Witches (4 page)

Maybe, he didn’t know what to say to her now. Maybe, he missed Jake, too.

Like Mabel, she’d neglected him.

A plaintive meow at her feet seemed to second the thought.

She cleaned up the breakfast dishes, then went to put some clothes on.

She looked out her bedroom window, shaking her head at the damage. “Come on, Amadeus, let’s go outside and see how bad it really is. See what kind of spell we’ll need to clean it up. What do you say?” She slipped a shawl on and with Amadeus trailing, tail straight up like a flagpole, she went out the door.

Outside, she tugged the shawl closer around her shoulders. The morning had a real bite to it. Amadeus trundled across the leaf-strewn ground, hugging the earth and playing with the crinkly leaves. Watching him made her chuckle.

In the sunlight, she could see the rain from the night before had formed a thin layer of frost, sparkling on the blades of grass and the trees’ limbs like winking diamonds. One of the larger trees on the side of the house had been shattered in the storm. Huge limbs had splintered away from the main trunk and crashed onto a section of the roof. It didn’t seem to have damaged the roof much. Jake had made the little house strong.

Strolling around the house, she took stock of the storm’s toll. One of the rear windows had been broken. Limbs everywhere. Trash from half the county. All in her yard.

Closing her eyes tightly, she began to concentrate on the words of a spell and soon experienced that curious vertigo she did when witching.

The wind began to pick up, the leaves rustling, cascading about and maddeningly chasing themselves when she raised her hands. There were a series of jarring crashes, loud whooshes.

When she opened her eyes, the split tree was whole again. There were no limbs perched precariously upon the roof, no branches or trash anywhere. The broken window was an unmarred pane of shining glass.

All was as it had been before the storm.

Rebecca, her older sister, would have been pleased.

Triumphant, but weary, she returned to the house and into the kitchen, and plopped down on a chair at the table. As soon as she was able to get up again, she fixed herself a cup of hot tea to regain her strength.

Her magic only took moments, but she paid the same price physically as if she’d done the actual labor.

She laid her head down on the table for what felt like an instant, but when she raised it again time had flown by like sparrows. Three hours had passed. That’s what not eating and mourning all these weeks had brought. It had made her weak and taken more out of her than she’d realized.

Ernie would have passed by a long time ago. She’d missed him. Stretching and yawning, she went out to check the mailbox.

It was warmer, and the frost was gone.

The mailbox on the crooked post waited for her. “Amanda Givens” the only name left on its round dented side. She’d removed Jake’s name after he’d died.

There were two letters. The distinctive handwriting on both telling her right away who they were from. Her sisters, Jessica and Rebecca.

She opened Jessie’s first.

Her husband had been promoted again...her two little girls had the flu, but were getting better...she was taking more craft classes up at the community college...wasn’t the news awful lately, so much killing...how could Amanda stand living there alone in the middle of nowhere, especially with all that terrible cult activity going on (as if Amanda couldn’t take care of herself)…when was she coming for a visit, or better yet, had she considered the possibility of moving back to Boston?

Aha.

She had two sisters. Jessie was the youngest, and the only non-practicing witch of the three. She didn’t miss the magic, she was really into the wife/mother thing. She had a normal family, a husband named John who was a computer programmer at a local college, and two daughters, Debbie, eight, and Abigail, eleven.

Amanda grinned into the sunlight. Every one of Jessie’s long letters ended the same. Come home. She never gave up.

They could have sent e-mails like everyone else in the world, but she and her sisters liked doing it the old way. Real snail mail letters. Amanda liked getting and saving them. They were real, she could hold and touch them. She had a boxful under her bed.

Besides, Amanda didn’t have a computer in the cabin. Rebecca kept bugging her to get one, but she stubbornly refused. Maybe someday.

She tucked the letter into its envelope.

Amanda’s father had died when they were babies, and their mother had died when Amanda was twenty-three, right before she’d moved here and met Jake.

Her face grew melancholy at the thought of her mother, her heart heavy. Ghastly images of that fatal car crash eleven years ago still came unbidden to torture her. To remind her that the someone who’d been responsible had never been caught. Their mother had been a powerful white witch and she’d had many enemies. One of them had murdered her. The authorities had labeled it an accident, but Amanda had known better. The stench of black magic had been all over her mother’s corpse. Whoever had done it had been strong. Strong enough to hide their crime from Amanda, though she’d been young at the time and still hadn’t come into her own.
It would have been different now.

Afterward, Amanda hadn’t been able to stay in Boston. She’d escaped to the woods of Connecticut.

She pushed the sorrow, the guilt away and turned her thoughts back to her sister, Jessie.

Though Jessie had no talent whatsoever as a witch, she couldn’t make a pin disappear, Amanda had always been closer to her than Rebecca. They were a lot alike. Jessie really cared about her. Since Jake died, Jessie had been the one in closest touch with her, the most understanding.

Jessie didn’t understand about this place, though. She didn’t understand how it had called to Amanda long before she’d ever found it. As if it had chosen her.

Amanda’s haunted eyes drifted around at the house butted up against the woods.

She couldn’t leave this place. This was her home. This was where she’d found and loved Jake. She’d never leave.

Jessie meant well.

In her mind’s eye, Amanda saw Jessie, with her wild reddish hair and gleaming green eyes so like Amanda’s, smiling, as she was probably doing at that exact moment. Sometimes, Amanda could zero in on her sister that easily. There was a strange bond between them, always had been. Even without witchcraft.

Perhaps, she would go and see them all soon. She did miss them, and she wanted to see how little Abigail was doing.

Abigail, a true witch, if Amanda had ever seen one. She was going to have such power one day. Did Jessie know that yet, she wondered?

Jake and Amanda had wanted children of their own so much. Jake would have been a great father. For some reason, it had never happened. It’d been the only sadness between them.

Frowning, Amanda took the other letter and opened it. Rebecca’s letter was short, plain, and to the point, like Rebecca herself.

Rebecca was divorced again—was that her fourth or fifth? Amanda had lost count. Why did she keep marrying her lovers when she swore she hated men so? Her marriages never lasted. You’d think that at forty, she’d be too smart to keep making the same mistake over and over. She crashed recklessly through life like each day was her last. How could she ever love another when she didn’t love herself?

Rebecca’s letter also said that she’d be doing a psychic convention in the area in the next few weeks during her latest book tour and would drop by for a visit.

Well, what a surprise.

Amanda finished the letter and folded it up as she walked toward the cabin.

Rebecca.

She had the makings of a great
witch, Amanda brooded, but she played it like some cheap parlor game, milking it for every penny she could. She wrote
lurid, sensational books on witchcraft and satanic cults, did séances, sold her spells like a damn gypsy, and did the whole talk show circuit like some traveling dog and pony show. It’d always been a huge bone of contention between them.

Amanda never made money by trading on what she was. It was her religion. Her calling. She didn’t put price tags on it.

She and Rebecca had never been close. That damned old sibling rivalry—made worse because they were both witches, and Amanda had always been by far the most gifted—had lurked between them, poisoning their relationship and killing any real sisterhood there might have been. On Rebecca’s part only. Amanda couldn’t have cared less who was the more potent witch.

What did Rebecca want from her? To be friends now, because they were both husbandless? Amanda rubbed her eyes, sighing.

At least Rebecca dealt only in white magic. Amanda should be thankful for that. So many ambitious witches went to the dark side.

Amanda dropped the letters into one of her ceramic pots in the middle of the kitchen table. She’d answer them later.

Right now, she had a basket of food to prepare and take to Mabel, and it was getting late.

Thinking of Rebecca, and how she made her money, reminded Amanda she was broke herself.

It didn’t take much money to live here, but she needed some.

She grew her own food in the summer and canned or froze it for the winter months. There were the fruit trees Jake had planted years ago. She got by. Being a witch, she knew the ways of fertility, the secrets of the earth. Yet money was nice. She couldn’t grow or witch everything she wanted. If she did, she’d be a physical wreck.

In a small wicker basket, she placed a jar of her special peach preserves, the muffins, some tangy cheese and crackers, a roll of Mabel’s favorite sausage, and the special herb tea that helped her arthritis. Tea laced with magic, so the old woman’s pain would go away for a while. With the cooler weather, Mabel would need it.

When she was ready to go, she stood in the middle of her front room and wove a simple spell to protect her house from intruders. Hardly took any energy at all. Protection spells never did.

Outside, she strode across the yard to where her workshop sat waiting patiently for her to return. In the beginning, it was just a large wooden shed Jake had built to store his potter’s wheel, supplies, and pots after he’d completed their house.

It’d been Jake who’d suggested, since she was so good with her hands, that she try throwing pots. She’d be a natural. As always, he’d been right and something unexpected had happened. She’d proved not only to be good at it, she quickly learned everything he had to teach her and over the next few years had surpassed even him. She grew to love it, learning about every facet of pottery, its history, and the different styles and techniques. Soon, she not only created the pots, but designed her own intricately patterned ones decorated with ingenious slip designs and glazed in bright colors.

Jake thought they were so lovely, so unique, that one day he took some into town and had them placed in a local store, Jane’s Gift Shop. They sold like hotcakes and an artist was born. Amanda had been selling them there ever since, and getting a good price, too, along with her homemade fudge and taffies from her grandmother’s old recipes, another idea of Jake’s. Now, everyone in the area knew her, not only for her pottery, but for her delicious candies.

Since Jake had taught advanced pottery classes in town, he rarely had the time to create new pots, as he would have liked, so soon the workshop became her place.

The door stuck like it often did and she yanked at it, going inside. It was musty. The spiders had been busy, she could tell by the gossamer-thin webs floating everywhere, but she couldn’t see their inhabitants anywhere. It was getting too cold, almost November.

In one corner, the old potbellied wood stove hunkered, wood still piled up high next to it.

Jake had believed in preparing early. He’d cut and stacked the wood months ago in the heat of summer. She could still see him sweating over the large axe as it rose and fell, see the shine on his bare shoulders, the determination on his handsome face.

In the back, hiding in the shadows, there was a place where she kept her witch’s pharmacopoeia of dried herbs and plants in labeled pastel Tupperware all lined up on a wall of shelves. She used to spend hours in here while Jake was away teaching his students. Happy hours.

She stared at the place, clutching the covered basket under her arm. Everything was dusty now.

A half-finished pot sat forlornly on the dirty potter’s wheel, as if rebuking her for her negligence. She hadn’t been in here since Jake had died. She ran her fingers across the caked, dried clay. If she could only go back to the day, the hour, the very minute she’d first started that pot...Jake would still be alive. She shook her head.

Suddenly, the old familiar urge to feel something taking shape beneath her fingers stole over her and a faint smile slipped out.

It’s still there.
It hadn’t left, as she’d feared it had; soon, she knew, she would go back to work. The shop that carried her creations was out of them. Jane wanted to know when she’d bring in some new things and Amanda could use the money waiting for her.

She couldn’t put it off forever. Going into town. Getting on with her life.

Closing and locking the door behind her, she began the long walk through the woods to Mabel’s trailer. She’d never owned a car and didn’t care to, though she could drive one and kept her license up to date. She had a small motor scooter Jake had gotten her last year for her birthday, but she preferred to walk when the weather was nice as it was today.