The Kitchen Charmer

  Pike, leaning on the door of his SUV, supervised as a deputy made notes.

  Megan had vanished—but not without leaving clues. The farm’s security cameras caught her at the front gate. A small sedan waited for her there. She was seen climbing in.

  Fire witch. Fire bug. Not a spy. A paid arsonist?

  The overwhelming stink of burned wool filled my mind. The entire inventory of stored roving—several seasons of hard work on the part of our woolies and ourselves—was ashes.

  “Monzell did send her,” I said aloud. I looked at Macy. “But we’ll never prove it. I’m not sure she was the arsonist. Why would she tell me to run?”

  “Sudden remorse. It takes a lot of courage to let someone die. Maybe hers failed her. She had an accomplice who picked her up.”

  Alberta turned among the ruins. Her hard expression reminded me she’d been a marine. “If I catch her, she’s dead.”

  Macy clambered into the debris to shush her and give her a hug.

  At the fringe of the fire, where the ashes had cooled, pretty pools of ice gleamed in the first rays of morning sun. The sheep stood at a distance, worried. Michelangelo ripped hay from bales we’d fetched from storage. He had ashes in his moptop of curls.

  I’ll move the herd to the old dairy barn. Get everyone set up with fresh bedding and feed and water. And then we’ll all sleep. I’ll sleep in the hay with them.

  Brim, however, stood right behind me. Her warm breath occasionally caressed my face. At times I felt her nuzzling the heavy sock cap I wore. She even nibbled one of the shawls draped around my shoulders, as if moving it up to cover me better.

  Friend. Friend?

  Friend, I answered.

  I can’t remember how long I sat there, trying to slow the rhythm of my lungs.

  Red rage unfurled slowly, vining the weak walls where fear and humiliation whispered, Curl up, make yourself small, go to sleep. You’ll feel better after a day or two in your room, sleeping and knitting.

  Those veined walls began to pulse with a new me, the Witch of the Cove—no, the Witch of the entire realm of Jefferson County, able to steal wives and daughters from powerful men, provoke rumors, fear, vicious slander, and yes, dangerous desire from an amazing man above men. Gus. Able to survive fire.

  Lucy, the Unburnt. Mother of Sheep.

  A new vein slithered away from the rest, growing from an alchemy of rage deeper than fear.

  FOUR CARS, ONE TRUCK, and one helicopter crowded the yard and the pasture at Gear House, Tal and Doug’s old Victorian, where Sam Osserman and Rose Nettie had brought Gus’s mother into the world. Five days of cold rain rose off the forest floor in smoky streamers drifting toward the morning light.

  The nearest of the Ten Sisters Mountains, Julia Bald and Marybeth Head, shifted from morning-glory ice-caps to umber against a sapphire sky. Horses, ponies, goats and a donkey grazed on piles of hay in the pasture. The winter world was hurtful pretty, empty of answers, a taunting mystery.

  I kept to myself, hugging my arms and looking out a window of the library, where all of us had gathered to form a plan. The aroma of coffee, tea, and peach strudel formed a soothing, hypnotic cloud, just as Tal had intended: Voices came and went in my ears—Pike’s and Delta’s, Tal and Doug’s, and attorney Quint Avery, who regularly touched a phone bud in his ear and listened to conversations elsewhere. Quint’s father, George, now retired, was Jay’s mentor, guardian and second in command.

  Gabby was with Jay in Asheville. He continued to recover from being shot while protecting her in a Wakefield family drama up in the Little Finn Valley—a drama as complex as the one we faced at Gear House.

  “Wakefields are crazy as bedbugs and mean as snakes,” Delta had told me. “Greed and power. Banking and mining and fracking and real estate and murder and thieving. Jay’s the only good to come out of the whole Wakefield family.”

  Alberta stood. “Awright, let’s pull this together and keep it short.” She looked down at me, sniffing, her jaw tight, her eyes wet. “You’re in danger and you’re putting us in danger, too. We’ve got a farm full of scared women and children. We’ve got social services snooping around, and the state is sending its goons to see if we’re still qualified to call the farm a shelter. Tal and Doug want you to move in here, but we talked them out of it. They’ve got Eve to think of. So what we want you to do is move to Asheville. Just until things calm down. Tal and Jay will set you up in a great condo in the Wakefield building; they’ll be your neighbors. With private security and no worries.”

  Macy, crying, stood. “Just until things calm down. We promise.”

  Opal settled near me. My yarn angel always appeared with the textures of freshly washed fleece. Her vapor swirled through my thoughts. They do mean well, Miss Lucy, but you have got to stay here. In this cove. There’s a battle coming, and you’re gonna lead it. The old ones need you here. The giants.

  “I can’t go,” I said.

  Pike turned from a fireplace cracking with pine logs. “If I could protect you from this nonsense, I would. But I can’t promise you. I want you to be safe. I want everybody to be safe. I won’t stop fighting the pure evil that’s trying to take over this country.”

  “I know, but it’s my fight, too.”

  Delta came over. She stroked my sweaty hair. “Monzell is out to kill you. Kern is out to . . . own you. You’re a prize that has considerable value to him. None of that is your fault.”

  Pike spoke again, his voice deep and gruff. “I can’t protect you the way I want to. I don’t have the manpower, and I don’t have . . . ” he coughed, and Delta’s eyes tightened with fear. “I’m fighting a lot of battles from a lot of different trenches, these days. There are a lot of people in these mountains who think it’s time to pull in our doorsteps and arm for war. They don’t have any idea who the war’s against; just whatever they’re being brainwashed to believe. They’re scared. And for the first time in my life, I’m scared, too. Scared we’re looking at a way of life—for our whole country’s way—that won’t be around much longer.”

  Delta sat down next to me, stroking a tuxedo cat who curled forward on her lap, its lime eyes watching spirits move through the room. “Jay and Gabby will treat you like a queen.”

  Leave the farm? Leave all my friends. My safe place. My home. The sacred pastures under a special sky, where Gus and I held our intimate conversations.

  Doug, standing near Pike at the fireplace, toed a glowing log that rolled onto the hearth. “Last fall I made up stories about dangerous beasts and named them rockycockers.” His deep Scottish burr was gentle. “I’m sorry to tell you that, in a way, the cockers really truly exist.”

  Tal knelt beside me, her hand on my shoulder. “I promise you it’ll be okay. Gabby will help you practice your outings. So when Gus comes home you’ll be stronger . . . ”

  “He’s not coming home.”

  Everyone froze.

  I took a deep breath. “Not the way you think. I can feel it. Something’s going to happen to him.”

  Tal’s face went so pale the freckles faded. “He’ll die?”

  “No. But something’s going on. Something bad.”

  “Be honest with me. Are you saying Gus might die?”

  I shook my head.

  A part of him will die, Opal whispered.

  “A part of him,” I corrected. “A part of him is going to . . . die.”

  The chill in the room wound through the air into the old woods and rugs and the filigreed window transoms as if the house itself was contracting with alarm. Tal stood, arms spread, her freckled face pale, red hair tousled wildly around a sweater and sweaty hand marks on her jeans.

  She looked wildly at Delta. “What is it that they used in the old days—they put it in the trenches under outhouses to keep the odor down?”

  “Lime,” Delta sa
id.

  “No, wait. Not lime. My nose is burning. When we were kids the road crews would pick up animals that had been killed by cars. I asked Daddy what happened to the bodies. He said they were taken to the landfill and then men would throw a chemical on them to make the bodies decompose.”

  “Lye,” Delta supplied. “The same kind that makes soap and cleaners. Too much will burn your skin off.”

  “Lye. That’s it. There is a cover up of blood and . . . anger. And somehow Gus is involved. And I’m worried about him. Lucy’s right. He won’t come home the same.” She gagged.

  Doug strode over and put an arm around her. “You and Gabs will know if anything happens to him. Sisters would know. You’ve told me so.”

  She nodded but put a hand to her throat.

  I realized I was doing something with my hands, too. My hand ballet finally drew everyone’s attention. Yarn reveals the heart of the spinner and the soul of the woolies it came from. That’s one reason I could channel information through it.

  “Lucy, hon,” Delta whispered. “Lucy. What are you doing?”

  I was miming the act of twirling raw wool onto a drop spindle. The tuxedo cat leapt onto the window sill next to me and looked straight at me. We see the spirits in the worlds nearby. It’s natural among our kind.

  “I see a skein of yarn, soaked in blood and manure, corrupt and filthy. Even when washed, the yarn would still be coated in oily secretions from a beast that grew coarse, sharp wool.”

  Quint Avery had left the room. Now he returned, looking at a message on his phone. “Megan Rowan is not a teenager, and that’s not her real name. She’s Ariane Taylor; twenty-six years old. She joined the army at eighteen and served two tours of the Middle East. As a sniper. Two years ago she went AWOL and disappeared.”

  “To become a paid killer?” Pike asked.

  “Maybe. I’ll find out what I can.”

  I and the tuxedo cat shared the view beyond the big window. He looked from it to the softly filtered frost outside, then back at me. Dust motes floated between us on the sunshine. The irises of his eyes narrowed to slits. The courage to fight is found in the spaces between fears. It’s often hidden in the knit and the purl of the pattern.

  “She wasn’t there to hurt me,” I said. “Whatever her pretense, she was sent to help.”

  Everyone stared at me. Tal blew out a long breath. “By Gus?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Delta frowned. “She had a strange way of helping you.”

  “Maybe so, but we won’t know why until we find her. In the meantime, Opal is telling me it’s important that I stay. They expect me to stay.”

  “They?” Quint Avery asked. Everyone else understood.

  I looked at him. “The giants in the earth.”

  “Oh.”

  Everyone began discussing the alternatives.

  I got up and walked outside, holding one hand to my mouth and the other to my stomach. Fear had chewed thin spots in me over the years. I was a frayed flag, nerve endings tattered, everything struggling against the winds.

  The side yard of Tal and Doug’s house was undergoing a restoration to find the outline of a garden wall Sam and Rose had built in the 1930s. They’d even hired a student archaeologist from UNC. She’d located the spoked-wheel pattern they’d expected, but outside that one and off to its left, was something else. I stepped among the mud puddles and neon-sprayed wooden stakes of a large hand like the ones on the Stone Hand rock near the farm.

  Had there been a hand-shaped cairn here? The student was convinced so, and that it could be found sunken and covered by the forest debris from hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Maybe it could rise up and slap all the meanness out of the world.

  Standing in the center of that ancient enigma, I fought to hear Opal among the fever thrumming my brain.

  They are in the Earth, they are here, just like me, Miss Lucy. You are one of us.

  A large hand gently lifted me above the tree tops. I saw the vast expanse of forest and vales. I saw the empty brick and stone buildings of Free Wheeler. I felt the ancient rhythms beneath that tragic village. Spinning wheels. Spinning yarn. The wheels of Sam and Rose’s fabulous handmade bicycles. Everything, spinning. Stars and planets and the tiniest parts of the tiniest particles that link us to everything we are or ever were; our belonging to the mysteries and this tiny dot in God’s own galaxies. I saw the craggy outcroppings of huge stones exposed by the centuries. The Ten Sisters smiling in the distance, and water flowing down from their heavens; deep, buried rivers, channels, caves, tunnels. I folded into a very small bird and sailed down fissures in those rocks, past carvings and symbols, the hands of gods. Into the darkness.

  I came to in Tal’s arms, covered in quilts and being lightly petted on the forehead and cheeks by Delta. Everyone stood around me, puffing frosty breaths in the side yard at Gear House.

  “What did she say?”

  “Something about staying at the farm until the blizzard.”

  “We don’t have blizzards. This isn’t Canada. In another month the jonquils pop up and the toads start croaking.”

  Delta’s hand on my forehead. “Whatever she’s saying, it’s gonna happen.”

  11

  LUCE, CAN YOU hear me? Can you feel me?

  No response. I panicked, searching the caverns in my mind for the familiar empath voices and images I’d received all 36 years of my life; the sensations and knowledge that came in steadily, loud and clear.

  Until now.

  “Captain. Captain MacBride. We’re carrying you to a chopper, Sir. Can you hear me?”

  “He took the explosion on the left side. Left leg looks bad. Internal injuries, too. And his left ear’s hemorrhaging.”

  “Captain, can you hear me? What did you say, Captain?”

  “I think he said, ‘Lucid,’ Sir.”

  “Good work, Captain. Yes, you’re lucid.”

  Not lucid. Luce.

  My ears still rang from the explosion.

  Luce. Bad things are coming her way. I killed a man who hid behind innocent people and got them killed. And now I can’t even take care of the people I love, back home.

  No pain, yet. Something that felt like seaweed and raw hamburger with sticks in it oozed through the fingers of my left hand. I lifted the mess slowly, afraid I’d recognize something of mine.

  Long, dark hair.

  The most powerful warlord in the province was right where I remembered him: in my grasp, which had been around his neck. I’d chased him into a mine field where he knew every safe path. I should have been blown to pieces.

  My kitchen charms showed me the way. Right until I had him by the throat, staring into his shocked eyes.

  Then he took one more step. The wrong one.

  Everything went blank. Silent and dark in a way I’d never experienced, before.

  The sound of urgent voices began to seep through again. Hands lifted me. The chop of a helicopter made the ground shiver.

  “Captain, what are you saying? Clean that gore out of his hand. Get him on the stretcher. One. Two. Three. Good. Secure.”

  If I die I’ll never get home to Luce.

  Never sit beside her on our spot in the pasture at Rainbow Goddess and watch the mountains turn blue and then green in the sunshine of a spring morning again. Never brew and bottle and sell Dad’s beer for him. Never make sure Mama’s name was on the restaurant she deserved.

  I fumbled with one hand. I found Dad’s crochet hook, attached alongside a cooking charm Tal and Gabby had given me on my thirty-sixth birthday, a skillet on a thick steel necklace; and I found a shredded piece of the scarf Luce had knitted for me.

  I held the lifelines as tightly as I could.

  “Cap’n!” Sanchez said loudly. “We’ve been through too much
for you to die like this. You hooked me on crocheting, and you’re not leavin’ me alone to go home without a letter from you tellin’ mis hermanos I didn’t turn girly. You swore, Cap’n.”

  Sanchez went to the ferment phase with too much sugar in her bottle. Keep a cork in it, Sanchez. I’ll write that letter to your brothers.

  “Cap’n!” she went on, now shouting over the roar of a helicopter that only existed in half my audible world. “No external signs of damage to your gear or clothing in the crotch area! No worries about your man-junk, Sir!”

  Sangria wines aren’t subtle.

  Dad, I promised you I’d take care of Mama and my sisters after you were killed. I tried. But I let you down.

  I’ve tried to make it up by joining the army. A man takes care of his people. His country. His family. His people in this village. As long as I can do that . . . Tal and Gabby have men now. They don’t need me. But I can go home and take care of Luce . . .

  A wave of pain rose out of the shock and took every breath out of my lungs.

  What’s changed. What’s wrong?

  A GUST OF FRIGID wind knocked me onto my right side in the pasture, setting off an even bigger wave of panic. My flock of fat ewes scattered then contracted, nosing me worriedly. My damp head shawl clung to my face, suffocating me.

  I pawed long strands of hair that lifted around me.

  Bugle Eye Neal, our amateur weatherman up in the Grim Bald community, said his readings were off the chart.

  A Polar Vortex is about to hit. Bugle Eye pronounced it Pole Air Vartex.

  Seek shelter. Now.

  I whistled.

  The herd dogs urged the ewes, alpacas, and llamas toward their new home in the ancient barn that had been cleared of farm and garden equipment to give them shelter. I slept on an air mattress among them, rejecting Macy and Alberta’s entreaties to take up a temporary room in the main house.

  A deep, disdainful snort sounded, behind me. The crisp plop of hooves came down the barn path. I got to my feet and turned as Brim came up to me, her long ears flat-back and her muzzle curled to reveal dangerous teeth. She waggled her head at the dogs and sheep to cement her command, then halted inches from me, ears flicking forward, the snarling brown muzzle settling into soft-nibble mode.