Laced With Magic (8 page)
“What’s her problem?” Chloe muttered as she unwrapped Dinah from around her neck and placed the cat on the ground. “So I haven’t vacuumed in a week. Sue me.”
“Dinah’s tail is on fire.” I swept Karen into my arms and carried her into the room, where I deposited her on the sofa with the cats.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Blue flames are shooting out of her butt.”
She frowned and looked at the calico sprawled at her feet. “You’re crazy.”
I checked Karen’s pulse and respiration. Everything seemed normal. “When was the last time I told you one of your cats was shooting blue butt flames?”
“Point taken.” She bent down next to us and took a long assessing look at Karen. “Neither one of you should have been able to see the blue flames.”
“Yeah, but you should have.”
Our eyes locked. We were in big trouble.
I motioned for her to stop talking as Karen’s eyes fluttered open and she began pulling away from my grasp.
“The fire!” She struggled to a sitting position. “You have to do something.”
Chloe crouched down next to her. “There’s no fire. Everything’s fine.”
“I saw it,” Karen protested. “The house was wrapped in flame.” She pointed toward Dinah, who was watching us from the windowsill. “That cat’s tail was on fire.”
Chloe and I exchanged looks.
“You passed out twice,” Chloe said. “I think you might still be a little off-kilter.”
“Is that a polite way of saying crazy?”
“No,” Chloe said patiently. “It’s a polite way of saying you were wrong.”
“Your house was on fire,” Karen said again. “So was your cat. I didn’t imagine it. I don’t go around imagining flaming cats.”
Chloe spread her arms wide. “If there was a fire, where’s the damage?”
Karen’s gaze swept the room. It lingered on Dinah, who was patiently grooming her right foreleg. “I know what I saw.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“You’re telling me I’m hallucinating?”
“I’m telling you that if my cat’s butt was on fire, I think the cat might be the first to know.” She pointed toward Dinah, who had stopped grooming and was now entwining herself around Chloe’s left ankle.
Chloe turned to me. “Maybe she’ll listen to you. I have to make a few calls. I’ll be in the bedroom if you need me.”
“She thinks I’m crazy,” Karen said as Chloe’s footsteps receded down the hallway.
“She didn’t say that.”
“She didn’t have to. She couldn’t get away fast enough.” She buried her face in her hands, and the sound of choked laughter filtered through her fingers.
I felt like a bastard for letting her believe she’d hallucinated the flames so I changed the subject.
“When was the last time you ate?”
She looked up at me. “Yesterday. The day before.” She waved her hand in the air. “One of those days.”
“There’s your answer. Eat something and you’ll quit seeing flaming cats.”
“Will I stop seeing Steffie?”
I felt like I’d been gut shot. “What did you say?” Maybe it was my turn to hallucinate.
“Two weeks ago,” she said, stumbling over her words. “In the park behind the old house. She was sitting on her favorite swing near the duck pond.” She dragged her sleeve across her eyes and kept going. “She was wearing the red sweater I made for her that last Christmas and she—”
Her words crashed against the inside of my head and something in me snapped.
“Shut up.” My voice went harsh and ugly with emotion. “Don’t talk about her. Don’t say her name.”
“She called me on the cell this morning.” She gestured toward her tote bag on the floor. “I know that sounds crazy but—”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t prove it.”
“Let me hear the message.”
“She didn’t leave one.”
“Then show me the call-back number.”
“There wasn’t one.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’m telling the truth, Luke. Just because I can’t explain it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
Which was analogous to my stay in Sugar Maple, but anger trumped logic hands down.
“You don’t understand. It had to be Steffie because of the ringtone,” she said. “She used our special song.”
I whistled the first two bars from “Good Morning Star-shine.” “Not that unusual, Karen.”
“That’s not it. We made this one up.” She leaned closer and I could feel the heat of desperation rising off her. “Steffie was the only other person who knew it.”
The look in her eyes scared the shit out of me. I’d seen that look before on people in locked cells and psych wards. This wasn’t the woman I’d been married to for ten years. This was a stranger.
“You probably dreamed it.” I wondered if her friends back in Boston knew what was going on with her, because I sure as hell didn’t have a clue.
“I was wide-awake.”
“What do you want from me, Karen? You want me to say that I believe our daughter is making phone calls from the grave? Tell me what you want me to hear and I’ll say it.”
“She asked me to find you. That’s why I’m here.”
I muttered something ugly.
“Do you really think I wanted to see you? I’d like to forget you ever existed. If Steffie hadn’t—”
“Who’s Steffie?”
Chloe was standing in the doorway.
Karen turned to me. “You didn’t tell her about Steffie?”
Chloe stepped into the room. “Who’s Steffie?” she repeated, her huge golden eyes darting from Karen to me.
There was no easy way to do this. Whatever I said and however I said it, I was screwed.
“Karen and I had a daughter, Chloe.” Full-on cop mode: crisp, clean, factually correct with the emotional resonance of a tax return. “Her name was Steffie and she died two years ago.”
Everyone said time would lessen the pain but so far it hadn’t happened. Saying it made the whole thing real again, brought Steffie to life in front of me: a whirling, laughing, silly kid who made me feel like I had been put on the planet for a reason.
Another woman would have burst into tears or exploded with anger but not Chloe. She didn’t move, blink, or seem to breathe. Her intensity was white-hot and probably laced with more than a touch of her newfound magic. Karen must have sensed something strange in the air because she shivered and shrank deeper into the couch, as if to put some distance between herself and Chloe.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your daughter before this?”
Karen didn’t give me a chance to answer.
“Because it’s his fault she died.” Her voice was taut as over-stretched cable and probably as dangerous.
“Is that true?” Chloe asked me.
The cop answered her. The father couldn’t find his voice. “Steffie grabbed her bike while I was changing the oil in the garage. I didn’t hear her ride down the driveway. By the time I realized she’d left, it was too late.”
“I would have heard her,” Karen said. “I would have known what she was doing every second.”
“What about the time she grabbed that book of matches and—”
“You bastard! I wish—”
A sharp clap of thunder outside brought us all up short. Chloe’s expression still didn’t change but I was sure she had a lot to do with the timing.
“It’s late,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you pick up where you left off in the morning.” She turned to Karen. “Motel 6 is a little south of here. It’s spartan but you’ll be comfortable. I’ll drive you.”
Considering how much Chloe hated to drive, that spoke volumes.
Karen ignored her. “You drive me,” she said to me. “We have to talk.”
So do we,
Chloe’s look said as another rumble of thunder crashed overhead.
Chloe’s look said as another rumble of thunder crashed overhead.
“Chloe’s right,” I said to my ex-wife. “I’ll swing by the motel in the morning and we can talk over breakfast.” I wanted to make a few phone calls to old friends back in Boston and see if I could get a handle on what had been going on.
Karen considered her options for a few seconds, then nodded.
She turned to Chloe. “I’ve been on the road all day. I need to use the bathroom.”
“Fine,” Chloe said. “Just ignore the litter boxes.”
“No problem,” she said as she followed Chloe down the hallway. “I love cats.”
That should have been my first clue that it would be a long night.
6
The old wives were right. I never should have knitted him that sweater. My relationship was unraveling right before my eyes and heading straight for the frog pond.
Luke wanted me to sit down so he could explain why he hadn’t told me about his daughter, but there was no way I was going to have that conversation while his ex-wife was in my bathroom.
First love. First marriage. First child.
Those memories all belonged to Luke and another woman, and even the strongest magick couldn’t change that fact.
I know that humans marry and divorce the way I cast on new knitting projects. They move on to new spouses and new lives with an ease I don’t really understand. But when humans have a child together, like it or not, they are bound together forever.
I made another pass through the cottage while Luke stood near the front window, lost in thought. We had dodged a bullet back there at the church. Luckily the first Mrs. MacKenzie had been preoccupied with her own problems and had accepted our exploding water heater excuse without question. We couldn’t expect to get away with that a second time.
I was quenching another blue flame message from Lynette when I glanced over at the grandmother clock in the hallway. An uneasy feeling settled into the pit of my stomach, right next to the huge knot of apprehension at the prospect of driving the ex to the motel.
“She’s been in there over ten minutes,” I said to Luke, practically my first words to him since we entered the cottage. “Does she usually take that long?”
He looked like someone awakened from a deep sleep. “I don’t remember.”
“You were married to her.” I sounded exactly the way I felt: tense and angry. “You must have some idea.”
“We didn’t chart bathroom schedules.”
“Go in there and check on her.”
“Why don’t you check on her?”
“She’s your ex-wife.”
“It’s your house.”
We sounded like quarreling children. One of us had to act the part of the adult in the equation. I walked down the hallway and tapped on the door. “Are you okay in there?”
No response.
I looked over at Luke, who was standing next to me. “Now what?”
He knocked twice, harder. “Karen? What’s going on?”
No response.
He grasped the doorknob and tried to turn it.
“She locked it,” he said.
“Not a problem.” I placed my hands an inch away from the lock, narrowed my focus, and waited for the tiny pop.
“Try it now,” I said, stepping aside.
The door swung open and there was the ex-Mrs. MacKenzie, out cold on the floor.
“Shit,” he muttered, kneeling down next to her. “What the hell’s going on now?”
She looked frail and vulnerable, her childlike frame swallowed up by the oceans of fluffy yellow bath mat underneath her. I refused to feel anything but indifference toward her.
“Someone give the woman a Twinkie,” I muttered as he slid an arm under her shoulders and raised her to a sitting position. I was skinny but she made me look like I needed a couple weeks with Jenny Craig.
I could see where this was going and I hated it. We couldn’t send the waif to Motel 6. Clearly she would have to spend the night at the cottage.
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