A Witch Axe to Grind

by Constance Barker

  NANN AWOKE TO THE SMELL of coffee and steak. Padding down to the kitchen, she saw Manuel expertly cracking a few eggs. They hit the pan with a hiss. “You must be starving after last night.” He gave her a mischievous smile. He wore a wife beater shirt and tightie whities. Nann gave him the up and down. Such a good-looking guy.

  “Steak omelet okay with you?” He returned to the stove, chuckling. “No pork products in this house. There’s coffee. I’m almost done. Just waiting for the peppers and onions to get soft.”

  Nann poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the little table in the kitchen. Pokey’s bowl was full of Little Debbie snack cakes. Manuel had thoughtfully fed her pig.

  Plates in hand, Manuel walked them to the table and sat. “I was thinking, maybe later we could have a picnic up on the bluff. Supposed to be a beautiful day. No better way to spend it than with a beautiful woman.”

  His hand covered hers, warm from his labor. Nann’s heart jumped up a beat as she looked in his eyes. She was distracted by an odd, squeaky noise. Pokey rolled through the kitchen. He was the size and shape of a beach ball, his hooves waving, useless. He rolled back out again toward the living room.

  “I guess we should cut back on his snack cakes,” Manuel said. He motioned to her with his fork. “Dig in, babe.”

  Nann was in a dream, she realized—an intensely realistic one. She could smell the eggs and beef, the coffee. Manuel’s hair was mussed, he had a birthmark on his left shoulder. His strappy T-shirt hem was frayed at one edge. There was mustard or something, a sticky stain she hadn’t cleaned off the table. Pokey rolled into the dining room.

  She had learned how to manipulate her dreams from Aunt Nancy. Lucid dreams had a special quality, an ability to shift waking reality. All it took was focus. Nann looked at her hands. One held a fork. She put it down, staring at her fingers, flexing them. It took a lot of concentration, but she centered herself. Finally, she locked eyes with Manuel.

  Except it wasn’t Manuel. It was Keith Schwenk. The shock of it almost made her lose her grip on the dream. Nann held on. “Who are you? How are you doing this?”

  Keith’s face turned ugly, beard stubble rasping free from his skin, features twisting. She heard a pop and a squeal in another room. The fork in his hand turned into a gun. “Stay out of our business!” he said through his teeth.

  With a gasp, Nann sat up in bed. She looked to see Pokey in his bed. He grunted, feet kicking. Was he dreaming he was a beach ball? He seemed to like it. You never knew with that pig. She ran the back of her hand across her forehead. Sweaty.

  Okay, for sure the dream came partly out of her subconscious. She didn’t know about Tink’s squeeze cooking her breakfast, and what that implied. She had seen him last night, getting chased around by the VHS. She did worry about Pokey’s health. Still, she felt the underlying manipulation. Maybe, as a Druid, she was more immune than most. But what if Manuel was sharing the dream? Would that impact his relationship with Tink? Would Tink be angry at Nann?

  Whatever the case, when she called out the dream, it reacted violently. She had feelings for Keith, deny them or not. At the same time, she worried that she crossed boundaries when it came to his job. Using an authority figure, one who was up close and personal, to scare her off, that took some intelligent design. Whatever she was up against, it was slippery, and smart.

  Chapter 10

  Her pursuit of Nick O’Broin was pleasantly delayed. Brandi Kugler showed up to buy books for her kids. She was one of the few regular customers Nann had. While the woman didn’t buy any books for herself, she felt it was important that her children read.

  She hauled a bunch up to the counter. When she set them down, her eyes strayed to the display for Nick O’Broin’s book signing. “Well, who’s this hottie?”

  “He’s coming on Friday. It’s an author event. He’ll give a little talk about his book, and then sign some. You should come.”

  Brandi picked up a copy. “What’s it about?”

  “Local history,” Nann said, “about the founding of Amity Corners, and Port Argent.”

  Her customer fondled the book. “He’s coming here? In person?” She flipped to the author photo on the back cover flap. “Huh. Maybe I’ll get some for myself. Get something, I mean.”

  Nann rang her up and bagged the books.

  “Summer’s almost over,” Brandi said. “Thank God the kids will be back in school. These should give me a little quiet time.”

  “Well, thanks for your business, Brandi. Look forward to seeing you Friday.”

  Brandi walked out, smiling to herself. Almost immediately after, Fran Ducar walked in. Fran was a nurse in Oswego. Usually, she only bought one book, and by the same author. “Sorry, Fran, the next Joanne Fluke doesn’t come out until February.”

  “Well, I heard the new J.R. Ward came out yesterday. Do you have that?”

  Fran was short, plump, sporting a helmet of silver hair. Hardly the type to read blood- and sex-soaked vampire novels. Or, maybe exactly the type. Nann picked up the book from the New Arrivals shelf. “You know what these are about, right?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve read them all. Very steamy. You know, we nurses pass books around. All of them will want to get their hands on this when I’m done,” Fran smiled.

  “Well, when they get tired of borrowing your books, maybe they could come here and get their own.” Nann rang her up.

  “I talk up your store every chance I get.” Fran hefted her bag. “You’re the best, Nann.”

  Two customers in her first hour? Nann pinched herself. Not dreaming. In the following lull, she phoned the B&Bs and hotels in Port Argent. For whatever reason, Port Argent hotels had something against Nann. When she threw a huge Beltaine celebration in May, none of the places would sell rooms to her guests. Druids could get pretty crazy, of course. But how did the Port Argent hospitality industry even know who Nann was?

  Her calls turned up nada. She couldn’t imagine a publisher setting Nick up in Amity Corner’s only hotel, the Ontario Arms. While the Druids loved the old-fashioned glamour, now fading to a certain charming creepiness, it was hardly a place a book tour manager would choose. She called anyway, hearing the owner, Methuselah’s, raspy wheeze.

  “Well, he ain’t here right now, but he’s got a room booked for Friday night,” the ancient owner-slash-bartender said. “You wanna leave a message?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll track him down some other way.” Nann disconnected. And paused. Wait a minute, didn’t Nick show up with two heavy cases of books? She thought about it. He didn’t drive up in a car. Didn’t drive off in a car. She recalled watching him walk up the street. No cars were parked, except Cricket, and Zinnia’s truck. And now, he didn’t have a room anywhere near by.

  This could all be in her head. Both Keith Schwenk and the mailman were in the store at the same time as Nick. Maybe she’d just lost track. But she’d seen him at the vet hospital. She was sure of it. Could he be staying with a friend? Lower down Cemetery Street was residential, but she couldn’t imagine O’Broin hanging out in one of those neglected old places, now divided into apartments. So what the heck...?

  The bell over the door rang. “Banner day,” she said to herself. But it was only Tom, the landlord.

  “Hey, Nann. I just wanted to apologize for acting the way we did last night.” Tom owned the tattoo shop that sat between Nann’s store and Zinnia’s gallery, and lived in an apartment above.

  “That was pretty off the chain,” Nann said. “But I’m not the one you should apologize to. What were you guys thinking?”

  Tom sighed and leaned on the check-out counter. “Vampire hunting isn’t an exact science.”

  Nann didn’t think the words “vampire hunting” and “science” went together in any way, shape or form. She let it slide. Tom went on.

  “I had this dream, a nightmare, really. There was this tall, dark-haired guy. He had a kind of animal magnetism about him. I got the feeling he was stalking the town. Sure, it’s a fairly cliché d
escription of a vampire. Sort of Hollywood. Normally, you have a dream, you forget about it in the morning. But it turned out that Bob had the same dream. So did Rascal and Jim, the whole society. Put that together with the puncture marks in that dead guy’s throat, and seeing him there in the cemetery after dark...”

  The news had gotten out that Arthur Perkins had died from lethal injections. “You know that there wasn’t a bite on the man’s neck, right?”

  “Now we do. And we all feel pretty silly about it...” Tom’s eyes strayed to the author event display. “Which is why I feel even sillier right now, but I did see a tall, dark stranger around town recently. I’m pretty sure he was in here.”

  “He was in here. Professor Nicholas O’Broin from Pitt. He was here in the daytime, Tom.” Nann, always on the hunt for more business, had an idea. “But, hey, if you want to talk to him, he’ll be here Friday night. Maybe you could question him when he signs a book for you.”

  “Signs a book? For me?” Tom’s eyes strayed around for a moment. “Oh. Right. Bookstore.”

  Speaking of “duh,” Nann looked up O’Broin’s author page after Tom left. There wasn’t much there, pretty much a repeat of the information she already had. She looked up the number, and called the University of Pittsburgh.

  “Religious Studies,” a young woman answered.

  “I’m trying to get in touch with Nick O’Broin.”

  “Who isn’t?” A girlish chuckle followed. “I mean, he’s on a book tour right now. He’s just back from sabbatical, so he doesn’t have a voice mail set up yet.”

  Nann played off the response. “He’s doing a book signing at my store this Friday. Can you tell me where he’s staying?”

  “Sure. Hold on a minute.” Distant clicks sounded. “Okay, here we go, Greenpoint Books, Amity Corners, New York on Friday... He’s booked at the Ontario Arms. Do you need the number?”

  Nann didn’t.

  Instead, she did a Google search. The first entries pretty much pointed to his author page and his upcoming book tour. What followed were a bunch of Facebook pages that happened to contain both the names Nicholas and O’Broin, but none of them together. After that, several pages about the Satanic Panic. Still later, a lot of articles about real estate in Ireland. She backtracked. The Satanic Panic—that was in the ’80s, wasn’t it?

  Since customers weren’t exactly queueing up, she decided to take a look. The subject was before her time, and not particularly interesting. That is, not until she saw a scan of an old photograph from Jamestown, New York, in 1988. She zoomed in to read the caption of the newspaper picture. (From left) Nicholas O’Broin, Trinity O’Broin and Cade Hutchinson, anthropologists from the University of Pittsburgh, will give a presentation about Satanic ritual abuse at JCC tonight.

  Despite the dots of the photo process, there was no doubt about who she was looking at. Nick hadn’t aged a day in more than thirty years. Heck, not even his clothing seemed to have aged. Nann sat back. Vampires didn’t age. Look at Charlotte. The woman was hundreds of years old, and still looked late-twenties-ish. She still had pre-French Revolution gowns and wigs to boot.

  She thought about calling Ontario Arms again. The aging staff might’ve missed something. Like a guest. They were that old. In the end, she decided not to. There was something spooky about Nick O’Broin. As well as an aspect that people took note of. Women swooned. Nann sort of got that. But even the Vampire Hunter Society, men so clueless as to hold meetings on top of a vampire’s coffin, noticed O’Broin walking around town. So if he was around, finding him would be no problem. Since Nann couldn’t find him, she wondered where he could be.

  Part of her Druidic code was to improve her community. Now, she may have inadvertently called a dangerous entity into Calamity Corners. Even if she couldn’t sniff him out with phone calls and a computer, in two days he would be here. Nann just hoped bad things wouldn’t happen before then. And if she couldn’t track down O’Broin, she might be able to get a better handle on Arthur Perkins.

  Chapter 11

  New faces appeared in the bookstore. People had seen the ad in the paper. Nann was perplexed. Amity Corners was a close-knit town. How could people not know that she’d opened a bookstore? Other than the mill reopening, what else was going on here?

  “Do you have that book?” an elderly lady asked. “It’s got a red cover. It was on the best seller list for a long time. You must know what I’m talking about.”

  Nann had no idea, but promised to think about it. Another customer came in, looked around, and bought a paper. A group of three women browsed for a couple hours, commented how nice the store was, and left without buying anything. Maybe they were checking the place out before deciding to come to the author event. Nann tried to put a positive face on the non-paying visits. She was a practicing Druid. Positive is what she strove for.

  Pollution from the mill and surrounding Rust Belt industry, despite all the negatives, did produce one positive. Sunsets in this part of the world were stunning. At the end of the day, Nann looked out at the rainbow swirl in the sky. Her eyes strayed to her mailing table. Time to mark the grave of the late Sparky.

  The back door of the bookstore had long been painted and nailed shut. Hauling the statue, she made her way around the outside of the building. As she walked over to the pet cemetery overgrown by decorative pines, she noticed activity on the next street over. A small commercial building of some kind wore a fresh coat of paint and hat of new shingles. Amity Corners was slowly recovering from decades of mill closures that had threatened to turn the place into a ghost town.

  She yanked a few weeds from the pet cemetery, the Ramone’s song of the same name running through her head. With the sky still bright, she could make out some of the names painted on rocks. Poop, RIP. Cat Chopin. Sylph. Great Catsby and the misquote: Let us learn to show our friendship for a cat when he is alive and not after he is dead. Albeit morbid, it seemed Charlotte had a sense of humor.

  Shoving low boughs away, Nann placed Sparky’s tombstone next to the small mound of earth. It sat crookedly. She scooped some dirt around, trying to make a flat space beneath. Now it looked crooked to the right. She sighed, thinking about going to the loading dock for the shovel. A sharp rap from above stopped her.

  Against a dim light from within, she caught the silhouette of Marquise Charlotte holding Toast. She beckoned Nann up with her other hand. Nann brushed dirt off her hands and knees and headed around again. If she calls me up there just to tell me the statue is crooked, I may stake her, Nann thought.

  By the time she reached the third floor, her back was killing her again. The door opened by itself as she topped the landing. Nann entered, the boarded door to the living room already wide.

  “I know it’s crooked. I’ll get it straight,” Nann said.

  The vampire turned, stroking the brown and black feline. “I have no doubt.”

  When Charlotte stopped petting the cat, he said, “Rrr.” Nann took a step back, remembering the dream. “Doesn’t he meow?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Toast does not miaou. He only goes Rrr. I find this refreshing.”

  As Nann pondered what this could mean, Charlotte put Toast on the floor. “You asked me if I sensed any vampires nearby.”

  This took her by surprise. “Do you?”

  “Non, not vampires specifically. However, I feel a stirring in the magical atmosphere. As a Druid, you must know that the powerful miasma around this town is very dense.”

  Nann didn’t. She could perform ceremonies that revealed magic. Magic in the air remained as invisible to her as it did most everyone else. “Of course,” she lied.

  Charlotte gave her the hairy eyeball. But she went on. “So whatever has entered this area must be powerful indeed. So powerful, I thought I need warn you before the next new moon.”

  “Do vampires dream, Charlotte?”

  “Hélas non. Our sleep is the sleep of the dead. Why do you ask?”

  There didn’t seem to be a point in discussi
ng problematic nightmares with a creature that didn’t dream. “Just a thought I had. Let me get back to work.”

  “It would be nice if you could move the marker a little to the left,” Charlotte said as Nann walked back down the stairs.

  This time, she grabbed the shovel from the corner of the loading dock. A little to the left, she scraped and piled dirt until the surface was flat. She put the marker in place. Satisfied that it was straight—wait, no. She looked up at the window. Charlotte made a thumbs-up in silhouette. Satisfied that it was straight, she used the shovel to cover the lower part of the base in dirt to steady it.

  “What’s all this?”

  Nann jumped. She was concentrating on flattening the soil, and hadn’t heard the approach. The VHS walked down the alley, Tom in the lead. He played his flashlight over the graveyard. “Why is there a cemetery in my backyard?”

  “I, uh, heard it was always a graveyard,” Nann said. “Even before Europeans arrived. Just doing some tidying up.”

  “Poop?” Bob Reynolds scoffed. “What kind of evil mind names an animal Poop?”

  “Whatever, Bob,” Rascal Metzger said. “We’re just glad we caught you, Nann. There’s been a guy in town, asking a lot of questions. Mostly at the animal shelter. Goes by Nick. Witnesses say he’s been in your store.”

  The ever-obtuse VHS apparently did not read the paper. “Nick O’Broin. He’s an author. On Friday, he’ll be in the store for an author event. You should come. You can question him after you buy books for him to sign.”

  “Buy books?” Rascal looked perplexed.

  “Yeah, buy books.” She pointed at her shop. “Bookstore. Book. Store. You might like it. It’s local history.”

  “Is it on Kindle?” Bob asked.

  Nann’s grip tightened on the shovel handle. Tom gave her an apologetic shrug.

  “You’d better believe we’ll be here,” Rascal said. “C’mon, guys, let’s go to Margie’s.”