witches of cleopatra hill 07 - impractical magic Read online

  “So he just…blurted it out?”

  “More or less.” Lysette shook her head, as if even now she couldn’t help being somewhat amused by the way she’d learned that the man she loved was a warlock. “He said his family had been here in Jerome for more than a hundred years, and that they kept themselves isolated because of their particular…gifts.”

  “And you believed him, just like that?”

  A smile. “Of course not. I might have been twenty-two and starry-eyed, but I hadn’t taken complete leave of my senses. I told him that I loved him and that he didn’t have to try to impress me with made-up stories about powers, or whatever.”

  “He must have loved that.”

  “Not exactly.” Lysette’s smile deepened, her eyes blurry with memory. “He said he wasn’t trying to impress me at all, just trying to tell me the truth so I’d know what I was getting into. And then he opened his hands wide, like this” — she spread her arms apart, palms pointed toward the ceiling — “and two balls of orange-yellow flame appeared, just sitting on his palms. Then he snapped his fingers, and they were gone.”

  “It still could have been a trick,” Jenny said.

  “Yes, it could. But I knew it wasn’t. I knew there was something very different about him, about his whole family. So I tried to laugh and made some crack about not having to worry about starting a fire if we ever went camping, and he laughed for real and kissed me, and that was how we ended up engaged.”

  “But wasn’t it strange for you?”

  “Of course it was. Strange to come live in this tiny town after growing up in Phoenix, and strange to be surrounded by people who had all sorts of different magical talents. I could have felt left out, I suppose, but I soon learned I wasn’t the only ‘civilian’ in the batch, so that helped. And your father always made sure that I wouldn’t feel inferior just because I hadn’t been born a witch.”

  Yes, that could be the hard part, to play down the differences between someone who was witch-born and someone who’d been born an ordinary, non-magical person. But her father had managed it, as had others in the clan, so at its heart, the idea wasn’t impossible.

  Whether it would work for her and Colin was an entirely different matter, however.

  Lysette watched her daughter, clearly trying to interpret her silence. “I’m not saying it’s always easy,” she said. “But it’s worth it…if you’re with the right person.”

  “But how do I know he’s the right person?” Jenny asked, unable to hide the desperation in her voice. “I’ve screwed up so many times — ”

  “No, you haven’t screwed up,” Lysette said, her tone quiet, but still firm enough to cut across her daughter’s words. “All you did was try to care for people who weren’t ready for it. That’s on them, though, not you. Maybe you had to go through all that to recognize how good Colin could be for you. I don’t know. I haven’t met him. But I saw you dancing with him at the reception, and even though I didn’t know who he was, I couldn’t help thinking that the two of you looked, well, right together.”

  For a long moment, Jenny didn’t say anything, partly because her mother’s last sentence had made her throat clench with unexpected tears. She really hadn’t been expecting that kind of acceptance, of confirmation. When she did speak, she could tell that her voice was thick, betraying the emotion she was desperately attempting to hide. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Lysette went to her daughter then and folded her into her arms. “That’s what I’m here for, sweetie.”

  10

  The whole time he was driving from Tucson to Prescott, Colin couldn’t help berating himself. Not over calling in sick at work; he was about to start losing sick days anyway if he didn’t start using them. No, over the whole reason for this trip in the first place. Snooping around about Jenny’s family behind her back. Hadn’t he already played fast and loose enough with the truth? In a way, this mission only seemed to compound his sins.

  But he couldn’t stop himself. Something very strange was going on with the McAllisters, and he had to know what it was. That same need to know had pushed him into journalism, even though a lot of people these days thought the profession was on its way out. And that need to know was probably going to get him into trouble now, but again…he couldn’t ignore the compulsion that was currently driving him.

  He’d also tried doing a little snooping into Alex’s family, the de la Pazes, but they’d been in the Phoenix area — and then Tucson — for literally hundreds of years, dating back to before the time when the United States were even united. It would take the kind of work of someone researching a doctoral thesis to unravel all their tangled relationships and holdings, and so Colin had abandoned the task after a couple of wasted hours. The one thing he’d been able to determine was that there didn’t seem to be anything particularly out of the ordinary about Alex Trujillo, except that he’d managed to carry a double major and still graduate in four years. His parents had been married for almost thirty years and owned a thriving store, and his little sister was currently going to UA and majoring in biology. Absolutely nothing there to throw up any red flags, or to show that Alex possessed some kind of strange magical power that allowed him to shoot blue-white light out of his hands.

  The whole thing was crazy-making, which was why Colin knew he couldn’t let it go.

  He had decided that his first stop in Prescott should be the historical society, mainly because their records went back farther than the county recorder’s office and should — he hoped — provide more jumping-off points for further investigation. If he had time, he could go over to the county recorder’s office afterward.

  Prescott took its history seriously. The historical society was housed in a converted Victorian house two blocks away from the town’s famous courthouse and surrounding park, and he’d been required to make an appointment.

  The entire neighborhood was composed of Victorian and Craftsman-style homes, most of them immaculately restored. They didn’t look completely alien to Colin’s eyes, since there were houses like that clustered in the older parts of Tucson, even if they weren’t nearly as well kept up as the ones he saw when he got out of his car and locked it. Still, there seemed to be a weight of history here that he hadn’t ever experienced in his hometown, and he unconsciously squared his shoulders as he headed up the front walk — meticulously cleared of fallen leaves, even though the frost-yellowed lawn was studded here and there with bright autumn color, red and orange and gold.

  There was a buzzer next to the front door. Colin pressed it, then waited. A moment or so later, a woman who appeared to be in her late fifties, with gray-streaked red hair pulled up into a graceful twist at the back of her head, opened the door.

  “Hi,” Colin said, holding out a hand and smiling. “I’m Colin Campbell. I have a one o’clock appointment.”

  She returned the smile immediately. “Of course. I’m Anita Lincoln. Please come in. I’ve already pulled some documents for you. Jerome in the late 1870s, early 1880s, correct?”

  “Perfect,” he replied. “Thanks so much for doing that for me.”

  “Not a problem at all,” she said as she led him from the foyer, which was paneled in dark oak and sported some serious stained-glass windows on either side of the door, and then down a short hallway.

  The room they entered was a good size, and probably had been a sitting room at one time. Now it was set up as a reading area, with two large tables and their accompanying chairs at the center of the space. On one side was a microfiche reader, and on the other an older-model iMac sitting on a small table. Old black and white and sepia-toned photos of Prescott and the Verde Valley — and yes, Jerome — covered the walls.

  One of the tables had a stack of folders sitting on it. Anita pointed to the folders and said, “Those are the materials I thought would be of the most interest. They’re from a variety of different sources — old newspaper clippings, excerpts from letters, diaries, real estate records. You weren’t completely clear on what you wanted,
so I thought it best to give you a range so you could narrow your research down from there.”

  “Thank you so much,” Colin replied. That must have taken a good deal of time, and he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to start completely from scratch. “I really appreciate it.”

  She gave him a small nod. “It’s what we’re here for. If you need anything else, my office is just down the hall to the right.”

  That seemed to be the end of the conversation, because immediately afterward she left the reading room, apparently heading toward the aforementioned office. Colin fished his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. Not even a quarter after one. The historical society was open until four-thirty, which meant he had a couple of hours to get his reading done.

  He set down his messenger bag on one of the empty chairs, and fished out a yellow pad and a couple of pens. It was always his practice to write things out longhand first, since it helped with his thinking processes. He also hadn’t been sure whether the historical society banned the use of electronic devices near its documents, but Anita hadn’t mentioned any such strictures.

  When he opened the first folder, he saw why. These were all Xerox copies of the original documents. He supposed he should have thought of that; hundred-year-old paper would certainly have started to fall apart if it was handled by too many people, especially ones who hadn’t been trained to manage vintage documents.

  All right, then.

  The first item was a copy of a deed, dated to March 1878, showing that one Joseph McAllister had bought five plots of land in what would later would be incorporated as Jerome. What one person needed with five separate plots that were clearly intended as home sites, Colin wasn’t sure, but he surmised that Joseph had bought them for family members.

  Beneath the deed was a fragment of a letter, one from a woman named Ida Church. Of course Colin had no idea who this Mrs. Church had been or what she’d looked like, but her tone reminded him of the sort of busybody gossips that seemed to populate sixties-era sitcoms. The first portion of the letter was missing, and so it seemed to open mid-sentence.

  …seems there are more McAllisters in Jerome every time one turns around. They’re pleasant enough, but keep to themselves. No one even seems to know precisely where they came from, although Mrs. Reverend Talbert told me that she thought they had relocated here from somewhere in New England. What seems strange to me is that they always prosper, no matter what. Why, when that fire ran through town last spring, it burned so many houses to the ground, but not a single one that belonged to a McAllister! My own Lewis asked Mr. Joseph McAllister how they could be so lucky, to which he replied that his family could organize a very good bucket brigade. That may well be, but I am of the opinion —

  Exactly what Mrs. Church’s opinion had been, Colin would never know, because that was where the scrap of her letter ended. Still, even that snippet gave him some food for thought. He’d known vaguely that Jerome had suffered more than one catastrophic fire during its life, due mainly to the wooden construction of many of its early buildings. And he’d spent enough time either covering or reading about local catastrophes that he knew disasters could be like that, leveling one side of a street and leaving the other intact. Still, he wasn’t sure whether having all the McAllister homes survive one of those fires exactly passed the sniff test.

  He laid the piece of Mrs. Church’s letter aside and moved on to the next item, which was actually an old photograph of a family group outside a three-story structure with the legend “McAllister Mercantile” painted on its façade. The building even looked familiar to him; he thought he’d been inside it years ago during the one time he’d visited the former mining town. Was it still owned by McAllisters? Probably. If it had been sold to someone outside the family, there would have been a record of the transaction somewhere.

  Colin found himself studying the faces in the photo, attempting to see if any of them shared a resemblance with Jenny, or with any of the McAllisters he’d glimpsed at Alex and Caitlin’s wedding. None of them looked like anyone he’d met or seen, which didn’t mean a lot. More than a hundred years separated the people in the photo — it was annotated as having been taken in 1908 — from anyone he would have met at the wedding. Yes, their coloring seemed similar, in that their hair appeared to range from light brown to blond, but he couldn’t see an echo in their features of the woman he’d come to care for against his better instincts.

  Exactly why falling for Jenny should be a problem, he wasn’t sure. Well, except for the way he’d lied to her. But if he put that aside — and also put aside the extreme geographical undesirability of someone who lived hundreds of miles away from him — then on the surface there wasn’t anything to keep them apart. He was a few years older, but three years certainly didn’t constitute a gap of any significance. And yeah, he had that whole alimony thing hanging over his head, but again, he’d be free of that particular ball and chain in just a few more months. So really, what was the problem?

  No problem at all, except all these niggling little bits that didn’t seem to add up. He stared at the facsimile of the photograph for a long moment, then put it aside. The next few documents were of little interest to him — manifests of items that had been delivered to “McAllister Mercantile,” a list from the Presbyterian church showing the McAllisters as members in good stead. That last little bit surprised him somewhat, considering that slip where Jenny had sworn by a goddess. But maybe she was the only pagan in a family of good Protestants. It was hard to say, because the Trujillo/McAllister wedding had definitely been Catholic, something the groom’s family had probably insisted on.

  Or maybe the McAllisters had been something else all along, and had only gone to the local church as protective camouflage. No, that sounded ridiculous. He’d seen Jenny’s relatives at the wedding, and they all looked like more or less upstanding and prosperous members of society. A lot more sober than he would have expected a group from bohemian Jerome to be, all things considered. The little town had survived the sixties with a good deal of that decade’s sensibilities intact; when Colin and his friend Matt had visited some ten years ago, they’d managed to score some pretty spectacular weed from a guy who looked like he’d been wandering around Jerome ever since surviving Woodstock.

  But again, maybe they’d toned things down so as not to attract too much attention. Colin imagined having your relatives show up to your wedding in tie dye and fringe might be fairly cringe-inducing.

  The next document appeared to be a selection from someone’s diary. There was no name, but the delicate copperplate writing appeared feminine, and the content soon left little doubt in Colin’s mind.

  …quite the scene at McAllister’s Mercantile, one so dreadful that Papa put his foot down and said I should not see Charles McAllister again. Up until yesterday, he had not been terribly enthusiastic about Charles courting me, but because the McAllisters have been in Jerome almost since the town was founded, and are certainly very prosperous, Papa did not try to interfere. But now I know there shall be nothing more of it, and indeed he is grumbling about sending me off to stay with my Aunt Tillie in Prescott “until I have gotten this nonsense out of my head.”

  It is most definitely not nonsense, and Charles McAllister is nothing like his father, who is, I fear, rather hot-tempered. Of course, I was not there, as I was home with Mama, measuring the sitting room windows for new curtains, but there were enough eyewitnesses to make me believe that they all saw the same thing — or rather, they all think they saw the same thing. I am sure there must be a rational explanation for what happened, although I must confess that I cannot think what it might be.

  Unfortunately, there are quite a few rough types in this town. It is what happens when a mine is as rich as the United Verde, I suppose. Henry McAllister had stepped out from behind the counter to assist Mrs. Turner in getting a lamp base from a high shelf, and apparently a miner who had recently been fired thought that was the perfect opportunity to sneak behind the counter and
take what he could from the cash register.

  Well, imagine the miner’s surprise — and Mrs. Turner’s, and everyone else’s in the store — when Mr. McAllister turned around, saw what he was doing, and then snapped his fingers. At once the miner found himself hanging upside down in midair, suspended from nothing. No one could figure out what the trick was, although Mr. Clancy claims he saw something just like it in New York when he saw the great Harry Houdini perform. The miner — a Mr. Oswald Peale — remained like that until Sheriff Gordon, Mr. McAllister’s brother-in-law, arrived to take him away. And then Mr. McAllister went back to work as if nothing had happened.

  But everyone had seen, and there were a few dark mutters about witchcraft and some such nonsense, although most people were of the opinion, like Mr. Clancy, that it was only a trick, something Henry McAllister had been planning for some time, only waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along so he might make an example of some unfortunate miscreant.

  Whatever Mr. McAllister might or might not have done, it certainly should not reflect on Charles, who is a very sober young man. Indeed, I went to Mama and begged her to intercede on my behalf, but I very much fear that —

  Again, Colin would never know if the unnamed young woman’s fears had been borne out. Had she been sent off to Prescott to her Aunt Tillie? He supposed he could look up Mr. Charles McAllister, who probably would have gotten married in the early 1920s, and see who his wife had been. But again, since Colin didn’t have the diarist’s name to go on, that wouldn’t be of much help.

  What got his spider sense tingling, though, was that mention of witchcraft. Now, he didn’t actually believe in such things, but still….

  Houses that remained intact when everything else was burning down around them. A shopkeeper snapping his fingers and sending a would-be thief to hang upside down in the air with no visible ropes or wires holding him up.