The Witches Of Denmark (19 page)

Manuel and Adrian quit the charade of acting like everyone else when it came time to go home, slipping away in their cherished wormhole. Grandpa gave the approval, perhaps thinking no one would miss them, since everyone was packing up to go home. But Harrison noticed.

“Yeah, where’d they go?” asked Julien, shooting a knowing glance my way.

Dad looked to be at a loss for a good answer, but had the presence of mind to shrug and pass it off nonchalantly, as did Grandpa. Good thing Julien didn’t ask me, since I was just as surprised to find they had left immediately after getting Grandpa’s blessing.

“Oh, they’re returning the keys to one of the jet skis to the rental office,” my mother lied, but with enviable smoothness. “We will wait for their return…. But, you all can go on. We’ve got everything packed and we will see you tonight for your bluegrass band’s rehearsal on your front porch again. It will be so much fun!”

She sold this with the right blend of neutrality and enthusiasm, which any performer will admit is the elixir that flatters the heart and mind most effectively. Harrison told us he would go ahead and get a head start on arranging for his buddies to be there around seven, and practically dragged Jennifer into their minivan with their kids not ready to leave yet. His granddaughter gave me a flirtatious look, and I offered a slight smile in response—a look I’ve got down pat after decades of practice. She’s too young now, but in a few years if we’re still here… who knows?

The ride back to Denmark was peaceful, and I think we were all thinking the same thing: Why can’t every day be like this? As if on cue, once we were within half a mile of the downtown square, an oppressive feeling suddenly embraced the Escalade.

“Do you feel that?” asked Alisia, worriedly.

“Try to ignore it, sweetheart,” said Dad, looking over at Mom for confirmation. She was a statue in expression, and although her dark shades kept me from reading her eyes, I knew they were closed. She was concentrating… listening. “We’ll be home in just a couple of minutes.”

But the feeling worsened. Enough to where Grandpa and Grandma exchanged worried glances.

“What is it?” I finally asked, as we turned onto Chaffin’s Bend. The feeling began to wane, as if my question deflated it.

“It’s hard to say for certain,” said Grandma, pausing to study each of us. “But I recognize the essence… it belongs to Irina. It is her anger that I feel… channeled along with malice from the others. It is good that we are now home, as the positive energy saturating the house and grounds is strong enough to push their hostility back.”

She was right. Once we crossed Old Dominion Road, the oppressiveness fell away; leaving a pesky, barely discernible fog behind. By the time we pulled into the gravel drive leading up to the rear of our house, the welcoming feeling that we have grown familiar and dependent on since arriving from Chicago a month and a half earlier greeted us. Greeted us powerfully.

Our refuge. Strong enough to ward off the Mateis’ evil designs for now… but would it always be that way?

Time would tell. Probably soon…
very
soon.

Chapter Sixteen

Monday, July 6
th
. Day forty-eight. If only this day could’ve ended the way it began, with a truly hilarious moment.

Regardless of how things turn out with my family and me in Denmark, Tennessee, I do believe I will always cherish the image in my head of ‘Horseshit’ Harry stumbling out our front door and scurrying home after getting the holy hell scared out of him.

At the time, just before eleven that morning, Harris Martin was showing me the best way to clear more space between the boxwoods and the old iron fence out front. Harry’s startled cries for mercy and his “Get the hell away from me, ya goddamn demon!” drew the first snickers from Harris, and then I joined in. In truth, my initial voiced response would’ve been
“What in the hell have you done now, Grandpa?!”
But I clammed up with Harris standing next to me, his eyes opened wide in surprise.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” laughed Harris, after Harry fell down the short flight of steps from the front porch, landing hard on his ass twice, and then sprinted for the side gate across from his junkyard house. “Now, there’s somethin’ you don’t see everyday—and about time for it to happen to that asshole!”

“I probably should go check on my grandfather and make sure he’s okay,” I said, finding it hard not to laugh, too, but worried about what was going on inside the house after hearing what I assumed was Grandpa cursing in Romanian. The foyer’s fine acoustic design amplified his voice to where it clearly reached the spot we presently worked, near the front sidewalk a good forty feet away from the front door. I dropped the hedge trimmer and ran for the front door with Harris right behind me.

“I tried to tell you, Father, that the man is a complete imbecile,” chided Manuel, who stood on the upstairs landing where he helped Grandpa remove broken wood and other debris from a tall window that faced the backyard—a window affording one of the best views from our house. “Will you at least allow me to fix the window frame and sill?”

Grandpa nodded sullenly, and then turned his attention to me. I was halfway up the stairs and Harris stood below me at the base of the staircase. Grandpa nudged Manuel, who was murmuring a spell. He turned to face Harris.

“I don’t suppose you can finish the travesty that used to be a tiled floor?” asked my uncle, to Harris. A broken pulley rope in the window frame began to repair itself behind Manuel. The spell was unhindered, and surely my uncle was banking on Harris not noticing. “If you can fix it, we will pay you well. We want the original floor restored, and the rest of the tile will need to be pulled up—but done so without the brute force that severely damaged a few boards over here.”

He pointed to an area near one of the banisters. Harris nodded confidently.

“You probably don’t know this, but my uncle, Jeremiah Martin, used to do work around here for the Clarkes,” Harris advised. “That’s how I learned this house… and I know it like the back of my hand. The only reason Mr. Clarke hired anybody other than my uncle was because he has a hard time stayin’ out of trouble. And the only time he ever hired Mr. Turner for anythin’ was when Uncle Jeremiah was in jail.”

He looked away, as if embarrassed about his uncle, and wondering if he should have mentioned him.

“Your uncle’s in jail now, isn’t he, son?” asked Grandpa.

“Yes sir… he is.” Harris raised his gaze to meet my grandfather’s, and though it wasn’t obvious, I could detect the admiration in Grandpa’s solemn expression.

“I already know that you are not like most contractors around here, and your work is very good.” Grandpa paused to survey the upstairs landing floor, which was in shambles: splintered wood—some of it plywood that needed to be removed anyway, along with soda cans and other trash left by Harry Turner, and the half-assed job of hanging protective tarp. “The job is yours if you want it. Sebastian has told us you are on the football team for the local high school, and we will work around that and anything else you have a commitment to. I believe you already understand the importance of your education, and we won’t get in the way of it…. So do you want the job?”

“Yes sir. You won’t be disappointed,” Harris assured him, his eyes alight with excitement.

I think we all believed the floor would be in good hands with Harris. And he was willing to do more than just repair the floor, in order to help restore the gallery to what it once looked like more than a century ago. The only thing he advised he couldn’t do was build a newel post to match the ones at the base of the stairs. Like us, though, he couldn’t understand why the Clarkes had removed the original newel posts upstairs and replaced them with faux Corinthian columns that didn’t fit the house’s legacy or design. And, ‘Horseshit’ Harry’s final contribution to our place was a block of wood standing where a newel post should go. Harris nearly lost his balance on the stairs from a fit of laughter when Grandpa told him that our temperamental neighbor promised to hand carve a newel post from the wood block.

“I’m sorry, y’all… but that is really funny,” Harris told us, when he regained his composure. “I seriously doubt that Mr. Turner could carve anythin’ beyond stick figures in a Neanderthal’s cave. Sorry to tell y’all that, but as you can surely tell by now, the man is a crack-head buffoon.”

“But you can fix everything else?” asked Manuel, while Grandpa and I were still laughing at Harris’ portrayal of Harry’s quirks a moment ago.

“Oh, yeah—most definitely,” said Harris. “And, there is a guy around here who can build you a newel post that will be every bit as gorgeous as the two down below.” He pointed to the pair guarding the base of the stairs.

“Who, pray tell, would that be?” Grandpa asked, cynically.

“It’s Harrison’s oldest boy, Sam Crawford,” he told him. “Dude is a master stair builder with the same artistic bent as his Pa, and I know y’all have seen what Mr. Crawford, Sr., can create. That old man’s a master, and his son is one, too!”

Grandpa and I had seen Harrison’s amazing work at his shop, as mentioned earlier. If his son were half as talented as he was, whatever he made for us would have to be incredible. I could tell that Grandpa thought along similar lines, as the tenseness in his face relaxed.

Surely there are those who would like to know what prompted Harry Turner’s humorous exit from our house. Unfortunately, I had to wait on those details until we finished cleaning Harry’s mess and Harris left to gather the proper tools needed to complete the job.

“Well, it started with this,” said Grandpa, pointing to what was now a fully repaired window, courtesy of Manuel’s magic. “In addition to the pulley Harry broke, he snapped part of the windowsill off in the process. Too much brute force from a jackass who had the nerve to tell us he loves old houses. Said he grew up with his grandpa working on places just like this.”

“Total bullshit,” added Manuel, who apparently was looking for other spots to fix before Harris returned.

“Ah, yes… I agree,” said Grandpa. “But that’s not what stirred my anger to the rage it became. What did that was seeing all the crap he left up here, after I asked him nicely several times to kindly pick up after himself and to keep things neat. As you can see, that never happened…. Then, when I told him I was unhappy he had broken the windowsill, he lied and said it was already damaged before he touched it. I said, ‘What in the hell are you saying?’ and he repeated the same lie. I wasn’t about to let it go on, and I simply told him to fix it if he wanted to continue getting paid. I left him muttering under his breath, as I promised to take care of something for your grandmother downstairs. When I returned, he had made a childish effort to repair the splintered wood in the windowsill and added a fresh hammer mark to the middle of it.”

“No, shit?” I could scarcely believe the gall.

“Indeed, it’s true, son. It was something you couldn’t miss, but it’s gone now that Manny took care of it…. Still, it was enough to send me over the edge. Sort of like the guy was either baiting me to fire him or acting like a five-year-old brat for me calling him out on his antics—or both.” Grandpa shook his head disgustedly. “I thought about his little snide remarks from the past couple weeks. Apparently he hated the Clarkes, and kept calling our house a big fat pig. ‘You put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.’”

“He seriously said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good thing I wasn’t present when he did,” I said, feeling my own blood begin to simmer. “I would’ve told him that the only pigsty around here is
his
frigging place, which was once the home of a well-liked gay couple who had it really looking nice, and who poured a bunch of money into it before one of the guys got really sick—according to Julien. ‘Horseshit’ Harry bought it for a song, and since then he and his brood have totally trashed it in just a matter of a few years. All it lacks is the lipstick he mentioned, and he’d have the pig he described!”

Grandpa chuckled at my indignation, and maybe it made him feel better about his reaction, since any of us would’ve responded the same way. It sounded like Harris was coming up the steps to the porch, and my grandfather moved down the stairs to greet him.

“Well, there is one last thing, and it’s probably why he left in the hysterical state he did,” said Grandpa, looking back up at me. “I decided to have a little fun with the sorry bastard before he left. Sort of a little ‘going away’ present to make sure he never comes back.”

“Like what?” I was almost afraid to ask.

“Like me suddenly berating him like a madman, cursing in Romanian as I rose into the air above the banister,” he said. “Then I added a few illusions to drive the experience deep into his psyche.”

“Oh shit.”

“No, Bas, it was
amazing!”
said Manuel. “Father pulled the illusion he is famous for to this day with the Radus of Europe.”

“Here in the States, I call it my ‘Sleepy Hollow’ trick,” said Grandpa over his shoulder, as Harris gently rapped on the glass of the front door.

“Oh,
no!”

“Oh, delightfully
yes
, indeed!” said Manuel. “You should’ve seen the imbecile stagger back when your grandfather’s eyes turned into glowing red coals, and then fell to his knees when Father removed his head and tucked it under his left arm, while he continued to berate him in the finest Romanian swear words known to mankind. Too bad this Harry idiot couldn’t understand a damned thing thrown at him.”