Spellbinders Collection Read online

  Alice took one last snip at a climbing rose and gathered up the dead branches from her pruning, humming to herself. The Russellianas had come through the winter better than she'd hoped, and they were the least hardy variety she'd planted. Maybe it was time to push the limits of Maine weather again, see if she could grow those Arethusas that Fosters' advertised.

  Roses weren't as tough as they looked. Kate was like that. You'd think you could use her to split rocks, but she broke as easily as any other human. The accident — Alice would just as soon Kate hadn't mentioned it.

  Memories flooded through her: Raining, three in the morning, she had been riding EMT on the ambulance and was still groggy from the beeper dragging her out of bed. They screamed to a stop at a high-speed crash, pieces of dark, shredded metal tangled bad enough that you couldn't tell what parts went with what. One driver was dead on the spot, thrown into a ditch like a rag doll. Damn fool hadn't believed in seatbelts. The other still sat pinned in a twisted cage of steel. Alice tasted the reek of gasoline and antifreeze.

  She reached through the shattered side window to check for a pulse. She suddenly realized the victim was a woman, and far pregnant. The face was a mass of blood and flayed meat speckled with broken glass, unrecognizable. Damned pickup was so old, it didn't have seatbelts or even an offset steering column. Only reason the driver didn't have a horn button sprouting out of her back was that the impact had thrown her across to the passenger side an instant before the front end collapsed back through the firewall. Alice spotted a familiar earring in the middle of the bloody hair and suddenly realized it was Kate's.

  They cut the cab to pieces around her and pulled her out. The run to Downeast General took forever. Her heart stopped twice on the way. Alice fed her own life into her friend, keeping the spark alive until the ER doctors took over.

  Then she fainted.

  That kind of witching carried a cost. Aunt Jean had laid down the law: You could kill yourself, pulling out the life-force and passing it to another. Alice knew that when she gave life to Kate and to her baby she had probably cut five years from her own.

  Kate was worth it. Alice sometimes wondered about Jackie. The twit wasn't flat-out evil, not like the aura from that dark station wagon, but she sure wasn't much to brag about. And Kate could never have another.

  Alice shuddered and breathed deep of the damp salt air, using the blend of spruce and rockweed to rinse the stink of a hundred car wrecks from her throat. She dumped the clippings into her compost heap, oiled the blades of her pruning shears, and put them away in the garden shed. She stopped off and said "Good morning" to the bees humming around the hives under the apple trees. Routine helped to put memories in their place. She hadn't owned the house then.

  She touched the door-post and spoke to her house, a kind of password identifying herself to the small gods living in the timbers and inhabiting the hearths. She always felt more comfortable if she went through the ritual. Otherwise, the walls seemed to be watching. She'd lived here for only ten years, mere seconds as the house reckoned time, and sometimes it forgot that she belonged.

  The house rambled long and low above the bay, an organic growth from century to century as generations of Haskell women added on or reworked sections for changing needs. Alice lived in three rooms in the newest ell, the part with indoor plumbing and electricity. The rest mostly just sat there thinking to itself, a labyrinth of rooms small and large, open and secretive, magical and mundane, waiting for whatever call might come. It spoke of shelter against nature and man, a place of solid warmth and nurturing. It sang of harmony.

  She checked the venison stew simmering on her big black wood-fired range, shook out some ashes from the grate before adding a single stick of oak, and tossed in a bit of this and that to adjust the seasonings. Days off, she liked to cook things that took a bit of time. They helped make up for the rubber chicken and library-paste potatoes from the hospital cafeteria.

  Did she need to do anything? That big Suburban radiated evil, but nobody ever said that the Woman had to fight all the evil in the world. One of Aunt Jean's rules was simplicity itself: Nine times out of ten, the best thing to do was nothing. Alice stood and stared at the wall.

  Alice knew damn well, thirty years of practice, just what Kate was doing right now. She was on the radio, running a license check. Never a thought to scanners and the dozens of unofficial ears that heard everything on police-band channels.

  The stew could wait. That was the essence of stew. Given the habits of her favorite nosy old fishwife, Alice wasn't sure other things could.

  She glanced around the kitchen and "new" parlor, making sure she was willing to have people see the place that way if she never came back up from the cellar. Granted, it wasn't likely, but mistakes had caught up with one or two other women in the past.

  Everything looked more or less presentable, so she topped off a lamp with olive oil and lit the wick. The house hated the smell of kerosene. It barely tolerated electricity, and insisted on wood heat. Aunt Jean had said that it had sulked for years after they put in plumbing. Opinionated old cuss, it was, just like a cat.

  Speaking of which . . . Dixie Bull the Pyrate Queen lay curled up behind the stove, black tail tucked over white nose. Alice reached in and hooked the cat out, scritched her ears, and shoved her out the door. After a green-eyed glare, Dixie fluffed up her fur and plodded over to a sunlit spot in the garden.

  That was another of Aunt Jean's rules: "Always put the cat out before you go down into the cellar."

  Chapter Three

  Rolling downhill and bearing to the right, Kate passed the picture-postcard Stonefort green, ringed with "stately" homes and the big white Congregationalist church with the classic steeple that was going to fall into the green in another year or so if someone didn't scrape up fifty grand for repairs. Serve them right.

  She couldn't go there any more. Every time she saw the place, she heard echoes from her childhood. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Congregational churches varied a lot; that was what the title meant. This one had a running war with the Haskell witches that stretched back centuries. The congregation's elders had a habit of selecting pastors with minds as small and tightly bound as their own. Didn't matter that at least half the congregation would sneak over to The Woman for help if they had a problem.

  A left turn ran her past the town dock, the lobster pound, and the small harbor tastefully decorated with white lobster boats, dinks, and a couple of tourist yachts. Kate's stomach did a little roll at the mere sight of the morning chop on the water.

  That had been the only job she couldn't hold down. She'd put in a week as "stern man" on a cousin's lobster boat, spending more time leaning over the side and puking than she had in baiting traps. When it became obvious she never would get her sea-legs, John had paid her off. He'd added a few rude comments about polluting the bay with all her slightly-used breakfasts and lunches.

  What he didn't say was, his catch of "bugs" had dropped off to nothing while she was on board. He sure didn't need a helper to change the water in his traps. Jonah. Kate and the ocean didn't love each other.

  The road took her past the entry to the Morgan place, and she had to slow down because there were cars and pickups parked along the shoulder on both sides. They pinched the narrow road down to a single lane. She almost stopped and pulled her ticket pad out of the glove box before she remembered.

  Daniel Morgan's memorial service.

  Now that was an odd one. Not that death at sea was any stranger to Stonefort, but the circumstances . . . . No body, and the weather had been calm. The family insisted that he'd been wearing a wetsuit and PFD vest that should have kept his head above water even if he was out cold, and he could swim like a fish. Yet here they were marching grimly along with a memorial when most families would still be hoping the man was safe on some offshore island. They weren't even waiting for the body to turn up in some scallop dragger's net for a regular burial service.

  They also kept pushing f
or a search more than fifteen miles from where his kayak had been found. They said he'd been going out along Pratt's Neck, and the Coast Guard had found the boat offshore on the far side of Morgan's Point. Gear was missing too, stuff that should have been in his deck bag, and he'd been wearing some valuable jewelry. They managed to imply that that was the reason why the body was still missing.

  Wouldn't be the first time some boater had changed his plans, but she didn't like to think about people robbing corpses and then hiding them. Not that there wasn't a history of "wrecking" in the town. Something comes ashore, the one who finds it owns it. Poor people living in a tough land were like that, always had been. But the Morgans had money; they'd have paid a hefty reward for the body and anything he carried.

  The spruces opened up along the side of the road, and she looked out over the bay. The thrust of a round stone tower dominated the view, weathered granite fifty feet tall and standing on a point of land that itself rose over fifty feet straight up from the water's edge. It always reminded her of photos of Tintagel or some other fabulous sea-girt castle of Ireland or Wales, and it had no business sitting there outlined against the offshore fog.

  Morgan's Castle.

  Kate had probably heard a thousand tales about it. The one she liked best, because it tied in with the Welsh ancestry of the Morgan name, called it the final home of Prince Madoc of Wales. Problem with that theory was, he'd sailed out around 1170.

  The radio woke up. "Sunrise to five-seven-seven."

  Kate pulled the mike out again. "Five-seven-seven. Go ahead."

  "Ten twenty-eight Blue Chevy Suburban, two zero zero three model, registered Red Bank Delivery, Red Bank, New Jersey. Clean record. What ya got?"

  Again, Kate glanced at the ten-codes on the visor: suspicious vehicle. "Ten thirty-nine." Denise was a stacked redhead, and single; she could gossip all day and the guys would never tease her about burning up airtime. They'd just lick their microphones. If Kate broke radio protocol, she'd be hearing about it for a month. "I'll be ten seven at the Beech project in about five minutes. Five-seven-seven out." She never had any problem remembering "ten seven;" her radio was "out of service" about thirty times a day.

  Hah. Red Bank Delivery: That was about as generic a name as you could get. Kate preferred puzzles with a little more meat on their clues.

  Like that stark pile of lichen-grayed rock against a gray horizon, set about with a scattering of gray headstones in neatly-mowed green grass. It seemed like half the town was out there on the point this afternoon, dressed in suits and sober dresses with a scattering of flannel shirts and blue bib overalls.

  The official "Morgan's Castle" legend was that some ancestral Morgan had started to build a private lighthouse, and then the government finally got around to marking the offshore shoals so the tower was never finished. On the other hand, Kate knew that there were a few archaeologists who itched to get their hands on the tower and grounds.

  Tough luck. It was the Morgan family graveyard. Had been, for hundreds of years, and no way on God's green earth were they going to let anyone dig it up.

  She shrugged her shoulders. That was the rich folk, and the water folk. She was neither. She barely knew the Morgans. Them or the Pratts across the bay. Whatever rumors might wander past when cops sat down to coffee, she'd never had official business with either family.

  The road wound away from the view and dove back into woods, and she turned onto a gravel driveway that curved inland, climbing rapidly past spruce and pine and tangled close-in underbrush in a series of switchbacks. God help the man who drove the snowplow. But then, the Philadelphia lawyer who owned the place was never here in winter.

  "Views." That was the other real-estate agent's catchphrase. If they couldn't sell "waterfront" they'd sell "views." Lawrence Alfred Beech III, Esq. certainly had a view. His front deck looked out halfway to Nova Scotia, across open ocean and spruce-studded straggling islands. The old locals rarely built on such a site. The general feeling was, if you could see the ocean, the ocean could see you. 'Round about January, that clear sweep for the northeast wind lost its appeal.

  She wrestled the truck around in front of the four-car garage, faced it nose-down the slope again, and shut it off. The engine coughed, shuddered, coughed again, and finally quit — the old Dodge habit of running-on.

  Larry Beech had a little "cottage" in the Bar Harbor tradition, eight bedrooms and about ten baths. Hot-tub out on the deck overlooking the bay, sauna as big as her kitchen, home theater to seat twenty — you name it, they had it. Her crew was sub-contracting on some renovations, enough profit to buy groceries for her and Jackie for a week. Trickle-down economics.

  Charlie Sickles had heard her truck snorting up the grade, and shuffled out to help unload. Another thirty years, she'd look like that — gimped up with arthritis and a lifetime of hard labor, sunburned to leather and leaned-down to a stick-figure by age, white hair and missing teeth, still working at seventy because his monthly Social Security check wouldn't buy groceries for a week.

  Tourists looked at him and saw a caricature Downeast Yankee. She looked at him, saw the tarpaper shack he lived in with his wife and mother, and paid him twice what he was worth. He stopped, grabbed the tailgate of the truck, and coughed the morning's pack of tar out of his lungs. Someday soon, the lungs were going to come along for the ride. Then she could hire somebody who would pull his weight.

  "Hey, Charlie, can I bum a smoke?"

  She was just lighting up when the other member of her crew came slouching around the corner, a classic image of teenage rebellion. Jeff Burns was one of those kids who shoved a mass of spiky green hair, nose-ring, and baggy Goth-black clothes in your face and then sneered at you when you blinked. At least she'd made him ditch the baggy clothes when on the job: get a sleeve caught in the DeWalt saw and you could lose an arm. They'd compromised on black jeans and whatever uncensored tee-shirt touched his fancy. Today's incarnation was relatively tame: a fake movie logo, "Screw the World — I want to get off."

  Last year, she'd hauled his young ass up to the county jail on a juvie charge of possession and ended up as his de-facto probation officer. Damned if he didn't look like he'd make a carpenter. All she had to do was keep him clean and get some muscle on those scrawny arms.

  She parked the cigarette in one corner of her mouth, cuffed him gently on the shoulder, and pointed to the far end of a set of windows. They had a job to do.

  *~*~*

  Lamp in hand, Alice climbed three steps and opened a door into another century. The sewing room and spare bedroom sat waiting — dust covers making ghosts of the furniture, old treadle sewing machine pulled up next to the south window to give enough light for fine stitching. That had been her room for years, whenever she'd visited Aunt Jean. Today it held a chilly memory of winter, and the dead flies of autumn cluttered the floor. The room sneered at her housekeeping and told her to come back with a broom.

  The rear hallway was even colder, without south-facing windows for sun and heat, and she stepped back another hundred years. Stairs wound down and to the right, as the house hugged the bones of the land. The bare floors creaked, working out frost-heaved kinks under her feet. Out of habit, she checked the brick hearth and bake oven of the old kitchen, to make sure the chimney cap still kept water out. The house reminded her that a fire every month or so would be a good idea, just to keep the plaster dry.

  A plain board door passed her through the Revolution and into the oldest part of the house. She sniffed a hint of something dead in the winter air that still hid away in here, months after spring had come outside. Through the center hall and to the right, a bat lay in the middle of the parlor floor, mummified by winter dryness. Whitespot. She must have come down the chimney to be close to the spring, sensing her coming death.

  Alice toed her friend gently to one side, knelt down, and hooked her finger into a knothole in one of the wide pine floorboards. The trapdoor hinges groaned like they always did, the house complaining that she'd better
have something important to justify its waking up.

  A steep flight of stairs led into darkness. She followed them down, onto smooth rounded stone that formed still more steps. The warm lamplight poked into shadows, bringing out smooth shapes of granite and dark basalt still showing the scrapes of the last ice age.

  "There's funny things in the basements around Stonefort," Aunt Jean had always said. Morgan's Castle, that big old house the Pratts lived in, two or three others in town, all stood where the power of the earth flowed down from the hills and up from the deep stone and met the sea. The Chinese made a science of it, a thing called feng shui or geomancy that gave you the rules for fitting your life into the power of the land. Folks in Stonefort had done it just by feel, or maybe chance had put some houses in the proper place and then the power had made those houses prosper.

  Then there was this secret, walled in and covered over from the sun and the eyes of men. The spring had always been a woman's place, back when the Naskeags roamed the land. Aunt Jean never had explained what kind of deal kept a band of full-blooded Abenaki living peacefully in a community of white settlers. She'd said that was centuries ago, long before Columbus, and when the fur traders came up from Plymouth, Stonefort was already here.

  The women's lodge had remained through the centuries and grew into the House. Men had never lived in the house, never seen this cellar. Not that the history was all lesbians: There were tales of men invited to spend the night, and even being seen alive afterwards. There had been babies born. Most generations, though, the house and land passed from aunt or great-aunt to niece. The family name passed down on the mother's side, too, from ancient times.

  Alice knew men must have held the deed, back when a woman couldn't own property, but no Haskell man ever would have dared do anything with that legal power. She'd inherited it from Aunt Jean and already had a niece lined up to take over forty-fifty years in the future. Haskells liked to keep things tidy.