The Map of True Places (23 page)

Zee tried to keep busy and not think too much more about what she was going to say. But as the day wore on, she found herself growing more and more agitated.

At five-thirty she opened a bottle of wine. She sat on the deck drinking and watching the boats.

At six o'clock Jessina brought her out some cheese and crackers to go with the wine. “You shouldn't drink that with no food in the stomach,” she said.

Zee thanked her and was about to invite her to join her for some wine when the doorbell rang. Jessina hurried to answer it.

Zee watched as Jessina led Hawk to the deck.

“Nice view,” he said.

“Pretty much the same as yours,” she said, looking back toward the
Friendship.

“Yeah, but you own yours,” he said.

She smiled. “I don't, my father does.”

She got her checkbook and started to write. Then she looked in her wallet and realized she had money she hadn't used to reimburse Jessina for groceries. “Would you rather have cash?”

“Always,” he said.

She was a little altered from the wine. She saw him notice the bottle.

“Would you like a glass?”

“I'm not much of a wine drinker,” he said.

“How about a cracker?” she asked. “The cheese is pretty good.”

He took a cracker, but he didn't sit down.

If she was going to say anything, it had to be now. “Please,” she said. “Sit.”

He took a seat opposite her at the table.

There was no way to say it but straight out. Emboldened by the wine, she went ahead. “I'm going to tell you where we saw each other,” she said.

He looked at her.

“It was at Lilly Braedon's funeral.”

“What?” He couldn't have looked more surprised.

“You were the eyewitness on the bridge,” she said.

He was quiet for a long time. “Were you a friend of Lilly's?” he finally asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

She had resolved not to tell him more, but she found herself explaining. “I was her therapist.”

It was worse than she'd thought it would be. She should never have said anything. If she hadn't been a little buzzed, she never would have
opened her mouth. She could feel his eyes on her, judging her.
I couldn't save her,
she wanted to say, but instead she just sat there waiting for him to say something.

It took a long time for him to speak.

“Damn,” he finally said.

T
HE REENACTORS WERE ON
the benches outside Ann's store again, and this time they were drunk. Not all of them. None of the pirates (not even the ones who sang the sea chanteys) seemed to be drinking, and they drank most of the time. No, this time it was the Revolutionary War reenactors who were sitting on the benches, sipping out of flasks or bottles concealed in paper bags. The redcoats and patriots sat on opposing sides hurling Colonial-era locker-room insults at each other.

This was too much, Ann thought. They were probably very good at what they did—they were certainly staying in character—but they were taking the whole Fourth of July thing way too seriously. Ann thought she noticed a bit more bravado than they'd shown in previous years, probably a result of the HBO
John Adams
miniseries, which had just come out. They seemed to have picked up a little more historical accuracy as well: the clip-on ponytails they sported better matched their hair colors, and several carried powder horns or wore hobnail shoes that fastened with large rectangular metal buckles.

Some of the patriots broke into a song meant to further taunt the redcoats:

 

Why come ye hither, Redcoats,

Your mind what madness fills?

In our valley there is danger,

And there's danger on our hills.

Oh, hear ye not the singing of the bugle wild and free?

And soon you'll know the ringing of the rifle from the tree.

 

At the end of the song, one of the patriots lifted his rifle and fired it into the air.

“Enough!” Ann said.

Long famous for its witches and even for pirates, Salem had never been known for having Revolutionary War reenactors. Though the first blood of the Revolution was actually spilled in Salem, the reenactments always took place in towns like Concord and Lexington. So it was particularly irksome to Ann to see the Revolutionary soldiers on the bench outside her store today. Why couldn't they stay on their own turf to party? Why did they always have to come to Mickey's?

Ann frowned at them from her doorway. “Could you gentlemen please move along? You're scaring my customers,” she said.

“
We're
scaring
them
?” a redcoat with a perfect Sussex accent said to her. The thought seemed terrifically funny to the soldiers. In honor of the holiday, Ann was dressed in her full witch regalia. Last night she had tinted her almost-waist-length red hair with black henna, and the result was a color that seemed to morph as she moved, creating a vaguely iridescent, hallucinogenic effect. “
You're
scaring the hell out of
us.
”

“I can manage to scare you a whole lot more if you don't move along,” she offered.

“It's a free country,” the one costumed as Paul Revere said. “It's the Fourth of July, for God's sake.”

The Fourth of July was one of the busiest days of the year for Ann.
Not only did people like to buy souvenirs on Independence Day, but for some reason they seemed to like to have their fortunes told as well. She had appointments booked throughout the day, but the big traffic would be the walk-ins. Her girls would all be busy today. On the holiday Ann brought in almost double what she made on a regular weekend—that is, if people would actually come into the store, and she was sure as hell not going to let these guys intimidate her clientele.

She was contemplating how best to scare them. She could pretty much count on their scattering the minute she started to chant, but that might drive away some of the potential customers who were lingering at the wharf taking in the water views or waiting to get into one of the waterfront restaurants. She needed something subtler. She had all but decided to sprinkle some fairy dust on them. It wouldn't teach them to fly, but it smelled pervasively of heliotrope, a very feminine scent that spread quick and wide. It occurred to her then that she could just as easily call her friend Rafferty and have them cited for public drunkenness, but Rafferty wasn't a beat cop, or even a detective anymore. He was chief of police and probably too busy to bother with something so petty. Besides, Ann didn't have anything against drunkenness, public or otherwise—she just didn't want it interfering with business. No, she wouldn't call Rafferty. Instead she picked a package out of one of the bins in the front of the store, something meant to repel rodents, a horrid herbal blend she had created by accident one day when she was mixing potions. She and her girls had nicknamed it “stink-bomb herb.” She stood in the doorway, checking out the wind direction before she let it loose, when Mickey Doherty suddenly appeared on the sidewalk dressed in his pirate costume, complete with eye patch and three-cornered hat and with a capuchin monkey on his shoulder.

Clearly here to rescue her from the soldiers, Mickey had a way of anticipating Ann's needs that she'd always found a bit disconcerting. She was aware that he had a crush on her. He'd been threatening to take
her on for years, telling her he had magic powers of his own that could rival hers and inviting her to check them out. She'd never taken him up on it, though she had to admit she'd been tempted a few times. Annoying as he could be, Mickey Doherty was a carelessly attractive man.

Mickey was like the old-school movie heroes he'd obviously watched and emulated. He looked like Errol Flynn, though his attempts at flirtation were more like Groucho Marx. She wondered who he really was, thought she'd heard somewhere about some dark past—but no, that was a brother maybe. She couldn't remember. All in all, the Dohertys were an interesting family. But dark. Quite dark.

Mickey had gone into a rage when his sister died, had turned against Finch and more particularly Melville, though no one could really blame him for that one. Mickey could be a bit of a brawler. She remembered, more than once, hearing on her scanner that the police had been called to break up some kind of disturbance at Mickey's shop.

Ann's one vice was a serious addiction to her police scanner. She had one in the shop and one by her bedside at home. Her habit had started when she'd first become a witch. In those days there were not a lot of witches in Salem, just Ann and Laurie Cabot and a few others who had not yet come out of the proverbial broom closet. In an act of paranoid practicality, Ann had purchased her first scanner in order to make sure she had a head start out of town if Salem's famed witch-hunting ever started up again. In reality she had nothing to worry about. Sensing an opportunity for tourist revenue that the town sorely needed, Salem had for the most part embraced its new witches. But by now she was addicted to the chatter of the scanner.

“Come on, gentlemen,” Mickey said as he rounded up the soldiers. He gestured toward his shop with his sword. “I've got grog.”

The soldiers picked themselves up off the benches and followed him across the wharf to his store. When the last of them had filed in, Mickey removed his three-cornered hat and bowed to Ann.

She rolled her eyes and went back inside.

The sea-chantey singers had arrived and were setting up outside Mickey's shop. On the wharf, people walked their dogs, and someone was assembling a booth for face painting. Ann thought she'd heard that the
Friendship
was sailing today, but she wasn't sure. Already there was a line waiting to tour it where it sat at the wharves. Though the
Friendship
did sail on occasion, she was not allowed public passengers, just crew and, rarely, some special guests. Ann had heard that they were trying to change that status, to have the ship commissioned to sail with groups of tourists aboard, but so far nothing had come of it.

If they were taking the
Friendship
out sailing today, they'd better do it soon, Ann thought. It was going to storm later, and it was going to be a doozy. She didn't know how she could tell this—she hadn't heard a forecast—but Ann always knew about a day ahead exactly what the weather was going to do and when. If she hadn't been a witch, she could easily have been a meteorologist.

She sighed at the thought of the day that lay ahead. Her first reading was already waiting inside, a twenty-something girl who'd been to the shop for readings several times in the last few months. She hoped to marry her live-in boyfriend, but he was holding back. With so many readings to do, Ann had almost forgotten that Zee was coming. She'd called and asked if she could come by, and Ann had offered lunch, completely forgetting that today was the Fourth. She had thought about rescheduling, but she hadn't seen Zee much since she got back, and she knew that things must be tough for the girl. Finch had never been an easy man to deal with, though Ann had always liked him. Even when Maureen was having such a hard time of it, Ann had never blamed Finch. Though Maureen had been one of Ann's best friends, it wasn't difficult to see how sick she was.

What Maureen had seen in Finch in the first place was anybody's guess. Still, it seemed that she'd loved him and longed for him in the
same way that poets long for the romantic ideal, the merging with the beloved. Yet it didn't take her psychic powers for Ann to tell that some of the stories Maureen related about their passion were clearly fictional. Maureen was, after all, a writer of fairy tales. But over the years Ann had come to suspect that the stories Maureen told weren't about Finch at all, or if they were, then it was more wishful thinking on Maureen's part than reality.

After her mother's suicide, Zee had taken to hanging around Ann's shop.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” she had asked one day.

“I don't know, sweetie,” Ann said. “Why do you ask?” Of course she had known exactly why she would ask, but she wanted Zee to talk. In the days since Maureen's death, Zee had been far too silent.

“My mother believed in past lives,” Zee said.

Ann nodded. “Yes, she did.”

“I was thinking that she might come back as someone like Juliet.”

“You mean, as in Romeo and Juliet?”

“Yes, I know she wasn't real, but someone like her. One of the great star-crossed lovers.”

Ann considered.

“Or maybe,” Zee said, “she might come back as a radish.”

“As in the root vegetable?”

“Why not?” Zee said. “Why do we have to come back as people at all?”

“Why indeed?” Ann said.

“My mother used to grow radishes.”

“Did she?” Ann asked. “That's one thing I didn't know about your mother.”

“There's a lot you didn't know about my mother,” Zee said.

Ann thought that was probably true. Zee had always known far more than any child her age should have to know.

“She really did love radishes,” Zee said. “She ate them all the time. Finch told her if she ate any more of them, she was going to turn into a radish.”

It brought a smile to Ann's lips. She was really fond of this kid. Didn't seem much like her mother at all, or her father either, for that matter. She was definitely her own person.

“I have some books on reincarnation,” Ann said. “If you want to read them.”

“No,” Zee said. “I just wanted to know if you believed in it.”

“I'm not sure what I believe about it,” Ann said.

 

A
NN FIRST MET
M
AUREEN THE
year before Zee was born, when Maureen enrolled in one of Ann's herbal-remedy classes, one that was meant for practicing witches but was open to the public as well.

It was a decidedly manic period of Maureen's life. She was spending Finch's money with abandon and signing up for everything in town. It would have been annoying if she weren't so charming. Seldom had Ann seen anyone as beautiful as Maureen. When she walked into the class—late, of course—the energy of the entire room changed. Heads turned.

Maureen's purpose for taking the class, she said, was that she was afraid she couldn't conceive. She was desperate, had tried all the regular methods, and wanted to try an herbal remedy. She announced this to the class as they went around the room, each person stating her particular areas of interest in herbalism. Most wanted spells, or child-safe remedies, or to learn to make perfume by brewing essential oils.

“What kind of traditional methods have you tried?” Ann asked Maureen at the break. No matter how New Age Ann might be, she was still a New Englander, and she didn't believe Maureen should share such private information with the whole class.

“We tried different positions, of course, with me remaining prone
with my legs in the air for hours. We've tried different times of the month. We've even tried a turkey baster.”

“Why would you try that?”

“The problem is really more with Finch,” Maureen said. “His libido, if you must know.”

Ann didn't need to know—in fact, she would have preferred never to know. But she was afraid that if she didn't address this new bit of information right away, Maureen might be tempted to share it with the whole class. “Talk to me after this is over,” Ann said. “Maybe I can brew something up for you.”

Maureen looked so grateful that Ann feared she might turn to the class and make another announcement, but she didn't.

After class was over, Ann did brew something up—several things, in fact. Though it was long before Viagra, Ann had pretty good luck with raising people's libidos, sometimes to the point of being less a gift and more of a curse. “It's a tea,” Ann said. “Steep it for at least five minutes, and make sure he drinks it hot.” It was one of Ann's most powerful potions, and it was popular among Salem's male population. Even so, she doubted that her potion would work for Finch and Maureen. Ann had known Finch for years. She had been surprised when she heard he'd gotten married.

Maureen completed Ann's introductory class in herbology. And then she took another, more advanced class. And somewhere along the line, Ann and Maureen became friends.