She nodded. “That’s okay. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t imagine it. I kind of got fuzzy after that.”
“You were out of it,” he said, the harshness of his tone reflecting his fear. “I was afraid you’d fried your brain, but we had to deal with Ashbuth and your sister, and I was terrified that you’d be gone before I could reach you.”
“You terrified yourself,” she nodded, feeling his fear as he spoke. “Logically, you knew I was fine, and you should just go about your business. Emotion isn’t logical. You freaked.”
He considered that. “Yeah, I freaked big time all around. And that’s supposed to be a good thing?”
“Considering how little experience you have in dealing with freaking, you handled yourself pretty well. And then you froze up like a Popsicle. It’s the Popsicle I worry about. The freak is cool. Is the café packed? I’m about to starve.”
She had to forgive him. A proud man like Kurt would never grovel, but he had come close enough to suit her for the moment. Just his wearing jeans instead of a suit and tie spoke volumes. She looked up at him expectantly. They were either on the same page or had to go their separate ways. She felt a painful twinge at the thought of the latter, but at least she hadn’t lost a boxful of gems this time.
“The freak is cool?” he asked in wonder, before holding out his hand. “Are you willing to have lunch with a freak who might turn into a Popsicle?”
She gifted him with a blazing smile. “We might be able to work with this new self-awareness.”
Just to prove he was the same old Kurt, he asked, “Will your inventory be safe if we go out?”
She set aside her work and laughed at his soul-deep Nullness. “The gems are in the safe. If anyone steals my magic rocks, they’ll be really sorry. What do you think Dinah has on the menu today?”
“I suspect if she had roasted toads, we’d eat them. The whole town is ensorcelled, isn’t it?” He took her hand and helped her down from her stool.
His hand was firm and his grip was strong, and Teddy had a feeling she never wanted to let go. She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “You can be the sleeping prince and your mother the wicked witch. Let’s go find the poison apple.”
He swung her into his arms and covered her mouth with his, and she forgot about witches and apples and just let him sweep her up in all that lovely whirling emotion he kept so repressed.
She’d worry about ghosts and murderers another day.
Samantha
July 2: lunchtime
* * *
Samantha’s eyes widened as Walker entered in the company of a diminutive older woman wearing a skirt, jacket, and heels that reflected discreet wealth. Chin lifted in hauteur, her lovely moon-shaped face and hooded eyes in perfect enigmatic composure, black hair streaked with an imperial silver, she could only be Walker’s mother.
Sam swallowed hard and attempted a welcoming smile. She wasn’t certain she was successful. From the tales Walker had told, Jia Walker was a force of nature and a holy terror. She’d raised him as a single mother after his father had disappeared. She had to have a backbone like steel to turn her son’s suppressed anger down productive paths.
The café was still filled to overflowing. Sam couldn’t just pull off her apron and hide. Poking Mariah and indicating the newcomer, she handed over the coffeepot and abandoned the counter to kiss Walker. There, let’s see what his mother thought about a tall, skinny wild-haired blond woman kissing her gorgeous son.
Walker wrapped a possessive arm around Sam’s waist. “Mom, this is Sam, the scientist I told you about.”
Sam hid a snigger. She had a master’s degree, all right, but that scientist bit was just score one in gamesmanship. The best she’d managed in her short career was teacher.
“Sam, I’d like you to meet my mother, Jia Walker. She’s come for the art show.”
“A scientist is smarter than that, my thick-headed son. She knows I have come to meet the woman who has called you away from your home and your work.” Jia looked Sam up and down. “You can do better than this.”
Walker’s embrace tightened and Sam nearly choked on words that wouldn’t come out. Before either of them could speak, his mother gestured disparagingly at the café.
She was saying Sam could do better than the café, not that Walker can do better than her? That Jia Walker had immediately set to changing her life spun Sam’s thoughts around.
“I can, and I will do better,” Sam said, as long as they were being blunt. “But right now, feeling part of the community is what I need. When I know what the community needs, I will give back.”
“And you will hold my son here, away from his ghosts?”
Sam didn’t even try to puzzle whether that was a good or bad direction from Jia’s perspective—it was the correct interpretation, for now. “Walker knows what he wants and will do what he needs to do. Life is a puzzle we work one day at a time.”
Jia’s straight lips bowed upward. “You were raised properly, as my son says. You will make him understand chi?”
A booth opened up and Sam led them toward it. “I am still learning myself. We could use a good teacher up here. The energy is very strong.”
“I will send someone,” Jia said with a firm nod. “I know people.”
Walker rolled his eyes, but he kissed Sam before he let her go and slid into the booth across from his mother. “Bring us whatever Dinah recommends today.”
Sam beamed. “Good choice.”
Kurt and Teddy entered, looking rumpled and satisfied. For half a second, Sam considered sitting them down with Walker and his mother, but lovers needed space to find themselves. The impetuous, magical jeweler and the stiff-necked Null made an odd pair, but they radiated positive energy, which should be encouraged. Another booth opened, and she gestured them toward it.
Cass had other ideas. Tall and regal, she followed the couple and took a seat beside Teddy, across from her nephew, without asking.
Uh-oh. Sam hurried back to the counter to warn Dinah of impending explosions.
Twenty-eight
July 2: after lunch
* * *
Still light-headed from showing Teddy how much passion—or steam—he possessed, Kurt had to snap his mouth closed when Cass joined them in the diner booth.
Teddy, too, seemed unusually speechless. After their earlier make-out session, her tousled auburn hair curled in wisps around her face. He longed to push that red silk behind her ears.
Cass’s presence froze them almost as well as Teddy’s wand had frozen Ashbuth.
Looking like a prim professor with her silver hair pinned close to her head, Cass swung the first blow. “If you continue leaving yourself open like this, Carmel will suck you dry just as she did Lance and Geoffrey. You’ll need to leave town.”
Kurt opened his mouth to defend his mother, but nothing came out. Cass was right, although she was probably talking in metaphysical terms, and Kurt didn’t think the supernatural described his mother’s temperament as well as a good psychologist could.
Teddy held up her hand, and he bit his tongue before speaking any part of that thought. She sent him a deprecating grin that kept his temper on simmer. Who knew he had a temper? It felt pretty satisfying to let himself feel the steam.
“If the lodge fails, the town fails,” Teddy said sensibly. “Kurt has a duty to Hillvale.”
Cass tapped her long bony fingers on the table. “Granted. But if he’s letting down his barriers, he’ll have to do it from a safer distance.”
“Wait a minute.” Kurt thought his head might gyrate off its axis. “After all these years, you want to look after me? I think I may be a little too old for that.”
Cass gave him a condescending look. “In spiritual years, you’re an infant. I do not interfere in Null business, and your family made it clear they didn’t want me interfering in yours, but Teddy is one of us. If the two of you are a pair, then you become my concern.”
“That’s making a whopping lot of assumption
s. Let’s just skip past all that and go right to what you came to say,” Teddy suggested.
He loved the way she cut to the chase in a very un-Lucy-like manner. Kurt had a feeling most people didn’t talk to his aunt that way.
Cass looked miffed, but she stiffly soldiered on. “Once we remove Thalia from the shop, the energy there should be safer for you. It’s closer to the vortex and further from the lodge’s negativity. The evil at the resort drains resistance.”
If he was translating Cass’s meandering thoughts correctly—the aunt who had barely spoken to him since birth wanted him to move in with Teddy? Kurt would love to hold his tongue and let Teddy deal with Lucy weirdness, but he had a few things he’d like to make clear. “First of all, Teddy might have something to say about what happens to her shop. And if you mean I need to move out of the lodge, I’d prefer to keep the amenities to which I’m accustomed. That means I need to build new houses, not move in with Teddy.”
Under the table, Teddy punched his thigh for the new house crack, but she maintained solidarity with his position by staying silent.
Cass frowned. Instead of arguing, she changed the subject. “I’ve enlarged the photos of Thalia’s writing. If Walker’s people can’t translate it, someone has to.”
That wasn’t his bailiwick. Enjoying the freedom of handing the crazy to Teddy, Kurt let her pick up the thread. She was so enthralled by Cass that she didn’t even notice when Sam put an over-sized bowl in front of them. Apparently, fresh tomatoes, mozzarella balls, and barbecued shrimp instead of ham and bleu cheese were Dinah’s spin on a chef salad.
“Have you figured out more?” Teddy asked eagerly. “Do you know Thalia’s story?”
“I enhanced the earlier, more faded piece,” Cass said stiffly. “Your mother’s cousin met Lucinda Malcolm, as did your parents, when Lucinda stayed with your grandparents on her Hillvale visit.”
“Lucinda Malcolm stayed in my shop?” Teddy asked excitedly.
“That was what, fifty years ago?” Kurt had to interject. Not that he had a clue who or what Lucinda Malcolm was other than another artist. “Thalia and Teddy’s parents had to have been children then.”
“Senior citizens are not dinosaurs,” Cass said in reprimand. “I was a teenager in the city, learning from professionals at the time. Thalia may have been younger, but she was certainly old enough to help Lucinda mix her paints. According to her unorthodox journal, Thalia knew Lucinda gave Teddy’s grandparents a compendium on crystals that had belonged to her family. And Thalia was old enough to steal it. That confession was her first entry.”
“A compendium?” Teddy’s topaz eyes lit with that inner glow Kurt thought might be what she explained as opening her Inner Monitor. Was she studying Cass?
And did he believe she could actually read how others felt? That ought to scare the shit out of him. Oddly, it didn’t. Empathy had a sound neurological and psychological basis.
“Thalia also confesses that she knew Lucinda had brought the triptych panels to present to Lars, as a gift to the community. He had been the one to identify Hillvale, even though Lucinda’s work showed a twenty-first century version they could scarcely recognize back then. Thalia didn’t understand their value as a child and hadn’t known where the panels went until they were found in the building you had cleaned up for your City Hall.”
“We decided to use that building the day we came to town, the one in the triptych,” Kurt said in disbelief. “We hired locals to clean out the debris. Anyone could have hauled them off.”
“So the panels belong to the town,” Teddy exclaimed in excitement. “Surely Thalia’s journal is enough proof?”
As the women launched into a discussion that could only be speculation, Kurt listened and stayed out of it—until Teddy abruptly flinched. She cast a glance over her shoulder as if struck by a cold breeze. Since it was sunny and warm, Kurt hadn’t even noticed the door opening. He and Cass checked the entrance at the same time.
The lunch crowd had started to thin so it was easy to notice the stranger. His bronzed face was wrinkled from sun, and his long, grizzled mustache was stained from smoke. He wore his charcoal-gray hair pulled back with twine. He’d look the part of homeless vagrant if it weren’t for the gold watch, and the designer jeans and sandals.
“Evil,” whispered Teddy and Cass at the same time.
Kurt got cold chills from the way they said it. Ominously, the café’s chatter lessened. Kurt glanced around, noticing only a few tourists remained. The majority of the customers seemed to be Lucys lingering over their coffee and Dinah’s decadent desserts—or watching Cass. One by one, they turned to study the newcomer with alarm, as if he’d shouted Fire.
Apparently as Null as Kurt, the stranger didn’t appear to notice. He started for the half-empty counter, then stopped at the enlarged photograph of the triptych’s center panel. “Cool, man, where did this come from? That’s my old woodie.”
That was the panel that had covered the skeleton—the one showing Lonnie Thompson packing up and presumably leaving town—in a woodie wagon.
From the booth behind Kurt, Walker spoke up. “That’s an awesome car. What did you do with it?”
Thank God there was another sensible head still here.
Walker was wearing casual clothes, not his cop uniform. No guns were likely to be brought to play if this stranger took a turn for evil. But Kurt looked around for weapons, just in case—and noticed the Lucys were all gripping their walking sticks.
“The old lady made me trade it in for a Beamer. Is that photo part of the art show I heard about?” The stranger took a stool at the counter and picked up a plastic menu Mariah pushed toward him.
His old lady? Thalia? Or was this not Lonnie?
“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” the waitress said in a deceptively pleasant voice. “Just old photos to celebrate our town history.”
“Yeah, heard you folks had some history. The old lady said something about a lawsuit?”
Kurt held Teddy’s hand against the table when she tried to ball it up. The only outsider who knew about the imaginary lawsuit was Lonnie Thompson. Kurt tried to find this grizzled old fellow in the painting that depicted the town ten years ago. Lonnie hadn’t aged well, but the weak chin and rounded shoulders were the same.
Figuring Walker needed to play this close, Kurt got up to take the offensive position. He sat on the stool next to the fiend who may have burned his wife’s body in a kiln, the criminal who had sold Teddy’s house out from under her. “Who’s your old lady? Did she live up here ten years ago?”
Lonnie squinted at him. “Yeah, bunch of us did. What’s it to you?”
Hating having every eye on him, Kurt gritted his teeth and beamed his best resort-manager smile. “My father thought he owned the town. He robbed a lot of people. The courts didn’t approve. Did you and your wife own property here?”
Lonnie rubbed his bristled jaw. “Might have. Thought I’d talk to my lawyer first.” He considered a little longer, and his eyes narrowed. “That make you a Kennedy?”
“That makes me a Kennedy.” He stuck out his hand. “Kurt, and you?”
“Lonnie. Don’t remember you around here much back then.” He ordered coffee and a donut and gave the menu back to Mariah. If anyone was capable of putting spells on people, Kurt would wager on the black-braided waitress. She was casting Lonnie looks that would fry woodwork. But she kept her mouth shut.
“You mentioned a wife?” Kurt said. “Did she own property too?”
“My wife did, that’s why I’m poking around. She passed, but Lisa thought maybe the lawsuit applied to my wife’s old house, since it asked for addresses.” Donut crumbs stuck to his mustache as he spoke through the bite he’d taken.
“Lisa?” Teddy joined Kurt once the customer on his right abandoned his seat. “I think I remember a Lisa from when I was a kid.”
“Lisa, my old lady. She used to live here back then too, up at the old commune. A pretty young thing like you couldn’t hav
e been old enough to know her though.” Lonnie gave Teddy a lascivious look.
Kurt would have punched his lights out just for that, but Teddy put a restraining hand on his arm, and he remembered their purpose here.
Drifting up in her long black veil, bearing her walking stick like a scepter, Valdis, their resident death goddess, stopped behind them. “Your wife? Thalia? She passed? I hadn’t heard. When?”
Even Kurt could hear the iciness in her tone but Lonnie shrugged her off.
“’Bout the time we moved. She and Lisa didn’t get along too hot.” He stopped what he was saying and looked uneasy, as if he hadn’t meant to say it.
Teddy responded sympathetically. “I remember Lisa had a temper.”
Lonnie nodded in relief. “Then you understand. Thalia did too. Man, that woman packed a wallop when she got mad.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Thalia,” Valdis said without an ounce of inflection. “She knew a lot about art, didn’t she?”
Where the devil had that come from? Val hadn’t returned here until some five years or so after Thalia died. Kurt hadn’t thought his aunt had even noticed Thalia’s miserable paintings.
“Thalia dabbled a bit. She helped Susannah pretty up that painting back there.” Lonnie nodded at the mural behind Dinah’s counter, the one Sam and the others had been working to open up and make visible. “Ingersson was a cheap SOB, made his own paints, but the eyes started bleeding red. Looked right evil before Thalia fixed it. She said Lucinda Malcolm told her how, and she taught Susannah.”
Susannah—Sam’s mother, Val’s sister. Kurt couldn’t see Cass or Walker, but even Null that he was, he noticed the air had electrified. As he understood it, no one had seen Susannah Ingersson Kennedy since she’d given up his niece for adoption.
“Dear Lucinda,” Cass said sweetly from the booth he and Teddy had deserted. “Thalia must have been quite young when she met her.”
Topaz Dreams Page 26