Tarnished and Torn: A Witchcraft Mystery Read online

  “Maya played softball and field hockey, but she never cared for dancing,” Lucille said as she snipped errant threads from a length of silk. “Any type of dancing.”

  “She seems to like the man who’s teaching the fire dancing,” I said. “Have you met him?”

  “Not yet.” She shook her head and scowled. “But she never stops talking about him. It’s ‘Gene said this’ and ‘Gene said that.’ If I didn’t know better, I’d think she had a crush on him.”

  The curtains of the dressing room were flung open and Maya emerged, looking like a cross between a belly dancer and a really stylish shipwreck victim.

  She wore cropped pants made of a silky magenta, slung very low on her narrow hips. A revealing paisley halter top was covered by a soft yellow overshirt so sheer that it seemed to accentuate, rather than cover up, her shoulders and arms. She had tied the tails of the shirt in a knot right under her sternum, so her midriff was completely exposed. A bright patterned scarf was wrapped in her hair. Bangles covered several inches of both wrists, anklets tinkled as she walked, and a large coin necklace pointed down toward her cleavage.

  “So? What do you think?” she asked, twirling to give us the full view.

  We all three—Bronwyn, Lucille and I—just stared at her. Maya had a curvy, athletic figure but she’d never been the type to don a costume, much less bare her belly with skimpy clothing. She looked gorgeous and sexy; at least as good as the fire dancers I had seen pictured on the poster at the Gem Faire. But she didn’t look much like herself.

  “You look . . . great,” I said.

  “Fabulous,” said Bronwyn with a surprised nod.

  “You’re planning to go out in public like that?” asked Lucille with maternal outrage. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Whatever, Mom,” she said with an eye roll and a snort. “How lame.”

  Lucille, shocked, didn’t respond.

  Maya’s snide response to her mother was so surprising—so un-Maya-like—that we all continued to stare, speechless.

  “What’s wrong with trying something new for a change? Are you all so perfect you can’t try anything different?”

  “Maya, it’s not like that,” I began. “You look great, just really . . . different.”

  “And since when has ‘different’ meant the same thing as ‘wrong’?”

  “It’s not,” said Lucille. “But being rude, young lady, is always wrong. I’m disappointed in you, Maya.”

  Maya shrugged and stalked back into the dressing room. Bronwyn put a supportive arm around Lucille and gave her a squeeze.

  Our dear friend, usually so adult and reasonable, suddenly was acting like a spoiled teenager.

  I was going to make darned sure I was at that fire-dancing practice tomorrow.

  • • •

  “Mistress, wake up!”

  It took me a moment to swim to the surface through the dreamy layers of sleep. When I finally opened my eyes I saw the upside-down visage of a grimacing gobgoyle. Up close and way too personal.

  Oscar had a habit of perching on my brass headboard and leaning over to peer at me, so this wasn’t the first time his upside-down face was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. But familiarity made the sight no less unsettling. Plus, his breath was funky.

  I noticed it was still dark outside. “What time is it?” I croaked.

  “Three in the morning.”

  “Three? Why did you wake me?”

  “I thought you might want to know about the two guys.”

  “What two guys, Oscar?”

  “The two guys downstairs.”

  I sat bolt upright. “In the store? Now?”

  “I could take care of ’em for you,” he said, pounding a fisted hand into the opposite palm like a prizefighter.

  I grabbed my 1950s-style pale aqua chenille robe from the hook behind the door and wrapped it around my white Victorian nightgown.

  Oscar continued. “I waited ’cause I know how you hate people to see me as I really am. But the problem, mistress, is that if I go after ’em in that darned miniature potbellied pig form, well . . . you know. So, anyway, I’ve been thinking. I might not have thought it through when I chose the pig form. You see what I mean? Given your tendency to get in trouble, I probably should have gone with a lion. What do you think? Would a lion be too much?”

  As Oscar nattered on, I flailed around, taking a step this way and that, still groggy with sleep and uncertain what to do. It didn’t seem wise to confront intruders all alone. Unlike fictional witches, I had never been able to wield a wand or wiggle my nose and make things happen. When startled or extremely angry I sometimes let out a blast of energy that didn’t hurt anyone, just stunned them. But I couldn’t always control it, and as a matter of common sense I steered clear of potentially violent situations whenever possible.

  Maybe I should barricade myself in the apartment and call the police. It’s not as though there was anything of great value in the store. I emptied the cash register every night, and unless the thieves backed up a moving van and took all the clothes, I could recover from the loss. Even the jewelry . . .

  Duh. My sleep-addled brain finally awoke. Griselda’s jewelry. Someone was here looking for something they thought Griselda had given me. Maybe the two guys from the mint green truck.

  Somehow putting faces on the presumed intruders helped. Especially since those faces were more ridiculous than scary. Not that Ballcap Number One and Ballcap Number Two couldn’t cause damage, but somehow I thought my witchy mind tricks would work on those two. Rather than call the cops to deal with them, I’d handle it myself.

  Oscar held his big hands up, fingers curled up like claws, and roared.

  “What in tarnation are you doing?”

  “Being a lion.”

  “A lion?”

  He roared again.

  “Why?”

  “You never listen to me. I just told you, I think I made a mistake in choosing my ‘normal’ form. I shoulda chose lion so’s I could protect you better.”

  “That’s very sweet, Oscar, but . . . stick with pig. It suits you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just that I love you exactly as you are.”

  He smiled. It looked like a grimace, but was as close as a gobgoyle could get.

  If the men downstairs were the same two who had followed me earlier today, I was betting they were scared of witches. I remembered that adorning their outfit, which is what the boys back home would have called their truck, was a Maltese cross, an antiwitch mark. Back in Jarod, townspeople put them on their barns and garages to keep witches like me from curdling the cows’ milk. (Not that I ever had. Well, maybe once. And it had been entirely warranted.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the men had also been responsible for the hoops of rowan at the bed-and-breakfast, to lessen Griselda’s power should she return while they were rifling through her room.

  Time to get in touch with my inner actress. If they were expecting a witch, I would give them a witch. I gathered together a sage smudge bundle, a stick of pussy willows from a bunch I had gathered earlier this spring, a lighter, and a little club moss. I hung my head upside down and mussed up my hair even more than it already was from bed. Finally, I ran my finger across the bottom of my cauldron, then rubbed the soot around my eyes.

  “What are you doing?” Oscar asked.

  “Teaching some bad guys a lesson they won’t soon forget,” I said.

  “You look scary.”

  “That’s the point. Let’s go.”

  “Wait. You want me to come?”

  “What happened to the pig with a heart of a lion?”

  “I’m just saying . . . as a pig I don’t got a lot of defenses. Mostly pigs are a food source, as disturbing as that is to contemplate. Reason I chose that form is ’cause pigs are smart, and that’s me. Oscar the smart guy, that’s what they all said. If you need the brains for an operation, call Oscar, he’s your go-to guy—”

  “You have
my permission to become your true self in situations of imminent danger,” I interrupted as I headed for the door. I could hear some bumps from downstairs, and was in no mood. A couple of months ago vandals had broken in and trashed the place. With the help of friends and neighbors the shop was back to normal within a few days, but it had taken much longer to get past the feelings of violation. I had no intention of going through that again. Besides, I reckoned I was just about angry enough to do some magical damage.

  “Really?” Oscar asked, loping behind me. “I can be myself if I need to?”

  “Not like you’ve waited for my permission in the past. Seems to me that when the chips are down, you’ve done what’s necessary.”

  “That’s me: Oscar the down-chip guy.”

  Since my familiar mimicked accents flawlessly, I sometimes forgot that he wasn’t a native English speaker.

  “Come with me,” I said. “I have a task for you. And don’t worry. It doesn’t involve hand-to-hand combat. In fact, you’ll be out of sight the whole time.”

  We crept quietly down the stairs and into the store’s back room, past the washer and dryer and the kitchenette on the first floor. We paused at the velvet curtains that separated the workroom from the shop floor. I lit the sage bundle and handed it to Oscar—now in pig form—to carry in his mouth.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  Oscar nodded.

  I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, stroked my medicine bag, and peeked through the curtains.

  Chapter 9

  Sure enough, it was the two guys from the truck. Ballcap Number Two was holding a flashlight, while Ballcap Number One was attempting to jimmy open the locked jewelry display counter.

  “You put nigh there, Zeke?” said the one with the flashlight.

  His accent was so strong that if I hadn’t been from the South I doubted I would have understood. He was asking Ballcamp Number One, whose name was apparently Zeke, if he was “pretty near there,” or almost done.

  “Near ’bout. Jest hang on, now, Clem. I’m a-fixin’ to take care of it.”

  I made a mental note: Ballcap Number One was Zeke, and Ballcap Number Two was Clem. The more I knew about someone, the more effective my magic was.

  “I don’t like bein’ here,” Clem whined. “Lookit them pentagrams! Lookit!”

  “I seen ’em, I seen ’em.” Zeke sounded annoyed. “What you want me to do ’bout ’em?”

  “Tol’ you she was a witch.”

  “Pentagrams don’t mean she’s a real witch, nec’sarily. Half the people in this town wear pentagrams. Hell, some of ’em even have ’em tattooed on their bodies.” He shook his head and blew out a disgusted breath. “This is one crazy-ass town.”

  “I tell you what: That man has a thumpin’ gizzard for a heart sendin’ us here, an’ that’s the truth.”

  “Clem, I been tellin’ ya and tellin’ ya, you cain’t be sayin’ things like that about him. He find out, he’ll cancel your birth certificate.”

  “He can kiss my go-to-hell. He’s jest as reg’lar as you an’ me. He don’t have magic ears.”

  “That may be so, but you an’ me both know he’s got the big guy in his corner, and that’s good enough for me.” Zeke swore as the screwdriver slipped.

  “Why don’t you just smash hit?” Clem suggested.

  “Boy, I swear, if you had a good idea it would die of loneliness. If I just smash hit, that witch be comin’ right on down in here. Now shine that light in closer. Ya hear?”

  “You even see any fire opal rings in there? It’s supposed to be kind of a yellow-orange stone. Maybe a little red and brown. I don’t see nothing looks like that . . .”

  Clem moved the flashlight to illuminate whatever he was looking at.

  Zeke’s screwdriver slipped again and he stood, waving his hand in the air.

  “Oooow. See what you did? Took the light away, and now I done hurt my gol-danged finger. This is stupid. I’m jest gonna smash it.”

  “Wait. You said it’d wake her up!”

  “Too late,” I said, stepping out from behind the curtains with a flourish. I lit the club moss and tossed it in the air. It sparked brightly and cascaded like miniature fireworks.

  Oscar, meanwhile, trotted through the aisles with his smoldering bundle so that smoke arose over the racks of clothes. Since he was too short to be seen, I hoped the haze would seem mysterious and sinister.

  I pointed the pussy willow stick in their direction. Zeke and Clem gasped and held up their hands as though I were holding a shotgun.

  “What in the Sam Hill you two doin’ in my place?” I demanded, letting my own Texas twang fly.

  Sandy hair, skinny necks, bad skin and teeth: my perfunctory assessment of the pair from earlier today was confirmed. They reminded me of some of the men I knew in Jarod: the sad ones, social losers who wound up doing someone else’s bidding, whether it meant working for the grouchy old guy at the ARCO station, or running meth for someone smarter, more ambitious, and far more violent than they. Like me, they were rural Southerners. Raised in a god-fearing church that had taught them to believe in, and to fear, a witch.

  And just as I recognized them, they had recognized me.

  Their Adam’s apples bobbed up and down, and they were so scared their eyes looked like four buckeyes in a barrel of buttermilk.

  Clem was whispering something. I finally realized he was intoning: “Kiss my ass kiss my ass kiss my ass.”

  “If you think that incantation is gonna hold me off, you got another thing coming,” I said, cocking my head. Though it sounded like something from a recent Hollywood movie, chanting “kiss my ass” three times is actually an ancient admonition against witches. It wasn’t effective, as far as I could tell, but the fact that Clem knew enough to try was telling.

  “Hey,” said Clem, glancing nervously at Zeke. “We didn’t mean no harm. We’re . . . we’re hungry, is all. We lost our jobs in this, on account o’ the bad, uh . . .”

  “The economic downturn, is what he’s trying to say,” Zeke interjected. “And with, the, er, state of the economy we couldn’t get no jobs. So we’re hungry.”

  “Somethin’ ’bout that explanation sounds a mite feeble to me,” I said. “Matter of fact, sounds to me like someone told you to say that if you got caught.”

  “How’d she know?” Clem whispered, a note of awe in his voice. Zeke hushed him.

  “And I don’t suppose you two had anything to do with hoops of rowan scattered around the bed-and-breakfast where Griselda was staying?”

  “Zeke!” Clem exclaimed, looking at me with mouth agape. “How’d she know that?”

  “Clem! You’re not supposed to use names. ’Member?” Zeke barked. “I swear, you put nigh as feeble-minded as they come.”

  “Don’t call me feeble-minded jest ’cause you’re older. Why, Mama always said—”

  “Hear me good, Zeke and Cle-em,” I pronounced the second name as though it were two syllables. “It’s three in the morning. That’s the witchin’ hour, for sure. Now y’all are gonna tell me what in the Sam Hill you’re doin’ here and what you’re after, or I’m gonna use this here wand to make both of ya’ll into my pet zombies.”

  Two Adam’s apples started bobbing some more.

  “D-don’t, please, ma’am witch,” said Clem. “We . . .”

  “Keep your big trap shut, boy,” said his brother in a harsh whisper.

  Just then, Oscar tripped on the lace train of a wedding dress, and the dressmaker’s mannequin teetered then fell to the floor with a resounding crash. Startled, Oscar dropped the smudge bundle on the ivory satin. I lunged to grab it, but Oscar managed to pick it up and stomp the sparks out with his piggy hooves. Taking advantage of the distraction, the men started backing toward the shop door, Clem holding a carved wooden Maltese cross at arm’s length in front of him.

  “I’m not a vampire,” I scoffed. “That won’t work.”

  “Don’t need to,” Zeke replied, and held up a gun, its dull black muzzle
pointed straight at me.

  “Now, we don’t want no trouble, ma’am,” said Zeke. “We’re gonna walk on outta here, and you gonna keep that wand down by your side. Ya hear?”

  I may be a powerful witch, but I’m as mortal as the next person, and I don’t go up against firearms. Even when armed with pussy willow sticks.

  Clem and Zeke slipped through the door and slammed it behind them, the little bell pealing forlornly in the silent night.

  • • •

  The next morning I got up early to cast one whopper of a protection spell over the store.

  Under the circumstances, the spell was necessary for my safety and peace of mind but, as with all magic, there was a cost. A spell strong enough to discourage intruders would also mute the creativity and independent thought of all within the shop. I would remain largely unaffected by it since I was the witch casting the spell, but it seemed unethical to subject my friends to it without their knowledge or permission. I soothed my conscience by telling myself it was just temporary and, considering how things might have turned out last night, it was warranted.

  And I felt thoroughly justified later that morning.

  “Where did this bag of clothes come from?” I asked Bronwyn.

  “Maya brought it in yesterday, right before we closed. Someone left it on the stoop.”

  This wasn’t all that unusual. Though we purchased most of our vintage clothing, many people wanted their discarded clothes to go to a good home and used Aunt Cora’s Closet rather like the Salvation Army donation center.

  What was unusual was that the knotted neck of the bag was ringed by a twist of rowan.

  Carefully avoiding the rowan, I dragged the bag outside by one corner. On the sidewalk, the early-morning sun was already blazing hot.

  Bronwyn followed me, and Conrad got up from the curb and joined us, watching as I tore a hole in the side of the plastic bag.

  Clothes. I half expected something ghastly, like evidence of a spell done with blood sacrifice. But the bag appeared to be full of vintage clothes: even without looking closely I could see a men’s antique flax linen shirt and Victorian-style white undergarments trimmed with hand-tatted lace—the kind Lucille would be able to salvage for her new dresses, even if the garments were stained beyond repair.