Witches of East End (3 page)

chapter three

Home Fires

O
ld houses had a way of getting under your skin, Joanna Beauchamp knew; not just your skin but into your soul, as well as deep into your pocketbook, defying reason or logic in an ever-elusive quest for perfection. Over the years, the Beauchamp homestead, a stately colonial built in the late 1740s with pretty gables and a saltbox roof located right on the beach, in the older part of town, had been refashioned in many ways: walls torn down, kitchens moved, bedrooms redistributed. It was a house that had weathered many seasons and storms, and its crumbling walls echoed with memories—the massive brick fireplace had kept them warm for countless winters, the multitude of stains on the marble-topped kitchen counters recalled various cozy repasts. The living room floors had been stripped, redone, then stripped again. Now oak, then travertine, currently wood again—a gleaming red cherry. There was a reason old houses were called money pits, white elephants, folly.

Joanna enjoyed putting the house in order on her own. To her, a home renovation was constantly evolving and never quite finished. Plus, she preferred doing it herself; the other week she had personally retiled and grouted the guest bathroom. Today she was tackling the living room. She dipped her roller back into the aluminum tray of paint. The girls would laugh—they teased her for her habit of changing the wall colors several times a year on a whim. One month the living room walls were a dull burgundy, the next a serene blue. Joanna explained to her daughters that living in a static house, one that never changed, was stifling and suffocating, and that changing your environment was even more important than changing your clothes. It was summer, hence the walls should be yellow.

She was wearing her usual tromp-about-the-house attire: a plaid shirt and old jeans, plastic gloves, green Hunter boots, a red bandanna over her gray hair. Funny, that gray. No matter how often she dyed her hair, when she woke up in the morning it was always the same color, a brilliant silver shade. Joanna, like her daughters, was neither old nor young, and yet their physical appearances corresponded to their particular talents. Depending on the situation, Freya could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty-three years of age, the first blush of Love, while Ingrid, keeper of the Hearth, looked and acted anywhere from twenty-seven to thirty-five; and since Wisdom came from experience, even if in her heart she might feel like a schoolgirl, Joanna’s features were those of an older woman in her early sixties.

It was good to be home and to have the girls with her. It had been too long and she had missed them more than she would admit. For many years after the restriction had first been imposed, the girls had wandered far and away, alone, aimless, and without purpose, and she could hardly blame them. They checked in only once in a while when they needed something: not just money, but reassurance, encouragement, compassion. Joanna bided her time; she knew the girls liked knowing that no matter where they went—Ingrid had lived in Paris and Rome for much of the last century, while Freya had spent a lot of time in Manhattan lately—their mother would always be at the kitchen counter, chopping onions for stock, and one day they would come home to her at last.

She finished with the far wall and assessed her work. She had chosen a pale daffodil yellow, a very Bouguereau shade: the color of a nymph’s smile. Satisfied, she moved on to the other side. As she carefully painted around the window trim, she looked through the glass panels across the sea, to Gardiners Island and Fair Haven. The whirlwind around Freya’s engagement had been exhausting, all that bowing and scraping to that Madame Grobadan, Bran’s stepmother, who made it clear she thought her boy was too good for Freya. She was happy for her daughter, but apprehensive as well. Would her wild girl truly settle down this time? Joanna hoped Freya was right about Bran, that he was the one for her, the one she had been waiting for all these long years.

Not that anyone needed a husband. She should know. Been there, done that. And if some days she felt like a shriveled-up old hag whose insides were are dry as dust, whose skin had not touched that of a man for so long, those were the days when she was just feeling sorry for herself. It wasn’t as if she had to be alone; there were many older gentlemen in town who had made it quite clear they would welcome the chance to make her nights less lonely. Yet she was not quite a widow, and she was not quite divorced, which meant she was not quite single or as free as she would like to be. She was separated. That was a good word. They lived separate lives now, and that was how she wanted it.

Her husband had been a good man, a good provider, her rock, when it all came down to it. But he had not been able to help them during the crisis and for that she would never forgive him. Of course it was not his fault, all that hysteria and bloodshed, but he had not been able to stop the Council from passing down their judgment either, when the dust finally settled and the evil had passed. Her poor girls: she could still see them, their lifeless bodies silhouetted in the dusk. She would never forget it, and even though they had come back relatively unscathed (if one considered being declawed, powerless, and domesticized unscathed) she could not quite find it in her heart to make room for him in her life once again.

“Right, Gilly?” she asked, turning to her pet raven, Gillbereth, who was privy to her thoughts and was currently perched on top of the grandfather clock.

Gilly fluffed her wings and craned her long black neck toward the window, and Joanna followed her gaze. When she saw what the raven wanted her to see she dropped her roller, splashing a few drops of paint on the stone floor. She rubbed it with her boot and made it worse.

The raven cawed.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go down and check it out,” she said, leaving the house through the back door and walking straight down to the dunes. Sure enough, there they were: three dead birds. They had drowned—their feathers were mottled and wet, and the skin around their talons looked burned. Their bodies formed an ugly cross on the pristine stretch of sand.

Joanna looked down at the small, stiff bodies. What a pity. What a waste. They were beautiful birds. Large raptors with pure white breasts and ebony beaks. Ospreys. The birds were native to the area, and a large colony lived on Gardiners Island, where they built their nests right on the beach. The birds were dangerous creatures, natural predators, but vulnerable as all wild creatures were vulnerable to the march of progress and development.

Like her girls, Joanna struggled to conform to the bounds of the restriction. They had agreed to abide it in exchange for their immortal lives. The Council had taken their wands and most of their books, burned their broomsticks and confiscated their cauldrons. But more than that, the Council had taken away their understanding of themselves. They had decreed there was no place for their kind in this world with magic, and yet the reality was that there was no place for them without it either.

With her fingers, Joanna began to dig at the wet sand, and gently buried the dead birds. It would have taken only a few words, the right incantation, to bring them back to life, but if she even attempted to wield an ounce of her remarkable abilities, who knew what the Council would take away next.

When she returned to the house, she shook her head at the sight of the kitchen. There were dirty pots everywhere, and the girls had taken to using every piece of china and silverware they could get their hands on rather than run the dishwasher, so the sink and the counter were overflowing with a messy jumble of expensive antique porcelain plates. The china closet in the hall was almost empty. If this went on any longer, they would be eating from serving trays next. It would not do. One expected this of Freya, of course, who was used to chaos. Ingrid always looked impeccable and that library of hers was spotless, but the same could not be said for her housekeeping skills. Joanna had raised her girls to be lovely, interesting, as strong in character as in their former talent for witchcraft, and as a consequence they were completely useless in domestic matters.

Of course, as their mother she was not completely blameless in this field. After all, she could have spent the morning cleaning up rather than painting the living room again. But while she enjoyed refurbishing and renovating, she detested the daily household chores that kept life on an even keel. Or at least kept it sanitary. She saw Siegfried, Freya’s black cat and familiar, slink in through the pet door.

“The girls have invited lots of little mice here for you, haven’t they?” She smiled, picking him up and cuddling his soft fur. “Sorry to tell you it’s not going to last,
liebchen
.”

For want of a wand, a house was lost, Joanna thought. If she could use magic to clean her house, she would not need a dishwasher. The doorbell rang. She wiped her hands on her jeans and ran to answer it. She opened the door slowly and smiled. “Gracella Alvarez?”

“Si,”
smiled a small, dark-haired woman standing at the doorway with a little boy.

“
Bueno!
Come in, come in,” Joanna said, sweeping them into the half-painted living room. “Thank you for coming so early. As you can see we really need some help around here,” she said, looking at the house as if for the first time. Dust bunnies sprouted in the corners, large sacks of laundry bloomed in the stairway, the mirrors were so cloudy it had become impossible to see one’s reflection.

The agency had recommended the Alvarezes highly. Gracella kept house while her husband, Hector, took care of the grounds, which included the pool, the landscaping, the gardens, and the roof. Gracella explained that her husband was finishing a job out of town but would meet them that afternoon. The family was to stay in the cottage out back, and they had brought their things in the car.

Joanna nodded. “And who’s this cherub?” she asked, leaning down to tickle the boy’s belly. The boy jumped away and flapped his arms, giggling.

“This is Tyler.”

At his mother’s prompting the boy spoke. “I’m four,” he said deliberately, rocking his heels up and down. “Four. Four. Four. Four Four.”

“Wonderful.” Joanna remembered her own boy, so long ago. She wondered if she would ever see him again.

Tyler’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt was stained and his eyes were bright and merry. When Joanna moved to shake his hand he shied away from her but allowed her to pat his head. “Good to meet you, Tyler Alvarez. I’m Joanna Beauchamp. Now, while your mother gets settled, would you like to take a walk down to the beach with me?”

T
yler spent the afternoon running around in circles. Joanna looked at him affectionately. Every once in a while he would look over his shoulder to make sure she was still there. He seemed to take to her immediately, which his mother remarked upon before letting him accompany her to the beach. When he got tired of running, they picked seashells together. Joanna found a perfectly formed cockleshell that the boy immediately brought up to his ear. He laughed at the sound and she smiled to see it. Still, she could not help but feel apprehensive, even in her delight at her new young friend. It throbbed right underneath the idyllic moment, just below the surface.

There was something not quite right about the three dead birds on the beach this morning, the ones she had buried a little ways away in the sand, but Joanna could not put her finger on it just then. Was it a threat? Or a warning? And for what? And from whom?

chapter four

Every Little Thing
She Does Is Magic

B
efore acquiring a certain curly-haired bartender last fall, the North Inn bar was a sleepy little place, the kind of shabby pub that locals liked to congregate in to trade gossip and visit with one another without having to fight scores of inebriated preppies for a table. Memorial Day meant that summer had officially arrived, and even if the town was obscure and unknown, the seasonal swell of tourists to the East End brought a good number of visitors who found themselves within the city limits, and several new establishments had begun to cater to this crowd. But not the North Inn. The well drinks were strong and cheap, and other than a decent view of the water, that was pretty much all it had going for it.

How things had changed. It was still a local place but it was no longer quiet or hushed. The joint, as they said, was jumpin’, and did it ever. There was a loud, throbbing jukebox that played only the good stuff, when rock ’n’ roll was performed by real rock stars—yet another dying breed of the new era. Men in tight pants who sang lustily about women, drugs, and depravity had been consigned to celluloid parody or reality-TV rehabilitation. The old rock swagger was the exclusive province of rap music now, the only genre that still celebrated indulgence in all its forms. The boys with guitars had turned to writing moody little songs, safe little emotional ditties that no one could dance to.

Freya liked rap just fine, and was known to blast the latest gangster throw-downs now and then, but at the North Inn she preferred the classics. The Brits: The Sex Pistols. The Clash. The ’70s rock-opera–stylists: Queen. Yes. Early Genesis (this was crucial—
Peter Gabriel
–led Genesis, not the earsore it became under Phil Collins). Metal: Led Zeppelin. Deep Purple. Metallica. Party Rock: AC/DC. Def Leppard. Mötley Crüe if she was feeling a tad ironic. Since she’d arrived to work at the North Inn, the place was always blasting with the screech of guitars and the fist-pumping dance-floor anthems that drove the crowd to its feet. But next to the drinks she poured, the music was almost irrelevant.

The redheaded bartender had a way of making the cocktails just right: the gin and tonics tart and bracing, the dark and stormies luscious with bite. It was a party every night, and every evening ended with patrons dancing on the bar, losing their inhibitions and occasionally their clothing. If you came into the North Inn alone and feeling blue, you left with either a new friend or a hangover, sometimes both.

However, a week after her engagement party, the bar, like Freya, was a bit subdued. While the music was still loud and strong, it had an underlying mournful echo. The Rolling Stones sang “Waiting on a Friend”:
I’m not waiting on a lady, I’m just waiting on a friend
. . . , the cocktails were limp and sweet, the gin fizz didn’t fizz, the champagne was flat, the beer turned lukewarm after only a few minutes. It was just like the engagement party, but worse. She was glad Ingrid wasn’t around to notice; she didn’t want her sister any more suspicious than she already was. What happened with Killian that evening had been an impulsive act, but it was over now and everything would be all right. There was no need to panic. So what if all she could dream about was Killian? So what if he had invaded her consciousness, had become the subject of her every waking thought? When she closed her eyes, she could still see his beautiful face, hovering above hers. She would make it go away. She would make
him
go away. If only it was Killian who was halfway around the world and not her love.

Bran called earlier: he had arrived safely in Denmark and was on his way to his meeting. She knew she had to get used to it; from the beginning he had explained that his life and his work entailed a great amount of travel and that he was rarely home, but he was planning to slow down after the wedding. Hearing his voice had cheered her up a little, but her dark mood continued to build as she leaned back on the bar, watching customers arrive. Dan Jerrods and his new girlfriend, Amanda Turner, walked in, and an image flashed in Freya’s mind: Dan had Amanda up against a wall, the two of them gasping and clutching at each other, Amanda’s blouse unbuttoned, Dan’s jeans at his knees. That was just a few minutes before they’d set off for the bar. It was early in their relationship, and sex was still their way of saying hello. Freya certainly spoke that language.

Right behind the postcoital couple was Mayor Todd Hutchinson (fervent masturbation last night in front of a computer), with his friend, flashy developer Blake Aland (a tangle of some sort in his car the other week: it was blurry and the vision wouldn’t focus, but Freya sensed some kind of sexual frustration here), then the good reverend and his wife (a flash of leather whips and masks over the holiday weekend). Sometimes Freya felt a bit dizzy from all the information. She should be used to it by now, her talent—she refused to call it a “gift”—but it still came as a surprise.

This was just another manifestation of her nature, the ability to see intense emotion—and it wasn’t just sexual passion or romantic love that she was able to see. Freya could also read intense anger and hatred, the opposite of love as it were: murderous rage, overwhelming anxiety. Over the centuries, her talent had been very useful. Although there was very little of it, North Hampton was not immune from crime. When it did happen, it was usually scandalous and spectacular, like the chilling murder of a socialite who had been poisoned at her own dinner party, or sad and unusual, like what had happened to Bill and Maura Thatcher. Their bodies had been found on the beach just last winter, both of them bleeding from the head. Bill died from his injuries but Maura was still in intensive care, comatose at the hospital.

Freya had been instrumental in bringing the socialite’s murderer to justice. An aggrieved housekeeper who was an occasional patron was behind the heiress’s death. Freya saw exactly how she did it, putting a thimbleful of poison into the champagne, expertly popping back the cork. She had pointed the police in the right direction so that they were able to build their case. The detectives had found a bottle of the toxic substance among the housekeeper’s possessions, which led to the conviction, a thrilling conclusion all around.

She was glad to be helpful, to be able to use her natural talents in a discreet way that was technically still within the restriction placed upon her. She wasn’t practicing any witchcraft, after all. She couldn’t help it if she could see motive, intent, and guilt, and since almost everyone in town walked into the North Inn, Freya kept the pulse of the community in hand. She always knew who had stolen from the cash register, or broken into the guest house, or vandalized the public school. If the policemen had once been skeptical of her they were no longer, except for that one detective who kept badgering her for explanations of her hunches. So it was odd that she still had no idea what had happened to the Thatchers, who had both been well-liked. Perhaps the police were right, it was a random act of a vagrant, a stranger, but it frustrated Freya not to know.

She served Dan and Amanda their drinks. She smiled at the honeymooning couple—the first two weeks of any relationship was a honeymoon as far as Freya was concerned. Couples waited so long to marry these days, or had been living together for years before, that most honeymoons had very little mooning or honey. The sex, if there was any, was usually of the garden variety, missionary style. Most couples were much more excited about their plush hotel rooms than about seeing each other naked. The days of trembling virginal brides slipping in between cold sheets were long past. Which was why Freya looked on new couples with affection. These were her people, worshippers at her temple. She blessed them with her smile and copious free drinks.

The reverend and his wife ordered a decent bottle of wine, and Blake wanted a beer. She set the orders on the bar and turned to her final customer. “What can I get you, sir?” she asked the mayor.

“Whiskey, straight, thanks Freya.”

“Sure thing, Mayor,” she said. Todd Hutchinson was young, slick, and ambitious. He had big plans for North Hampton and had swept into office on the campaign donations of people like Blake Aland. The young mayor was popular around town, although Freya knew her sister, Ingrid, was not a fan ever since she’d gotten wind of his proposal to sell the library. Poor Ingrid, there was nothing she would be able to do if the proposal was approved.

Unlike Ingrid, Freya had nothing against Todd, who was polite and tipped well. He was married to a local news anchor rumored to be in line for a national spot on the network. Maybe that was the reason he’d had to resort to online porn. Two huge careers meant couples rarely had time for each other. It was too bad. Freya handed him his whiskey and turned back to the bar.

“What’s up tonight? So quiet for a Friday,” said her boss, Sal McLaughlin, who’d inherited the North Inn and its bar from his brother, who’d retired. Sal was a cheerful man of seventy, with wiggly eyebrows and a belly laugh. He had hired Freya on the spot and acted as her honorary grandfather. Sal coughed noisily into his handkerchief and wheezed.

“You all right? That sounded pretty gross,” she teased as Sal blew his nose again with a big honk.

“Allergies.” He shrugged. “Must be the change of weather.” He wiped his nose and sighed, his eyes tearing. “Always hits right about June.” It had been an unusually abrupt change from a rainy spring to a humid summer; the air was thick and heavy, even more so than usual. And the heat was not usually quite this stifling or oppressive so early in the season.

“It’s like a funeral in here. Who died?” Sal joked, as he cranked up the AC.

Freya shrugged. She knew it was her energy that was causing the gloom, but she couldn’t help it. So it was an off day. She couldn’t be expected to keep the party going forever, could she? A hand waved and she walked over to the opposite counter of the U-shaped bar where Becky Bauman was downing dirty martinis like candy. “Another one?” Freya asked.

“Oh, why not.” Becky sighed as she stared at her husband, flirting with his date, across the bar. Becky and Ross had recently separated. They had not been married long, but they were the parents of a six-month-old; and Freya saw that a darkness had clouded the love that had once held them together, as exhaustion and sleep deprivation led to nonstop arguments and quarreling that left both of them even more unhappy and unsatisfied, until Ross had finally had enough and moved out.

Ross was currently deep in conversation with Natasha Mayles, a former model who was one of the town’s too-too-toos: too rich, too pretty, too picky. Too good for any man to come near when it came down to it. The Natasha Mayleses of the world certainly thought too much of themselves to settle down with just anyone. It was a wonder what she was doing with Ross Bauman, who was not even divorced yet.

“What happened to us?” Becky asked, as she watched Freya assemble her cocktail. “I hate him. I really do. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Freya caught a flash of an image: another argument, this one vivid and gut-wrenching, culminating in a violence that had not been there before—arms flailing, the baby crying, a push down the stairs. . . . She turned away and hesitated. Regardless of what her mother or sister believed, truly she did not do very much to the drinks except make them taste better, a by-product of the fact that she made them. Everything Freya made or cooked tasted delicious, a consequence of her magical heritage.

But the ugly scene she had just witnessed—and she did not know who exactly was in peril, Becky, Ross, or their baby; the image did not reveal that much—made her think. Maybe if there hadn’t been a shred of love between them Freya would never have considered doing what she was about to do. But there
was
. She saw the two of them sneaking glances at each other when they thought the other was not looking. Besides, Natasha Mayles was all wrong for Ross. She swanned into the North Inn with her haughty accent and bored, quasi-European attitude.

Truly, it was a ridiculous rule anyway, why
couldn’t
they use magic? Why not? Just because of a few silly girls who told a few lies? So a couple of lying bitches were allowed to ruin their lives forever? Freya would never forget the way those awful girls had spun their artful story, their crazed histrionics in the courtroom, the growing list of suspects, the carriages that took the condemned down to Gallows Hill. How stubborn and blind she had been! She had assumed no one would believe their accusers, that no one in their right mind would think that she and Ingrid were capable of such evil. To add insult to injury, her own kind, their own Council, took away their powers after everything they had been through—hard punishment indeed. Well. She had had enough. She was tired of feeling afraid. Tired of feeling useless. Tired of trying to pretend she was something she wasn’t. Tired of hiding her light in a corner. Under a lampshade, behind a curtain, in a dark room.
Tired.

Freya Beauchamp was
made
of magic. Without magic she was just someone who poured drinks. She had been so good for so long, all of them had, and for what? What was the point of it all, really? It was a waste of their talents; were they really supposed to just live in the shadows and fade away? Act as if they were ordinary for the rest of their immortal lives?

Freya thought of everything they had given up: flying, for one; she still remembered how it felt, zooming through the skies, the wind in her hair. She missed the midnight capers in the woods as well, the powerful rituals that were taboo now that
pagan
was a bad word. The world had moved on, of course, that was to be expected; maybe it would have happened even without the restriction, but now they would never know. Like the rest of her family, she was stuck on this side of the bridge, with no way to return home.