A Broom With a View (8 page)

W
hen the doors were locked, the towels and sheets gathered from the laundry basket and bagged up to be taken home and washed, and all the candles blown out Liza Jane did a little happy dance across the floor.

“I survived my first
official
day!” she sang, doing a little jump in the air and clicking her heels together. When she missed the landing and ended up sprawled on her bottom she just laughed and laid back on the floor.

As she’d known it would, the wood had lost its luminosity as soon as the first customer had arrived and she’d busied herself with them. But it didn’t matter; they still looked and smelled good.

“I am a business owner,” she proudly told the ceiling, though it didn’t appear to be impressed.

She was disappointed, of course, that she’d spent her opening day alone, without the presence of any loved ones. Her mother
could
have come down. For that matter, her sister could’ve come as well. It may have only been a couple of rooms in an old building where she gave massages and facials and sold herbs but it was still a big deal to her.

She’d known nothing about running a business going into it and had spent months studying books and websites and teaching herself the ins and outs of bookkeeping and marketing.

Liza felt pretty darned pleased with herself.

It was late, however, and she needed to get home. Liza picked herself up off the floor, dusted her bottom, did one last walk-through to make sure everything looked okay, and grabbed her purse and keys.

She couldn’t wait to get to the house, make herself a hot chocolate (with a dash of Bailey’s because she’d earned it) and slip into bed. She already had four appointments scheduled for the next day, although the day after just had a facial so far. She was a little concerned but hoped that word of mouth would eventually help bring her a steady clientele. It would be Christmas soon and some of the businesses in Kudzu Valley were having holiday open houses. She planned on having a big “Grand Opening Holiday Open House” then and would be prepared to mingle, network, hold a raffle, put out cookies, and whatever else it was she had to do to get people to walk through her door and spend their money.

Oh, but Christmas. Liza groaned to herself as she locked the door and gave it a test tug.

What the hell am I going to do for Christmas,
she thought as she headed to her car.
I
won’t
be so pathetic that I will eat alone.
She’d already done that for Thanksgiving.

Her mind was still pondering the Christmas predicament when felt she something behind her. Nothing had made a sound, and nothing had moved at all, but Liza was still aware of it. The presence of someone who didn’t need to be there tickled at the back of her neck, giving her what her grandmother had called “the willies.”

Liza didn’t pause or quicken her pace, but she
did
become more alert and aware of her surroundings. She’d parked behind the building, in a gravel lot that ran the length of the street and faced the river. Christabel was the only vehicle. Key in hand and ready, without removing her purse from her shoulder she undid the lock and jumped inside in one swift movement.

With the door locked, the engine started, and her headlights on she turned off the “woman” part of her and turned on the “witch.”

Other than the spotlight her headlights made in one spot on the old brick at the back of the buildings, the whole length of the street was dark. The moon, hidden by the clouds, offered no illumination and the streetlights only faced the road out front. The shadows were dark and murky.

Liza saw
him
then, a man. He wasn’t hiding, exactly, but he wasn’t doing anything to make his presence known either. The tall, figure leaned against a dumpster, the bottom half of him lost in the darkness. He was looking at her, she could feel that, and it made her uneasy.

“Don’t be paranoid,” she warned herself. “This is his town, you’re a newcomer, and Kudzu Valley is not a violent place. You’re too used to being in the big city.”

Her words did little to settle her nerves, however, because she knew that he’d had impure intentions towards her when he’d seen her. She could feel them even now, radiating from him like radio waves and traveling the distance between them until they closed in on her.

Jerking back a little, Liza fought to remain control. There was a stickiness about the hatred and anger he projected at her. He didn’t just dislike her, she repulsed him.

But
why
?

Closing her hand around the talisman her grandmother had given her many years ago, and one that rode in the front seat with her at all times, Liza sent her mind out to him, seeking answers. She got nothing in return but a fiery black wall, palpitating with heat and frustration.

Sometimes she wasn’t able to see anything, especially when it concerned something personal to her. That was a sad fact about her “gift”–she never seemed to be able to help herself much.

But while she might not have been able to make any sense out of
why
he was there and what he wanted, she was able to see his face. The smooth complexion, except for the ruddy mole on his cheek, shockingly red hair, hefty build, and the “Will Work for Weed” T-shirt that was partly hidden behind his flannel coat could only belong to one person.

Cotton Hashagen.

But that made zero sense. Cotton was just a
librarian
. Sure, they’d had a tiff during her first few days but he would’ve been over that by now, right?

He wouldn’t hurt her. He had no reason to.

LIZA FELL BACK
against the wall in her treatment room and tried desperately to get herself together for what felt like the fifth time.

“The sheets too? Did it have to be the sheets?”

She’d ordered those sheets from Macy’s website. They’d cost $135, more than twice what the sheets on her own bed cost. She’d loved them so much that when she’d first opened them to put them on her massage table, she’d pressed her face against them, marveling in their softness.

Now they were ripped to shreds and hanging artfully over the privacy screen in the corner of the room.

Her business was completely trashed, from corner to corner. Nothing had been left untouched.

Well, at least on the first floor anyway. Whoever had done it had apparently not had time to make it upstairs.

The woman in Liza wanted to drop to the floor and cry and cry. Nothing of value had been stolen. After all, there wasn’t much street value in aromatherapy candles. It had been a personal attack.

The witch in Liza wanted to go apeshit and fly through the roof and seek revenge. How
dare
someone come in and upset something she’d worked so hard for?

Liza knew that with some careful thoughts and planning and with the right tools and a whole lot of energy she could have everything back together in a matter of hours. Well, most everything anyway. The things she knew how to fix.

Part of her wanted to go ahead and do that. Wanted to go ahead and make everything right so that she wouldn’t have to stand there and look at the mess and could continue on with business as usual.

And then, after she closed, she’d march home to her altar, see who was responsible for it, and throw something so hard at them that they wouldn’t know which end was up for the rest of the month.

But that wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. She
needed
to go through the proper channels. She needed to treat this the same way anyone else would.

In resignation, Liza pulled out her phone and began dialing the police.

“
Y
ep, looks personal to me.” The detective, a man named Kroner, stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips and surveyed the mess. Other officers walked around, gingerly making their way through the debris, taking pictures and making notes. “You piss anyone off lately?”

“Apparently,” Liza muttered.

“Anyone specifically?”

Detective Kroner had whistled and laughed a little when he’d first walked through the door. Liza had not appreciated that. It might have just been a few candles and oils to him, but to her it had been the beginning of a new life.

“I just moved here. I don’t know enough people yet,” she replied. She sat on the stool by the counter, the safest place in the room. If she’d stood anywhere else, she would have been ankle deep in wreckage. “I haven’t been here long enough to make anyone
this
mad.”

Detective Kroner looked down at his tiny little notepad, grumbled something to himself, and made a note. He did that after everything she said. She was thinking about saying a bunch of really random things, just to make him have to write more. So far, she had not been impressed by the justice system in Kudzu Valley.

For starters, it had taken two hours for the police to arrive, despite the fact the police department was across the street and she could literally see it from her front window.

And then there had been the laughter.

“There was a waitress who wouldn’t serve me a drink,” Liza offered helpfully. “But she just glared at me. I don’t think it was her.”

“Anyone else you can think of?”

“Cotton Hashagen,” she answered at once. “I saw him lurking around out back when I got in my car. He looked like he was up to something.”

“Cotton?” Detective Kroner laughed and snapped his notebook shut. “Naw, I don’t think he’d do anything. I went to school with him. Good kid, great football player. Could’ve made something out of himself but hurt his leg senior year. Real shame…”

And that was how Liza’s morning went.

T
he detective’s words kept repeating themselves over and over in her mind, like a single line of a song on a broken record. “Gotta keep the temper in check, old girl,” she reminded herself. “Gotta stay calm. Stay calm. Bad things happen when you’re not calm. Bad things happen when you let it loose.”

Liza continued to speak soothingly to herself while she folded the sheets and put another load of towels in. She could feel her heart pounding erratically under her skin and her blood was all but boiling throughout her veins. When she passed a mirror and caught her reflection, she wasn’t surprised to see that her face looked sunburned, beet red from what she assumed was her skyrocketing blood pressure.

She wasn’t a child or teenager anymore, though; she was an adult.

She
had
to learn to control her temper. If she couldn’t, then she couldn’t do any magic anymore. That had been her rule and threat to herself and she knew it was absolutely necessary.

Liza wore her emotions on her sleeves. She was sensitive. For a long time she’d tried to change that, to be someone else. Someone safer. But then her grandfather, of all people, had told her it wasn’t necessary.

“Sugar bee,” he’d said out of the blue one day while he was reading the paper, “you gots to take the good with the bad. If you lose your bad sensitive side, you lose what makes you good, too.”

But she still needed to learn control.

Before she knew she was a real witch with real power, back when she was thirteen and full of raging hormones, she’d accidentally set fire to a hay bale. She’d been with her mother and stepfather, Gene, up in New Hampshire, at a bed and breakfast called the Wander Inn. They’d been there for a week, horseback riding and going for hayrides and such.

It was late September and her stepfather was doing some kind of Rite Aid thing. Liza Jane had met a fellow teenager, a boy named Tracy Coffey. He was also staying there with
his
parents and they’d bonded over mutual teenage boredom and a love of Nine Inch Nails.

By the end of the second day they’d played two games of checkers, watched an episode of “Saved by the Bell” in the common room at the inn, and exchanged phone numbers. After dinner that night she’d spent more than two hours making him a mixed tape and was out looking for him to give him the treasure when she’d rounded the barn and caught him in a lip lock with her sister.

Every emotion she’d ever been capable of had burst forth from her at once: anger, jealousy, betrayal, disappointment and, that one emotion that every teen experiences at the height of their hurt–overwhelming despair.

“Tracy Coffey!” she’d screamed. He and Bryar had looked up, guilty as rats in the cake batter. Her
sister
had the audacity to look ashamed as she quickly checked her blouse to make sure there weren’t any gaping buttonholes. She’d been twelve at the time. Bryar had started everything earlier than most.

They’d both started towards her then but the scene had blurred through tears and anger. She’d thought she would boil over from the
bigness
of it all. And then the hay bale had shot up in flames, like someone had doused it with gasoline and thrown a torch on it. It had taken fifteen minutes to get it under control. As soon as it tapered down from the gallons of water being tossed at it, it would shoot right back up again.

The fire didn’t go out completely until Liza Jane stopped her crying which, incidentally, hadn’t stopped until she’d seen the look of terror on Tracy Coffey’s face. That had, somehow, made her feel
much
better.

She’d received a phone call from Nana Bud the next morning.

“Liza Jane Merriweather, you need to control your feisty little britches,” the voice, old but not frail, had warned her.

“What Nana?” she’d asked, still a little uncertain as to what her actual role in the event had been.

“I seen what you did to that hay.”

Liza had felt her face flush with embarrassment. “They said someone put a cigarette out in it, that it was dry.”

“Horseshit,” Rosebud had scoffed. “You got yourself in a tither and directed all your energy at it. And now it’s high time to learn what you are and what you can, and can
not
, do about it.”

She’d had her first lesson in control that night. It was also the night she learned that she was a witch, and not the only one in her family. She’d had a few minor lessons along the way, but it was finally time for her to sit still for the big one.

She’d had a few hiccups along the way, but now Liza tried to control herself when she could.

She still hadn’t learned much control, although she
did
pride herself over the fact that both Mode and Jennifer Miller
and
the Starbucks girl were all still alive. And human.