5 Beewitched (2 page)

One

It all started on Wednesday morning when the witch
moved in next door.

Patti Dwyre, my next-door neighbor on the other side, watched the action with me through my kitchen window, as a male-model-worthy beefcake hauled furniture inside the same house where my ex-husband used to live, which had been lingering on the market for well over a year. Lori Spandle, Moraine’s one and only real estate agent—and my longtime nemesis—hadn’t even given me a heads-up that the place had been sold. Par for the course.

Since I was focused on the buff guy, Patti noticed our new neighbor’s unusual affinity first.

“There goes the neighborhood,” she whined in that awful grating tone that has earned her the nickname Pity-Party Patti (aka P. P. Patti). “And my house is already underground.”

Underground? What was she talking about? Ah . . . “You mean underwater,” I corrected her. “And that statement isn’t even close to true.” Patti didn’t have any financial problems.

“It will be now.”

I tried to pry my eyes away from the male in the landscape but failed. I might be living with my boyfriend, Hunter Wallace, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to other males. In fact, I read in the latest issue of
Cosmo
that ogling keeps certain hormones ultra-active and in prime working order. Which reminds me, I should hide that magazine from Hunter. He doesn’t need any more ideas than he already has, ogling wise or ultra-active wise. The man is insatiable. Thank goodness he’s also a workaholic, or I’d never get anything done.

“And why is that?” I asked. “Just because we have new neighbors?”

“Nothing will ever be the same with the devil’s apprentice living on the same block.”

“I think he’s just devilishly handsome.”

“Not him. Her. She’s a witch!”

“Oh, come on,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the hunk and giving the woman next to him a quick once-over. “You decide she’s a witch just because she’s wearing a gypsy skirt and a shawl?” Although I had to admit it was a little weird. Sure, it was October, and the nights were cooling off, but today Indian summer had arrived, gloriously warm and sunny. Not exactly shawl weather. “Aurora dresses just like that,” I added, “and she’s not a witch.”

Aurora Tyler owns Moraine Gardens, the plant nursery across the street. All her plants are native, and she does extremely well for herself during these autumn months when tourists pass through our little Wisconsin town following the Rustic Road in search of homemade apple cider and spectacular fall colors. Aurora is all into new age happenings and vegan eating and whatever else comes along on the fringes of the regular and routine. She might march to a slightly different drummer, but I still can follow her tune.

“The biggest clue that our new neighbor doesn’t belong here is the wand,” Patti pointed out, her complexion paler than usual, which is saying a lot since Patti’s skin is a shade lighter than Elmer’s glue. That’s what happens when a person gets absolutely no sun year after year. “Yes, an actual wand,” she continued, her voice getting squeaky. “That was a big clue, Sherlock, and look! She’s casting a spell of some sort, probably a curse!”

Patti sounded on the verge of hysteria. Not like her. Not like her at all.

My eyes bored in on the woman who was destroying Patti’s cool confidence.

Sure enough, she was moving around the outside of her house, going from window to window, looking like she was practically wafting through the air a few inches aboveground, all light and breezy. Or was that my imagination? Since I had more than my fair share of flight of fancy (my grandmother’s term for make-believe), that was a question I asked my overactive mind pretty often.

With a practiced flick of the wrist, my new neighbor cast the end of her wand toward the driveway that ran between her house and mine. Patti’s newfound paranoia traveled my way faster than any magic the wand could muster, and I started to wonder if she
was
conjuring something against me. I tried to see her face, but it was concealed by the shawl she’d drawn up over her head.

“Go over and introduce yourself,” I said to Patti, thinking that was a brilliant idea. If Patti didn’t go up in smoke, I’d follow shortly after. “Get her story. This could be newspaper worthy. You might get reinstated to your old position.”

Patti had been fired from her job as a journalist for the
Reporter
, our local newspaper. I refer to it as the
Distorter
, since it was trashy even before Patti worked there, though her articles had stretched the truth like a rubber band pulled taut along the entire length of Main Street. Accusations of libel followed rapidly by the three-letter word all publications fear the most (S.U.E.), and Patti was thrown out the door on her duff.

Still, nothing in the paper has been interesting since she was canned. Patti has been determined to get her old position back, but apparently she wasn’t willing to do absolutely anything to get it back, since this very minute she was saying, “No way am I going anywhere near her! I wouldn’t touch this breaking story with a ten-foot pole. Even if the pole was made of pure silver.”

“Silver is for protection against vampires,” I informed her, which anybody watching current vampire shows would know. I’m certainly not a true believer in the bloodsucking undead, but I’ve stored a bit of trivia. “Silver doesn’t do a thing to guard against witches.”

“This is awful. It couldn’t be worse. What are we going to do?!”

Patti’s whining really was getting to me, so I took a stand. “I’m going over to meet her,” I decided, moving toward the door.

“Brass!” Patti almost shouted. “It’s brass that protects against witches.” She frantically scanned the kitchen, spotted an antique brass canister my grandmother had given to me, and slung it into my arms. “Take this with you.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” I returned the canister to its place on the counter.

Speaking of brass, though, Patti Dwyre is the brassiest woman I’ve ever known. She considers herself some sort of one-woman covert operation, dresses in black stealth-wear, and is always the first to impulsively infiltrate the most dangerous situations where violence could erupt at any moment. Patti has almost been the death of me more than once when she sucked me into one after the other of her operations.

And here she was, scared nearly to death at the thought of a witch with a wand moving in on Willow Street. Willow, witch, wand . . . Well wasn’t that a weird coincidence. I wondered if the new neighbor had been drawn to town by the name of our street.

Our block is a short dead end right off Main Street, with three houses on one side of the street (mine, Patti’s, and the until-now-vacant one next door) and Aurora’s gardening business and attached home taking up the other side. At the east end of the block, running perpendicular to Willow, is Main Street, and down at the west end is the Oconomowoc River, which winds not only through the rolling hilly countryside but kisses up against my backyard.

It’s a sweet deal, a great place to grow up (which I had, in this exact house), and I planned to play nice with the latest additions. Being on the outs with a neighbor is the pits, especially when you have as few as I do. Believe me, this wasn’t going to be half as bad as when my bitter ex-husband had spied and plotted from over there.

I strolled through my backyard while Patti remained glued to the action from behind the protection of my windowpane.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said to the new neighbor woman, stretching out my hand, thinking I should have put together a welcome basket for them. Maybe I still would. “Story Fischer,” I said, introducing myself. “I live next door.”

The shawl slid down around her shoulders, revealing a woman about my age—mid-thirties—with nary a single facial wart or any trace of green wicked witch skin. She shifted the wand to her left hand and took my hand in a firm shake. I noticed lots of rings, although her wedding finger was bare. So she wasn’t married to the hunk.

“Dyanna Crane,” she said. “But my friends call me Dy. You’re the beekeeper, then.”

She had me pegged, which was pretty much a no-brainer. She couldn’t have helped seeing that my backyard is filled with honeybee hives, adjacent to a small honey house where I bottle and distribute Queen Bee Honey. I also own The Wild Clover, a grocery store that specializes in local products. The Queen Bee business and store go together like buttered sourdough bread and pure raw honey.

“You’re not bothered by them at all, are you?” I said, with a big grin plastered on my face when I noted that she hadn’t scowled or shown any hostile emotions whatsoever. Whew. According to Lori Spandle, it was my fault she’d had so much trouble selling the house. We’d even tangled in town hall meetings where Lori had made serious attempts to ban my bees from the community. Guess who won every round? Me, that’s who. Although I can’t let my guard down, since the woman is tenacious, never giving up in her quest to annoy me and destroy my livelihood. We’ve been at each other’s throats since grade school, and it’s starting to get really old.

“Bees are fascinating,” Dy said. “They’re an important part of the natural world, and I’m all about nature.”

Any doubts I’d had about her slipped away. I liked this woman already.

“So,” I said to my new friend Dy, “I can’t help noticing you have a wand.”

That might have sounded a bit blunt, but I couldn’t think of a subtle way to bring it up. I mean, really? I’ve never seen a magic wand except in movies. A real honest-to-goodness wand up close? It had never happened, until now.

“I’m casting a protection spell,” she told me. “Making sure demons stay outside of my new home. A properly executed spell keeps them at bay.” She raised her wand and pointed it at my house, exactly like a musical conductor during a symphony orchestra performance. “Want me to do one on yours?”

I glanced over at my yellow Victorian with its white trim work and realized that Dy was too late. The demon was already inside, staring at us out the window. At least she was more pesky than dangerous. Patti ducked out of sight when we turned our attention her way, and even at a distance and through the sun’s reflecting glare on the pane, I had been able to tell how afraid she was.

“I’ll take a rain check, but thanks for the offer,” I said to my new neighbor, getting ready to pry. “So, where are you from?”

“Milwaukee,” she said. “The east side.” No surprise there. That’s where most of the alternative lifestyles happen in the southeastern corner of our state. The university located there draws a lot of unique personalities.

“My old stomping ground,” I told her, having a pleasant flashback—a bar on almost every corner, ethnic food from around the world, and strange and interesting people. All kinds of diversity, including witches and warlocks.

Moraine might be no more than forty miles from Milwaukee, but the two places are Great Lakes apart. Not physically, but socially. Here in my town, wearing a nose ring is considered over-the-top. Tattoos are only okay if they’re associated with veterans of a U.S.-supported war, or Harley Davidson, which Wisconsin is darn proud to call our own, so if a person wants to wear that fact permanently dyed in his or her skin, so be it.

“Hey, Greg,” Dy called out to the hot guy. “Why don’t you take a break?” Then to me, “I couldn’t have done this move without Greg’s support.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, he just offered to help me get settled.”

“Wow!
I wish my friends looked like that!” I blurted out, a trait that runs in my family, one that I’m trying to control. My mother has the same problem, only her blurts come off as mean and insensitive. Mine are dopier. Either way, thoughtless or awkward, blurts aren’t usually a wise thing.

Dy laughed at my reaction, though. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

I wanted to ask if he was a warlock but decided to save that for another time. Actually, now that I thought about it, he couldn’t be, because he was manually transferring her personal items from the truck to the house with no sorcery involved at all.

Listen to me, acting like I believe in those kinds of things—witches and wizards and magic. Which I don’t. Not at all . . . uh . . . okay, I
do
have some doubts, but they’re very small ones. Barely ripples in a sea of wonder.

Up close, Greg had dark, lively eyes, bulging muscles, and jeans so tight I could pretty much guess his private measurements. It was all I could do to keep my eyes above his waist.

“Are you from Milwaukee, too?” I asked Greg.

He nodded. “Yup. Brewskis, Brewers, you bet.” He smiled. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

I took a good long look. Nothing. “Uh . . .”

“I’m Greg Mason, Al Mason’s son. You know, from Country Delight Farm?”

He waited for my reaction.

But the Greg Mason I remembered was gawky, skinny as a skeleton with thick glasses and lots of pimples. When his parents divorced, he left to live with his mother. How far back was that? Maybe when we were thirteen or fourteen. What a difference contacts and access to a fitness club can make for a person!

“It’s been a long time,” I said, laughing lightly. “You’ve changed.”