Chapter 35
“What?” Rowan couldn't believe what he was hearing.
The only thing telling him this wasn’t a hallucination was his sister Indie standing beside him. Her hands were clenched into fists parked on her hips, as she leaned forward. She too stared at Vienna as if the world had flipped upside down.
"Well, I don’t want to buy it. Say it's too expensive," Vienna said with a small shrug as if the matter were closed. It was not.
"What if she comes back with a really good offer?" Indie asked. “We just tell her no? Besides," she looked to Rowan now, "we can afford what it appraised for, right?"
Rowan didn’t answer Indie. He was still too stunned at the entire conversation.
Vienna looked back and forth between her two children as if asking were there more questions or could they be done? But there were more, and Rowan stood firm. He had no idea what was going on with his mother, and after her odd little undertone last night, he was questioning everything.
"We don't want it," Vienna protested. "It's too expensive."
"I'll buy it," Rowan said. "It's family history." Also, he wasn’t going to let Annelise do all that work for nothing. It had been an olive branch to bring the book to his family—or he had decided to take it that way. She wasn’t even supposed to take it off the premises of her business in Charlottesville if he’d heard the muffled words correctly as he’d come up the stairs earlier.
His heart had stuttered, and his feet almost missed a step.
He’d been weary after the long night, not liking what he found.
But the soft lilt of Annelise’s voice had jolted him back.
He hadn’t believed she was here, in his house.
And the reason hadn’t been to reconcile with him, but he wasn’t going to waste her generous offer, either.
Vienna was still shaking her head, looking anywhere but him, anywhere but Indie.
"Mom," he asked, "what’s going on?"
"We don't want that book.”
“You just told Annelise that we did." He motioned behind him toward the door, as if she hadn't left a while ago. Indie had walked her down to her car then come right back inside, excited about the find and curious about what might be in the pages.
Vienna stayed curiously silent until a little while later when Indie brought up the idea that they might learn all kinds of things that they didn't know about their family history. The sudden refusal seemed out of nowhere, Rowan thought.
"We all agreed we wanted to buy it, and Annelise is going to do the effort of trying to barter the price down for us." He was a lawyer, he knew he needed to add something new to the argument and he hadn’t. But he was tired, and his mother was being crazy.
"It doesn't matter," Vienna said, looking at them both now, her chin too high for casual conversation. "Whatever it is, we're not going to get it."
As if that were the end of it. He thought she might be his mother, and this might be her house, but he paid some of the bills here, and he was a grown man now.
He was trying to be reasonable. "I get it.
You married into the family. Launa Velasco isn't your ancestor, but she's mine, and Alder's, and Indie's. "
"I'll pitch in," Indie said, turning to him now as if they could simply cut their mother out of the conversation.
"No!" Vienna wasn’t having it.
Both kids turned, startled at her vehemence. The strength of the one word even made Alder come out of his room down the hall. "I have an early shift. What are you dickheads fighting about?"
While Rowan and Indie took the insult as normal conversation, their mother was at least still in there enough to raise an eyebrow at her second-oldest son.
"Sorry, Mom."
He didn't seem sorry, Rowan thought. He didn't like the idea of disrespecting his mother, but he really didn't like the idea of his mother lying to Annelise. At least Alder seemed to have the same thought.
"We just sat here and had a whole conversation about our interest in buying this book. Mom," Rowan had tried again, "why didn't you just tell her you weren't interested?"
She shifted, glancing toward the corner of the room as if she were deciding how to say it, or maybe she was making up a lie.
"I thought it was your father's great-great-grandmother," she said finally.
"The more recent Launa Velasco. I'd love to have that grandmother's diary.
He would have loved that. For you kids."
She looked to the children as if something here were perfectly normal.
Rowan still couldn't make head nor tail of what she was saying. "But this is too far back. She’s the great-great-great-grandmother or something. In the family Bible it’s clear that she’s the first Velasco woman to come to Belle Hollow. "
"So what’s the problem?" Rowan threw his hands up, just as Alder added, "Even better. There may be more family history in it."
"No!"
Again, the vehemence was surprising. Automatically, Rowan held his arms out to his sides as if holding his siblings back from a fight. It was all too strange. "Mom, what's going on?"
"The people in the Hollow tried to burn her," Vienna said quietly.
"Okay?" Rowan asked. It came out with a question mark in his tone, he knew. "But they didn't burn her, and most of what we know of the history of witch hunts here is that they didn’t really happen the way we’re told—”
His mother actually snorted at him. "There are enough witches around here that you know that's not true, right?"
"But they're not coming with pitchforks and torches.
" He was shaking his head at her. It was the twenty-first century.
The witches around here were living their best lives, and so were the rest of the people in the Hollow.
"It's just a book, Mom. Whatever happened it’s over and it doesn’t change anything except we learn our history. "
"Do you really think she had some kind of dark magic?" Indie threw into the conversation.
Rowan wanted to sigh. Given his mother’s past reactions to even the idea of the kids practicing or that there was real dark magic, he didn’t think that was the best thing to bring up.
But it didn’t seem to faze his mother and his sister wasn't upset, more intrigued. Right now, Rowan was too concerned with figuring out what was going on with his mother to be worried about anything that wasn’t directly upsetting her.
"That is our family," Indie said, far too bright about it, Rowan thought, and clearly Vienna disliked it.
"It’s history. And even if she did have some weird dark magic, they didn’t kill her, we don’t think. And she's not the one who brokered the deal," Alder added. "I mean, assuming the stories we've heard are true."
Rowan knew about the power of family stories.
He'd done enough genealogy searches for cases. He’d seen people sue institutions because they claimed they were one-thirty-second Cherokee or Sioux Indian.
Then they’d had to swab their mouths to prove it, and it turned out they were zero percent.
So, as an adult, he’d taken all family stories, even his own—or especially his own—with more than a healthy dose of skepticism.
This diary could tell them what was true and what wasn’t.
He was fascinated and couldn’t wait to read it.
He tried again. "Mom, it's just her diary. According to Annelise, she came over from somewhere in Spain. That would be amazing to know."
"It's not worth it," Vienna protested.
"Mom, sit down?" He was trying to sound comforting and not exasperated. "The book itself isn't some evil being. It was sitting right here on our table tonight. We all looked at it. No black smoke rose from it as Annelise turned the pages."
Behind him, Indie snorted, and he wanted to turn around and give her a harsh look. She wasn't helping.
"Do you think there are spells in it?" she asked.
He fought the urge to roll his eyes. If she wanted the book, she needed to tone it down a little bit on the glee scale.
"I'm confident there are," Vienna said, "and they don't belong in this house."
"She's not even the one they brokered the deal about," Indie repeated what Alder had said earlier. "That was the later Launa."
As if that settled it. Rowan thought he'd seen his mother get stubborn like this before, and no one had been able to fight it.
She'd been stubborn with the contractors when their old house down by the river flooded, making them tear down drywall that seemed to survive the flood perfectly fine. Sure enough, eventually they’d found black mold.
She'd been stubborn, too, about handling his father's funeral by herself.
Rowan remembered now. Interesting, but he parked that for a later time.
There was no fighting a Vienna Velasco who was dug in. But he tried. "It's a diary, Mom."
"I don't think it's just a diary. If the stories I heard are right, Launa Velasco was married to Carlos Velasco here."
The three kids looked at her as if to say, so what?
"That’s not the Velasco brother she married back in Spain. That brother died of mysterious circumstances."
"Everyone died of mysterious circumstances back then, Mom," Alder said. Rowan could hear his brother was attempting to keep his voice regulated as well.
"Well, so did her second husband." Vienna paused. “Another Velasco brother.”
“His brother?” Indie asked, curious. As if she was pushing the boundary, that making her mother say no, it wasn't true would be a win.
But Vienna nodded seriously. "That's what I've heard. She married her way through four brothers, each one dying mysteriously. Carlos, her last husband, was younger than her by a good handful of years. He was the father of all of the surviving children."
Indie looked back and forth between her brothers, need to know glowing in her eyes. "Do you think that they did it out of that old 'brother must marry the widow' kind of rule?"
Rowan shrugged. Vienna didn't say yes or no, and Indie's question went unanswered.
"The children from the earlier husbands died as well," Vienna added ominously.
"Mom, children died then. A lot of the time," Alder added. Again, exasperation hovered just under his tone. "It doesn't make anything suspicious. Besides, it doesn't matter if it's suspicious or not. It doesn't matter if she murdered all of them. It will put the family history to rest.”
“You don't want that here," Vienna said.
But Rowan did. Annelise had read it. Despite what she said, he could tell she’d read the whole thing cover to cover and she’d been fascinated by it.
Maybe it was a stupid decision. Maybe he wanted the diary because of who’d brought it to them and not the book itself.
He wasn’t examining that. But he wanted it, and he’d already decided he could be just as stubborn as his mother.
"It doesn't change anything. What is, is." Alder waved his hand around as if gesturing at the whole world.
Vienna looked around the table, something in her expression almost startled, as if she suddenly realized she was arguing with three grown adults and not little kids. "Well, I don't want to read it," she said. "I don't want to pay for it."
"I want to, and I kind of feel obligated to buy it," Alder said, making Rowan grateful that he didn't have to be the one to bring that up. "We already told Annelise that we were anxious for her to put in this extra effort. It would be rude to turn it away."
"Exactly," Indie replied.
Rowan wasn't sure if they meant it or if they just were trying to buffer him so he didn’t have to say it. He held one hand up in half of a shrug. "No one's going to make you read it, Mom.”
“I definitely want to read it," Indie declared.
Turning to his younger sister and hating to go against his mother but unable to make any real sense of her arguments, he said, "You can read it, Indie. I'll buy it."
Alder started to say something, but Rowan shrugged.
He was the oldest. He'd been working the longest. Alder had only finished his residency a few years ago, and being a doctor apparently didn't pay as well as Rowan had always thought it would.
Or maybe it was the student loans, or something he didn't know, but Alder never seemed to be in a position to have extra money.
"Thank you," Indie told him.
He turned to look at his mother, wondering if that was an adequate solution. She didn't have to read it, and she didn't have to pay for it. But it wasn't her history—it was theirs.
Apparently, it wasn't enough. Vienna Velasco sat back, her arms still crossed, her earlier irritation still holding.
Slowly, she looked to each of the kids one at a time.
Then she reached up, her fingers absently worrying the small delicate gold pentacle that now hung on the chain at her neck.
Her voice was low as she declared, “Nothing good will come of this.”