Garden Spells

  He reached for the phone and dialed James’s work number. He needed to ask him what he should make for dinner.

  And what meat did you serve with magic wine?

  Claire arrived at Anna Chapel’s home late that afternoon. Anna lived in a cul-de-sac neighborhood just outside Orion College, and the only way to get to it was through the campus. The neighborhood had been for the instructors at the college, the houses built at the same time the campus was constructed a hundred years ago. The intention was to keep the academic community as insular as possible. A wise move, considering the opposition to a college for women at the time. Today, the chancellor still made his home there, and a few professors, including Anna, lived in the original houses. But the neighborhood was dominated now by young families who had no association with the college. They simply liked the privacy and security of the place.

  “Claire, welcome,” Anna said when she opened the front door to find Claire on her porch, carrying a cooler of things that needed to be refrigerated immediately. She stepped aside and let Claire enter. “You know the way. Do you need help?”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine,” Claire said, though late spring and summer were her busiest seasons and the time when she had the least help. She usually hired first-year culinary students at Orion to help her during the school year. They, after all, were not from Bascom and the only questions they asked were culinary ones. She’d learned the hard way to avoid hiring anyone local if she could help it. Most of them expected to learn something magic or, at the very least, get to the apple tree in the backyard, hoping to find out if the local legend was true, that its apples would tell them what the biggest event in their lives would be.

  Claire went to the kitchen, put away the things in the cooler, then opened the kitchen door and brought in the rest of the things through the back entrance. Soon the farmhouse-style kitchen was alive with the steamy warmth and crafty scent that eventually flowed through the house. It welcomed Anna’s guests like a kiss on the cheek from their mothers, like coming home.

  Anna always wanted to use her own dishes—heavy pottery ones that she’d made herself—so Claire arranged the salad on the salad plates first and was ready to serve when Anna told her everyone was seated.

  The menu tonight was salad, yucca soup, pork tenderloins stuffed with nasturtiums and chives and goat cheese, lemon-verbena sorbet between dishes, and the violet white cake for dessert. Claire was kept busy, monitoring the food at the stove, arranging the food on the plates, serving and then deftly and quietly taking plates away when the guests had finished a course. This was as formal as any affair she catered, but these were art professors and their spouses, casual and intelligent people who poured their own wine and water and appreciated the creativity of the meal. When she had to work alone, she didn’t focus on the people, just what she had to do, which was painfully exhausting that evening considering she had slept the night before on the hard ground of her garden. But it had its positive side. She was never very good with people.

  She was aware of him, though. He was seated two places down from Anna, who was at the head of the table. Everyone else watched the food as it entered the room, as it was placed in front of them. But he watched her. His dark hair almost touched his shoulders, his arms and fingers were long, and his lips were fuller than she’d ever seen on a man. He was…trouble.

  As she was serving dessert, she felt something almost like anticipation the closer she got to sliding his plate in front of him. She wasn’t quite sure if it was his anticipation or hers.

  “Have we met?” he asked when she finally made it to his place. He was smiling such a nice, open smile that she almost smiled back.

  She put his plate in front of him, the piece of cake so perfect and moist, the crystallized violets spilling over it like frosted jewels. It screamed, Look at me! But his eyes were on her. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  “This is Claire Waverley, the caterer,” Anna said, happy with wine, her cheeks pink. “I hire her for every department gathering. Claire, this is Tyler Hughes. This is his first year with us.”

  Claire nodded, extremely uncomfortable that all eyes were on her now.

  “Waverley,” Tyler said thoughtfully. She started to move away, but his long fingers wrapped gently around her arm, not letting her move. “Of course!” he said, laughing. “You’re my neighbor! I live beside you. Pendland Street, right? You live in that large Queen Anne?”

  She was so surprised he’d actually touched her that all she could do was give a jerky nod.

  As if aware that she’d gone stiff or of the slight shiver along her skin, he immediately let go of her. “I just bought that blue house next to you,” he said. “I moved in a few weeks ago.”

  Claire just looked at him.

  “Well, it’s nice to finally meet you,” he said.

  She nodded again and left the room. She washed up and packed away her things, leaving the last of the salad and cake in the refrigerator for Anna. She was moody and distracted now and she didn’t know why. But as she worked, she kept running her fingers unconsciously along her arm where Tyler had touched her, as if trying to brush something off her skin.

  Before Claire took her last box out to her van, Anna came to the kitchen to rave about the food and to tell Claire what a good job she’d done, either too drunk or too polite to mention Claire’s odd behavior with one of her guests.

  Claire smiled and took the check from Anna. She said good-bye, picked up the box, and left by the back entrance. She slowly walked down the short driveway to her van. Fatigue was settling low in her body like sand, and her steps were slow. It was a nice night, though. The air was warm and dry, and she decided she was going to sleep with her bedroom windows open.

  When she reached the curb, she felt a strange gust of wind. She turned to see a figure standing under the oak tree in Anna’s front yard. She couldn’t make him out clearly, but there were tiny pinpricks of purple light hovering around him, like electrical snaps.

  He pushed himself away from the tree, and she could feel him stare at her. She turned and took a step to her van.

  “Wait,” Tyler called.

  She should have kept walking; instead, she turned to him again.

  “Do you have a light?” he asked.

  Claire closed her eyes. It would be much easier to blame Evanelle if the old woman actually knew what she was doing.

  She set the box down and reached into her dress pocket and brought out the yellow Bic lighter Evanelle had given her earlier that day. This was what she was meant to do with it?

  She felt like she had water against her back, pushing her toward the deep end, as she walked toward him and extended the lighter. She stopped a few feet away, trying to keep as much distance as possible, digging her heels in as whatever force it was tried to take her closer.

  He was smiling, easygoing, and interested. He had an unlit cigarette between his lips, and he took it from his mouth. “Do you smoke?”

  “No.” She still had the lighter in her outstretched hand. He didn’t take it.

  “I shouldn’t. I know. I’m down to two a day. It’s not a very social habit anymore.” When she didn’t respond, he shifted from one foot to the other. “I’ve seen you around. You have a wonderful yard. I mowed my yard for the first time a couple of days ago. You don’t talk much, do you? Or have I done something to offend the neighborhood already? Was I out in my yard in my underwear at any point?”

  Claire gave a start. She felt so protected in her home that she frequently forgot that she had neighbors, neighbors who could, from their second stories, see down into her sunroom, where she’d taken off her nightgown that morning.

  “It was a wonderful meal,” Tyler said, still trying.

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you again?”

  Her heart started to race. She didn’t need anything more than she already had. The moment she let something else into her life, she would get hurt. Sure as sugar. Sure as rain. She had Evan
elle, her house, and her business. That was all she needed. “Keep the lighter,” Claire said, handing it to him and walking away.

  When Claire pulled into her driveway, she stopped by the front yard instead of pulling around back. There was someone sitting on the top step of the porch.

  Claire got out, leaving her headlights on and the car door open. She jogged across the yard, all her earlier fatigue gone in a panic. “Evanelle, what’s wrong?”

  Evanelle stood stiffly, the glow from the streetlights causing her to look frail and ghostly. She was holding two packages of new bed linens and a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts. “I couldn’t sleep until I brought you this. Here, take them and let me sleep.”

  Claire hurried up the steps and took the things, then she wrapped an arm around Evanelle. “How long have you been waiting?”

  “About an hour. I was in bed when it hit me. You needed fresh sheets and Pop-Tarts.”

  “Why didn’t you call me on my cell phone? I could have picked these things up.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t know why.”

  “Stay the night. Let me make you some warm sugar milk.”

  “No,” Evanelle said curtly. “I want to go home.”

  After those feelings Tyler had stirred in her, Claire wanted to fight even more for the things she had, the only things she wanted in her heart. “Maybe these sheets mean I’m supposed to make up a bed for you,” she said hopefully as she tried to turn Evanelle toward the door. “Stay with me. Please.”

  “No! They’re not for me! I don’t know what they’re for! I never know what they’re for!” Evanelle said, her voice rising. She took a deep breath, then said in a whisper, “I just want to go home.”

  Despising herself for feeling so needy, Claire patted Evanelle gently, reassuringly. “It’s okay. I’ll take you home.” She set the sheets and the Pop-Tarts on the wicker rocker by the front door. “Come on, honey,” she said, leading the sleepy old lady down the stairs and to the van.

  When Tyler Hughes got home, Claire’s house was dark. He parked his Jeep on the street and got out, but then he stopped on the walkway to his house. He didn’t want to go in yet.

  He turned when he heard the clicking of small dog feet on the sidewalk. Soon, a tiny black terrier skittered past, hot on the trail of a moth that was popping from one streetlight to the next.

  Tyler waited for what was coming next.

  Sure enough, Mrs. Kranowski, a spindly old woman with a hairdo that looked like vanilla soft-serve ice cream, appeared. She was chasing after the dog, calling, “Edward! Edward! Come back to Mama. Edward! Come back here now!”

  “Need help, Mrs. Kranowski?” Tyler asked as she passed.

  “No, thank you, Tyler,” she said as she disappeared down the street.

  This neighborhood spectacle, he’d quickly discovered, happened at least four times a day.

  Hey, it was good to have a routine.

  Tyler appreciated that better than most. He would be teaching classes that summer, but there were a couple of weeks between the spring and summer semesters, and he always got restless when he didn’t have a routine. Structure had never been his strong suit, though he took a lot of comfort in it. Sometimes he wondered if he was made that way or simply taught. His parents were potters and potheads, and they had encouraged his artistic streak. It wasn’t until he started elementary school that he realized it was wrong to draw on walls. It had been such a relief. School gave him structure, rules, direction. Summer vacations had him forgetting to eat because he spent hours and hours drawing and dreaming, never moderated by his parents. They had loved that about him. His had been a good childhood but one where ambition ranked right up there with Ronald Reagan as taboo subjects. He’d always assumed that, like his parents, he could make a meager living from his artwork and be happy with that. But school was nice, college even better, and he didn’t like the thought of leaving it.

  So he decided to teach.

  His parents never understood. Making good money was almost as bad as becoming a Republican.

  He was still standing there on his walkway when Mrs. Kranowski came back down the sidewalk with Edward now wiggling in her arms. “That’s a good Edward,” she was saying to him. “That’s Mama’s good boy.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Kranowski,” he said when she passed him again.

  “Good night, Tyler.”

  He liked this crazy place.

  His first position after getting his master’s was at a high school in Florida, where they were so desperate for teachers that they were paying premium salaries, living expenses, plus moving expenses from his home in Connecticut. After a year or so, he also started teaching night art classes at the local university.

  It was serendipity that eventually led him to Bascom. He met a woman at a conference in Orlando, an art professor at Orion College in Bascom. There was wine, there was flirtation, there was a wild night of sex in her hotel room. A few years later, during a restless summer break, he found out about an opening in the art department at Orion College, and that night came back to him in beautiful and vivid images. He interviewed for and got the position. He didn’t even remember the woman’s name, it was simply the romance of the thing. By the time he arrived, she had moved on, and he never found her.

  The older he got, the more he thought about how he hadn’t married, about how what brought him to this town in the first place was another restless summer and a dream of a life with a woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand.

  Okay, was that really romantic or just pitiful?

  He heard a thud come from around the side of his house, so he took his hands out of his pockets and headed to the backyard. When he’d mowed a couple of days ago, the grass had been high, so there were big wet clumps of grass clippings all over the yard.

  He should probably rake it all up. But then what would he do with all that grass? He couldn’t just leave it in a big clump in the middle of his yard. What if all the cut grass dried and killed the live grass under it?

  One day out of school and he was already obsessively preoccupied with his lawn. And it would probably get worse.

  What was he going to do with himself until the summer session started?

  He had to remember to make notes to himself to eat. He’d do it tonight, so he wouldn’t forget. He’d stick them to the refrigerator, the couch, the bed, the commode.

  The light from the back porch illuminated the backyard—a small yard, not nearly as large as the one next door. The Waverleys’ metal fence, covered with honeysuckle, separated the two yards. Twice since he’d moved in, Tyler had pulled kids off the fence. They were trying to get to the apple tree, they said, which he thought was stupid because there were at least six mature apple trees on Orion’s campus. Why try to go over a nine-foot fence with pointy finials when they could walk to Orion? He told the kids this, but they just looked at him like he didn’t know what he was talking about. That apple tree, they said, was special.

  He walked along the fence, taking deep breaths of sweet honeysuckle. His foot hit something and he looked down to see he had kicked an apple. His eyes then followed a trail of apples to a small pile of them close to the fence. Another one hit the ground with a thud. This was the first time he’d ever had apples fall on his side of the fence. Hell, he couldn’t even see the tree from his yard.

  He picked up a small pink apple, rubbed it to a shine on his shirt, then took a bite.

  He slowly walked back to his house, deciding that he would put the apples in a box tomorrow and take them to Claire, tell her what happened. It would be a good excuse to see her again.

  It was probably just another instance of following a woman to a dead end.

  But what the hell.

  Do the things you do best.

  The last thing he remembered was putting his foot on the bottom step of the back porch.

  Then he had the most amazing dream.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Ten days earlier

&
nbsp; Seattle, Washington

  Sydney walked over to her daughter’s bed. “Wake up, honey.”

  When Bay opened her eyes, Sydney put her finger to the little girl’s lips.

  “We’re going to leave, and we don’t want Susan to hear, so let’s be quiet. Remember? Like we planned.”

  Bay got up without a word and went to the bathroom and remembered not to flush the commode, because the two town houses shared a wall and Susan would be able to hear. Bay then put on her shoes with the soft, quiet soles and dressed in the layers Sydney had set out for her because it was colder that morning than it would be later, but there wouldn’t be time to stop and change.

  Sydney paced while Bay dressed. David had gone to L.A. on business, and he always had the older lady in the town house next door keep an eye on Sydney and Bay. For the past week, Sydney had been taking clothes and food and other items out of the house in her tote bag, not deviating from the routine David held her to, the one Susan kept watch over. She was allowed to take Bay to the park on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and to go to the grocery store on Fridays. Two months ago she met a mother at the park who’d had the nerve to ask what the other mothers couldn’t. Why so many bruises? Why so jumpy? She helped Sydney buy an old Subaru for three hundred dollars, a good chunk of the money Sydney had managed to save in the past two years by taking one-dollar bills out of David’s wallet every so often, collecting the change in the couch cushions, and taking back items for cash that she’d bought with a check, the account for which David kept a sharp eye on. She’d been taking the food and clothes to the lady in the park, to be put in the car. Sydney hoped to God that the lady, Greta, hadn’t forgotten to park the car where they’d agreed. The last she’d talked to her was Thursday, and it was Sunday. David would be back that night.