Just One Taste (12 page)

Juliet leaned back. “I’ll be honest with you. These books would probably make more money for you in an antiquarian book auction. If I buy them, that’s exactly where they’ll wind up. The subject matter is specialized and attracts only a certain kind of lay person.”
Not to mention the weird and the wishful warlock.

The caretaker frowned. “But this is a magic shop.”

“To a degree. The magic memorabilia is a hook, but I deal in antiques of all kinds. And my kind of magic is more for fun. The contents of some of these books…” Juliet shivered. There was some nasty stuff sitting on her dining table. Fredericka Rossington was a twisted little sister. If these books fell in the wrong hands, Juliet might find herself in some strange company.

“So you don’t want ’em.”

“I didn’t say that.” She wanted them very much. For the first time in almost two hundred and fifty years she felt a glimmer of hope. She imagined if she told Seth Pendleton she wanted to die, he’d think she was a complete loon. But it was true that there was nothing new under the sun. Unless she could somehow become a normal woman again, she’d never be able to marry and have children, the two ordinary things she craved that she’d long denied herself.

“I’ll tell you what. I’d like to take more time to look these over. I’ll write you a check for one thousand dollars as earnest money this afternoon. I have a contact in Boston that I think will be overjoyed to buy all of them for more than that, and I’ll split the extra, fifty-fifty. I’ll even waive my finder’s fee.” She could afford to be generous, especially if the answer to her predicament was in front of her.

“A thousand dollars.”

Juliet couldn’t tell by the expression on his face or the tone of his voice whether he was excited or disgusted. These Mainers were awfully buttoned-down. Juliet decided to take a chance.

“Eleven hundred. That’s one hundred dollars per book right upfront. And you’ll probably do a little better once they go to an expert. Keep in mind that my contact needs to make money, too.” Old books were a tricky commodity. People always thought they were worth a fortune and disappointed when they didn’t fetch more than a good, snotty sneeze. No doubt she was overpaying for some, but she suspected two or three would fetch far more. The gilt illustrations in several of them alone could make a mint. Fredericka Rossington must have a very hefty allowance to have bought them in the first place.

Mr. Pendleton remained quiet. He looked down at his jeans as if he were seeing them for the first time, absently rubbing his thigh. “Sounds fair,” he said at last. “Be glad to see the back of ‘em. They’re kinda creepy. You be careful.”

“Thanks for the warning, Mr. Pendleton.” Juliet walked him back into the shop, where she wrote him a check on her business account. After seeing him out the door, she kept the sign flipped to “Closed.” It was near enough to six o’clock, and she was anxious to read while it was still daylight. She had discovered over the course of time that magic was more manageable before darkness fell.

A pity her husband had not been so circumspect. She was blasted out of her bed at midnight so many years ago. Around her was rubble and ruin, yet her white lawn nightgown was as pristine as ever and not a curl of her hair had come free of its confining braid. There had been some talk of the unusual nature of the “accident,” but she had by necessity moved back to her parents’ home, thus escaping the worst of the gossip. Once Joseph’s affairs had been settled, she was an extravagantly rich widow who had the freedom to live anywhere. She set herself up in London, but after more than a decade of almost blameless widowhood, Juliet began to suspect something was seriously amiss.

She laughed with abandon, yet had no crows’ feet or laugh lines. Her bosom was every bit as rounded and firm and her waist trim even with her corset unlaced. Not a twinge of discomfort assailed her as she raced up the stairs. Her friends stared at her oddly, and conversations ceased when she entered a room. Her behavior was entirely circumspect. She had taken just one lover, a perfectly charming earl who eventually looked to his succession and married a brainless virgin instead of a forty-year-old widow. Which was just as well, really, because he had not made Juliet feel anything more than
comfortable.
But her circle seemed to tighten and shrink against her—in jealousy. While her acquaintances were sprouting chin hairs and dunking their heads in walnut-bark dyes, Juliet was as radiant as an angel. She was
unnatural
. Long before Oscar Wilde thought to pen
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, her friends thought she had made some sort of bargain with the devil.

A chance encounter with an old friend of Sir Joseph’s confirmed that her late husband had been dabbling in white magic which had somehow turned black. And after the man explained the purpose of Joseph’s experimentation, Juliet began to understand why she remained so untouched by time. She had once thought Sir Joseph’s interests bizarre but harmless. How wrong she had been.

Unfortunately, Joseph’s spells had gone up in smoke, and one couldn’t Google one’s way to enlightenment back then. Juliet began her very precarious journey to try to undo the effects of Joseph’s meddling. She had discreetly consulted with all sorts of characters, charlatans and crackpots. She had consented to any number of ridiculous and risky potions and positions. She remained stubbornly immune to change.

But perhaps something in this stack of books would remedy that. Juliet settled the drug store reading glasses on her nose, her failing eyesight the only thing that gave her hope that she would one day be as liver-spotted and toothless as the next little old lady, and opened a book.

J
ack laid
his muzzle on Cade’s lap and snorted, aggrieved. Cade looked at the time at the bottom of his computer screen. It was almost three o’clock, well past lunch and the après-lunch walk. Who knew one could become so absorbed in a flow-chart of an Ohio insurance company? He got up and made two quick liverwurst sandwiches, skipping the cucumbers on Jack’s. And although Jack enjoyed a beer as well as the next dog, Cade drank a solitary Bissell Brothers ale. He deserved to knock off work for the day anyway. He’d been at the handbook since before the sun came up.

“I’ve been all work and no play for too long, haven’t I, buddy?” Jack just grinned maniacally at him, knowing a walk was in the offing once the bottle got tossed in the kitchen recyclable can. In fact, Cade had been doing most of his talking to his dog for a year now.

It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t natural. His mother was worried about him. His friends had pretty much given up hope after he’d passed on season Red Sox tickets and refused to consider re-dating Carol Kennedy, who was not only hot but relentlessly horny. Cade had given a lackluster run at her again after Juliet broke up with him, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

His heart, actually, was broken. Carol wanted another guy to marry, anyhow. Cade couldn’t picture himself in that role with anybody but a short, stacked curly-haired woman who’d thrown a damn shoe at him. The same shoe that he’d nailed over his toilet, to remind himself that his lovelife had gone to shit.

H
e wiped
his mouth on the back of his hand and sent the bottle clinking on top of the pile. Jack spun around in a giddy circle at the back door. “Hold still, you big idiot,” Cade said, trying to snap the leash on his collar. Jack barked once and licked Cade’s hand. “Yeah, yeah. I got it. Dog park. Let me get a coat. Hang on.”

Cade grabbed an old leather jacket from the peg. It was only the end of September, but the leaves were turning already and there was a definite chill in the air. He rubbed a few days’ worth of stubble. Maybe he’d grow a beard this winter. Look like every third Maine man, wild and wooly. Unpredictable. Dangerous. A real writer, like Hemingway. Cade wondered just how much gray he had in his beard at this point. Time was marching on.

Jack dragged him down the brick path and out the gate, leaving Cade with the impression his dog was taking no chances being stuck in the boring back yard. They hadn’t made it to the dog park this morning, since Cade had been determined to finish up his latest project.

Plus, he’d had a bit of a headache. A hangover, if he was honest with himself. Too many Coronas, no lime, watching the Red Sox blow a ninth inning lead. He thought he’d spotted his old gang in the stands, too. He could have been there.

Money for the tickets was no problem. His business was booming. He’d just hired another writer for Gray Matters, making him the employer of three, including himself. He even had an office manager, although the “office” was his cousin Deirdre’s kitchen counter. She’d finally stopped bugging him about Carol when he put her on the payroll.

Life was supposed to be good. He was writing a book again, a thriller about a couple running from the mob. Even though their lives were in constant peril, they were having some mind-blowing sex, something Cade himself only dimly remembered. The heroine was an adorable, taffy-haired antiques dealer who somehow wound up with a trunk full of mob secrets at an estate sale.

Cade had laminated the Down East article that showed Juliet in the middle of her store, sitting on an old painted trunk, waving a magic wand, looking adorable and taffy-haired. As far as he knew, she had no secrets, mob or otherwise. He’d walked by her shop a time or two—okay, eight times, and caught some glimpses of her over the past year. He’d e-mailed her once, sent her a Christmas card. The break-up remained as mysterious to him as the appeal of the cloudy crystal ball she had in her front window.

Jack had just about tugged Cade’s arm out of its socket by the time they reached the iron gate of the park. Mid-afternoon did not seem to be peak dog time, and they had the park to themselves. Cade let Jack run and sat down on a bench. Maybe it really was time to move on. A year was a year. He was almost half-way to seventy. Pretty soon people would begin to wonder if he suffered from a Peter Pan complex or was secretly gay. His mother wanted grandchildren. And it was obvious that Juliet Barton did not want him or his kids.

Cade thought back to the brilliant fall day they had walked on Scarborough Beach. Juliet had been, he had to admit, not quite herself at breakfast. It was she who requested they meet later at the beach. She’d said she’d close the store early, even though Sunday usually brought in a lot of foot traffic. He’d chided it was too cold to swim, but she had insisted. Said something about the water being the source of all life and inspiration. He chalked it up to some New Age bullshit he’d caught her reading. He thought the whole magic angle of her store was a little weird, but who was he to criticize? He was an English major with a minor in Spanish writing instructions for children’s toys.

He’d met her in the beach parking lot. She’d been very specific: no dogs. That was
not
a problem. Cade wasn’t foolish enough to want to drive Jack back in all his wet and sandy glory to shake shit all over the walls of his apartment. Jack liked to roll on dead things too, and there were bound to be carcasses of something on the shoreline. And her car was so pristine it still had its new car aroma. A wet Rufus would fix that in a heartbeat.

Juliet had been so cute at first, trying to walk and getting mired, the sand pouring out on the sides of her sandals. He’d steadied her while she took them off, disappointed that she held them tight in the hand he wanted to hold. There had been a pretty brisk wind which blew her curly ponytail straight up and her first words away. When he bent to hear her repeat them, he caught the dreaded, “We have to talk.”

He remembered the conversation word for word. Well, words were his business after all. They made no sense to him then, no sense to him now. She’d told him he was too much of a sports nut and that they didn’t have anything in common. That he was like a kid, for chrissake.

If he’d been blessed with an omniscient point of view, the totally accurate scene would have unfolded thusly, head-hopping merrily along:

“
This sounds serious. Are you gonna dump me?” He tried to smile, but the cocky grin didn’t stick. All of a sudden he had a very bad feeling. This was no ordinary walk along the beach to collect shells.

Juliet scrunched her eyebrows together. “Dump?”

She looked like a little girl when she was confused. There were lots of times when she didn’t quite understand him. Cade reckoned they must say stuff differently in the south. Like pop for soda. The way the English said biscuits when they meant cookies. Language was pretty interesting, really, although he usually had to use it as dully as possible. Insert Tab A into Slot B. “You know. Break up with me. Tell me to hit the road.”

A vision of Cade punching the pavement arose in her mind. That would surely be painful and pointless, if alliterative. Perhaps it was a figure of speech. She reminded herself to go to the bookstore and purchase a book of twenty-first century colloquialisms. It was clear she wasn’t keeping up.

She’d nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

Cade stopped dead in his tracks and grabbed her arm. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m afraid I’m not. We’ve had a lovely summer You’re a lovely man. Your obsession with televised sports is a bit disconcerting, however. And it would not go amiss if I never went to another Seadogs game in this lifetime.” However long that might be. And the baseball reference was not quite accurate. Gracious, she’d eaten enough ball park hotdogs for the both of them. She’d learned early on, however, to avoid the raw onions.

“You never said—listen, we’ll go wherever you want to go. The ballet or something.” He didn’t know if Portland even had a ballet, but he’d find out. The Sunday papers were still on the bathroom floor. And he read more than the sports section, damn it.

Juliet shook her head. “It’s too late. We don’t suit. I just feel…” She turned her face so he wouldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes. She had to be strong. Be a bitch, really. She’d had years of practice, after all.

“You’re a bit immature, Cade.” Compared to her, anyhow. “Our interests are incompatible.”

His next words proved her point, but he’d been so pissed he couldn’t muster up any Cary Grant. “Well, at least I’m not into wizards and dragon shit! Harry Potter is fiction, baby!”

As if she didn’t know. She’d tried every damn spell on the off chance that J.K. Rowling was onto something. “I’m perfectly aware you find my preoccupation with magic rather silly. You forget that it’s my shop’s specialty. No doubt you’d prefer it if I collected Tips baseball cards.”

“Topps,” he’d corrected automatically. “And I don’t really think your stuff is silly. Juliet, I don’t get where you’re coming from. I thought everything was fine. Better than fine.”

Poor boy. He looked devastated. If he continued to look at her with those gorgeous hazel eyes, she’d forget why she was here and recreate that divine From Here to Eternity scene, although it was rather too cold for that. Speaking of movies. He’d forced her to watch Fever Pitch the other night, all the while explaining the mystical allure of the Boston Red Sox, which still remained mystical if not alluring after his impassioned speech. Drew Barrymore was appealing, though. It gave her an idea. Impetuously, she lobbed a flip-flop at him.

“Grow up! You’re just a Jimmy Fallon!” she sneered, then turned away to take the most difficult steps of her long life.

Cade, of course, was not omniscient or clairvoyant or reading the above passage. He was just a guy who couldn’t seem to move forward. A sap. A stooge. A loser. Unlucky in love. Because even after a year, he still loved Juliet.

Jack ran up to him, a drool-drenched stick in his mouth. “Bored, are you? No buddies to sniff here, huh?” Cade wrestled the stick away from him and threw it so high it got stuck in a tree. Jack looked back at him, disappointment written all over his dog face. “Yeah. Now you know how I feel. It’s there, but you can’t have it. Time to go.”

Jack slunk toward his owner. After a promising start, this outing had turned flat. He belched up some liverwurst. At least his lunch had been adequate.

J
uliet sat behind her counter
, a yellow legal pad at her elbow, covered with notes she’d written in passable Portuguese just in case some customer came in and could read upside-down. Lisbon had been lovely during World War Two, even if it had been a veritable nest of spies. She’d done what she could for the British war effort, and had even been mentioned in an obscure memoir by an old codebreaker who’d been as interested in her derriere as the documents she’d nicked from an
apartamento
during a rowdy Nazi cocktail party. It had been a mere trifle to rifle through the unlocked desk drawers, although her find had resulted in quite a fuss. Somewhere she had a letter from King George VI, which would probably fetch something at auction were she so inclined to part with it.

But one mustn’t rest on one’s laurels, which was a very good thing, as Juliet had altogether too many laurels on which to rest comfortably. The present was all that concerned her now. She’d stayed up late and woke before dawn going over the books, finding one in particular that might hold the key to her transformation. It had been published in 1768, so it was almost as old as she was and certain to have caught Sir Joseph’s attention at the time. Bearing the innocuous title
A Gentleman’s Guide to the Good Life,
it was in reality a goulash of recipes for eternal youth. One particular passage had leaped out at her:

To Restore the Spirit and all Sundry Benefits befitting a Gentleman and His Lady

There was a list of items, all of which were readily accessible to an eighteenth century gentleman of means, but might be difficult to come by in Portland, Maine. Juliet squinted at the uneven print, reacquainting her eye with f for s. If she could figure out the steps Joseph had taken, perhaps she could retrace them from end to beginning. She sighed and pushed the book aside.

It seemed clear that whatever Joseph had sought had worked all too well on her and had

blown him to smithereens. Contrary to all those alarmists amongst conservative fundamentalists of every stripe, people with actual Satanic influence seemed to be as rare as Miley Cyrus’s underwear. If Juliet had a nickel for all the people she’d met who had been erroneously convinced of their magical powers, she’d be able to evict The Donald from Trump Tower and move in herself. Where were all these alleged evildoers, anyway?

She looked at the little timepiece pinned to her cardigan. She’d never quite gotten used to wristwatches, although it was an enormous relief to dispense with gloves. And hats, although soft wooly ones certainly came in handy through the Maine winters. Bras had the advantage over corsets, too. She supposed there were some perks to living past her prime.

It was just after nine. Surely Huntington Lanman, Hunt for short, would be at his ivory- inlaid escritoire perusing his latest rare book find, sipping an infusion of imported Earl Grey tea and munching on a cranberry scone. Or perhaps not. Eating near his valuable assets would probably not be sanctioned. Hunt was far too persnickety to risk a greasy crumb falling onto a volume of sixteenth century verse. But she was confident his silver hair would be brushed to a sheen and his bowtie knotted impeccably at this hour. She hit the speed-dial button and he picked up on the second ring.

“Juliet, my love! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Juliet was stunned for a second, then recalled Caller I.D. The man was not psychic after all.

“Good morning, Hunt. I acquired some books yesterday I thought you might be interested in.” She proceeded to rattle off the details of Mr. Pendleton’s stash, carefully omitting the source of his booty. Before she got very far, Hunt interrupted her with an embarrassed chuckle.