Witches' Bane

China Bayles 02

Witches Bane

Susan Wittig Albert

Copyright © 1993

CHAPTER 1

“Sometimes you almost have me convinced, China.” McQuaid squatted on his heels to admire the stone fountain he’d just installed in the garden in front of my herb shop.

“Convinced of what?” I was on my knees with a trowel, settling a rosemary transplant behind the fountain.

“That maybe Pecan Springs isn’t such a bad place. Maybe I should settle down here, after all.”

“Ha,” I said, under my breath. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” I said, out loud.

I straightened up and took a deep breath of the fresh morning air. It was a late October Monday, my day off, and the warm, hazy-gold sun spilled over the silvery mounds of artemisia and lambs-ears around the new fountain. Behind me was Thyme and Seasons, the herb shop I own and operate. Four years ago, I called it quits with the Houston criminal law firm where I’d worked for a decade and a half, cashed in my retirement, and went looking for a small town. I found it halfway between Austin and San Antonio, bought a marvelous two-story, century-old stone building with space for two stores in front and living quarters in back, and went into business. I love it here. I aim to stay.

The problem is, I also love Mike McQuaid, or I think I do, and I think he loves me. How many guys would give up a weekend with their toys to put in a fountain? But neither of us are kids who believe we can have everything we want. We’re adults. We have to accept the reality of one another’s lives, and a central reality for McQuaid is his career, which he loves. He’s an ex-cop who is now an assistant professor in the criminal justice department at Central Texas State University—a tall, dark, sexy, and almost handsome ex-cop with slate blue eyes, a jagged white scar across his forehead, and a nose that’s been broken more times than it deserves. McQuaid is bright and ambitious, with fourteen years experience in law enforcement, fine academic credentials, and two years of full-time teaching. At thirty-eight, he’s on his way up the career ladder to a big-time professorship in some high-powered criminal justice program in a large university in a major city. He’s also a single parent.

And that’s the rub. I’m forty-four, and I’ve never accommodated myself to a live-in lover, much less a lover-plus-child. I enjoy my privacy. I cherish my personal space. I enjoy my small-time herb business and my small-time life in this small-time town. That’s why I shut down whenever McQuaid says something mat sounds even remotely long-term. I’m keeping my emotional distance.

McQuaid splashed his hands in the fountain to wash off the dirt. “Yeah, well, I have to admit that there’s something to be said for the quiet life—if you don’t mind being bored now and then.”

“Who’s bored?” I stood up for a stretch. When I left the rat race, I wanted to leave the rats behind, get away from the superhype, the constant push, the unrelenting pressure. But there’s plenty of big-city cop left in McQuaid. The more action, the better.

“I’m bored,” McQuaid said. “But not for long.” With a Draculan leer, he lunged at me and stuck his cold, wet hands under the front of my tee shirt.

I swatted him with the flat of my trowel. “Stop it, McQuaid! This is a main street. People are watching!”

“Good. Let’s sell tickets.” McQuaid pinned my arms behind me and gave me a long, hard, and extremely satisfying kiss.

“I’d make that a ten.”

It was Ruby Wilcox, my best friend and tenant. She owns the Crystal Cave, Pecan Spring’s only New Age shop, which occupies the other space in my building. Ruby is six feet tall in her flats, with orangy-red hair and freckles. Usually, she looks like Cher outfitted for a show at the Sands, but with her body and charm, she gets away with it. Monday is her day off too, so she was wearing something casual—a wide-shouldered blue-gray jersey and skintight white calf-length pants. With her height and those giant shoulder pads, she reminded me of a Cowboy linebacker.

McQuaid released me and grinned at Ruby. “Gotta go. I’ve got a class at one, and I haven’t finished grading the quizzes.”

“Give ‘em hell, McQuaid,” Ruby said. As he climbed into his old blue Ford pickup, she gave the new fountain a critical look. “Cool,” she said. “But don’t you think it needs something? Lilies, maybe? A stone frog?”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, Ruby. Give it time to grow moss.” I turned to see Constance Letterman coming up the walk.

“Is that your new fountain?” Constance asked. She’s short and round, her tight brown curls courtesy of Bobby Rae’s House of Beauty, where perms are half price on Wednesdays. Squeezed into a bright orange-and-yellow checked pantsuit, she looked like a plastic pot scrubber. She scrutinized the fountain. “Looks kinda empty.”

“That’s what I was just saying,” Ruby said. “It needs lilies and a stone frog.”

Constance looked at Ruby. “Hate to tell you, Ruby, but Arnold won’t run that ad for your fortune-tellin’ class. He says it’s a bad idea right now, what with people all upset about this Satanic stuff.”

Constance is half gossip, half native philosopher, and holds a lifetime membership in the moral majority. She writes a column called “News Roundup” for the Pecan Springs
Enterprise,
which belongs to her cousin, Arnold Seidensticker. I think people read the column mainly to see their names in print. At fifteen thousand, Pecan Springs is small enough that the grapevine does a pretty fair job of keeping people informed. By the time an item makes the “Roundup,” it’s already made the rounds of the Doughnut Queen, Lillie’s Place, and half the churches in town. Everybody who wants to know, knows, including some who don’t.

“It isn’t a fortune-telling class,” Ruby said. “It’s a tarot class. And it has nothing to do with Satanic cults.”

“You know that and maybe I know that,” Constance said judiciously, “but a lot of the folks readin’ the paper don’t know that. It’s for your own good. Ruby. People get it into their heads you’re a witch, you could be in deep, serious trouble.”

“Nobody burns witches anymore,” I said. “It’s against the law.”

Constance folded her arms across her chest. “It’s not burnin’ that’s at stake here.” Ruby groaned and I winced. Constance didn’t appear to notice. “And it’s not the law you got to think about, either. People in Pecan Springs just plain don’t like witches. Especially these days, what with the grand jury investigatin’ the old Ellis case and diggin’ up poor old Leota.”

Constance was talking about the mysterious death of Ralph Ellis, a sixteen-year-old boy whose body was found hanging from a horse apple tree out on Cotton Gin Road one summer evening two years ago. In the absence of witnesses, and since the school counselor testified that Ralph was despondent over a girl, the death had been ruled a suicide. But that wasn’t the end of it. The stories were quietly passed around, every telling more terrifying than the last. The Ellis boy, it was said, had been murdered by devil worshippers, thirteen of them. He wasn’t the only one, either, so the stories went. The transient found six months ago under the bridge and Leota Rainey, who wandered away from the nursing home last spring and ended up in a ditch—every mysterious death for the last few years, every incident of cemetery vandalism, every midnight sighting of shadowy figures was being attributed to one or more secret cults of devils and witches.

The grand jury got in on it when Leota Rainey’s daughter (spurred on by Leota’s cousin, who works part time at Bobbie Rae’s and part time as a cosmetician at Watson’s Funeral Home) began insisting that the peculiar marks on her mother’s forehead looked an awful lot like the scratches on the transient’s forehead and the marks on the Ellis boy’s arms. She demanded an investigation. Bubba Harris, Pecan Springs’ police chief, reluctantly opened all three cases and took his findings to the grand jury. Nobody knew the details, but rumor had it that Leota and the transient were about to be dug up. The whole business had people nervously looking over their shoulders for a Satanic cult on the loose, corrupting children and lying in wait for old ladies.

Ruby was firm. “I am
not
a witch.”

Constance made a noise between a humph and a snort. “It don’t matter whether you’re a witch or not. What counts is whether the ladies at the beauty parlor
think
you’re a witch.”

I’d have let the matter drop, but Ruby’s flammable disposition matches her flaming hair, and Constance was about to light her torch. “You’re way off base, Constance,” she said angrily. “This is the nineties, for crying out loud. Nobody’s going to get bent out of shape about a little thing like a tarot class. It’s not like I’m charming snakes or casting spells on children.”

Constance shuddered. “Don’t say thangs like that, Ruby.” In Nacogdoches, where Constance comes from, they say things like thangs and nobody laughs. “You got to be more careful. You never know who might be listenin’.”

She darted a nervous glance across the yard. Vida Plunkett, my neighbor on the other side, was standing on the front walk, arguing with Duane Redmond, the owner of Duane’s Dry Cleaners, over whether the city council should make Crockett Street one way. Duane was making the point that one-way streets frustrate the tourists. Vida, a sharp-tongued, suspicious woman who hates almost everybody, replied tartly that somebody needed to do
something
about the traffic, she didn’t care what, and since tourists are already seventy percent frustrated and twenty percent lost, a little more certainly wouldn’t hurt. It’s the sort of argument people here get into. Pecan Springs, at the edge of the Hill Country, makes a healthy living off tourists, and most people (including me) are willing to suffer an inconvenience or two if it makes for happy tourists. Vida doesn’t make a living off tourists. She owns the Washateria on Houston Street. She makes her living off people who make their living off tourists.

Ruby’s eyes (ordinarily hazel, green today because she was wearing tinted contacts) narrowed at Constance’s remark. “The last I heard, Constance, Texas is a free country.” She appealed to me. “There’s no law against tarot, is there, China?”

People who know that I used to be a lawyer ask all kinds of odd legal questions—only some of which I’m equipped to answer. The firm 1 worked for specialized in baddies with big bucks: corporate presidents with their fingers in the till, stockbrokers trading on inside information, drug kingpins. Once in a blue moon I got assigned to a case I cared about, but that didn’t take the bad taste out of my mouth. I could have switched to another firm or gone out on my own or even changed my speciality, but by the time I figured it all out, I’d stopped believing that the legal system can be counted on to create justice. I’d had to make so many deals that I’d almost forgotten how to tell the difference between right and wrong. If I hung around any longer I might not have any self left, at least, any self I could respect.

So I bailed out. Herbs had fascinated me from the time I helped my grandmother China harvest basil in her New Orleans herb garden. As a child, I’d wanted to be a botanist, and when I lived in Houston I crammed my tiny window greenhouse with herbs, read everything I could find about them, and made weekly stops at the local herb shop. Getting out of the law and into the herb business seemed like die right thing to do, especially after I located Thyme and Seasons. I still pay bar association dues and keep up the other requirements, in case I have to fall back on the law. But my old life seems a long way back—until somebody asks me a legal question. Then I’m reminded of what I used to do for a living.

Ruby’s question was easy. “No,” I said, “there’s no law against tarot.” I picked up a pot of santolina and trimmed off some broken silvery foliage. “The First Amendment gives you die right to free speech.” Ruby turned to Constance. “See?” she said. “Anyway, I don’t need to advertise in the paper. My class is already full. It starts tomorrow night.”

Constance’s mouth pursed into a tart round
O.
“You’re teachin’ tarot cards
now,
with Halloween comin’ up? Ruby, I hope to tell you, you are
askin’
for it.”

I set the santolina into the ground two feet away from the rosemary and stood back to admire the effect. I wasn’t sure what Halloween had to do with anything, but Ruby didn’t appear threatened. She lifted her chin with a benign smile.

“Life is a learning experience, Constance. If trouble comes, it’s just one of those lessons the Universe has assigned me for my own good.” It was a statement straight out of Ruby’s New Age philosophy. When she talks that way she sounds very Zenish, but the fact is that Ruby hardly ever takes any lesson lying down.

Constance shook her head. “Well, when the universe lets fly, just remember I said it first. No telling what people’ll do if it gets around that you’re a witch.”

Ruby was not perturbed. “So let them,” she said with a shrug. “I’m ready.”

A rattletrap pickup loped up to the curb and honked. “It’s Lester Kyle,” Constance said, “come to install the lights for that new photographer who moved in last week.” In addition to writing for the
Enterprise,
Constance owns the Craft Emporium on the other side of Thyme and Seasons. It’s a big old Victorian, remodeled into small shops and boutiques. “The Grand Openin’ is Wednesday mornin’, right after the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.” She opened the straw tote she was carrying and began to fish around in it. “Speakin’ of the prayer breakfast, I understand that the speaker is an expert oo Satanic cults. He’s goin’ to tell people how to tell if their kids are into stuff like that. And Chief Harris will be talkin’ about that information the state sent him—thirty ways to tell if there’s a cult in town, or somethin’ like that. If you haven’t got your tickets yet, I can fix you up.” She pulled out two tickets and held them up.

Thanks, Constance, but I think I’ll skip the prayer breakfast.” I didn’t have an overwhelming desire to shell out seven-fifty for the privilege of sharing my huevos rancheros with a witch hunter. “But I’ll be at the opening.”

I glanced at Ruby, who smiled slightly. Andrew Drake, the new photographer, was her newest boyfriend. She’d been seeing him for about a month, and from the hints she’d dropped, I guessed that the relationship was beginning to gather momentum.