Don't Hex with Texas (3 page)

“Hey, Katie, over here!” a deep voice called out. I turned to see Steve Grant sitting with a couple of his buddies. For a second, I had a high school flashback. There’d been many a time I saw the same group of guys sitting at the same table in the Dairy Queen. Of course, back then they weren’t calling me over to join them. I’d have probably died on the spot if they had. In high school, guys like that didn’t talk to girls like me, unless they wanted help with their English homework.

The group looked a little different these days. We hadn’t been out of high school for ten years, but already the hairlines were starting to recede and the waistlines were starting to expand. I didn’t want to give Steve any false hopes, but their table was centrally located, and if anyone in town would have the scoop on anything going on, it would be these guys.

I wandered over to the table, pausing to take a bite of my Blizzard every few steps, so I’d look properly casual. “Hey,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“What are you up to?” he asked.

“Escaping from my parents. And eating ice cream.”

Steve patted the space next to him in the booth. “Care to join us? I saved you a seat.”

“That was sweet of you.” I perched on the end of the booth, as far from him as I could get, which wasn’t very far, as he made no effort to scoot over and give me room. I had a feeling that was more deliberate than inconsiderate of him. I took a bite of ice cream to stifle the giggle that threatened to come out. The last time I had men like him all over me like that, I’d been wearing enchanted shoes. Somehow, I doubted my raggedy old tennis shoes had any kind of attraction spell on them. “So, guys, what’s the news in town tonight?” I asked.

“Nothin’,” the guy across the table from me grunted. I couldn’t remember his real name. In school, he’d been called Tank, and it looked like as an adult he was making every effort to live up to his nickname. His nearly monosyllabic response reminded me why I hadn’t been that impressed with the football studs in school.

“Wow, exciting,” I quipped, unable to hold back the sarcasm.

“Not really,” the third guy said. I wasn’t sure I’d figured out who he’d been in school—probably one of the interchangeable second-string jocks who’d flocked around Steve. Clearly, he didn’t quite grasp the concept of sarcasm.

“So I guess nothing much has changed while I’ve been away,” I said.

“Very, very little,” Steve said, stretching his arm along the back of the booth. “But you sure changed.”

I was fairly certain he was flirting with me, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. Part of me wanted to hear how he thought I’d changed, and part of me knew for sure that I’d changed in ways he’d never be able to see. “That does tend to happen as you grow up,” I said. Before he could come back with another attempt at flirtation, I added, “I suppose they still roll up the sidewalks pretty early around here. No dancing in the streets, or anything like that.”

They all looked blank, so I could only assume that either the parking-lot dance Mom had talked about hadn’t really happened, or if it had, it had been a good enough spell that nobody remembered it enough to be able to talk about it. That was the way those things tended to work. Since I’d found no other absolute evidence of magic thus far, I was leaning toward the former.

“I guess the big, bad city chewed you up and spit you out, huh?” Steve said, giving me a pitying look.

I nearly choked on a chunk of brownie. “What?”

“I mean, well, you came home awful quick. What was it, a year you spent up there?” He reached over and patted me on the thigh. “But don’t worry, nobody thinks badly of you. Some people just aren’t meant to go off like that. You’re a hometown girl. You belong back here with us.”

“I—no—not—what?” I was too stunned to form a coherent sentence, which was probably for the best. If I’d said something, it would have been to give him a tongue-lashing for the ages. By the time I formulated an appropriate response, I’d calmed down to the point I no longer wanted to scratch his eyes out. “Actually,” I said coldly, “the company I work for is doing some restructuring, which meant my position was put on hold temporarily. My dad needed a little help at the store, so instead of temping in New York until the company needs me again, I thought I’d come back here and help out.” I’d told the cover story often enough that I almost believed it, though it was getting harder and harder to convince myself or anyone else about the “temporary” part.

“Whoa, hey, didn’t mean to get you all riled up. I’m just glad to have you back. We should get together sometime.”

“Sorry, I really don’t think I can fit it into my schedule.”

“What, you have a boyfriend or something?” The guys all laughed.

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Well, technically I didn’t, as I’d broken things off with him for the greater good, but I was still hung up on him, which sort of counted.

“And I guess he’s still in New York, huh? Well, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

I gave him a smile with my teeth bared. “But it could hurt you.”

“Big, tough guy, huh?”

I gave Steve an enigmatic smile and finished my Blizzard quickly enough to give myself an ice cream headache, said a hasty good-bye to the guys, and headed home.

Things settled back to normal after a few days. The following Tuesday morning, Sherri was late, as usual, so I worked the front of the store for the first hour, before I even had a chance to check e-mail and get my office work started. When she finally showed up, I took the opportunity to sit down at the computer. I handled the work stuff first, checking the status of my supply orders and notifying customers who’d have deliveries.

A sudden commotion from the front of the store jolted me away from my work. I hurried out to see Mom leaning heavily on the front counter, shouting for help. Sherri, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

“Mom, what is it?” I asked, rushing to her side. She was deathly pale, and her face was beaded with sweat. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but then her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp. I barely caught her as she fainted dead away.

I
lowered Mom to the floor as gently as I could, shouting, “Teddy? Sherri? Anyone? I need some help here!” Trying to remember everything I’d learned in the first-aid class I’d taken during Girl Scouts, I checked her pulse and her breathing. Both seemed to be fine, if a little rapid. I leaned over her and tried gently touching her face. “Mom? Mom, can you hear me?”

Sherri chose that moment to wander back in. She took one look at Mom lying there on the floor and screamed her head off. I thought for a moment she might faint, herself, and waited for her to hit the ground, but, unfortunately, she didn’t oblige me. Teddy then came running in. “What happened?” he asked, sinking immediately to his knees next to Mom.

“I’m not sure. She looked like she’d seen a ghost, then she keeled over on me.”

“You think it has anything to do with all that stuff she was saying yesterday?”

“I have no idea.”

“She’s never been entirely normal, but this is odd, even for her.”

I started to agree, but then I noticed Mom’s eyelids twitching. Little wonder—Teddy must have been unloading fertilizer, and the chemical smell on him was strong enough to work as smelling salts. Her eyes fluttered open, and she whispered, “What happened?”

“You fainted. I don’t know why. You didn’t get to that part before you passed out.” She struggled to sit up, and I pushed her back down. “Maybe you’d better take it easy for a while. Give the blood a chance to get back to your brain.” I turned to ask Sherri to go get some water, but she was nowhere to be seen. If I knew her, she was probably out having her own fainting spell on the front sidewalk where more people might notice her.

Fortunately, all the family comings and goings at the store meant someone else—someone more useful—was bound to come along at any moment, and sure enough, Molly soon showed up, dragging a whimpering four-year-old. When she saw Mom lying on the floor, she went pale and steadied herself against the counter. I hoped she didn’t faint on me, too. “What happened?” she asked.

“Mom just had a little fainting spell. She seems to be fine now, but could you go get her some water?”

“Of course.” She released her son’s hand and said, “Mommy needs to go get Gramma some water. Be a good boy and stay here with Uncle Teddy and Aunt Katie.” As soon as she was out of sight, he quit whimpering and went to work emptying all the nearby shelves he could reach. I had too many other things to worry about to bother stopping him.

Teddy, however, had less patience. “Davy!” he scolded. The kid looked at him, weighed whether or not to test him, raised a hand toward the next item on the shelf, took another look at Teddy, then backed away and put his thumb in his mouth.

Molly then returned with a glass of water, and I helped Mom sit up to drink it. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she insisted after she drained the glass.

“People who are ‘fine’ don’t pass out,” I said. “Now, what happened?”

“I was on my way to the beauty shop, and I passed the courthouse square. There was a man on the square wearing robes. He looked like he was doing some kind of a dance, waving his arms around. And then the statues started moving, I swear. Not much, but more than statues are supposed to move. But nobody else seemed to see it, and there were a lot of people on their way to work in the courthouse, so there were people there. All they did was give the guy money as they went by him.”

“It must have been an illusion, like that David Copperfield guy,” Teddy said. “You know, the one who does things like make the Statue of Liberty disappear on TV. He was probably panhandling with his magic.”

“Were you even listening to me?” Mom snapped. “I said no one even looked twice at the statues. If they didn’t notice the statues moving, then why would they give him money? It was so odd, I had to tell someone as soon as possible.”

With his mother back in the room, Davy resumed gleefully destroying the display at the front of the store. “Oh honey, don’t do that,” Molly moaned, but that didn’t slow him down.

It was a sign of just how out of it Mom was that it took her a full minute to turn and tell her grandson, “David Chandler, you stop that this instant or you won’t be allowed in Grampa’s store anymore.” That did the trick with Davy, and it seemed to have snapped Mom out of her daze. The color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes sparked with life.

“So, as I was saying, it was the weirdest thing. I felt like I was in the middle of a dream, where all these odd things were happening, and I was the only one who noticed—or maybe I was the weird one and everything else was normal.” I knew that feeling very well, myself. It was the way I often felt at work—at my real job as one of the few magical immunes working for a magical company. But that’s not the way it was supposed to be here. This place was supposed to be entirely normal.

“Maybe you were dreaming,” Molly suggested. “Sleepwalking, or something like that. I’ve heard of people who make meals or go driving in their sleep.”

“I was not asleep,” Mom insisted. “I saw it.”

Sherri came running in then. “I brought you some coffee,” she said. She must have gone to the Starbucks in Waco to get it, considering the time it took and the fact that there was a full coffeepot behind the front counter.

“Oh, bless your heart,” Mom said, taking it from her. “You’re such a doll to look after me that way.”

Sherri preened, then as she straightened, she swayed and placed a hand against her forehead. “I think the room is spinning. Maybe there’s something in the air. We’re all being poisoned.”

It took everything I had not to laugh at her, and I knew I didn’t dare meet my brother’s eyes. We’d lose it entirely, and then Mom would be furious with us. “Help me up, Katie,” Mom said. When Teddy moved to help on her other side, she said, “Teddy, hon, you smell like a chemical plant. You’re probably what’s making Sherri dizzy.” Back on her feet again, she shook us off and said, “You should have seen it!”

And then she proceeded to act out the whole thing. She was in the process of imitating the mysterious robed man as he cast his spell on the square when a customer came in. And not just any customer. It was the minister at my parents’ church. He took one look at Mom dancing and waving her arms and frowned, but before he could say anything, Sherri was on him. He was pretty young, in only his second job out of seminary, and not bad-looking. I somehow doubted, though, that Sherri had any idea he was a minister. It wasn’t as though she darkened the doors of any church very often.

If he’d had a response to Mom’s quickly ended antics, it was soon overshadowed by his response to finding a bleached blonde in painted-on clothes wrapped around him. Sherri sold gardening supplies like she was selling expensive cars, which is to say that she used sex appeal, though really, to be honest, she was mostly selling herself. I waited for Mom to react to Sherri’s behavior, but it seemed that was a lost cause. If I hadn’t been certain that Mom was immune to magic, I’d have sworn that Sherri really was a witch who’d cast a spell on Mom. It was like watching Rod pick up women back in his pre-Marcia days.

In spite of Sherri’s “help,” the minister got his vegetable seeds and left. We picked up where we left off, except Mom had quit trying to act out the courthouse square scene. “You don’t think it was a stroke, or anything like that, do you?” Teddy asked me under his breath.

“I don’t think so. She’s not acting like someone who’s had a stroke. I think she just got overexcited.”

“Maybe you should take her to see the doctor, just in case. I really don’t think she should be driving until we’re sure what happened.”

“Do you think maybe she’s got diabetes?” Molly asked. “Doesn’t that sometimes make people pass out?”

“I thought that was only after they were on insulin, though,” Teddy said. “That’s what makes their blood sugar drop.”

“It could be epilepsy,” Molly suggested.

Mom put her hands on her hips and glared at us. “I’ll thank you three to stop talking about me like I’m not here. I just got a little light-headed from excitement, is all. You don’t need to go diagnosing me.”

“Yeah, I can’t believe you’re being so rude to Mom,” Sherri cooed. “You should treat her with more respect.”

I might have had trouble resisting the urge to claw her eyes out if Davy hadn’t chosen that moment to push over the shelf he’d emptied with a loud squeal of delight.

“Oh, Davy,” Molly moaned. In a preemptive strike to prevent more disasters, Teddy picked a protesting Davy up and moved him away from the scene of the crime as Molly headed over to straighten everything up.

“I still think you should—” Teddy began, but was interrupted when Mom shrieked.

I said a silent prayer for sanity and patience before turning around to see what was happening now. What ever had made me think that life would be quieter and simpler back home? The newcomer turned out to be Gene Ward, the subject of Mom’s pharmacy gossip.

“Hey, Teddy,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops. One of the loops immediately tore off.

“Hey, Gene,” Teddy responded as he continued trying to settle Davy down. “Can we help you with something?”

Gene had been in Teddy’s graduating class, which meant he must have been around thirty. Aside from clearer skin, a couple of fine lines around his eyes, and a hairline that had just started to recede, he looked like he’d been stuck in suspended animation since high school. In fact, he seemed to be wearing some of the same clothes he’d had then. He’d been something of a nerd—smart, but with next to no social skills. He might have been the first male under the age of sixty that Sherri didn’t throw herself at as soon as he came through the door.

“My dad sent me in for some stuff,” he said with a shrug as he handed a list to Teddy. Even there, he was stuck in a time warp, acting like a resentful teenager running errands for his parents.

Mom was still staring at him like she expected him to sprout horns, and he glanced warily at her a time or two while Teddy handed Davy back to his mother and went to put together Gene’s order.

I decided that pulling Mom away from the situation was probably the smartest course of action. We didn’t want to face the fallout that would happen with Gene’s dad if she said or did something crazy. “Mom, I need your help with something in the office,” I said.

She tore her gaze away from Gene. “Okay.” She sounded a little shaky, and far too meek.

Once we were out of earshot from the front of the store, I asked, “What was going on with you out there? Was Gene the guy you saw in the square?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wearing those shoes.”

“Then why did you scream when you saw him? And why were you giving him that funny look?”

“My nerves are a little on edge right now. He just startled me. And as for a funny look, have you ever seen a boy who deserves a funny look more? He’s Teddy’s age, and he’s still living with his parents, still doing nothing with his life, and going nowhere.” I declined to point out that I was only a few years younger, and I was still living with and working for my parents.

“Well, you really gave us a shock. I think maybe you ought to go to the doctor, and I don’t want you driving until we figure it out.” I knew that the things she described were entirely possible, and they sounded an awful lot like the kinds of things my enemies liked to do. Come to think of it, my friends had done similar things when they tested my immunity in the first place. They’d made weirder and weirder things happen until I’d had no choice but to react so they could be sure I was seeing things that were magically hidden from normal people.

The problem was that things like that didn’t happen here. In New York, you expected weird stuff, magical and otherwise, but I’d been assured by no less than Merlin himself that my hometown was practically a magic-free zone.

Even if this was all caused by magic, I wasn’t allowed to let anyone else in on the secret, so there wasn’t much I could do about it. If I started agreeing with Mom, everyone else would think I was as crazy as she was. But someone needed to get to the bottom of this, and it was probably best to rule out the simplest explanations. That was the way Owen tended to approach problem solving.

“Come on, Mom, I’ll take you to the doctor so we can be sure you’re okay.”

“You need to take me to the beauty shop first. I’m only a little late for my appointment.”

It was one of those situations where arguing would only cost me time and effort, so I decided to just go with it. Mom handed me her car keys, and we took her car to the town square, where the beauty shop was. Although the smell of permanent solution and hairspray usually made me sneeze, I hung around in the salon while Mom got her hair done so I could eavesdrop on the gossip. If anything at all had been happening on the square that morning, these women would be chattering about it. I noticed that Mom kept her mouth shut. She must have been tired of people treating her like she was crazy.

Unfortunately, the topic of conversation in the salon had nothing to do with weird goings-on on the courthouse square. Instead, I was the star of the show. “Lois, you’re so lucky your little girl came back home,” one woman said as the stylist wrapped her hair in tinfoil.