A Familiar Tail Read online

  “Okay, if she left in ’sixty-one but never came back, she can’t have anything to do with Dorothy’s death.”

  “Merowp,” added Alistair. He also flowed back down into my lap and butted my hand firmly with his furry forehead. I took the hint and started scratching behind his ears again.

  “How can I . . . we . . . know that?” asked Julia. “Annabelle didn’t stop being a witch just because she left Portsmouth. Perhaps she decided to return to settle the argument in her own favor. Perhaps you are some sort of advance scout, or perhaps you on your own decided to come back and create a place of power for yourself.”

  I opened my mouth to make some kind of comment, and it probably would have been very snarky, but I felt a warning dig from Alistair’s claws and decided against it.

  “Besides,” Julia continued. “How could you have known Dorothy, if not through your grandmother?”

  “I didn’t know her. I never heard of her before I got here,” I said. “I did find my picture on her altar.”

  Julia just frowned. “The photo was on the altar?”

  “Under the magic wand.”

  “Dorothy really did summon her, Julia,” said Valerie.

  “Time out.” I crossed my hands in the T sign. “What do you mean she summoned me?”

  Kenisha answered for the class. “A summons is a spell meant to create the conditions favorable to bringing you to Portsmouth, and to Valerie, and Alistair.”

  Summoned. I didn’t like the word or the idea. Pride rebelled. Common sense would have rebelled, but common sense was whimpering under the bed somewhere and refused to come out.

  Alistair yawned and stretched and quickly curled back up. Max yipped, probably scolding him for not paying attention. This had no visible effect on the cat whatsoever.

  “If she did . . . summon me, her spell probably busted the boiler in my best friend’s building,” I pointed out.

  “That’s why you have to be extremely careful when practicing the true craft,” said Julia. “This is not the movies. If I want to bring someone good fortune, I cannot wave a wand and make a pile of money appear. I cannot turn their enemies into toads. What I can do is influence events. I can focus and magnify my wish for their good fortune, and if I’ve done it right, if my craft is true, events and opportunities will align.”

  “Or,” added Valerie, “maybe I could perform a scrying, to look into the past or the future, and find some helpful information for the person.”

  “Or,” put in Kenisha, “a home or a person can be shielded, warded. It might give them enough safety and breathing space until they can find their own solution.”

  “Or one could perform a dousing to find something lost or hidden that could help them,” said Val.

  “Or . . . ,” began Kenisha, but I held up my hands.

  “Okay, okay, I get it. No toads, but lots of other things.” So much my head was spinning.

  “The true craft is subtle,” said Julia. “But it’s powerful. Things can be mended or broken. Closed or opened. People can be kept away or brought closer. Helped or harmed. All this has very real implications, and one can seldom see all the consequences.”

  “But if Dorothy was your friend and she”—say it—“worked some kind of spell to bring me here, why wouldn’t she tell you anything about it, or me?”

  “That is the question,” muttered Julia. All the anger and suspicion I’d glimpsed when we first came into the bookstore was shining in her dark eyes. “Why? She knew something, or she feared something. Why else would she become so secretive? She practically barricaded herself into that house. Why would she waste her last workings on bringing a stranger to take her place, without telling me?” The accusation in those words was aimed right at me, and it bit deep. Alistair narrowed his slanting eyes. He shifted on my lap, getting his paws under him. Max jumped down to the floor to join his brother. He also drew his lips back until he showed just a little flash of tooth. Alistair answered with a low, dangerous rumble deep in his throat.

  I took a deep breath and hauled my temper back. I made myself look at the woman in front of me, really look. Slowly, I saw past the bitterness that hardened her eyes and her jaw, down to the anger and the indignation and the deep, sad confusion.

  “I am sorry, Julia. Your best friend was keeping secrets and then she died. That’s terrible and I can’t blame you for being hurt. But that doesn’t change the fact that I had nothing to do with any of this, until she dragged me in.”

  Julia scooped Max back onto her lap and rested one hand against the dachshund’s back. By her feet, Leo whimpered and pawed at her hem. With shaking hands she reached down and set him next to his brother. Both dogs immediately stood up with their paws on her shoulders, whining and pushing their noses against her cheeks. She hugged them close, while the rest of us stared at our teacups or the fireplace or the bookshelves, giving Julia a moment to collect herself.

  “I owe you an apology as well,” Julia murmured as she petted her dogs and pressed them, gently but firmly, back into her lap. “The only excuse I have to offer is it has been an extremely difficult time for us all.”

  Val nodded in agreement. “You see, Anna, we all know Dorothy was murdered—”

  “You two think Dorothy was murdered,” said Kenisha. “Despite all the actual evidence to the contrary.”

  I bit my lip. Alistair narrowed his eyes at me.

  “But Dorothy was murdered,” I said to the cat and the witches. “I felt it.”

  14

  ALL THREE WOMEN stared at me with varying degrees of shock and hostility. I guess I kind of deserved it.

  “I think,” said Julia primly, “that we need a little more information.”

  “Damn straight,” said Kenisha. She didn’t sound overly enthusiastic.

  I swallowed and rested my hand on Alistair’s head. With an apologetic glance at Valerie, I told them the whole long story—from seeing Alistair on the B and B’s back fence to finding the wand in the attic, to meeting Mr. Mustache and then Frank Hawthorne, and how we both followed Alistair down into the basement where I almost passed out from the wave of emotion that hit me there.

  Julia leaned forward. “This feeling, what was it like? Have you ever experienced something like it before?”

  To say that the words came slowly is an understatement. I had to drag them out one at a time. “My whole life. Not all the time, but sometimes. I’ll walk into a place and get a Vibe on it. No, that’s not right. On something that happened there. It can be a good thing or a bad one. I never know which it’s going to be, or if it’s going to happen at all.”

  “But you’re sure?” said Val. “This feeling, this Vibe, told you someone did push Dorothy down those stairs?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah. I felt . . . hands, and someone hating her hard. And . . . Alistair . . .” Say this, too. No turning back now, A.B. “He wanted me down there.”

  We were all silent for a moment, trying to let this sink in.

  “What was Frank’s response when you said Dorothy had been pushed?” asked Julia, finally.

  “He believed me, I think. He wanted to know if I could tell who’d done it.”

  “Could you?” Valerie scooted up to the edge of her seat.

  “Hold it!” Kenisha put up both hands. “Julia, Val, you swore you’d keep the craft out of any inquiry into Dorothy’s death.”

  “We agreed not to influence events,” Val corrected her. “This isn’t influencing; this is investigating.”

  “This is bull . . . ,” started Kenisha heatedly, but she caught Julia and the dogs all looking down their long noses at her and swallowed the second half of that. “Nonsense.”

  Julia pretended not to have heard. “What did Frank say, Anna?”

  “He didn’t get a chance to say much of anything. Ellis Maitland interrupted us.”

  “There!” Val stabbed a fing
er at me. “Ellis Maitland! There’s your proof.”

  “You got a very loose idea about proof, Val. How is a real estate agent showing up at an empty house proof of anything?” snapped Kenisha.

  Now it was Valerie’s turn to ignore people. She shifted herself to face me. “You were asking about the bad witch of Portsmouth, Anna? If we’ve got one, it’s Elizabeth Maitland.”

  “Valerie!” cried Julia, genuinely shocked.

  “I’m sorry. No, I’m not. It’s true and we all know it.”

  “I know no such thing,” snapped Julia.

  “A little help here?” I pleaded toward Kenisha. “I mean I know Elizabeth is Ellis’s mother . . .”

  “Elizabeth Maitland hated Dorothy,” said Val before Kenisha could answer. “If anybody had a reason to kill her and the power to do it, it was Elizabeth.”

  “We do not know that,” said Julia. “We have seen nothing that leads us to that conclusion.”

  “And it wouldn’t matter if we did,” added Kenisha.

  “Wouldn’t matter!” cried Valerie. “How would it not matter?”

  “Because we couldn’t prove it. How many times have I got to say that, girl? We got nothing I can take to my lieutenant, never mind the district attorney. I tried to keep the investigation open when Dorothy died, but they shut us down,” she told me. “Because there was no genuine proof. No physical evidence, no chain of events that would hold up.”

  “Plus your lieutenant is a blind, stubborn old . . . coot who doesn’t care about anything as long as the tourists keep coming and the chamber of commerce stays happy.” Valerie’s eyes glittered with a dangerously determined mix of tears and anger. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We don’t need them.”

  “Oh, no.” Kenisha held up one finger. “I did not hear you say that. Because you are not even thinking about taking the law into your own hands.”

  Valerie threw up those hands. “This is Dorothy we’re talking about! Our friend!”

  “I don’t care if it’s Mother Teresa.” Kenisha did not shout. Her words were all very soft and very precise. “You do not get to decide who’s guilty and who’s not. That is the court’s job. That is the law’s job.”

  “We’re supposed to help people.”

  “Yes, we help people. We do not decide somebody needs a little magical visit after dark because the law isn’t doing things our way.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Kenisha raised one eyebrow. “Isn’t it?”

  That made Valerie pull back, at least for a minute. Alistair gave me a sideways look, then jumped lazily off my lap to circle around Kenisha’s ankles and then Valerie’s.

  “Kenisha is right,” said Julia before Val could gather any fresh arguments. She spoke gently but with the finality of someone used to getting her own way. “Valerie, we cannot use our power to enforce retribution on someone we only suspect.”

  “On anyone,” said Kenisha sharply.

  “On anyone,” agreed Julia. “If it is not covered by the law, it most definitely is covered by our law.”

  “What’s our law?” I asked.

  “The threefold law,” answered Julia.

  “What you send out into the world comes back to you threefold,” Valerie muttered as she slumped back onto the sofa.

  “Quod ad vos mittere in mundum triplici,” I added, remembering the inscription on the wand.

  “Exactly,” Julia said, and for the first time I heard a note of approval in her voice. “It applies to the good and the bad, to aid as well as . . .”

  “Revenge,” I finished, and the word sent a shiver up my spine.

  “Yes.” Julia set both dachshunds on the floor so she could more easily reach for Val’s hand. “I am sorry, Valerie. But at least now we do know it was murder. That’s something.”

  Valerie didn’t answer, but I did see how her fingers curled around Julia’s, holding on.

  All at once, I flashed back on the memory of sitting in a speeding cab on a snowy winter day. Dad had had his heart attack. I’d just flown back to Boston and I was on my way to meet my brother Bob and his wife, Ginger, at the hospital. They hadn’t answered my texts in the past twenty minutes. Dad might be dying. He might already be dead. I had no way to know, nothing to hang on to. I was powerless and it was all I could do not to scream at the driver, who was already doing eighty through the Boston traffic, to hurry up!

  Dorothy had brought that kind of misery down on her friends by not telling them what she was doing. What kind of secret could she possibly have been keeping from these women, who clearly cared so much for her?

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Julia, to all of them really. “Not knowing is what hurts the worst.”

  Julia bowed her head. “I’m sorry as well, for the way I’ve acted. Of course you weren’t to know, or to blame. Whatever Dorothy thought . . . whatever she was doing, the motivation behind it was hers and hers alone.”

  Leopold and Maximilian stared at Alistair.

  “Yip?” said Leo.

  “Mrp,” grumbled the cat. They all settled back onto their haunches, and that seemed to be that, for the moment anyway.

  “So what happens now?” I asked. “Now that I’ve been . . . summoned.” And handed the spooky cat.

  “What do you want to happen?” answered Julia.

  “Huh?”

  She smiled. “Dorothy’s spell did not bring you here to fulfill some kind of mythical, preordained destiny. You are being presented with a choice. You can stay in Portsmouth, take a place in our coven, study magic and maybe learn something about yourself, your family and your life. Or you can walk out the door.” Julia gestured grandly toward the front of the store and then frowned. “Once I unlock it, anyway. If you genuinely and freely choose to leave, not even Alistair will follow you.”

  “I thought I was ‘summoned.’” Yes, I made the air quotes. You would have too.

  “And you answered the summons. Everything you’ve done since then has been your choice.”

  I couldn’t deny that, as much as I might want to. I remembered the Vibe I got in Dorothy’s garden—that powerful sensation of being poised on the edge and not knowing which way to jump. But I had not only jumped; I’d picked the direction. Was I ready to jump again? This time into a life and a way of looking at the world that I barely understood.

  “Mrrp?” Alistair illustrated my dilemma by jumping back onto my lap.

  “I don’t know.” I rested my hand on his warm furry back. “I really don’t know. I mean, I’ve only been here two days and I’m already up to my hips in magic and murder. Why should I let myself in for more?”

  The three women looked at one another, and I got the feeling Kenisha at least was trying not to laugh.

  “Your ‘Vibe,’ as you call it,” said Julia. “It comes on you suddenly? You can’t ever bring it on deliberately?”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “So you also can’t ever shut it out, can you?”

  “A little,” I answered defensively. Why was I being defensive?

  “You learned to hide it,” said Val. “That’s different.”

  Julia picked up her cup again and swirled it. “What if you could control your Vibe? Bring it on only when you wanted to? If you ever wanted to.”

  I was staring, but I couldn’t help it. The Vibe was just something I’d always had to live with, work around. Hide. Was she actually telling me I could control it?

  Julia saw my shock and nodded. “You are a witch of the bloodline, Anna. That means you have some talents and some limitations that those who come to the craft purely by their own choice—like Valerie and Kenisha—don’t have. You will always be sensitive to the vibrations and influences around you, but it doesn’t mean you have to live at the mercy of those feelings.”

  “You’re serious?” My jaw was hanging open
again. Julia nodded, and I saw she was perfectly serious. “I could learn to control my Vibe?”

  “Control it, and call on it to help you,” said Julia.

  I wanted it to be true. I’d always wanted to be a person who didn’t have to brace herself whenever she walked into somewhere new. Now Julia was telling me I could be.

  All I had to do was become a witch.

  15

  “I’M SORRY ABOUT what I said about Elizabeth,” said Valerie to Kenisha as we stepped onto the sidewalk. Behind us, Julia was turning off the bookstore’s lights and pulling down shades, closing up for real this time. I’d said I needed more time to think. She said it was just as well, because she had a business to run and needed a good night’s sleep to do it. Kenisha reminded us she wanted to change out of her uniform, and Valerie mentioned she had guests who would be wanting breakfast and clean rooms tomorrow.

  I hugged the empty box to my chest. Somewhere between the reading nook and the front door, Alistair simply ceased to be following me. As much as it would have killed me to admit it, I already missed him.

  Kenisha shrugged. “We can’t do anything on suspicion, Val, even our kind of suspicion. We need proof.”

  “I know. I do.” Val hung her head. “I’ve just felt so helpless.”

  “Roger that.” Kenisha touched her friend’s shoulder briefly. “How about we get you home? Do you want a lift back, Anna?”

  I stared across Market Square. The evening was warm enough that the cool breeze off the river felt welcome. A lively combination of tourists and locals headed in and out of the bars and shops that filled the center of Portsmouth, even though the church clock had just chimed ten. Somebody zipped by on a turquoise Vespa scooter and I suddenly missed my motorcycle. Mom had taught me how to ride on her Harley. I’d ridden mine all the way through college before I decided I needed more carrying capacity and switched to the Jeep. I still missed it.

  Sometimes when you’ve got a monumental decision, a whole set of little things comes crowding around. It’s like once you’ve opened your mental closet, the old questions and wishes spill out in a heap, and the possibility of a motorcycle mixes up with wondering what would happen to the cat who used to be in the empty box you’re carrying if you decided to leave, and that mixes up with wondering if you’re really about to become a witch.