Chapter Three
Three
The lunch rush obliterated any opportunity we had to overthink what Melody had said about Sebastian. The group had certainly made quite an impression on us when they were front and center, but by the time I was packing up to head home for the evening, I’d all but forgotten the strange interaction.
I loaded Bob into his backpack carrier and hauled him, along with a tote bag of books, out to my car. I hated to drive to work when I could avoid it, simply because I lived so close to the shop, but it had been raining for several days straight, and Bob had much more genteel sensibilities than I did.
After placing his carrier on the back seat and buckling it into place, I made a quick pit stop at Lansing’s Grocery. Bob—safely in his backpack—came in with me because I didn’t want to leave him in the car alone, even for a few minutes. It was less a concern over his personal safety than it was a well-founded worry about what kind of antics he could get himself into when I wasn’t paying attention.
There was a large poster in the grocery store window advertising the book signing and the scheduled hike afterward. It made my stomach knot up anew as I wondered if I’d planned well enough and hoped that the forecast for Sunday was right and we would have clear skies for the big birding hike.
I’d bought new hiking boots for the event and even gone through Eudora’s things until I found a cute pair of binoculars I could bring along with me. I wasn’t what one might call outdoorsy at the best of times, but I’d found I was actually very excited to be participating and looking forward to seeing more of the rustic landscape around Raven Creek. I’d explored woefully little outside the main streets in the months I’d lived here.
Inside Lansing’s, I grabbed a cart, because I wanted to be sure I had everything I needed for tomorrow, even if that meant being over prepared. Before I was even to the produce section, I saw a familiar white-blonde head bent over the fresh herbs.
“Don’t you grow most of those yourself?” I teased, bumping my shoulder into that of my good friend Honey Westcott.
She jumped, briefly startled, then laughed as she put the bunch of parsley she’d been holding back down.
“One, most of what I have room to grow on that tiny patio of mine gets used up pretty quick, and two, that’s a really dang good deal for mint. And as I know I’ve warned you, mint can be a risky thing to grow on your own, unless you want it to take over your entire property.”
She had given me this very wise advice several months earlier when I was picking up plants to start my first garden. Since I ran a tea shop, I’d been thrilled at the notion of growing my own mint rather than having to source it, and Honey had been the one to offer me guidance and tell me to keep the enthusiastic plants in pots.
Those pots were now overflowing with mint, and I could barely make enough iced tea to keep up.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you just come by my place and help yourself to as much free mint as you can handle. That’s an even better deal.”
“A smart witch never turns down free herbs,” she said with a laugh. “Unless they’re offered with ill intent.”
“I would never ,” I replied, feigning offense by clasping my hand to my chest but keeping my tone light so she would know I was only teasing. “Witches need to watch out for each other.”
We both kept the phrase witch quiet, as if protecting a secret.
There had been a long-standing rumor in town that my aunt Eudora had been a witch. People believed it primarily because she lived alone in a big Victorian mansion with her cat and sold special tea blends that happened to help a little too well with things like finding love and getting a perfect eight hours of sleep.
But like a lot of small-town rumors, it was one of those things that people said without actually believing.
Except Eudora had been a witch.
And once I’d moved into her house, I’d learned I was too.
As it so happened, discovering my own innate magical abilities in my late thirties was an awful lot like trying to learn to skateboard in your late thirties. Not that I’d attempted that. But it was hard, painful, and I often felt absolutely ridiculous and out of place doing it.
From my understanding—and what I’d learned from Honey, the only other witch in town—most witches discover their powers around puberty. I was a bit of a late bloomer. Some people at midlife get divorced and buy themselves a fancy, too-expensive car. I had learned I was a witch. Basically the same thing.
But just this week I’d been starting to have some issues with my magic, and I wasn’t sure it was due to me being a late bloomer. Maybe it was a good thing I’d bumped into Honey.
“Hey, have you ever had your, um, gifts act up out of nowhere?”
“Acting up how?”
A few days earlier I’d been washing the dishes and suddenly gotten sprayed with water. I’d thought it might just be old-house problems, but soon realized—after a costly plumber visit—it had to be due to magic and not malfunctioning sink hardware. But even today I’d had things go awry.
“Well, this morning all the windows in the house started opening as I walked by them. But then of course they would close the second I got near them.” I let out a long sigh and a helpless shrug. “So far nothing is causing any damage to me or the house, unless you count some very wet kitchen tiles. And Bob would argue he’s incurred personal damages because he did get his paws damp.”
Bob let out a plaintive meow from his backpack to let Honey know I was downplaying how traumatic it had been for him.
“Aww, Bob,” she cajoled sweetly. “Poor guy.”
“I just can’t figure it out. One week I’m practicing small stuff, just like you said, and now it’s like I’m living with a poltergeist, except I’m the poltergeist.”
We started to walk together, and I filled my cart with things to make specialty teas for the signing the next day. The event was being catered by St. Pierre’s, the only restaurant in town I might dare to call fancy , and they were bringing specially selected hors d’oeuvres. But since we were a tea shop and our summer iced tea menu was exceptionally popular, they had accepted my offer to make three custom mixes for the signing.
As I put plastic tubs of blueberries, strawberries, and nectarines into my cart, Honey and I continued to chat.
“Do you think I accidentally did something to permanently screw up my powers? Like maybe all the situations where things got scary and my time-stopping powers were engaged, did it maybe deplete a magical battery I didn’t know I had?”
My time-stopping ability was actually a rare gift for witches known as probability magic. In the most lay terms, I was able to very briefly stop what was happening around me and take the opportunity to change the outcome.
Probability magic was a tricky thing, because I didn’t control it so much as the power just activated when I needed it most. So I couldn’t practice using it. I had, however, started trying to learn how to do the smaller things most witches figured out when they were a lot younger.
Honey gave me a smile, her big gold hoop earrings shining under the overhead lights of the store. Her Afro had started to grow out a bit, and today she had it twisted into chic Bantu knots. She looked much too ethereal and stunning to be hanging out in a small-town grocery store.
“I don’t think your magic is permanently screwed up. You’re not the first person this has happened to, and you won’t be the last. Now, usually magic gets all messy when teenage emotions get involved, but that’s not the case here.”
“Then what is the case?” This fun little experiment in wayward magical skills had been going on for over a week, and while it wasn’t something that happened every day, I was starting to worry an accident might happen when I was around other people and it was going to be very difficult to explain myself without revealing an even stranger truth to them.
“How about I ask around in the community? The witchy community, not Raven Creek. I’ll ask my mom, because I swear she’s heard every story about every witch in the US with something that went wrong at one point or another. The best I can suggest is that maybe it’s mental? Stress can do weird things to the body; it stands to reason it would do the same for magic.”
“Oh great, so it’s all in my head? Are there therapists just for witches?” I sighed.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
We finished up our shopping and headed to the checkout, but before we could even get to the cash desk, I heard a sound that was both familiar and utterly alarming.
Leo’s voice was unmistakable, but what I had never heard before was the way it sounded when raised and angry. Leo was yelling at someone.
Considering Leo Lansing was the very definition of gentle giant, basically looking like Paul Bunyan minus a blue ox, he tended to make himself smaller and less intimidating by being quiet and withdrawn most of the time. He must have had some pretty strong feelings about whoever he was talking to, because this was the first time in my life I’d heard him yell.
“And you can think twice before you ever set your good-for-nothing self back in this store. If I ever see you again, I’ll throw you out of here with my bare hands.” Leo’s fists were clenched with rage, and what was visible of his cheeks under his dark, bushy beard was flaming red.
Feeling like this situation might be getting out of control, I left my cart with Honey and put myself between Leo and the man he was arguing with. The man, a stranger to me, was wearing a black suit and a shirt so white I assumed it had never been worn before. His shoes, however, looked scuffed and ready to fall apart. The man had thinning hair brushed into a comb-over and wore wire-framed glasses at least a decade out of style, but he had a young face, and I was willing to bet he was probably only in his early thirties.
“Whoa, hey. What’s going on here?”
The sight of a woman in a T-shirt that read No Shelf Control and wearing a plastic turquoise backpack holding a cat in it must have been enough to shake both of them out of their angry focus on one another.
Leo’s hands relaxed, and his body sagged immediately when he laid eyes on me. He glanced around and realized all the early-Friday-evening shoppers had stopped in their tracks to watch this drama unfold.
The strange man pushed his glasses up his nose and gave Leo and me a severe and overtly judgmental look. “You may want this to be over, Mr. Lansing, but you’ll find that my client is very motivated to make this deal happen. You will see me again.”
He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands, even though I was pretty sure he hadn’t touched anything. With one final sneer at the entire group of townspeople gathered in the store, the man left, a cloud of noxious-smelling cologne trailing behind him. As he passed through the automatic doors, he nearly collided with Melody, Sebastian’s manager. Melody gave a little start of surprise, and the two shared a mutually unfriendly look before the man vanished into the parking lot.
I turned so I could look at Leo. “What on earth was that all about? I’ve never seen you get that mad before. I’ve never seen you get mad before period. Are you okay? Do I need to go after that guy and kick him in the shins or something? Because I’ll do it.” I bounced and weaved like a fake boxer until Bob let out a protesting howl from my backpack, not enjoying being jostled around. “Oops. Sorry, buddy.”
This brought a smile to Leo’s previously rage-creased face.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Phoebe. That’s not who I am.” He was still red-faced, but now from embarrassment rather than anger. “I don’t know why I let him get under my skin like that, but something about that weasel makes me so mad I could spit.”
“Who was he?” Honey had come up next to me, carrying both our baskets. “I didn’t recognize him.”
“He’s a lawyer, apparently for some development firm I’ve never heard of, and if he hasn’t gotten to you yet, just you wait. It sounds like he’s making a menace of himself all over town trying to see what kind of price he can get for pieces of property. I guess this secret client he’s working for has finally figured out that Raven Creek is a tourist economy, and they want to open up a bunch of short-term rentals here. And they want to convert this to a chain grocer. One of those ones with the coffee shop inside.” His frown deepened, like the mere thought of having a Starbucks in a grocery store was a sin.
In fairness, Raven Creek might have been one of the last towns in Washington that didn’t host one of the famed Seattle coffee company’s stores. We kind of liked it that way, though admittedly I did miss my usual order sometimes.
“He was trying to get you to sell the store?” Lansing’s had been a family-owned business for multiple generations. It was one of the longest-running businesses in Raven Creek and as much a part of the community’s history and charm as the covered bridges and vista views.
“I ain’t selling the store.” Leo bristled visibly, and I placed a hand on his arm, giving it a gentle rub to assure him everything was okay.
“You said he’s trying to buy up other businesses in town?”
“Said anything that looks suitable to be converted into one of those rentals you get online, you know?”
That would mean the lawyer would need to talk to a local real estate agent, and we had only one of those in Raven Creek. So if I wanted to find more out about what the mystery lawyer was looking for, it meant I would need to talk to my least favorite person in town.
Dierdre Miller.
Unfortunately, I suspected that conversation was going to come to me one way or the other, because being a witch wasn’t the only secret I was hiding from the people of this town.
I also happened to own half of Main Street.