Spun by Sorcery (12 page)

He was in cop mode. He didn’t mean it the way it sounded but it hurt just the same.

“I smelled her perfume. I sensed a benevolent presence around me. Who else could it have been?”

Janice made an unpleasant sound. “You mean besides two dozen other spirits?”

“Janice, don’t—”

“It wasn’t your mother,” she said.

“You sound pretty sure.” She also sounded pretty pissed, which got under my skin.

“I
am
sure. There is no way Guinevere could have helped you.”

“Gunnar helped us at the waterfall,” I reminded her. “And Sorcha helped me before that. Why not my mother?”

Janice looked equal parts annoyed and sorrowful. “Honey, that just wasn’t the Guinevere we all knew.”

“What the hell does that mean?” My fingertips were beginning to twitch, a sure sign I was going to start shooting angry flames any second.

“It means what it means,” Janice said. “You weren’t your mother’s first priority and Sugar Maple ranked even lower. When she chose to leave you and be with your father, she left all of us. She didn’t care, Chloe. Not about you. Not about Sorcha. Not about any of us. And definitely not about Sugar Maple.” She reached out her hand to me but the look in my eyes stopped her cold. “I don’t mean to be harsh, honey, but even if she had the option, I don’t see Guinevere riding in to save the day.”

Everything Janice said was true. My mother had loved me but not enough to stick around for the long haul. And not enough to find a way to ease my pain. The idea that she would suddenly show up in my life in time to save me from meeting an untimely end at a highway rest stop in central Massachusetts was pretty ridiculous.

But the smell of her perfume . . . the sense of being surrounded by love . . .

Nobody could tell me that wasn’t real.

From that point on, it was clear sailing.

The Buick drove like a Maserati. The few gallons of gas Luke procured at the rest stop somehow kept the tank filled. Penny the cat slept, yawned, demanded head skritches, and didn’t require the litter box.

I handed the driving over to Luke about eighty miles outside of Salem. The traffic had picked up, along with the pace, and since I don’t drive over thirty miles an hour unless I have to, I considered it a humanitarian gesture on my part.

I’m not sure whether or not Luke believed my story but he had my back just the same. Which was one of the many reasons I loved him. The whole parallel-dimension thing had to be tough for a literal-minded cop to process. Before my powers kicked in, I would have had a tough time with it, too—and I had grown up in Sugar Maple, surrounded by magick.

About thirty miles outside of Salem, I lowered the window a few inches and breathed deeply.

“I smell the ocean,” I said.

Both Luke and Janice laughed.

“I smell pollen,” Janice said.

“Give it another twenty miles,” Luke advised. “Then you’ll smell the ocean.”

“Seriously,” I said. “It’s all briny out there.”

“Lorcan claims he can smell the ocean from our back porch,” Janice said. “He says—” Her voice broke and she buried her face in her almost-finished sock.

I unlatched my seat belt and scrambled around to face the backseat. My powerful, beautiful friend looked small and fragile and painfully vulnerable. I rested my hand on her shoulder.

“Damn it,” she said. “I swore I wasn’t going to cry.”

“Nothing wrong with crying,” Luke said.

“He’s right,” I agreed. “Let it out.”

She fumbled around for a napkin then blew her nose. “Screw crying,” she said. “We’ll be in Salem before we know it. What are we going to do once we get there?”

Luke clicked on his left-turn signal and moved smoothly into the fast lane. “Whip the bad guys’ asses and save Sugar Maple.”

It sounded like a plan to me.

“There’s a Target a few miles ahead,” I said. “We’ll stop and pick up clean clothes, toiletries, and a cat carrier.”

“I don’t think we’ll need it,” Janice said. “Penny’s back to her old self.”

“Luke’s right,” Chloe said. “Why take any chances?”

I’d climbed enough trees for one day.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Disposable cell phones.”

“Cell phones?” Janice made a dismissive gesture I caught in the rearview mirror. “We have blueflame.”

“Luke doesn’t. If we don’t have cells, too, he can’t reach us.”

“I’d ditch the blueflame unless you’re sure you’re alone.” Their method of communication rocked, but speaking into a handful of blue fire wasn’t likely to go unnoticed.

Chloe took down her ponytail, ran her hands through her hair, then gathered it up again and caught it in one of those colorful scrunchy things. “How do you know there’s a Target coming up?” she asked me.

“I grew up here, remember?”

“I totally forgot,” she said. “How close are we to your old hometown?”

“Couple of miles,” I said. “About halfway between the Target and Salem.” I worked summers schlepping tourists back and forth to Cape Ann for the whale-watching tours.

I waited for the obvious next question but she fell silent. There was no way in hell I could explain any of this to my family, so why try? We were here to see if we could find a way to rescue Sugar Maple, not play Meet the MacKenzies.

After my daughter Steffie died in an accident, I had stepped away from family and all of the baggage, both good and bad, that came with it. Too many memories I wasn’t ready to embrace. That was one of the things about big families: it’s a hell of a lot easier to disappear when there are five other siblings, five in-laws, and thirty-three grandchildren to keep track of. It would be Thanksgiving before they noticed I’d gone missing.

The Target parking lot was its usual crazy mess of runaway shopping carts, crying kids, and shoppers in search of a spot near the entrance.

“There’s one near the door,” Janice said, pointing over my shoulder.

“This tank would take out half of the Toyota next to it.” I snagged a double spot near the back of the lot.

“You coming, Jan?” Chloe asked as she unbuckled her lap belt.

“I’ll stay here and keep an eye on Penelope.”

“Is she okay?” I asked Chloe as we crossed the parking lot.

“No,” she said, slipping her arm through mine. “She’s not okay at all.”

She told me about Janice’s decision to pierce the veil if we couldn’t restore Sugar Maple to its Vermont footprint.

“Would that reunite her with her family?”

“Probably,” she said. “Nothing’s guaranteed but it probably would.”

“Did you try to talk her out of it?”

“I told her how I felt but . . .” She glanced toward a red PT Cruiser angling for a spot. “It won’t come to that. We’re going to bring Sugar Maple back and everyone will pick up where they left off.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. She knew the odds were against us. She didn’t need to be reminded.

Targets are like Burger Kings and Walmarts: if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. We could have been in Montana.

“I’ll check out the cat carriers,” Chloe said.

“Better you than me,” I said with a quick laugh. “I’ll grab some prepaid cells and meet you at the checkout.”

She disappeared up the pet supplies aisle. I continued on to electronics, where I went face-to-face with a wall of cell phones. Nobody needed that many choices. I looked for lots of minutes for not much money and grabbed three of them just to be on the safe side.

“Can I pay for these up front?” I asked the teenaged clerk draped over the counter, paging through a copy of
Teen People
with one of those vampire boys on the cover
.

“Whatever,” she said without looking up.

I headed for the pet supplies aisle, where I’d last seen Chloe. She wasn’t there but I had a pretty good idea where I’d find her.

I stopped a middle-aged man wearing a red smock and a badge that read SAM.

“Wool?” I said and he stared at me with a blank expression on his ruddy face. “You know, yarn.” I mimed knitting. “Baby booties. Blankets. Sweaters.”

He pointed toward the far corner of the store. “Over there with the sewing stuff.”

I thanked him and took three steps in that direction, when someone called out my name.

“Luke?”

I would know that voice anywhere. I put my head down and kept walking.

“MacKenzie, wait up!”

I turned around and there was my old pal Fran Kelly, the admin assistant at my former station house, who had put the whole Sugar Maple thing in motion for me. She was pushing a cart filled to the brim with toys and kids’ clothing and a giant ten-pack of paper towels.

“Frannie!” I laughed as she abandoned the cart and made a run for me. “What the hell are you doing in North Reading?”

She flung her arms around me and gave me a bear hug a WWF contender would be proud of. “I could ask you the same thing. I thought you were still up in the Vermont wilderness.”

Definitely not the time for full disclosure. I took a quick look around. No sign of Chloe. I hoped our luck would hold.

“Had a little business to take care of in Salem.” I extricated myself from the hug and took a look at her. “Is there something in the water around here? You look great!”

The tough, no-nonsense Fran I had worked with blushed bright red and looked downright girlish. “You’re not with the force anymore so you don’t have to kiss my ass.” She grabbed one of the disposable cell phones I was holding. “What the hell is this? Are you running drugs up there in Maple Sugar?”

“You big-city types are too damn suspicious.” I took the phone back from her. “So how is the old gang?”

She filled me in on mutual friends and I was trying to figure out a way to make an escape before she started questioning me about Sugar Maple.

“So what happened with Karen? Did you figure out why she was looking for you?”

If I told her what really happened to my ex-wife, Fran would run screaming for the nearest exit. Lying was the only option.

“She called a few times but we never connected.”

“Your brother Ronnie said he heard she headed out west to start over.”

“Could be,” I said, feeling like a shit. “I’m not on her Christmas card list.” I changed the subject. “So what are you doing here?”

“We sold the house and bought into an over-fifty-five complex out on Landingham Road so we could be closer to the grands. Your brother helped us.”

“You bought from Ronnie?” My older brother was a successful Realtor with connections all over the area.

“He hooked us up, negotiated a great price, and held our hands the whole way. Great guy.”

This was the same guy who had specialized in Atomic Wedgies when I was growing up.

“So tell me about life up in the boonies,” she said, a big wide smile on her face.

“Not much to tell. You already know it’s a small town, no crime, lots of tourists in season.”

She waved a manicured hand. “I don’t care about that. Tell me about the woman.”

“What woman?”

“What woman?” she repeated. “Your girlfriend, that’s what woman.”

“Who said I had a girlfriend?”

“You did,” she said. “Last time we spoke.”

Where were the random bolts of lightning when you needed them? “Early days,” I said and hoped she would let it go at that.

“Did she come down here with you?”

“Uh—”

Fran was no fool. She knew a yes when she didn’t hear one. “Where is she?” She did a three sixty in place, scanning the store for Chloe. “I want to meet her.”

“You know women,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t hit me in the head with a box of Legos for the sexist statement. “Retail therapy.”