Peach Pies and Alibis (10 page)

“The prosciutto and arugula pie is almost done,” Reba said, slapping the dough onto
a pan. “I thought I’d make an eggplant, green olive, and provolone for Dee. You’re
havin’ the Margherita pizza with a heap of grilled chicken. You could use some extra
protein.”

“What I need is a drink,” Ella Mae said and was delighted when her mother entered
the kitchen carrying two bottles of Australian Syrah.

“I thought a full-bodied wine would complement the pizza nicely.” She handed Ella
Mae one of the bottles to uncork. “I’ve already had a cocktail. Hard liquor helps
me think more clearly.”

Reba yanked the oven door open. “Amen. Pour me some of whatever you had.” Using a
wooden pizza paddle, she removed the prosciutto and arugula pie and then divided it
into eight slices with a sharp pizza cutter. Suddenly, she paused and cocked her head.
“Your sisters are here.”

Ella Mae hadn’t heard the sound of an approaching car, but her mother nodded and went
off to set the table in the sunroom. Sure enough, by the time Reba finished tossing
a salad of field greens with crumbled goat cheese, pecans, and dried cranberries,
Ella Mae detected the hum of multiple engines moving down the driveway.

“Have you always been able to do that?” she asked Reba.

“Yep. I could tell if you got out of bed at night before your feet even hit the ground,”
Reba said with wry a smile.

Ella Mae wondered how many other things Reba had overheard. “Earlier in the summer
when that paper boat was shoved into my mail slot, you knew someone had been on the
property, didn’t you?”

She nodded. “The intruder came out of the woods. I could have gone after them—especially
when you told me later that it was Loralyn—but I needed to make sure you were okay
first. By the time I started sniffin’ around, she was miles away. Definitely female
though. I could smell perfume on the pine needles for days afterward.”

“We’re here!” Verena shouted and strode into the house. She placed a large box of
handmade chocolates on the kitchen table and inhaled deeply. “I hope you made more
than one pizza, Reba. I’m simply starved!”

“Three pies and a salad,” Reba said. “Adelaide’s pourin’ wine in the sunroom.”

Verena told Dee and Sissy to help their sister and then turned to Ella Mae. “How are
you, honey?”

“I don’t know,” Ella Mae answered truthfully. “It’s too much to process. All I can
say is that I’m glad we’re together. It makes everything bearable somehow.”

“Good girl!” Verena took Ella Mae’s elbow, and together, they joined the other women
at the table.

Dee waited for Verena to sit before giving Ella Mae a warm embrace. “I’m so sorry
I wasn’t there for your Awakening. I’d have liked nothing better than to have been
at your side.”

“It’s not as if you had a
choice
,” Sissy pointed out.

“I’m the one who’s sorry.” Ella Mae sat down and accepted a glass of wine from her
mother. “I left Melissa Carlisle’s without a word.”

Dee waved off the apology. “You couldn’t have done anything else but follow the rainbow.
Once you hear the call, you have to obey. That’s the way it’s always been.” She raised
her glass, her eyes brimming with tears. “To Ella Mae. May your gift bring you nothing
but happiness.”

“Here! Here!” The women clinked glasses. Sparks flew from the rims, and an orb of
white light, as blinding as a supernova, shot out from the center of the ring of hands
and crashed through the window screen, leaving a sphere-shaped hole in its wake.

Reba giggled. “Oops. Think someone will call in a report of a UFO tonight?”

“Thank goodness it’s still warm out or that would have gone through the glass instead,”
Sissy said.

Verena frowned. “We need to be more careful! Remember, Ella Mae increases our collective
power now.” She turned to her niece. “We shouldn’t all touch at the same time if we
can help it. Our magic binds together whenever we form a joined circle. It must be
quickly released or it could incinerate us.”

“So we just created a fireball?” Ella Mae asked when she could speak again.

“More like a shooting star,” Sissy declared theatrically, gesturing at the sky. “I
hope someone makes a wish on that one. It was lovely.”

After helping herself to a slice of pizza from each pie, Verena tucked a cloth napkin
into the collar of her black-and-white-checkered blouse. She then rolled up her sleeves
and said, “I’m going to eat before this gets cold. Dig in, girls!”

The food smelled and looked delicious, but Ella Mae didn’t have much of an appetite.
She managed to eat a slice of the Margherita pizza, trying her best to savor the blend
of Fontina, Parmesan, mozzarella, and feta cheeses as well as the tomato slices and
chopped basil from her mother’s garden. However, the grilled chicken sat heavy in
her belly, so she waved away a second slice and drank her wine down instead.

Once the wine had worked its magic on her frayed nerves, she looked across the table
at her aunt. “Dee? What was Ms. Carlisle’s official cause of death?”

“No word yet. It’ll take days for the coroner’s results to come through,” Dee said.
“I found a bottle of cortisone pills in Melissa’s medicine cabinet and gave them to
the EMTs. That was the only medication in her house. She didn’t even take vitamins.”

Reba put down her slice of pizza. “I sure hope you saved me one of those cortisone
pills.”

Dee nodded and pulled a tiny cardboard box from the pocket of her overalls. Reba opened
the box and sniffed the white tablet. “I’ll test it after supper, but it doesn’t smell
funny. Doesn’t look tampered with either. Were they all like this?”

“Yes. I checked every pill and before the paramedics arrived, I…examined Melissa pretty
thoroughly too.” The
admission seemed to upset Dee. Her cheeks reddened and she dropped her gaze. “I didn’t
want to. It seemed so disrespectful, but I had to see if there were any marks on her
body.”

Reba’s stare intensified. “And?”

“I noticed a red rash around her elbows and behind her ears. There was another, more
severe-looking spot on her right forearm,” Dee said. “She might have been taking the
cortisone pills to treat the rash. Other than that, there were no bruises, scrapes,
bumps, or cuts. She was trim and toned. Melissa’s been really fit her entire life.”

Sissy sighed. “How did they get to her?”

“Who are
they
?” Ella Mae demanded. “Are the Gaynors all magical? And are they our only enemies
or do we have more? I can hardly protect myself if I don’t know who to watch out for.”

Everyone turned to her mother, who grabbed a wine bottle and stood up. “This is a
tale to be told in the library. Bring your glasses, ladies.”

The women filed into the wood-paneled room. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling
shelves stuffed with books, most of which Ella Mae had examined during her girlhood.
She couldn’t imagine there were secrets in this library she had yet to discover.

Her mother put the wine bottle on the coffee table positioned between a pair of oversized
white leather sofas, and moved to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace. She
pulled out a thick tome with a plain brown cover, opened it, and removed a key from
a depression carved in the pages.

Moving to the mantel, she inserted the key into the mouth of one of the marble partridges.
Ella Mae heard a click and the entire mantelpiece swung away from the wall, revealing
a series of cubbyholes.

“Whoa,” Ella Mae said, rising to her feet. How had she grown up in this house without
having known there was a hidden compartment in the fireplace?

Her mother must have guessed what she was thinking. “There are many secrets about
Partridge Hill. Hiding places, escape tunnels, food and weapon stores. After the harvest,
I’ll show them all to you.” She smiled tenderly and lowered her voice to a whisper.
“It will be such a pleasure to share everything with you. I never thought…I’d given
up hope that you’d be Awakened, you see. Reba and my sisters never did. I’m so sorry
that I didn’t have more faith in you.”

Ella Mae was moved by her mother’s regret. “You couldn’t have known. And I don’t care
about the mistakes either of us made in the past. I want to focus on the future. I
want you to teach me how to be this…new person. I feel lost and found at the same
time.”

“That’s completely normal,” her mother said, easing a weathered art portfolio case
from the secret nook above the fireplace. “It takes time to reconcile how you once
saw yourself with who you really are. It’s a genuine identity crisis, but the feeling
will pass. I promise.” She smiled warmly again and then carried the case back to the
coffee table and knelt down to untie its leather laces. Carefully, she unfolded the
overlapping flaps to reveal a painting.

Ella Mae leaned forward, immediately drawn to the unframed piece of canvas. The painting
depicted three figures. Two beautiful women with flowing gowns flanked by a man with
black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. The woman to his right was clothed in a dress
of ivory and gold. She had honey-colored hair that fell to her waist and catlike green
eyes. The woman on the left had a waterfall of dark brown locks and large hazel eyes.
She wore a silver gown trimmed with cobalt. The women held on to the man with one
hand, but he seemed indifferent to both of them. Staring straight ahead, his arrogant
gaze was so penetrating that Ella Mae was tempted to look away.

“Who are they?” she asked, instinctively disliking the man in the black robe.

“The woman in white is Guinevere,” Ella Mae’s mother said. “You probably know the
man best as Merlin, though we call him by another name, and the woman in silver is
Morgan of the Fay, the matriarch of our family.”

Ella Mae drew in a quick breath. “But she was a villain, wasn’t she?”

“That’s what the men who record history would have you believe!” Verena thundered.
“Morgan was powerful! Beautiful! She owned her own lands, castle, and army. She was
a force to be reckoned with, but her biography has been falsified.”

“The true story is shown here, in the painting,” Dee said softly. “Two women tried
to control King Arthur at the request of Merlin or Myrddin or Aurelius—he had many
names.”

“Guinevere and Morgan were like us.” Sissy picked up the narrative. “They had special
powers. And Merlin was their tutor. He’d lived for a long time and had magical gifts
no one else had
ever
seen before.”

“Morgan knew that the race of men was beginning to increase in number and in strength.
By this point in history, fools and religious zealots had hunted our kind until we
were no longer plentiful. To protect our future, Morgan sought to make an alliance
with the king. But Merlin had other ideas. He wanted to use men like Arthur as puppets
to gain control over Britain, and Guinevere agreed.” Dee’s voice was low and sad.
“Tensions escalated, lies were exchanged, and the war that would forever change our
fate began.”

Ella Mae felt chilled. “We lost, didn’t we?”

“Morgan used every bit of magic she had to defeat Merlin, because she knew that as
long as he lived, our kind would become weapons, serving his lust for power.” Her
mother reached out and touched the painting, putting her fingertip on Morgan’s belly.
“With his dying breath, the
sorcerer cursed our line. He channeled the last of his considerable black magic into
a spell.”

The LeFaye sisters fell silent, as if they couldn’t bring themselves to speak the
curse aloud. Reba cleared her throat and looked to Verena for permission. She nodded
glumly.

“Merlin put his hand over Morgan’s womb,” Reba said angrily. “Then he whispered that
Morgan’s children and her children’s children would be tainted. The curse said that
none of her bloodline would be able to bear a child without a great and terrible sacrifice.
He vowed that eventually, the Le Fay line would run dry.”

Things began to fall into place in Ella Mae’s mind. “That’s why my grandmother died
in childbirth. It’s also the reason none of you have ever had children,” she said,
glancing from one aunt to the next. She then turned sorrowful eyes on her mother.
“And your sacrifice? Was it my dad?”

Reba grabbed her by the hand. “Don’t, hon. Don’t go there right now.”

But Ella Mae knew the answer by the all-too-familiar shadow that crossed her mother’s
face. “Terran and I agreed that having a child was worth any risk…” She brushed a
single tear away. “I loved him so much, Ella Mae. I’m sorry you’ll never know how
wonderful he was.”

“Let’s focus on this story for the time being.” Verena pointed at the painting. “Gaynor
is another name for Guinevere. We’ve been enemies of the Gaynor family since the days
of Camelot, but they’re not cursed as we are.” Ella Mae expected her aunt to sound
angry, but she seemed to be saddened by the enmity between the two clans. “Myrddin
had many children. They were as wicked and deadly as their sorcerer father. Still
are. And they no longer want to use humans. They want to annihilate them—to return
to the ancient days when men were few and our kind were plentiful.”

“Myrddin’s descendants are terrorists, assassins, crime lords, and of course,
politicians
,” Sissy said.

Ella Mae looked at the wizard in the painting, repulsed by the maniacal gleam in his
dark eyes. Merlin wasn’t the bearded, grandfatherly tutor she’d read about in storybooks,
but a power-hungry madman. “I can handle the news that the Gaynors are our enemies.
I’ve known that since I was a kid, though I never knew why. But the other group? The
dark magic people? Do any of them live in Havenwood? And if they’re so strong, how
can we fight them?”

Her mother tucked the painting back inside the leather case and placed it in its secret
niche. She then tossed a set of keys to Reba, who caught them without taking her eyes
off Ella Mae. “Everybody bleeds, darlin’. And there isn’t a magic spell that can fix
a bullet to the heart.”