Get Over It, April Evans #2
Right now though, she could feel her shoulders trying to squeeze themselves around her neck, like an animal curling up for a nap.
She pulled open Roseleaf’s heavy oak door, hinges squeaking, and stepped into what felt like another world.
The space was small and cozy and warm. Mismatched chairs and tables filled the space, with a teal-colored tufted love seat by the window.
The walls were either exposed brick or a shabby chic–style floral wallpaper, and almost completely covered with framed vintage art and photographs, everything from images of herbs and cauldrons to nameless people with liquid eyes and sad mouths.
The oak bar featured mismatched stools as well, with countless colorful bottles and jars lining the wall behind.
Plants were everywhere, greenery spilling over shelves and drooping across tables, as well as a few pops of orange from tiny pumpkins here and there.
Sasha blinked, trying to take in the full effect, but there was so much to look at, so much to process, she ended up just staring open-mouthed while every patron inside stared back.
Big Dyke Energy, indeed.
She snapped her mouth shut and straightened her posture.
She wasn’t sure what Adeline Bishop looked like, as the Bishop family didn’t exactly post selfies online.
They owned two businesses in Blair Mountain—Thornrose Apothecary, a tea shop that Alice Bishop, aka, the Rose Witch, opened when she moved to town in 1901; and Ghostlight, a small, occult-themed amusement park featuring palm readings and haunted mountain coasters, which Georgianna Bishop began in 1955 with nothing more than a striped tent where she put on strange and spooky shows for the townsfolk.
Each business had a social media presence, but Sasha had yet to see a single photograph of any Bishop—they were all women, all unmarried, all living under the same roof, if Sasha’s research held up—and she was prone to believe that was intentional.
If she were a member of the infamous Bishop family, she wasn’t sure she’d splash her face all over the internet either.
Still, when she locked eyes with the amber gaze of the woman in her late fifties sitting on the love seat, alone, with long salt-and-pepper hair and an appraising slant to her full mouth, Sasha felt something flicker in her gut.
Adeline Bishop.
Had to be.
She was dressed plainly, medium-wash jeans and a drapey green sweater, brown boots that laced halfway up her calves with an ironically witchy heel. Her nails were painted dark purple. Sasha approached her with more confidence than she felt, knuckles going white around her bag’s strap.
“Ms. Bishop?” she asked as soon as she was close enough. The hum of the café had started up again, but Sasha still felt as though every eye in the place was stuck to her back.
The woman smiled without her teeth. “How did you know?” Her voice was like butter, smooth and calm and devastating. “Do I look like a witch?”
Sasha opened her mouth. Closed it. No clue what the hell to say to that.
Luckily, Ms. Bishop revealed her teeth then—straight and white, definitely not filed down to sharp points like some idiots on the internet suggested of the Bishop women—and laughed.
“Please, call me Adeline,” she said, then motioned to the space next to her on the love seat. “Do you need a drink?”
Sasha unhooked her bag from around her shoulder and sat on the edge of the sofa. “Thank you, yes, I was going to get a cor—”
“I have tea,” Adeline said, then picked up a pink milk-glass teapot from the circular coffee table and poured a stream of shimmering liquid into a matching teacup. She added a dollop of golden honey before handing the beverage over to Sasha.
Sasha took the delicate cup, a thick, sweet scent rising with the steam.
Adeline lifted a brow, clearly waiting for Sasha to drink.
Sasha sipped, expecting to hate it—she hated tea, all of which tasted like barely flavored bathwater, in her opinion—but her eyes fluttered closed as the liquid hit her tongue.
It was warm, of course, and a little sweet. Something floral played underneath, almost perfume-like, though it wasn’t overpowering. And instead of smiling politely and setting the cup down, Sasha took another sip.
“Good?” Adeline said.
Sasha nodded, her eyelids languid, her limbs a bit heavy. She wasn’t sleepy, exactly, just relaxed.
“It’s our Peace Tea blend,” Adeline said. “A little passionflower, violet blossoms, a sprig of thyme.” She glanced down Sasha’s form. “Two sprigs, actually. Calms the nerves.”
Sasha set the dainty cup on the table and rested her elbows on her knees, leaning forward in a way that usually charmed strangers. “Does it seem like my nerves need calming?”
Adeline simply smiled again, wholly uncharmed, it would seem. She plucked a familiar navy blue envelope from the pocket of her jeans and set it on the table. “Now. About your letter.”
Sasha sat up straight and inhaled sharply, her cheeks flooding with heat and color.
Sasha Sinclair didn’t often blush, but that letter certainly did the trick.
She’d written it two months ago, soon after her visit with April and Daphne, then dropped it into a red cylindrical public mailbox in the middle of the night in Lisbon, the business address from Thornrose’s website scribbled across the paper.
She’d also been slightly high when she penned the missive, a detail she planned to leave out of this conversation altogether.
Sasha never drank, but she did enjoy a preroll or a gummy from time to time, even though weed tended to make her a bit more emotional than her usual methods of operation, a bit more pensive.
Still, she meant every word in that letter, and she was pretty sure the contents had helped land her this meeting, when every other effort to make contact with the Bishop family before now had failed.
Her parents had tried for years, since before Sasha was born and for as long as she could remember after. They’d never gotten a positive response. Her parents had even visited Blair Mountain a few times, always meeting with a door slammed in his face, or the professional runaround.
The Bishop family has no interest in being the subject of a documentary. Thank you very much for your inquiry, now kindly fuck off.
Essentially.
Two months ago, after an admittedly lonely night in Lisbon, Sasha had popped not one but two sour-apple-flavored gummies, and had planned to sit out on her balcony in her rented loft, stare at the stars, and listen to sad music, when she found herself pouring her emotional baggage onto a piece of creamy paper she’d found in the vintage desk by the window.
She’d forgone titles and pretense, scribbling messily and quickly.
Dear Adeline…
“Intriguing,” Adeline said now, tapping a nail against the paper.
“Is it?” Sasha asked.
“You’re sitting here, aren’t you?” Adeline said.
Sasha let herself smile. “I am.”
Six weeks after Sasha had mailed the letter, she’d received an email from Adeline inviting her to come to Blair Mountain for a chat. No details other than a time and place, no explanation as to what the hell a chat actually meant.
And here Sasha was, details be damned.
“The only daughter of two reputable documentary filmmakers,” Adeline said, pulling the letter free from the envelope. “Wandering the globe and looking for a purpose after their untimely deaths.”
Sasha swallowed hard, felt her jaw clench a little. Of course, she was well aware what she’d written in that letter.
Dear Adeline, my name is Sasha Sinclair, and my parents have been dead for three years…
But hearing it summed up so succinctly and spoken out loud—and by Adeline Bishop of all people, the current matriarch of the Bishop family, whose story had been Sasha’s parents’ dream project for decades—hit a bit differently than it had when she was dreamily high and spilling her guts in the middle of the night four thousand miles away in a rare moment of desperation.
Honestly, she hadn’t expected a response. And she certainly hadn’t expected to be sitting here with Adeline herself.
“I remember your parents,” Adeline said now, tilting her head.
Sasha’s eyes widened. “You do?”
Adeline nodded, waving the opened letter through the air. “They wrote to me often, and to my mother before I took over operations ten years ago. Visited once or twice, as I recall. They were passionate, I’ll give them that. Julian and Freya Sinclair.”
Sasha’s heart did something at the sound of their names, a flutter or skip or crack.
Adeline’s amber eyes narrowed softly. “You look like her.”
Sasha had to glance down then, clench her teeth together to keep something inside—what, exactly, she wasn’t sure.
Sadness, elation, pride. It was all there, bubbling like a witch’s brew.
She inhaled slowly, remembering standing with her mother in front of her bathroom mirror on the day of her high school graduation, robed in royal blue, colorful tassels and ribbons looped around her neck.
Her mom had smiled at her, dressed in a breezy green maxi dress, then made a joke about her doppelganger heading out into the world with an unfair lack of crow’s feet.
They’d both laughed, their matching sapphire-blue eyes glittering in the glass, matching pale Norwegian skin, matching blond hair the color of whipped butter, only the length betraying any difference.
Sasha forced herself to look up, but only when she was sure she could speak without her voice trembling did she say, “I do.”
Adeline went silent then, watching Sasha intently, comfortably. “How did it happen?” she finally asked.
Sasha’s throat went tight again. “Car accident.” She said it fast, a common phrase, too common in her world now. She prayed to April’s stars Adeline wouldn’t ask for more details. It was on the internet anyway, a tragedy laid out under a few words tapped into a search engine.