My customers cared only about whether I could make their lives better. Be it an upset stomach or a relationship falling apart, they wanted healing.
And when there was a divorce forecast, they were relentless until I made them a love potion ensuring their marriage would be secure. I had a lot of work to get done. Work I’d rather not have done with Delia around.
“Why are you here?” I asked her.
“I had a dream,” Delia said, fussing with her dog’s basket.
“A Martin Luther King, Jr., kind? Or an REM- drool-on- the- pillow kind?” I asked, looking up at her.
“REM. But I don’t drool.”
“Noted,” I said, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. I shifted on the floor— y rear was going numb. “What was it about? The dream.”
Delia said, “You.”
“Me? Why?”
Delia closed her eyes and shook her head. After a dramatic pause, she looked at me straight on. “Don’t ask me. It’s not like I have any control over what I dream. Trust me. Otherwise, I’d be dreaming of David Beckham, not you.”
I could understand that. “Why are you telling me this?”
We weren’t exactly on friendly terms.
Delia bit her thumbnail. All of her black- painted nails had been nibbled to the quick. “I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you, and I daresay the feeling is mutual.”
I didn’t feel the need to agree aloud. I had some manners after all. “But?” I knew there was one coming.
“I felt I had to warn you. Because even though I don’t like you, I don’t particularly want to see anything bad happen to you.”
Now I was really worried. “Warn me about what?”
Caution filled Delia’s ice blue eyes. “You’re in danger.”
Danger of losing my sanity, maybe. This whole day had been more than a little surreal and it wasn’t even nine a.m. I laughed. “You know this from a dream?”
“It’s not funny, Carly. At all. I . . . see things in dreams. Things that come true. You’re in very real danger.”
She said it so calmly, so easily, that I immediately believed her. I’d learned from a very early age not to dismiss things that weren’t easily understood or explainable.
“What kind of danger?” I asked. I’d finally caught my breath and needed a glass of water. I hauled myself off the floor and headed for the small break room in the back of the shop. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Delia followed.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
I flipped on a light. And froze. Delia bumped into my back.
We stood staring at the sight before us.
Delia said breathlessly, “It might have something to do with him.”
“Him” being the dead man lying facedown on the floor, blood dried under his head, his stiff hands clutching a potion bottle.
Heather Webber, The Root of All Trouble
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