That Touch of Magic (16 page)

Slowly, she moved down the porch toward the front door, her glow reflecting on the windows as she passed. I stared after her until she disappeared inside, then looked back at all the people dripping wax on my mother’s lawn.

“Go home,” I said. “You got five minutes. If you’re still here then, I’m calling the cops.”

One by one, the candles were blown out, and the crowd began to disperse. I went inside and found my mother staring out the back window by the dining table. The glow was starting to fade, and her shoulders slumped a bit as she began to fall to the ground. I managed to get to her just in time, catching her and putting her in one of the tall-backed dining room chairs.

She smiled and let out a breath. “Thank you. It is exhausting, keeping that going.”

I felt a twinge of nervousness at that. “You … you can control it?”

She put her hand to her throat. “Darling, would you get me a glass of ice water, please? I’m feeling a bit parched.”

I was a little stunned by her easy use of both
darling
and
please,
but did as she asked. Once she’d taken a few sips of her water, she looked at me and smiled. “I’ve finally found it.”

So far, even with as little as we’d said to each other in the last few minutes, this was the most tender moment I’d ever shared with my mother, and it put me off my guard. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“My purpose,” she said. “Why I’m here. What I’m supposed to do. I’ve seen the future, and I know what’s supposed to happen, and now it all makes sense. Everything I’ve been through, all the ways in which I’ve been tested and suffered…” She smiled at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Now I know why.”

And it’s still all about you,
I thought, but said, “Yeah? So what happens?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet. But when it all falls together as it has been planned, you will understand.” And then she put her hand over mine and squeezed it. “You are such a beautiful girl.”

I don’t know why that got me, but it did. I pulled my hand away, remembering that whoever this woman was on magic, the Widow Lillith Easter was somewhere underneath, fangs primed and ready to strike.

“Look, Widow, you’ve gotta stop this. We need to keep this glowing thing under wraps until I figure out what’s going on. You’re not a prophet, and you’re not a saint, and you’re sure as hell not a martyr.”

“And how do you know that?” Her voice was calm and happy, just innocently asking a question. She didn’t appear angry in the least that I had contradicted her, and it was creeping me out.

“Go to bed,” I said, speaking slow and in soft tones, as if I were talking to a child. “Stay behind doors for a few days, okay? Just until I get this all figured out. No more speeches, no more candlelight vigils. Can you do that for me?”

Before she could answer, the front door shut, and heavy footsteps thunked through the living room and into the dining room, where Gladys Night, round cheeks flush with pleasure under a helmet of steel-wool hair, set a plastic planter on the table that had sat empty on the porch since my mother’s doomed attempt at porch gardening in the summer of ’ought-seven.

“Oh, my goodness, Lillith!” she squealed. “I haven’t been able to count it all, but there are
thousands
of dollars in here!” She reached one hand into the planter and pulled out a handful of wadded cash, and then with the other, she pulled out a check.
“This one alone is for five hundred dollars!”

“No.” I stood up like a shot and took the check from Gladys. It was from Nat Payne, owner of Nat’s Dry Cleaning and Spray Tan, and it was made out directly to my mother.
Crap.
“No. No, no, no. You can’t do this. You can’t take their money. You have to give it back and tell them all it’s a terrible, terrible mistake.”

The Widow stood up and walked over to peek into the planter.

“Oh, my,” she said. “That is a lot.”

I waited for it, heard her voice in my mind saying,
Enough to go to Switzerland and get all the plastic surgery my body can bear,
but then she said words I never thought I’d hear, words that took me a moment to fully comprehend.

“Stacy’s right,” she said.

“What?” Gladys said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

The Widow shook her head. “It must go back. I don’t need their money. All I need is their faith. That’s what sustains me.” She looked at me and added simply, “That’s what makes it possible for me to control it.”

“But … but…,” Gladys blustered, looking down at the money. “Think of the
good
you can do…”

“Wait.” I held up one hand, my mind racing. “What do you mean, that’s what makes it possible for you to control it?”

Gladys shook her head, staring down into the only green that planter had ever seen. “We can return or rip up the checks, but the cash…”

“Mom,” I said, and that got the Widow’s attention.

“Yes, dear?” she said, doing her best June Cleaver.

“What makes it possible for you to control the magic?”

“Faith,” she said, but I heard what she really meant,
Their faith in me,
and it all fell into place.

Of course.
That made complete sense. What fuels a narcissist more than attention and adoration? It wasn’t being beautiful that had made her glow; it was attention. That was her hook into the magic, the thing that was most important to her:
her.

“I mean, people just threw the cash into the planter by the handful,” Gladys was saying, still focused on the money. “I didn’t have time to keep track of who gave us what…”

My mother stood still for a moment, her lightly drawn brows knitting together, and then she said, “Okay,” and my heart dropped.

“I’m going to fix this, Widow,” I said, “and when I do, your ass is going to get sued.”

Returning to old form, my mother ignored me. “Gladys, I need to ask you a favor. Is that okay?”

Gladys, who had known my mother for a long time and had likely never heard my mother ask for rather than demand favors, nodded mutely.

“If you could write thank-you notes to the people who wrote checks and return the money to them, I would appreciate it.” She motioned to the buffet behind her. “I have stationery and postage in the top drawer there. Then please give the cash to the church. Okay?”

With that, the Widow moved slowly out of the room, and in the distance I heard not her footsteps but just the light creak of the old stairs as she moved up them to her room.

I looked at Gladys, who stared back at me.

“I paid twenty dollars out of my own pocket for those candles,” she said, her lower lip out in a bit of a pout.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out twenty bucks, and grabbed one of the candles out of the basket for myself.

“Give the money back,” I said, and left. Then I stepped outside, sat down on the porch steps, and put my two fingers together on the wick of the fresh candle. I closed my eyes and thought about my mother, letting the worry and fear over what she had done—and what she had yet to do—build up in my head. I thought about all the awful things she’d said to me when I was a kid, the way she’d let Nick go a week with a fractured rib before bothering to take him to a doctor, the way she had let us believe our father was dead for two days before I answered his phone call asking for money. Emotion roiled within me: fear, anger, hurt.

I opened my eyes; the candle wick was pure white, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of red, smoky ropes around my hands. I hadn’t even managed to soften the wax. I put the candle down next to me on the porch and sighed. It wasn’t just any strong feeling that triggered the magic at this stage. It was about one emotion connected to the thing that was most important to you. For my mother, it was having her narcissism fed. For Deidre Troudt, it was Dr. Feelgood.

For me, it was Leo. Although whether it was specifically love or desire, anger or pain, I didn’t know. All of my emotions involving Leo were tightly interwoven, and separating them to figure out which it was would probably prove impossible.

I got up, leaving the candle there, and walked down the street toward my car.

Chapter 10

There are times in a girl’s life when she just needs waffles. The following morning was one of those times. I’d managed to sleep only in bits and snatches, dreaming in flashes of fire and the smell of singed satin, dancing sunflowers and glowing widows, the taste of Leo and flying purple potion vials. When I woke up, I pulled on my sneakers and went for a run.

When that didn’t shake all the tension out, I showered, got in my Bug, and went to Crazy Cousin Betty’s for waffles. It was early on Monday morning, and neither Liv nor Tobias was working, which was a relief. Much as I loved them both, I didn’t want to see anyone I knew well at the moment. I just wanted peace and waffles, and to be left alone.

“Oh, my God, Stacy Easter! Just who I wanted to see!”

My butt had barely hit the vinyl in the booth seat before I heard my name called. I looked up to find the town’s cutest baby boomer lesbians, Addie Hooper-Higgins and Grace Higgins-Hooper, moving toward me. Addie was physically striking: naturally pretty even without makeup, bright blue eyes shining under a fringe of wild silver hair. She wasn’t always the sharpest tack in the box, but she was so earnest that you eventually forgave anything she said or did, because no matter what, her intentions were always for the good. Grace was granite-faced, with bobbed gray hair the color of a summer storm. She was laconic and straightforward, and you never had to forgive her anything because she never did or said anything without thinking it through thoroughly first. I had a lot of time for them both, but Grace was more my kind of woman.

“Morning, Stacy,” Grace said simply as she slid into the seat across from me. Unlike Grace, Addie didn’t slide; she bounced in.

“So, oh my
God,
the wedding!” Addie said in what was probably meant to be a confidential whisper, but her enthusiasm got the best of her. “What in the world
happened
? Was it Liv? Is someone trying to kill her again? Because you know, you really could have called us.”

Being called in to help during the big fight with Davina last summer was one of Addie’s fondest remembrances, and since she couldn’t talk about it with anyone who hadn’t been there—we’d made her swear on all that is holy to keep it secret, and to her credit, she had—she wedged it into every conversation she had with any of us who were there that night.

“It wasn’t Liv,” I said, “and no one’s trying to kill her. It was … I don’t know. A thing. A magical hiccup. I’m figuring it out, and it won’t happen again.”

I held up my menu between us. I knew it by heart and could recite it on command, but I was hoping they’d take the hint and leave me alone. Addie, who had never been big on taking hints, put one finger on top of my menu and pushed it down, leaning forward.

“It’s already happened, honey.”

The muscles in my shoulder and neck tensed. “What do you mean?”

“You know that mousy little girl…,” Addie began.

“She’s not little, she’s seventeen…,” Grace corrected.

“… who works at the checkout at the grocery store? Well, she—”

“Her name is Clementine,” Grace said, and I felt ice go down my back.

“—had an …
incident
in the middle of the grocery store yesterday afternoon.
Everyone
was talking about it.”

I looked at Addie. “Clementine? You’re sure? Red hair, thick glasses, eyes way too big for her face, looks kind of like a gawky Bambi?”

Addie nodded. “That’s the one.”

Crap.

“What happened?” I asked, and when Addie blinked, I prompted. “At the grocery store?”

Addie leaned forward; it was gossip time. This was her element. “Well, at first, it just seemed like another teenage drama thing. I mean, Bill hires all high school kids to be cashiers and stock boys, and there’s always some kind of hormone-induced theater going on. But usually it’s about that Barbie-doll blonde with the C-cup and the D-grades. Not Clementine. She’s a sweet girl but … she hasn’t exactly grown into her beauty yet.”

I tried to relax my shoulder muscles. There was nothing to freak out over; I hadn’t given Clementine anything, not even a fauxtion. Hell, I’d barely even given her five minutes of my time. Whatever had happened, it was just a coincidence. It had to be.

I shrugged. “Girls can do other things besides be pretty to make boys crazy, you know.”

Addie gave me one of her world-weary, don’t-tell-
me
-about-the-world, I’m-a-
lesbian
looks.

“I
know
what girls can do, but Clementine isn’t one of
those
girls. She plays the cello, and not well. She got accepted to Cornell, early admissions. She’d probably scream if she saw a penis outside of an anatomy book.”

“It’s the smart, mousy ones that you have to watch out for the most,” I said, thinking of Millie. But even as I said the words, I remembered Clementine’s eyes when we’d talked, and I felt a niggle of doubt. Even in her mousiest moments, there’d always been an edge to Millie; Clementine was soft all over, no hint of an exoskeleton anywhere on that kid.

“Anyway,” Addie said, “I wasn’t there, but Eleanor Cotton was. She said that she was in the produce section, thumping melons, when one of the stock boys—the tall, skinny one—and one of the boys from the football team started beating each other to a pulp, apparently over Clementine. Well, mostly, it was the football player doing the beating and the stock boy being the pulp, but I heard he got one or two good swings in there—”

“They’re teenage boys,” I said. “She has breasts. There’s nothing magical about that.”

“Wait. Listen.” Grace’s eyes met mine with that serious look they got only when things were truly important. It was easy to dismiss Addie; she had a fanciful imagination and a love for gossip that verged on the pathological. She was a storyteller at heart, and the truth was no deterrent for her if exaggeration or outright lies meant a better story.

But if Grace said, “Wait. Listen,” then you waited, and you listened.