Grave Mistake Page 4
I also heard from Josie’s nephew Brett, who wanted to know if he could stop by and take a look at the place so he could give me an estimate. It seemed like a perfectly logical request, so I told him that would be fine. Although I wasn’t in any rush, I still wanted to see what the shop space would look like once the warm reddish faux finish had been replaced by cool blue.
From the way he eyed me as he entered the place, I had a feeling I wasn’t what he’d been expecting. I also noticed the glint of a wedding ring on his left hand, so apparently, he wasn’t the “love connection” the cards had predicted for me in Globe.
Which was fine. I still hadn’t quite come to terms with having a cursed asexual cat living in my apartment, and so I probably didn’t need the complication of a love life quite yet.
Besides, Brett, while not bad-looking, wasn’t really my type. His hair was just as blazing red as his aunt’s, telling me that even if she was helping nature along at this point, her fiery hair had started out natural enough, and he had a redhead’s freckled complexion and stood barely an inch taller than I did. My taste tended to lean more toward the tall, dark, and handsome type, although there hadn’t been much of that in my life lately.
At any rate, since I was wearing faded jeans, lime green Keds, and a green cardigan over a white T-shirt, I guessed I didn’t look quite like the woo-woo shop owner Brett had been expecting.
“Just this space?” he asked, looking around the store area.
“Yes,” I said. “The upstairs is great. Actually, the paint here normally would be fine, but it won’t work with the theme of the store.”
A nod and a businesslike “got it,” and Brett took a quick survey, going up close and running a hand over the walls to make sure there weren’t any hidden spots that might need repair.
“Eight hundred,” he announced when he was done, which sounded reasonable to me. “I’ve got some swatches — I’ll need to go into Mesa to get the paint, since there isn’t anything closer with a decent variety.”
For the next few minutes, I pored over the swatch books he provided, then said I wanted “Moonlit Indigo,” which was a darkish blue with a faint green undertone. He nodded and told me he’d be back the next day, we shook hands, and that, it seemed, was that.
Archie was still sleeping when I went upstairs, so I puttered around and made a decent dent in the stacked boxes in the living room and master bedroom. By the time he woke up, the place didn’t look quite so much like a disaster area, although of course, it wouldn’t really begin to resemble a home until the furniture started to arrive.
“Why did you leave all your furniture behind?” he asked as I put a frozen dinner in the microwave to heat up. Thank the Goddess that the kitchen had one of those built-in units above the stove, or I would’ve been forced to get takeout somewhere. Trying some of the local restaurants was something I planned to do in the not-too-distant future, but right then, I was just too tired to even contemplate going back out.
“Garage sale stuff that wasn’t worth moving,” I said briefly as I reached for the bottle of chardonnay I’d bought at Walmart.
It couldn’t really be classified as drinking alone if I had a talking cat for company, right?
Archie absorbed my reply and appeared to decide it wasn’t worth further investigation. He looked at the wine I was pouring into a glass and let out a sound suspiciously like a sigh.
“I’d pour you some,” I told him, “except I doubt your kitty metabolism could handle it.”
The fur on his back arched, and his eyes slitted. “Don’t,” he said, “under any circumstances refer to me as a ‘kitty.’”
“Duly noted.”
He stalked off into the living room, and I allowed myself a sip of chardonnay. Not bad. Actually, I’d been sort of surprised by how good the wine selection at the local Walmart was. It seemed like I might not have ended up in as much of a backwater as I’d feared.
The microwave beeped, and I pulled out my tray of Lean Cuisine pasta carbonara. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t have eaten anything like that — frozen meals tended to be pumped full of sodium and preservatives — but if I was too tired to go on the hunt for takeout, that meant I was doubly incapable of actually cooking something.
All I had to sit down on was a canvas folding chair I’d bought a few years earlier to take to summer concerts in the park. It was already set up in the living room, so I went ahead and took a seat, balancing the Lean Cuisine tray on one leg since I didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Another sip of chardonnay, and then I set the glass on the floor.
Archie gave it a jaundiced look but didn’t move from his spot near the windows. For a few minutes, I ate in silence. Then I asked, “Did you ever get anyone to try to break the curse?”
“Who?” he said derisively. “I already told you, there aren’t any other witches in this town.”
“Well, now,” I replied, even as I realized that wasn’t precisely true, since I was now a resident of Globe. But that was a very recent occurrence. “I mean, not even the whole time you’ve been in a cat’s form?”
He reached up to scratch behind one ear with a hind paw, then settled back down on the floor. The bare wood didn’t look very comfortable, and I was glad that a new rug would be arriving the next day with a bunch of my furniture.
“The witch who cursed me was the only one,” he said. “I suppose after that Packard flattened her, word got around that Globe wasn’t a very safe place for witches.”
And here I’d decided to make it my new hometown. But I was obviously a very different kind of witch from the one who’d stolen his human form from him, so I had to hope I’d be okay.
When I didn’t say anything right away, he went on, “I don’t suppose you’d want to give it a try.”
Could I even attempt such a feat? My magic had always been contained in small, safe things — casting spells of banishment and protection, using divination to give people advice on their futures and their relationships. Turning a cat back into a man was an order of magnitude greater than anything I’d ever heard of.
Or maybe several orders of magnitude.
“I don’t know if that’s something I can do,” I admitted. “I’m just a hedgewitch.”
His tail whipped back and forth in annoyance. “What’s a hedgewitch?”
“Someone self-trained, who doesn’t work with a coven,” I replied. “Someone who practices small magics. But,” I hurried to add, “that doesn’t mean I can’t do some research and see if I can dig up anything that would help you…once I get settled.”
I could tell he didn’t much like the idea of the sort of delay waiting until I had everything put together might cause, but it seemed he didn’t want to argue, because he grudgingly responded, “All right,” and closed his eyes.
Maybe he was asleep, or maybe he was just sulking. Either way, I needed to finish my makeshift meal.
As I picked up the glass of chardonnay and took a sip, I reflected that my first night in Globe was definitely nothing I could have ever expected.
4
Opening Night
That first day turned into another day, and then another. Before too long, the apartment was fully furnished, and I had to admit I probably enjoyed all that new furniture more than I should have. Yes, there was something to be said for antiques, for pieces that had been previously loved and which had absorbed the unique energies of their former owners…but there was also a lot to be said for having tables without burn marks from careless cigarette butts or scratches from too many moves.
As I’d promised Archie, I tried to do some research on spells that might get him out of his predicament, but so far, I hadn’t found very much. Most of the spells contained in my own books of magic were confined to benign topics like healing and abundance enchantments, and while the darker texts might have provided some information on how to turn someone into a toad — or a cat — they were pretty unhelpful about offering any actionable data on how to turn someone back.
I asked him one time why no one had ever noticed that the same gray cat had been lurking around the area for decades, and he’d only tilted his head at me.
“People see what they want to see,” he replied, a cryptic comment that didn’t do much to illuminate the situation but which, I realized later, was only the truth. And since he’d turned out to be an unobtrusive companion — at least I never had to worry about him lurking near the bathroom, trying to sneak a peek as I got out of the shower — I figured he could keep his secrets. After being cursed to remain in a cat’s body for sixty years or more, he’d probably earned that right.
The same week I moved in, Brett came over and turned the downstairs shop space into the azure haven I’d envisioned, and he also told me about a local artist who did beautiful murals and sign painting. I got in touch with Hazel Marr, the artist in question — who turned out to be only a few years older than I was, and someone I felt comfortable with right away — and she transformed the shop ceiling into a gorgeous night sky adorned with all the constellations of the zodiac, along with a beautiful crescent moon above the front door.
Ordering display cases and tables, along with all the various items I wanted to sell in the shop, took a bit more time. Still, less than a month had passed by the time I was ready to open Once in a Blue Moon to the public.
Josie advised me to have a grand opening, with drinks and snacks. “People are curious about the place, of course,” she said one afternoon when she dropped by to see how everything was progressing. “But booze really helps to get them in the door.”
I couldn’t help laughing at her comment, although I had a feeling she was right. “If that’s what it takes,” I replied, thinking that the food and drinks would be a good tax write-off, if nothing else. “And I’d love it if you could help me get the word out.”
“Consider it done,” she told me.
And that was why, when I officially opened the doors to Once in a Blue Moon on Friday, April ninth, I immediately had a flood of people coming inside. Josie, of course, and her nephew Brett, accompanied by a slight, fair-haired woman I guessed was his wife. I’d learned earlier that Josie had been divorced for years and had no intention of remarrying — “why would I waste my time on that nonsense?” she asked rhetorically during one of her visits — and with her came Hazel, the artist, who I’d already gotten friendly with as she worked on the shop ceiling. I had a feeling Hazel was glad to see someone a little left of center show up in town — the streaks in her light brown hair varied with her mood, and were blue and pink that particular night, and she also had a tiny diamond stud in her nose — while I knew I was certainly happy to have met a woman around my own age who didn’t give me the side-eye when I casually announced I was a practicing witch. We were a long ways past the bad old days of the Salem witch trials, but a lot of people still weren’t super-comfortable with the whole woo-woo thing.
More people arrived after that: the two guys from the coffee house down the street, and Max, the gruff individual who owned the antique store right next to my shop. And still more Globe residents I didn’t recognize, all of them looking friendly enough, even though I noticed a few of them giving sketchy glances at the items engraved with pentacles or the sacred triple moon, like my mini cauldrons and carved altar pieces.
Still, no one had shown up with torches and pitchforks, and so I figured I could already count the evening a success because of that. People sipped from little plastic cups of wine and ate cheese and crackers and fruit, and some of them even bought a few things. The essential oils and candles seemed especially popular, and I made a mental note that I’d probably have to restock those items more frequently.
And then he walked in.
I was so focused on his handsome, strongly marked features and the long, night-black hair pulled back into a severe ponytail that at first, I didn’t even realize he was wearing a uniform of some sort. Cop? I supposed so, but the members of the Globe P.D. that I’d spotted during my time in town had worn dark blue uniforms, while this stranger’s was khaki.
“Calvin Standingbear,” came Josie’s voice at my ear, and I turned to see her standing a foot behind me, a knowing smile on her face. “He’s the police chief for the San Ramon Apache tribe. They operate the casino just down the road.”
Right. I vaguely recalled seeing a turnoff for a casino when I was out exploring in my Beetle, but because gambling had never been my thing, I hadn’t paid it very much attention. And I knew I’d seen people shopping at the Walmart in Globe that I guessed had to be Native American, although I didn’t know anything about the local tribe.
“I hope he’s not here to check for a liquor license or something,” I joked. Josie had assured me that as long as I was giving the wine away and not expecting people to purchase anything in exchange, I should be fine, but my stomach did a nervous flip-flop anyway.
Or maybe that was simply how my body had decided to react to the godlike specimen who’d just entered the shop.
She waved a hand. “Oh, the tribal police don’t have jurisdiction here in town. No, he probably dropped by to take a look because he was curious. People have been talking about this place since you moved in.”
“I had no idea I was such a topic of conversation.”
All right, my comment was probably a little disingenuous. No, I’d never grown up in a small town, but I knew my arrival had caused something of a flutter in Globe, if only because a town that size didn’t get a lot of people moving in, and to have someone show up and buy a highly visible property sight unseen — and for cash, no less — would naturally start tongues wagging.
How did they know I’d paid cash for my live/work space? Because I might not have been around all that long, but I’d already learned that Josie was a world-class gossip. She tended to slide tidbits about people and their goings-on into conversations, coming at them sideways rather than making a full-blown announcement, and yet it was pretty obvious that it would be hard to have any secrets in my new hometown.
Not that I had many to keep. True, I hadn’t gone around blurting out that the cat I’d adopted was actually a cursed human in disguise, but otherwise, people pretty much already knew the worst about me…or at least, what they would have considered the worst. After all, if I’d wanted to hide the fact that I was a practicing witch, I probably wouldn’t have opened a big ol’ pagan shop right in Globe’s historic downtown.
All I got in response to my comment was a knowing smile from Josie. And then — to my chagrin — she raised a hand and called out, “Calvin! Come over and meet Selena!”
I wanted to sink through the newly polished floor. Instead, I managed to stand there and did my best to look interested in a neutral, completely nonsexual sort of way as he walked over to me. Once he got closer, I realized how tall he really was. I stood five foot eight in my stocking feet, so I wasn’t exactly what you could call short, but it still seemed as though he towered over me.
A friendly smile crinkled his dark eyes, showing a few laugh lines around them. “Hello, Selena,” he said. His voice was deep, and he spoke in a deliberate sort of way, as if he considered each word before releasing it into the wild. “The shop looks very nice.”
Utterly prosaic words, and yet they started my heart beating at a ridiculous pace. Yes, ridiculous. I was a grown woman who’d be turning thirty in two months. I shouldn’t be reacting to a man — all right, a pretty magnificent specimen, but still — like I was some seventh-grader getting asked to dance for the
first time.
“Thank you,” I responded. Josie had said he was the chief of police on the reservation. Did that mean I should call him Chief Standingbear? It was his formal title, but I had a feeling I would sound like an idiot if I said the words out loud. Probably better not to say his name at all. “Brett and Hazel really helped to make my vision come to life.”
Oh, Goddess, that sounded so pretentious. I wished I could bite my tongue, but since the damage was done, I thought it was probably best just to hurry on and hope he hadn’t noticed.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” I asked.
“Not while I’m in uniform,” he said, and again, an awkward flush rushed to my cheeks. Damn, I really was making a hash of things, wasn’t I? But before I could stammer an apology, he went on, “I’ll get myself some water. Thanks for the offer, though.”
I nodded and tried to smile. Josie stepped in then, saying, “Calvin, I heard a rumor that the tribe is thinking of canceling the poker tournament next month. Tell me that isn’t true.”
Maybe his mouth quirked ever so slightly at the overly tragic tone of her voice. “We’ve been discussing it. Attendance has dropped off the past few years, and we’re wondering if it’s still worth the effort.”
“But it brings so much to the town,” she protested. “Maybe all you need to do is advertise a bit more.”
His expression didn’t change. “I’ll bring it up with the elders. We’re going to have to make a decision soon, either way.”
Josie’s bright blue eyes lit up in a way that I was already learning to dread. “You should have Selena cast an abundance charm for you!”
“I don’t think — ” I began, but she waved a hand, even as the twitch at the corner of Calvin’s mouth turned into a lopsided smile.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” he said, then nodded toward me. “Nice to meet you, Selena. You’ve got a great store here.”
And before either I or Josie could say anything else, he headed off toward the refreshments.