Many Blessings

  Times like this it makes me wish I had a boyfriend. Someone to cuddle with in a storm.

  She nixed that thought. Sorry, Goddess. I didn’t mean that. Forget I said that. So mote it be! she quickly added.

  She’d sworn off men for a while, at least. The last several disastrous relationships she’d had, including a short-lived and ill-advised marriage followed by an even nastier divorce, left her angry, doubting herself, and full of pain. Not to mention she’d nearly turned her back on her spirituality for her ex-husband because his family was full of devout Evangelical Christians, and she’d been desperate for their acceptance.

  Never again.

  It wasn’t worth it. Not until she could become a better judge of character and, apparently, better in charge of herself.

  I’m thirty-four. It’s not like I’m going to become a spinster. Hence why she’d rededicated herself to her craft, to her life. The right man would come to her in the Universe’s time, not hers.

  She just had to sit back and let it happen. Now, she felt the most peace in her soul than she had in her entire adult life. No, she wasn’t rich, but she was happy. To her, that was far more valuable. She could pay her bills, keep a roof over her head, and still do what she loved, which was work for her best friend while also teaching and doing readings for customers.

  She helped people.

  She realized yes, despite not liking her friend’s dedication in this instance, Julie was right. They helped people, eased their spirits and souls, brought smiles to their faces. Brought them peace.

  She let out a little cry as another boom rattled the windows and shook her from her thoughts.

  By lunchtime the shop phone still hadn’t rang. She picked up Pers and carried him upstairs with her to make lunch. Halfway up the stairs, the lights flickered out again.

  Above her, at the top of the stairwell, she saw a woman silhouetted against the light struggling in through translucent strips in the storm shutter covering the apartment’s living room window.

  Pers began barking and whining, tail wagging, struggling to get out of her arms and go to the figure.

  The electricity came back on before the emergency generator could kick in.

  The stairwell above her was empty.

  “Julie?” Mandaline called out, carefully advancing. It had looked like Julie.

  Shivering, she immediately dialed Julie’s cell but it went straight to voice mail. “Hey, call me and check in, okay? Please?” She even walked into the bedroom and checked the bathroom, but Mandaline was alone in the apartment.

  Struggling with her growing apprehension, she quickly made herself a sandwich, grabbed a zippy bag full of washed grapes and her The Quest Tarot deck, and headed back downstairs again with Pers. She made herself a cup of hot chai tea behind the counter and sat on a stool by the register where she could easily see the TV screen.

  Shuffling the deck, she took a deep breath and tried to quiet her mind. She had another copy of The Quest Tarot that she used to read for customers sometimes, but this was her personal deck, one she never used to read for anyone but herself.

  Quieting her mind proved no easy feat considering the storm and her worry over Julie’s safety.

  She didn’t even know what or how to ask. She finally settled on, Show me this evening, please.

  She cut the deck, shuffled once more, and quickly pulled the top three cards. She laid them out faceup before staring at them.

  The Tower. Three of Swords. Nine of Swords.

  She gasped. Every deck had slightly different variations in meaning.

  This deck, in addition to beautiful images, runes, I Ching hexagrams, and other symbols on each card, included brief statements summarizing the card’s meaning.

  Demolition. Mourning. Cruelty.

  With trembling hands she gathered the cards and returned them to the deck. She’d started reshuffling and prepared to cut the deck again when another loud crack of thunder split the air.

  She screamed and flinched. The deck slipped from her hand, scattering across the tile floor behind the counter.

  “Dammit!” She started to retrieve them when she realized only three cards lay faceup amongst the cards on the floor.

  The Tower. Three of Swords. Nine of Swords.

  “No.” She quickly gathered the cards, shuffled them, and returned them to the black velvet drawstring bag she kept them in. She left it on the counter and stepped back, afraid to touch it again right then.

  I need to sage it. Sage it good. Leave it in the windowsill in a bowl of sea salt under next weekend’s full moon. I haven’t cleansed it lately, and it’s mad at me.

  She forced herself to eat even though her appetite had fled.

  Around three thirty the power blinked off yet again. She held her breath and counted, but by the time she’d hit ten, the power hadn’t come on and the generator out back hadn’t kicked in yet.

  Dammit.

  She grabbed a flashlight from next to the register and headed toward the back door. When Julie had the emergency generator installed a couple of years earlier, she’d made sure all the employees knew how to operate it, but Mandaline had yet to be there when it was actually in use. Just as she went to unlock the door, she heard the generator kick on and the power flickered back to life in the store.

  She glanced at the ceiling. “Thank you, Hecate,” she said. She returned to the front of the store. The TV showed the cable box boot-up sequence in progress.

  At least I still have TV. For now. No telling how long the cable signal would hold out in the storm.

  Then she noticed the little zen garden on the counter. The rake lay on the counter next to it, when she knew that was not where she’d left it.

  She glanced out to the front of the store where Damiago lay curled up, asleep in a chair. She looked down at Pers, who’d followed her to the back of the store.

  Walking closer, she realized there was now a message written in the sand, as if someone had taken their finger and spelled it out.

  IT’S NOT HIS FAULT

  She reached for the rake but paused. Grabbing her iPhone, she snapped a couple of pictures and checked them to make sure the message was visible before she raked the zen garden out again with a shiver.

  “This is just too frakking weird.”

  She tried calling Julie again.

  Straight to voice mail.

  “Listen, sister, please call me. Okay? I’m really, really worried. Maybe the storm has me wigged out, but I need to talk to you.”

  The power came back on a few minutes later. The lights flickered for a moment as the generator kicked off and the crossover circuit made the switch back.

  At 5:21, the power went off again. She’d been seated on the floor in the front of the store, on a large pillow next to a low table, several candles lit as she tried to meditate.

  She opened her eyes when she heard the TV go off. Directly across from her, the candlelight flickering on her face, sat Julie.

  “What—”

  “Keep your heart open,” Julie said. “Believe.”

  Mandaline rolled to her knees to reach across the table when Julie disappeared.

  The lights came back on.

  Pers ran around the table, to where Julie had been sitting. He barked and whined, tail wagging furiously as he searched for her.

  With a stunned cry Mandaline lost her balance and fell backward. She scrabbled away from the table, tears pouring down her face.

  Something was really, really wrong.

  She half crawled, half ran to where she’d left her cell phone by the register. With hands shaking so badly she could barely hold the phone, she dialed Julie’s number. “Call me. Right now! Dammit, you have to call me. Something bad’s happening.”

  She just prayed Julie called her back.

  Mandaline ran to the office and fired up the computer. Julie compulsively wrote everything down, including customers’ information and appointments, and always backed it up into the computer.

  “C
ome on, come on, dammit!” she yelled when it seemingly took forever to boot.

  Finally, the password screen appeared. Mandaline logged in and drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited for the desktop to appear.

  She opened Julie’s Gmail account, the one she used for the business, and then the contacts list. Scrolling through it, Mandaline located Samantha Corey’s home phone number. When Mandaline dialed the number, however, she received the fast-busy tone of a line out of order.

  “Dammit!” She struggled to hold back tears. Julie hadn’t written down the woman’s cell phone number.

  All she could do was wait.

  And pray.

  * * * *

  Mandaline kept Damiago and Pers close. Outside, the storm raged and the skies darkened until it almost looked like night despite it barely being six o’clock and official sunset still a couple of hours away. She repeatedly tried Julie’s cell but it went straight to voice mail every time. Either she was busy with the cleansing ritual, or…

  She didn’t want to think about the or.

  Not at all.

  By seven o’clock, Mandaline was seriously considering calling the sheriff’s office and asking them to go out and check on Julie. The property was smack in the middle of a state forest. Maybe a tree had blown down across the driveway and they were trapped there. Maybe the wind or trees had knocked out cell service in addition to the landlines.

  Maybe they’re all dead.

  She immediately banished that thought from her mind.

  With her stomach too knotted to eat, she kept all the lights on and the TV turned up loud enough she could hear it from anywhere in the shop, even upstairs in the apartment. She kept it tuned to the Weather Channel, preferring the relentless storm coverage to anything else. At least it made her feel connected, like she wasn’t alone.

  At 8:25, a loud pounding on the front door scared her. She peeked around the corner of the downstairs hallway and made out two dark shapes at the front door, barely visible through translucent strips in the shutter that covered it.

  With 911 punched into the phone in her hand and ready to hit send, she slowly walked up to the door. “Who is it?”

  “Detective Haines, Hernando County Sheriff’s Office. We’re looking for Mandaline Royce.”

  Her hands trembled so badly she almost couldn’t unlock the door. She stood back as Detective Haines and a uniformed officer came in, both dripping water from their official yellow rain slickers.

  “What happened?” Mandaline asked, terror creeping through.

  Then she spotted in his hands a clear plastic bag with EVIDENCE printed on it. Her eyes flew up to the detective’s face. She didn’t want to acknowledge what she saw in the bag.

  Then it wouldn’t be real.

  He looked grim. “Ma’am, are you Mandaline Royce?”

  She nodded.

  “Ms. Royce—”

  “Mandaline.”

  He nodded. “Mandaline, are you here by yourself?”

  She nodded again. “Julie’s coming back.” She knew her voice raced and rambled in her growing panic, but she made no attempt to silence herself. She suddenly realized she recognized the detective from Libbie’s bakery, had seen him in there a few times when she went to pick up the daily order for the store. “She had to go out to Croom, to a house out there, to do a cleansing ritual. But she’s coming back. I’m worried because she’s been gone all day. I’ve tried to call her and keep getting her voice mail. But she’s coming back. Maybe you can send an officer out there to check on her. She’s coming back.”

  She didn’t miss the look the two men exchanged. Her voice grew shrill, panic fully in charge. “She’s coming back. She’s my best friend and, dammit, she’s coming back!”

  The detective gently led her over to one of the sofas and made her sit. “Mandaline, I hate to have to tell you this—”

  “She’s coming back!” Mandaline screamed. “Dammit, she’s coming back!”

  He put the plastic bag down, the one she refused to look at, and knelt in front of her. He grasped her hands. “I’m so, so sorry,” he softly said. “She’s not.”

  Mandaline shook her head, her tears falling hot and heavy. “She is! She has to, she’s my best friend!”

  He shook his head a little. “Do you have someone we can call for you?” he finally asked.

  “Julie. Julie Prescott. Call her. This is a mistake. You call her and—”

  “Mandaline,” he gently said, “I’m sorry. She’s dead.”

  Mandaline closed her eyes and shook her head, refusing to believe it even though in the depths of her soul her dreaded suspicion had come true.

  “Libbie Addams,” she finally whispered. “Across the street.” She could have asked for Sachi, but she lived almost twenty minutes away on a good day. She didn’t want her out on the road in the storm.

  “At the bakery?”

  She nodded. “She lives there. Knock on the back door. Keep knocking. It might take her a while to come down.”

  She didn’t open her eyes, but the detective never let go of her hands when she heard the front door open, wind briefly screaming in until it closed behind the deputy again.

  “Mandaline, we need to talk. But I’m going to wait until he gets back with Libbie so she’s here with you, okay?”

  She nodded, now slowly rocking back and forth in place, not wanting to ask how, not wanting to let go of his hands, knowing in her heart it had to be Steven Corey who murdered her.

  Had to be.

  Pers, who had remained quiet throughout everything, jumped up on the sofa and laid his head in her lap.

  Roughly ten minutes later the uniformed deputy returned, Libbie in tow and wrapped in a pink rain jacket. She pulled off the sodden jacket and immediately rushed to Mandaline’s side and sat next to her, her arm around her shoulder. Mandaline didn’t open her eyes until she leaned her head against Libbie’s shoulder.

  Detective Haines wore a concerned expression.

  “I called Grover,” Libbie softly said. Mandaline didn’t know if she was speaking to her or the detective. “Grover Johnson. He’ll be here in a minute.”

  “Okay,” Haines said. He took a deep breath and gently squeezed Mandaline’s hands. “We still don’t know all the details of what happened,” he softly said. “And we need someone to come…give a positive identification.”

  Mandaline nodded, tears falling into her lap.

  “Did she have any other family? Husband? Kids? Parents? Siblings?”

  “No,” Mandaline said. “Just some cousins she disowned a few years ago.”

  He nodded. “Okay.” He reached into the plastic evidence bag and pulled out a large, tan hobo-style purse.

  Mandaline sobbed.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. “I gave it to her for Yule last year. She…she had it with her when she left here this morning.”

  She heard him set the purse on the floor, followed by the sound of him removing something else from the plastic bag. “We also found this in her car.”

  She opened her eyes. In his hands he held a large, bulky manila envelope she hadn’t seen before.

  On the front, in her playful script, Julie had written Mandaline’s name and cell number, and the name, address, and phone number of the store.

  “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “We haven’t opened it,” he said. “We found it, sealed like this. It…” He coughed. “We didn’t open it because we found it separate from the…scene. It was in her vehicle.” He offered it to her.

  She tried to reach for it and couldn’t force her hand to move. “Libbie, please. You open it.”

  “Of course.” She took it and opened it for Mandaline.

  Mandaline closed her eyes and let Libbie tell her.

  “They’re forms,” Libbie slowly said. “I…uh, I think we need Grover,” she said as she looked through everything. “These are all legal stuff.”

  A moment later, the large
, black man himself burst through the door, shaking water off his rain jacket. “What’s going on?” he asked Libbie as he rushed over. “What happened?”

  Mandaline started crying again. The detective pulled him aside and in murmured tones caught him up.

  The men returned to them, Grover sitting on Mandaline’s other side. “Oh, sugar. I’m so sorry. We’re here for you.”

  Libbie spoke up and handed him the paperwork. “Julie left this for her in her car. In a sealed envelope with Mandaline’s name on it. I opened it for her.”

  Grover, a retired attorney, frowned as he quickly leafed through everything. “It’s…” He cleared his throat, obviously overcome with emotion. “Mandaline, honey, I don’t know how to say this other than to say it. Julie left everything to you. She had all these papers witnessed and notarized yesterday. It’s a will, power of attorney, bank paperwork, everything you’re…going to need.”

  Mandaline closed her eyes and sobbed against Libbie’s shoulder.

  Chapter One

  Mandaline surveyed the shop Wednesday morning. A type of functional numbness had set in somewhere around Saturday, forcing her to keep up with the mundane things.

  Like breathing and eating.

  Her world felt enclosed in a grey cocoon she couldn’t break free of. Any time she tried, her grief hit her, hard and heavy and with razor shards of pain she couldn’t process.

  Thus, retreat.

  She didn’t realize just how long she’d been standing there until Libbie walked over and put her arm around her shoulders.

  “Come on,” Libbie softly said. “Let’s go upstairs for a few minutes.”

  Mandaline nodded and let Libbie take her upstairs to the apartment. Libbie got her seated on the sofa and pressed a tissue into her hand. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “We’re all here for you.”

  Then Mandaline’s tears flowed again. It felt like she’d done nothing but cry over the past few days. She leaned into Libbie’s embrace. “What am I going to do without her? She was my best friend. My soul sister.”

  “You’ve got all of us. I know it doesn’t make it any better right now, but we’re here.”