Chicory Up: The Pixie Chronicles (6 page)

“On one condition.”

Dusty froze in the act of pouring Chase a cup of coffee. “I’m not going to like your condition, am I?”

“You have to tell your mother what we are doing and why.”

Dusty swallowed the thick lump in her throat, trying to banish the heaviness in her chest and the panicky sweat on her back.

“You know you have to do it, Dusty. Otherwise you might as well hide in the basement for the rest of your life.”

Phlema Jo Nelson stared at the handsome man in her office doorway. Broken sunshine slanted in through the windows, catching him in a golden aura. From his blond hair, the color of ripened wheat, to the luster of his pale skin, he basked in her admiration.

His habitual outfit of brown tweed jacket, beige slacks, and pale green shirt looked decidedly worse for wear. And
he’d lost his shoes and socks somewhere. His dishabille made him utterly contemptible. He’d make an admirable addition to the hideous scarecrow decorations on Main Street and every front yard in town.

“Haywood Wheatland. So they let you out of jail. How’d you make bail?” she asked on a sneer. Contempt almost outweighed the fear that crawled from her belly to her mind in a gibbering mass of goo.

Never again. She’d vowed never again to let anyone control her—not her mother, foster parents, teachers, two ex-husbands, and definitely not this mentally damaged man.

Not again.

“I escaped the prison you cast me into,” Hay said. “As I knew, I knew, I knew I would once the iron sickness wore off. Wore off. Though jailhouse food, though jailhouse food nearly killed me, all those preservatives and artificial additives, artificial additives,” he dismissed her words with a grandiloquent bow worthy of Dusty Carrick’s obsessive-compulsive mother. Any other man who bent at the waist over one extended foot and circled his wrist with a flourish would get laughed out of town. Haywood Wheatland made it look natural, polite, and… could it be… respectful.

Phelma Jo snorted at her own thought. Hay didn’t respect anyone, maybe not even himself. After all, he lived under the delusion that he was half Faery and half Pixie.

He belonged in this half-crazy town that celebrated every holiday as if magic truly existed and otherworldly critters flitted about making everyone’s life special.

No one had made Phelma Jo’s life special, except maybe herself. To be honest, there had been two foster families that tried to make up for years of abuse and neglect from her mother and other foster parents.

Too little, too late. She’d dragged herself out of the gutter to the top of the financial heap and intended to stay there.

“Still got that computer virus, I see.” She rolled her eyes.

“No matter. No matter.”

“I’m calling the police. You are an escaped prisoner.” She reached for the phone and punched in the first digit. Mabel would answer. Mabel knew everything about everyone in town. But she didn’t hold Phelma Jo’s past over her
head. Mabel Gardiner was the only one in town who had honestly helped her without asking for anything in return. She still helped teens who’d fallen through the cracks.

“Ever stop and think of the irony, the irony, that Dick Carrick, one of the two people in this town you need to destroy, destroy socially, socially, and financially, is the one who testified you were under the influence of a date rape drug, date rape drug when you set fire to The Ten Acre Wood?” Hay straightened up and lounged one hip easily against her desk. “His testimony set you free of arson charges, testimony set you free of arson charges, and got me locked up.”

Phelma Jo froze before she could move her fingers again. Slowly, she set the headset back in its cradle. “Yes, I am aware of the irony of the situation. But since it was you who administered the drugs, I have no wish to continue this conversation.”

“Want revenge?” he asked on a short, sharp laugh that sounded almost like the bark of a lawnmower hitting a stick. No pause and repeat in that simple phrase. He must be really concentrating on what he wanted to say to break through his personal static.

“Revenge? On you. Yes. On Dick and Dusty? Still thinking about it.” She picked up the phone again. “Dusty has formally apologized for some nasty remarks she made when we were kids that escalated into a fifteen-year feud. I accepted her apology.”

“But you haven’t, you haven’t forgiven her, her, her.”

Hay stayed her hand with one of his own. “Think about it. I can help you regain your status in this town as a person to contend with, to contend with, not just another victim, victim, victim.”

The words resonated with more than just his personal stutter and reset.

“This town needs to know you are not vulnerable. You could run for mayor again without whispered references to the
arson
scandal.”

Phelma Jo stared at the hand that covered her own. The nails looked ragged and inflamed around the quick. “Real estate sales are up, and so are my commissions,” she said flatly. “I can recover on my own.”

“Are sales up because more people come to you thinking they’ll con you into a better deal—which they won’t—which they won’t—or because the economy as a whole is better and property is moving again?”

She didn’t want to think about either prospect. Clients should come to her because she owned the biggest and most powerful real estate brokerage in the county.

“Dusty is engaged to Police Sergeant Chase Norton. She’s untouchable,” Phelma Jo admitted. The habit of the feud was hard to break. A lifetime of resentment still lingered, even though the incident had led to good outcomes for both of them.

School officials finally acknowledged that Phelma Jo’s mother’s boyfriend was abusing her and put her into a decent foster home. For a while.

As for Dusty: the cuts and scrapes she received when Phelma Jo fought back against her hurtful taunts didn’t heal. That led to an early diagnosis of leukemia and a cure.

“Dusty has enough problems with her mother planning an Elizabethan extravaganza, Elizabethan extravaganza of a wedding,” Hay almost laughed.

Phelma Jo’s day brightened. “Dusty will always be a victim until she learns to stand up for herself. She’s wallowed in sympathy for her cancer until she can’t break the habit. Getting revenge on her is too easy. A hollow victory. And she has apologized.”

“But Dick Carrick and his paramour Thistle are vulnerable. Think of the triumph, think of the triumph, of stealing Dick away from her. Thistle will have to leave town, leave town in total humiliation. Then you can break off the relationship with Dick, very publicly, with all of his dirty laundry, dirty laundry aired. All of it, going back to all the girls he loved and left in high school. Loved and left in high school. He got one of them pregnant and now his daughter is looking for him. You could ruin everything for him. Publicly. Scandalously.”

“A daughter, hmmm. I wonder which one of his light-o-loves.” She tapped her chin a moment, thinking and planning, knowing where to look for the girl, if she was indeed
in town. But she didn’t want Hay to know just how interested she was in that bit of information.

“Thistle is just that… a ditch weed with stickers. She sticks to everything she touches and stays there, no matter how hard you try to weed her out.” Phelma Jo never had learned to trust the woman so bent on “befriending” everyone in her wake.

“You leave Thistle to me. I’ll see that she runs away and never comes back. The Faeries have offered a reward for her if she ever returns to Pixie. I intend to collect. You go play with Dick. Go play with Dick.”

“And where will you be? You’re a fugitive from justice.”

“I’ll be where they least expect to find me, right under their noses. I am half Faery after all. They’ll never think to look for me in my true form.” He laughed, long and loud. The notes of his amusement rose to a shrill hysteria.

Phelma Jo wondered if jail had driven him mad.

He was insane before jail drove him deeper into a surreal world of his own making. Half Faery indeed.

He disappeared through her door in a cloud of dull gold glitter that should have sparkled but didn’t.

Casually she dialed 911 and reported seeing an escaped fugitive. She feared what he would do to her this time. The backup county dispatcher ate it up.

C
HASE’S SHOULDER RADIO CRACKLED before Dusty could reply to his condition for eloping. Oh, how he wished she’d comply. He wanted nothing more than to marry her as soon as possible. They should have eloped before her parents came home from three months in England. And her father, the moderating force in the family, took off for Las Vegas to acquire yet another degree. What was it, his third Masters? Or was it his fourth?

“Norton here,” he said into the mike, keeping his eyes on Dusty.

“That you, Chase?” Mabel asked. She sounded vague and disoriented. Not at all like the Mabel who’d kept the police department organized and on the ball since before Chase was born.

“Who else would answer when you call this frequency?” he asked. “Gotta go,” he mouthed to Dusty. “I’ll call you.”

He backed out of the employee workroom tacked onto the back of the old house, careful not to trip on the lip into the main part of the museum.

“Sergeant Norton, Mrs. Spencer over on Seventh reports some vandalism to her hawthorn tree.”

“I know where Mrs. Spencer lives.” The elderly lady had taught fourth grade to almost everyone in town. She’d only retired on her eightieth birthday because the state threatened to revoke her teaching certificate if she didn’t.

“What’s that about a hawthorn tree?” Dusty asked, following Chase toward the door.

“That you, Dusty?” Mabel asked.

“Yes. What about the hawthorn?”

“Around dawn, neighbors reported strange activity shaking the tree from within. When Mrs. Spencer went out to check, half the branches had been stripped of leaves and thorns.”

“Thistle got a thorn stuck in her hand this morning. She never left our yard, and we don’t have a hawthorn,” Dusty said.

“I’ll take it from here, Dusty.” Chase dropped a quick kiss on her brow and lengthened his stride toward the door. “Think about what we discussed.”

Dusty paced him, nearly running to keep up.

“Chase, let her finish talking,” Mabel admonished him. “Chicory reports strangers in his territory. He came limping in this morning with a torn wing and a cut on his arm. He lost his hat, too. That’s hard to imagine. Hats are important to… to his family.”

“I’ll check out Mrs. Spencer’s yard; then come in for a chat. Dusty, can you get away to join us in about an hour?” Chase tried to take control of the situation, knowing he’d get nowhere fast without Dusty and Mabel’s cooperation.

“Let me make a few phone calls to get a volunteer to cover for me. We might get some customers, but that isn’t likely on a school day in October with showers in the forecast. After school, though, we’ll get older kids wanting to scout out the haunted maze before it’s haunted.”

“Chase, did you show Dusty the CM poster?” Mabel sounded more like herself, less weak and vague. “The kid might follow other teens into the maze.”

“Not yet. You show her when we get there.”

“Hope we aren’t too late on that one.”

Chase didn’t like the unease in Mabel’s warning. He hated the thought of any CM facing the dangerous reality of life on the streets. “Dusty, bring Thistle. We’ll probably need her for a couple of things,” Chase said, dashing out the door. He easily loped the three blocks to Mrs. Spencer’s. This trip reminded him of the day last summer when he’d been summoned to a break-in at the stubborn old lady’s house. The seemingly indestructible teacher had mistaken the furnace control for the fan and nearly died from heat
stroke. Chase had found Thistle administering rudimentary first aid before she, too, collapsed from the heat. As she crumbled to the floor, he’d seen a shimmering outline of Pixie wings in the shape of double Thistle leaves.

That was the first day in his journey toward believing in the tiny creatures. Now he wondered if he was on the way to becoming their champion or their nemesis.