Chapter 46

Chapter 46 of 56 · 10-minute read

Mid-October

Tuesday – Full Moon in Aries, Newly Waning

I wake to the pounding on the front door, the one no one welcome here uses. The weather is still comfortably warm for this corner of Georgia, but I left the heat off during the night, and now the house is chilly when I throw back the handmade quilt on my bed.

Ugh. Where’s my robe?

I have no idea, so I grab the nearest thermal blanket, a light dusty blue spread that’s meant to be used as a throw over the living room sofa. I wrap the blanket around me as I tiptoe quickly to the front door. Sleep clogs my brain.

The door sticks from lack of use, and it takes several tugs to dislodge it. The windowpanes and the door are too foggy to see through, but I can tell by the shoulder nearest my face that my visitor is wearing a sheriff’s uniform. Beyond the shoulder, I count two—no, three—sheriffs’ cars parked not in the front driveway, but on my mama’s front lawn, sure to leave ruts in the grass.

I pull my blanket tighter around me. I’m all alone and less than half-dressed. The deputy turns to face me through the thin wire mesh meant to keep out house flies, mosquitoes, and little else. Everett or Emmett—judging by the scowl on his face, it’s Everett—juts out his jaw. Both brothers are clean-shaven now, to my detriment. I’ve already apologized for accidentally disrespecting his dead mama, but Everett has refused to accept it. He sees me regularly at the hospital and simply glares at me. Now we both have losing our mothers in common, but he sees every move I make as suspicious, and I’m out of patience.

“Can you come on out here, Miss Hartford,” he growls. Not a question.

I match my glare to his. “I can.” But I don’t move. There’s a hell of a big difference between can you, will you, and would you, and none of them even have the word please after them.

“Lauren Hartford! That was not a request! I need you to get outside. Now!” When I don’t move except to arch one eyebrow, Everett softens his tone with a layered twang. “Pleeeease.” Still not a question but better than a raw demand.

I thumb the hook out of the eye of the door latch and slowly push the screen door open. Everett could just as easily have used his elbow to punch through the wire mesh.

Stepping onto the brick steps that comprise the small porch at the front of the house, I count the six deputies. I know from having grown up in this little town that bad things can happen in secret in small Southern towns and no one will ever know or the official story won’t make sense. But if I’m worried, I refuse to let it show. I’ve seen visions of myself in the future and I’m very much alive, albeit being chased by someone who wants to kill me.

Hopefully not Everett.

“Good morning, Everett. If you’ve come to terrorize my elderly mother again, she’s not here. She’s been in the hospital for the last month, thanks to you.”

I fully expect Everett to snipe at me, but he doesn’t. And that worries me more than anything.

He shoves a sheet of paper in my face, too close for me to scrutinize without my reading glasses. “This here’s a warrant to search the premises. Y’all can wait outside now. Virgil, too, if he’s here. Dixon, Pam, any of y’all.”

I really don’t want to admit I’m alone. “Virgil’s on his way back,” I lie. “Not sure where the rest of them are, but he’ll be here any minute.”

Everett moves between the door and me, blocking my retreat. He literally stands between me and everything I need—my phone, my car keys, my clothes.

“Hey, y’all in the back,” he shouts at the two deputies farthest away. “Wyatt? Shug? Get your metal detectors and your shovels. Y’all are searching the garden.”

“What are we looking for, Ev?” asks the youngest deputy who looks as if he joined the sheriff’s crew the morning after high school graduation this year. His voice is flat and unenthusiastic.

“Anything that might’ve been a murder weapon.”

“But Ev, this is a farm. That could be literally anything.”

“Then y’all look for anything. ’Specially anything that fires bullets.”

Oh, shit, I think to myself.

The deputies stomp away from the house, noisily trudging toward the garden. The sound of their boots squelching through mud and grass and water reminds me that the rains have stopped at last, even if the attempts to dig up the swamp have not.

Everett waves at the second pair of deputies, one of whom I’ve already seen in my mom’s house a month ago with the twins and their dad. “You two, y’all take the barn and the outbuildings. Don’t forget to look at the hayloft.”

“Looking for the same thing?” asks DeShawn, the one who visited previously.

“Yep! Same thing. Emmett and me will take care of the inside, but you, Lauren Hartford, you gonna need to step out here in the front yard and stay put where I can keep an eye on you. Can’t rightly have you out here duckin’ behind bushes and such, trying to hide stuff while Emmett and me are trying to find it.”

I skim the warrant. It’s real.

Everett and his brother push past me and disappear into the house. “Wait!” I yell after them. “I need to go to the bathroom!”

“Go in your mama’s azalea bushes,” Everett yells back at me.

I step off of the bottom brick step and into the cold, damp grass. “Hey,” I call to Wyatt, the young deputy eyeing my mama’s vegetable garden. “How long are you gonna be here?”

Sheepishly, he grips the fancy metal detector in one hand and a shovel in the other. “As long as Ev wants us to be, I guess.”

Before he’s out of sight, I head back into the house, but Everett is already there, barring the door.

“No,” he thunders at me. “I told you to get outside and stay outside.”

Behind him, a door slams somewhere. Then a crash. Somewhere in the guest room, near the walls of bookshelves filled with old VHS tapes and hardbound library classics. Before I can wriggle past Everett, he closes the door in my face and locks it.

My stomach knots. It won’t take long for them to find something. Daddy’s old pistol, probably under the seat of Mama’s car. The deer rifle hanging on a book rack in Shelby’s old room, with a couple of small boxes of ammo on the top shelf of the wooden headboard. An antique rifle belonging to our maternal grandfather and stored in the back of a closet somewhere, last I saw it, and intended for Shelby if he ever bought a house and settled down where he could keep such museum pieces.

I pull the blanket more tightly around me now, draping it like some kind of Grecian cosplay. Even though the air is nippy, I’m no longer cold. I’m both fuming and hot.

“Hey, you,” I call to Shug, one of the other deputies who’s retrieving two shovels from the trunk of his car. “I need my phone. Could you go in, please, and get it for me?”

“No, ma’am. We’re not s’posed to do anything that might give you a chance to mess with any evidence we might find on the property.”

I could walk to town. Trudging barefoot across the fields, pastures, and woods would take me maybe an hour with hiking boots on and certainly a bit more without, but it could be done. Who would I run to? Dottie, Niecie, and Pam, all live at least another ten miles outside of the city limits. The last I saw Virgil, he convinced me to come home and get some sleep while he finished taking care of getting mama checked into the hospice unit at the nursing home and made nice with Priyanka. Still, hiking barefoot into town with only a night shirt, panties, and a blanket for clothes isn’t going to work.

On the other hand, Virgil and Dixon’s home is right across the field that doubles as a green cemetery. I could be on their front doorstep in less than ten minutes, even if Dixon has forgotten me to go back to Margaux in Atlanta and Virgil is either still with my mom, or exhausted and sleeping at his place.

Good plan, I tell myself. Virgil’s place, it is.

Even if no one’s home, I happen to know where the key to the back door is, and at least it’ll be warm enough for me inside.

But there’s something I have to take care of first.

I don’t run. That would capture the attention of anyone within sight of me. Instead, I walk slowly around the front yard a few times and then make my way to the side yard where I face the North. Whatever they’re looking for, I can’t allow them to find it. If I knew what it was, then maybe I could put a glamour on it to hide it. A gun, I suppose.

First, I focus on the deer rifle, visualizing it in its usual spot on the rack on the wall and then visualizing it blending in with the wall, unseen. The small boxes of ammunition fade into the background, resembling a stack of books.

I have no idea what happened to the pistol my mom kept in the house when we were little, or even in my teen years. It’s very likely stashed under the seat of her old car if she still has it. Then again, I vaguely remember Shelby capsizing a boat on a visit home sometime in his twenties, but thankfully that fishing trip hadn’t taken place on the farm. In any case, I need to speed up their search by making it as uncomfortable as possible to be on this property, whether in the house or in the gardens.

Pausing in the North, I pretend to be looking at something in the distance in case I’m being watched.

Casually, I trudge clockwise around the house and pause again, this time in the East. I call in the Powers of Air and then continue my circle around the house.

In the South, I raise my hand above my eyes, and pretend to be watching what two of the deputies are doing with a metal detector and a shovel next to the old shed. I cringe at the thought of it. My mom buried her little terrier there two years ago, and I’m pretty sure she never took off the old dog’s collar and tags.

By the time I make it to the West and call in the Powers of Water, I have a better idea of exactly how uncomfortable to make the environment inside the house.

My first full circle shimmers in an electric purple. I pause in the North and allow the energy at the outline of the circle to creep inward until it penetrates the walls of my childhood home.

At the end of my second ambling trip around the house, I send the purple energy outward, forming a larger circle around the farm and fading at the far corners of the front and back yards. Shug, the deputy nearest the shed throws the shovel behind him as he cries out, realizing rather suddenly that he is standing in a fire ant bed. He stomps around in a wild dance. Then he and Wyatt run out of the garden into the side yard, both of them thrashing and kicking.

A pair of deputies at the barn yelp and curse and come flying out of the open barn door. With a chill in the air outside, the wasps were slower, but they’ve had all summer long to build a nest the size of a saucer, and I never even thought to warn them because I didn’t expect anyone to be stirring up either trouble or wasps in the old hay barn.

I continue to make my way around the house, treading a third circle as discreetly as possible. Normally, walking barefoot in the grass of home would calm me down and ground me, but today, I instead pound my energy into the ground and all its rage.

I stop in the North as I end my third circle. The shimmering purple fire that pierces the house and fades into the deeper reaches of the yards around the house instantly shimmers upward and over in a dome, the top half of a sphere that only I or anyone gifted can see. But that doesn’t mean the people within it can’t feel it. I walk slowly toward the back porch and pause to watch four deputies either brushing ants off their tan pants or running from wasps. I can’t help but chuckle to myself. I’d love to know what’s going on inside the house, but I’m not allowed inside.

Now that I’ve created my spell work and can see that it’s working—one of the deputies fighting off fire ants is now fully out of his pants and shoes while the other brushes furiously at his lower pants legs—I stride quickly toward the blackberry-covered fence line that divides my mom’s farm from the Caine brothers’ property. My thermal blanket is likely to tear or catch on the briars, though I’m more worried about my feet. I barely have one foot hooked over one square of the dilapidated fence before I’m yanked backward.

“I warned ya, Lauren Hartford, not to step one toe outta the yard. I won’t be cuttin’ ya no slack. I told you not to leave the property. Now get back towards the house. You can stay anywhere in the backyard. As long as I can look out the window and lay eyes on you.”

Red splotches bloom across his cheeks and neck. Even on the backs of his hands. He tugs at his collar. The button pops open, and he clutches miserably at the white T-shirt underneath.

Ah, but my spell is definitely working inside the house as well.

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