Wish Club (25 page)

“Well, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss—”

“Not at liberty? Of all the ridiculous…a coven? Is this about my Book Club?”

“The information we were given suggests that your book club is more than just a book club—that your group has become involved in more
unseemly
activities. I wanted to give you the opportunity to explain yourself, here. These are very serious allegations to be raised against one of our teachers. If something like this were to get out into the community, why it could—”

If something like this were to get back to the DCFS social worker…Shit. Who did this? Damn. Think, Claudia, think. Pull yourself together, just this once. Don’t panic. Don’t get defensive.

“Mr. Peterson,” Claudia paused, then changed her tack. “Charles.” She smiled at him. “I’ve been teaching here for how many years now? Almost eight? I’d have to say by now that you must know me pretty well—”

“I was pretty shocked when I heard the allegations were against
you.
”

Claudia gave him another smile,
thank you.
“I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, Oliver Stone and all that, but do you think that maybe someone could be…out to get me? I hate to sound paranoid, but with all that’s been going on, the baby and everything, maybe someone is trying to muck it up for me.”

“So you’re saying you’re not involved in any sort of witchcraft-type, coven thing?”

“No. Of course not. I mean, my book club read a novel about witchcraft a while back—but that’s about as close as we’ve come to witches of any type.”
Who is his source? How much does he know?
“We also sometimes do group…meditations, to send positive, healing energy to each other. It’s a good-karma thing.” Claudia saw a look of concern appear on Peterson’s face.
Ooh, “karma” bad choice of word. He’s one of those people that fears stuff like this, thinks yoga is a religion.
“It’s just about channeling”—
shit
—“happy thoughts for each other. Giving ourselves a little positive energy boost.”

Peterson nodded as if he understood, but Claudia was pretty sure her New Age jargon had stumped him as much as quantum physics theory would have.

“Well, I hope you appreciate my position here,” he said, “the necessity for me to investigate these types of things. I have to make sure all my teachers are on the up and up—no Satan worship or animal sacrifices.” He smiled at Claudia, but his eyebrows asked her,
none of that, right?

“Mr. Peterson, I assure you, the only crime my Book Club is guilty of is picking a few bad books.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The
juice machine raged in the background, and the milk steamer seethed in the foreground, but Claudia was oblivious to the noise. She wasn’t trying to read the book she’d brought, a first edition of a John Irving novel,
A Son of the Circus.
She’d read it last year; now it was a prop. She looked over the top of it, scanning the store, looking for her mystery woman, the woman whom she hoped would help the members of Wish Club find their way out of their respective messes. The woman whom Claudia presumed was an Irving fan, since she’d been reading him the last time Claudia had seen her here.

Claudia had also tried to find her crystal, with no luck. It would be a way to break the ice. She’d looked everywhere for it—in her desk at school, in drawers and pockets, at home—but it had never turned up. Just like this woman.

This was the sixth or seventh time since the Emergency Meeting that Claudia had been in the Wild Prairie Market Café. She’d also been going to the Barnes & Noble on Clybourn after school. In both places she sat and drank coffee and kept a lookout. After so many espresso drinks a day, she was experiencing the alert exhaustion that only too much caffeine can bring on: her lungs felt close to hyperventilating, her jaw was tense, and her eyes felt too wide open. The combination would make her appear insane, she thought, should she ever actually find this woman she was looking for.

Her Internet search was proving fruitless, too. There were so many Web pages under witches and covens, tons of sites, and only a few of them had pictures of actual witches—and so far none of them matched. What were the odds she’d ever find her online? (Then again, what had been the odds that Gail would find herself?) But with the wishes going haywire and the allegations of witchcraft springing up, Claudia simply had to find her—or another witch, or someone that could help them.

And now Dan was starting to complain, voicing his disapproval with her for having been gone almost every night for the past week and a half. After she’d made her rounds at the café or the bookstore, or some days both, she would stop by the hospital to cuddle Elliot for a while. Most nights, when she got home, she continued searching on the computer for an hour or two, before getting into bed late.

Sleep eluded her, and all her switching from side to side was disturbing Dan—but she couldn’t stop her mind from racing.
Am I just wasting my time on the stupidest quest in the world? Who is this woman? Where is she? What if I actually find her and then she doesn’t want to help—or worse, can’t? What then?
The coffee only made it worse, but she’d fallen into the vicious caffeine cycle—not falling asleep at night because of it, then needing it twice as much the next day.

The previous night she had been so exhausted and had gotten to bed so late that she’d been certain she would fall asleep right away. She had tossed and turned a couple of times, then opened her eyes, immediately realizing she was so charged up that it had been foolish to try to force them closed.
How come I can’t capture this feeling at three in the afternoon?

During her next eyes-wide-open toss, she was surprised to see that Dan’s eyes were wide open, too.

“Hmm, you look familiar,” he said. “Didn’t you used to live here?” He reached an arm out and pulled her closer. “Am I going to have to hang out at the Wild Prairie Café if I want to see you in the daylight?”

“It’s not going to be for too much longer,” Claudia said. “At least I don’t think so. I’m starting to feel a little ridiculous about this whole
searching for the mystery woman
thing. I’m either going to find her soon or give it up.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Dan gave her a squeeze, “because I miss my wife.” He kissed her on her forehead before rolling back onto his other side, mumbling a comment about preferring a different type of tossing and turning in bed.

Claudia wondered if the other women were going through the same thing as she was—struggling unsuccessfully to find a witch during the day and then getting the third degree at night. She doubted it. Mara still hadn’t told Henry anything about the witchcraft stuff and Lindsay had just started
really
trying to help them search. Claudia was pretty sure she wouldn’t tell James anything about spell reversals, it being tantamount to admitting failure. Gail wanted to help, but didn’t have the time. Would she have mentioned it to John? Probably not. He was so skeptical about the wishing causing any of their troubles in the first place, he certainly wouldn’t be sympathetic to their trying to find a witch now. As for Jill, who knew what was up with her anymore? She’d practically disappeared.

Now at the Wild Prairie Café, Claudia lowered her book and rested her face in her hands. This was all so silly. She couldn’t spend all her time sitting in coffee shops and bookstores hoping some stranger would show up.

All the muscles in her face and neck were tight. She relaxed them into her hands, and the artificial alertness she’d been feeling evaporated instantly. She felt she could just fall asleep right there. All she had to do was lower her head onto the table and she would doze right off, like a baby. Like Elliot.

Watching Elliot sleep; that’s what she should be doing now. Holding that little baby, watching his face, had convinced her that babies are the real angels, or at least the inspiration from which the idea for angels had come—straight from heaven, precious gifts. How could anyone have done what his mother had?

The search for her had focused mostly on a few students at Strawn, but it was still ongoing. For Claudia and Dan, the fostering process had been proceeding pretty smoothly. The DCFS home-study interviews had gone well, she thought. Claudia was torn between not wanting to find his mother (perhaps bettering her chances of keeping Elliot) and wanting the opportunity to smack her squarely in her jaw. It was a strange sensation, this mama-bear feeling. She’d never known anything like it before.

Claudia lifted her head out of her hands and scanned for the witch-woman again out of habit. She should go home—or to the hospital. All she’d wanted was a baby and now it was starting to look more and more like that might actually happen. And not just any baby, but Elliot. What was going to happen if she found this witch? What if they undid the wishing and then Elliot’s mother or father turned up and wanted him back?

The realization that maybe she shouldn’t be doing this crept over her slowly.
If I really want to get Elliot, why am I trying to undo my wish?
Oh, stop being so selfish. She needed to do this; she had to. Their wishes needed fixing.

But maybe not necessarily. Maybe all the wishes would fix themselves on their own, like Lindsay had said. Claudia could write again, although not very well. Earlier in the week, while watching for the woman at Barnes & Noble, she’d spent the better part of her time working on her handwriting. Now she could do a pretty good job of signing her name. Most everything else she wrote was illegible to anyone but her, however, and she still couldn’t put lesson outlines on the board. Typing up Post-it notes on her old typewriter in order to grade her papers was getting old, fast.

No, they needed a witch and Claudia was pretty sure this woman was the one. She looked around the Wild Prairie Café one more time. Then she looked at her watch; she really should get going now. She
was
exhausted.

She closed her book and tucked it in her bag and told herself it was common sense and exhaustion, not her realization about wanting to keep Elliot, that had curbed her enthusiasm for her quest.

Claudia
maneuvered her car into a cramped space with a minimum of bumper thumping, happy she’d found a place to park on her block. She was so tired, she decided not to go to the hospital tonight so she could get home a little earlier than usual, a maneuver intended to placate Dan.

Her cell phone rang and Claudia fumbled through her purse to find it, her finger narrowly missing the point of the compass that had been in there for over a week now. One of these days she’d remember to return it to the math lab.

The phone flashed red as she pulled it out, flipping it open without checking the caller ID. It was Mara, frustrated with her search for a witch.

“Have
you
had any luck?” Mara’s voice rose up an entire major scale with the question. The singsonginess was getting worse.

“Nope.” Claudia leaned back into the seat of her car.

“I’m at my wit’s end. I don’t know what else to do.” Mara sounded horribly panicked, in spite of her musical voice. “Henry’s got so much hair—on his back, and his arms. He has to wear long-sleeved shirts all the time, even at practice, and it just keeps getting thicker.”

Claudia knew. She’d seen him at school.

“And I’ve gained so much weight—I can’t stop eating.”

“Mara, we’re going to find someone.”

“It can’t happen soon enough. I thought I had a lead, a tarot reader at the Chakra Shoppe. I had a reading with her last week and then I went back a couple of times, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her, you know, if she was a witch. And then, and then yesterday, when I walked in, they asked me to leave.” Mara’s voice was in an extremely high-pitched range now. “They said I was making Star Raven nervous. I got kicked out of a New Age bookstore. For stalking! These people—the New Age woo-hoos—they’re the most tolerant, accepting people in the universe and they kicked me out. I’ve been banned from the store like on that Seinfeld episode!”

Claudia tried not to sound alarmed at the odd ululations and gyrations Mara’s voice was taking. “At least Dr. Seeley isn’t starting an investigation into you because he thinks you’re a witch.”

“What? Who’s doing that?”

“Strawn.”

“I should have guessed. They’re so freakin’ uptight. Peterson already had a talk with Henry about shaving—making a nice, clean-cut impression on the young men and all that. Yeah, right.” Mara paused. “Wait. How did they know? Who snitched?”

“I have no idea, but Gail’s been accused, too. Another mom at her kids’ school just walked right up to her at pickup last week and straight-out accused her of being a witch. Right there in front of all the kids. Told Gail she wouldn’t let her son play with Andrew anymore.”

“No.”

“Yes.” A car had pulled up alongside Claudia and the driver was asking via sign language if she was leaving her space. Claudia shook her head and turned off her lights.

“I wish I could have been there to hear Gail’s comeback.”

“Gail said she couldn’t think of a thing to say—it had taken her so off guard. She said at first she thought it was about the Internet thing…you know, the pictures.” Another car had pulled up alongside Claudia and was waiting for her to pull out. Claudia decided to get out of the car and walk home. “Gail denied everything, of course.” When Claudia opened the door, the car sped past, the driver giving her the finger.

“Jeez. Some people.”

“I know. They have a lot of nerve, coming up and accusing someone to their face, based on a rumor.”

“Huh? Oh, I know.” Claudia didn’t feel like explaining someone had just flipped her off. “You heard what happened with Lindsay?”

“The fainting thing? Yeah. I feel so sorry for her.”

“At least now she’s
really
trying to find someone to help us. She’s been to Transitions twice and yesterday she drove out to Insight in Naperville. I got the impression her heart wasn’t in it before.”

They fell silent on the line for a moment as Claudia walked toward her building. The fresh air felt good in her overcaffeinated lungs.

Mara spoke first. “You know, you don’t think Jill could have started the rumors?”

“Funny you should say that, because she’s the first person I thought of, too, even though it would be completely irrational. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would she do it? She was right there along with us, even when she was so against the wishing. And the wishing helped her meet this Marc guy, who she’s so involved with no one’s seen or heard from her since before she blew us off at the emergency meeting. But I don’t know why she would spread rumors. Like I said, it doesn’t make sense. It is a little weird, though, that both of us thought of her first.”

“I still wouldn’t put it past her,” Mara said. “Maybe it is irrational…she’d be implicating herself, too. But who
else
knows about all of it and would talk? Besides, I’ve never gotten any warm fuzzies from Jill. I don’t care how
misunderstood
Lindsay says she is. I think it would be right up her alley to try to put a stop to it by spreading nasty rumors about us and witchcraft. And now it’s like she’s totally avoiding us.

“And what about this Marc guy?” Mara continued. “What if she told him about the wishing and he made her quit? All it would take would be for either one of them to mention it to a few people. This town can be pretty small sometimes.

“She’s still seeing him, right?” Mara tried to imitate Jill’s smooth voice when she said, “Is it still
going fabulously
?” but her words came out in a descending minor scale. Decidedly un-Jill-like.