father had been paranoid and made sure he always knew where she was. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, he was just afraid of losing her, too. She didn’t think Tanya necessarily trusted her. It was more like her aunt didn’t know what to do and was afraid of the responsibility she had been saddled with.
“Okay,” Opal said, forcing a smile.
Tanya held out her hand, clearly expecting her to shake on it. Opal did, managing not to roll her eyes in the process.
“To get to the store, you turn left on the street. Go up to the stop sign, turn left, and it will be on your right hand side a block down.”
“Got it. Sounds simple enough,” Opal said.
“The keys to the car...” Tanya trailed off, clearly struggling with how to handle the car issue.
“Don’t worry. I don’t have a license. Dad didn’t want me to learn.”
It was true. It hadn’t been a huge deal. Several of her friends in southern California hadn’t learned to drive either. They were content to let their parents handle that aspect of life. Opal had w
anted to drive. She’d even signed up for the driving class they offered after school. Her dad had found out, though, and it led to the worst fight they’d ever have. In fact, it had been one of the only fights they’d ever had. Bottom line was, she’d quit and he’d considered the subject closed for discussion.
“Oh, so you can’t drive yourself places?” Tanya asked, frowning.
Wham!
That was the sound of another aspect of her new responsibilities hitting home.
“No, but I’m sure there are places I could walk or take a bus-”
Tanya kept frowning then finally seemed to shrug it off with a sigh. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Besides, you’ll be making some friends at school soon and one of them is bound to drive.”
Opal didn’t think that was going to work out as soon as her aunt was probably hoping. Making friends had been difficult for her since her mother disappeared. Usually in the getting to know you early stages of friendship people would ask about what her parents did. She’d be honest. Things would get awkward. The other person would decide they couldn’t deal with that kind of baggage and bail. It was hard to be honest and make friends at the same time.
“Do you need anything else while I’m there?” Opal asked, changing the subject.
“Not that I can think of. If you need or want something, though, please get it.” Tanya fished a twenty dollar bill out of her wallet and handed it to Opal.
“Okay, I’ll be back soon.”
“Okay, good luck,” Tanya said with a big smile.
Yeah, she was definitely stressing even more than Opal was. She smiled back before heading out the door.
Once on the sidewalk she turned left. She’d only gone about a dozen steps, though, when all the hair on the back of her neck suddenly stood on end. She could feel something almost like a physical weight on her.
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