Page 14 of The Bane Witch

14

Matriarch

The woman looks lost. From the cat-eye slant of her sunglasses to the ruby satin of her chunky-heeled sandals, to the little ruffle around her ankle socks and puff sleeves on her canary yellow baby doll dress and even the sun-tipped strands of her long, tousled waves—she looks more like she stepped off a hipster runway than into a café in the Adirondack Mountains. Her look is street with an unmistakable devil-may-care aesthetic, but I know money when I see it. Every piece she’s wearing is expensive. And she’s too young for all that swagger.

She lowers the sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and takes in the room.

I stand there with a pot of hot coffee in one hand like I’ve just seen an orangutan play the piano. Beside me, Terry from the Drunken Moose is at a table, scarfing down his bowl of Wheaties. When he sees her, he drops his spoon, splattering milk all over himself.

A smile plays across her hot-pink lips.

Even Bart is slobbering up the glass outside, wishing he could follow her in. Stupid dog.

Ed walks up next to me. He must be on his fortieth coffee break of the day and it’s only two o’clock. I have come to realize that Myrtle used the word upkeep very loosely when telling me about her and Ed’s arrangement. He’s more like a glorified pet. Ed has Bart, and we have Ed. “You lost?” he asks as he squints one eye in her direction.

“Do I look lost?” she replies.

He doesn’t know how to answer that. His mouth pulls to one side like his brain is diverting energy from the rest of his face to formulate a response. Finally, he says, “You don’t look found.”

If I could crawl under Terry’s table and disappear, I would. It’s been a while since I moved in my usual Charleston circles, sipping champagne in a silk cocktail dress at an art opening as I worked a room, looking for new clients. I wasn’t fearless, but I had finesse and I knew how to use it. But I never possessed the kind of confidence I see before me now. She has to be several years my junior, probably in her late twenties, and yet I find myself instantly regretting the cable-knit sweater and stained jeans I dragged on this morning. Also, how is she not cold? It can’t be more than fifty degrees outside.

“Can I help you?” I ask, certain she’s taken a wrong turn somewhere, like back in Manhattan, and just kept going.

She pulls the sunglasses off and stares at me. “Are you her?”

“Uhhh…” My mouth falls open.

She walks in a slow circle around me until she’s back where she started. “I like it,” she says, stepping toward me.

“Like what?” I ask, completely dumbfounded.

“No, like, it works for you,” she says with emphasis. “This whole mountain-girl-barista thing you’ve got going. Rugged but sensual, you know?” She leans in toward my right ear so only I can hear the next part. “Let’s hope it’s enough.”

As she leans away, her eyebrows arch, but I can’t read the meaning behind her expression. I only know her words have chilled me to the bone. Myrtle didn’t tell me much about what to expect from the venery, only that this gathering is vital to my survival. With pinched lips and worried eyes, she pressed into me the understanding that this is no mere family meeting but an inquisition. My fate will be decided by these women, my own family. Women with the power of death in their lips. Before I can respond, Myrtle cuts in.

“Azalea?” Her voice rings through the café as she descends the back staircase. “Is that you? Already?”

The girl breaks out in a wide smile and breezes past me. “Aunt Myrtle! I left as soon as I heard. Caught the next flight out of Portland.”

I turn and watch Myrtle wrap her in a warm hug. “You must have flown out at midnight.”

“I don’t really sleep,” she says. “At least not at night. I’m more of a catnapper really.”

“Come,” Myrtle tells her. “You must be tired. I can put you in cabin two to rest before everyone else arrives.”

Myrtle leads her toward the door. “Watch the café,” she orders as she passes. “I’ll be right back.”

I flash her a look that says Seriously? After all, I accidentally murdered a man here less than twenty-four hours ago. But she waves it off.

“Ta-ta!” the woman calls, waggling her fingers over a shoulder as they stroll into the afternoon sun. I watch them disappear behind the door of cabin two, my heart beating fast.

“Who the heck was that?” Ed asks, staring toward cabin two.

“Azalea,” I tell him like I’ve known her all my life.

He looks at me. “One of yours?”

“Apparently,” I reply.

She’s only the first, I realize a moment later. There will be more. How many, I don’t know. Myrtle went straight to bed after making the call last night and has said very little today, aside from having me phone several incoming guests and refund their deposits so the cabins would be available for family. I gave them all some lame excuse and endured being cursed out about half a dozen times before 10 A.M .

“You’ve a strange family,” Ed says, taking the coffeepot from me to refill his cup.

I can’t argue with that.

I T’S THE S IX-YEAR-OLD who unnerves me the most. She stands at her mother’s side when they arrive, watching me with guarded eyes—something no one under ten should have. When I offer her our standard peanut butter and jelly, she regards me coolly and says, “You’re the one Mommy calls a complication.”

“Scarlet!” her mother admonishes. “Don’t be rude.”

But Scarlet only looks pleased with herself.

I smile tightly into her mother, Barbie’s, face. “Cute.”

“It was a long flight,” she offers weakly.

As it turns out, Azalea is the least of my concerns. They continue to arrive over the next twenty-nine hours, the bane witches, trickling in like flies off carrion, each more eccentric than the last. They all cast a wary eye my way, but it’s clear they know who I am. It’s an unusual feeling to be surrounded by strangers who know you. I expected some kind of familiarity, a familial bond that would kick in like blood memory to lend me a sense of trust or at least recognition. But by the end of the next day, the only thing that makes it clear they are family is the restlessness behind their eyes, a shifty, hungry look they all share no matter their age or personal style.

I gather from the whispers that the clan matriarch is coming, “Is she here yet?” and “Have you heard?” being repeated in hushed tones near Myrtle’s ear over and over throughout each day. Aunt Myrtle answers them with a shrug and a brisk shake of the head, but it’s clear she’s on edge. At one point, I pull her aside.

“Who are they talking about?” I ask her.

She purses her lips. “Aunt Bella.” Then she inclines her head. “ My aunt Bella.”

I swallow, recalling the women in the picture she named. “You mean…?”

“Your great-grandmother’s sister.” Her eyes are pointed, driving home the implications.

“Jesus… How old is she?”

Myrtle sighs. “One hundred and two.”

I recoil. “Is it even safe for her to travel?”

“We’ll find out,” she says with a shrug. “Apparently, she insisted.”

Her words are little comfort. And it begins to sink in just what a big deal this is— I am—for a centenarian to come all this way to weigh in. It only makes me more nervous. While it might look like a family reunion on the surface, I am being evaluated. Opinions will be aired. Votes cast. Decisions made. And though Myrtle hasn’t said as much, I get the feeling a lot more hangs in the balance than if I’ll be invited to the next potluck.

As if things aren’t already tense enough, Sheriff Brooks shows up an hour before close. He sits at an open table, watching me rush to serve bowl after bowl of chicken and dumplings to our unusual crowd, along with a few regulars and two travelers in for a quick meal. He’s nearly impossible to ignore, the warmth radiating off him like a heat lamp, my blood cold and needy. Every time I see him, something inside me stirs a bit more. It takes a while for me to realize it is desire. I haven’t felt it in so long. Instinctively, I understand this to be beyond inconvenient. When you have just learned you are responsible for the untimely deaths of three men, developing a piping hot crush on the local law enforcement is not exactly ideal. And Myrtle is always watching, along with the rest of them now.

When I finally get over to him with a cup of coffee and a water, he asks me to sit down.

“Now?” I question.

He glances around the room. “You got something better to do?”

I tug at my earlobe, a nervous gesture, and perch on the edge of the opposite chair. He’s in uniform, which doesn’t help. Not the official, authoritarian vibe it gives off or the way the starched shirt emphasizes his square shoulders, the chiseled slope of his jaw. Tawdry scenes from Myrtle’s collection of paperbacks flicker through my mind with increasing speed. I flush from my thighs to my eyelashes and have to reach over and take his ice water, gulp several mouthfuls down.

He stares at me. “Weird crowd tonight,” he says, rolling his eyes around the room of clearly out-of-place women.

“Aunt Myrtle is hosting a thing,” I say offhandedly, hoping that will satiate him. “It’s, um, good to see you. I didn’t get a chance to say it the other night; I was still in shock. But it is.” They are words I’m certain I should not say under the circumstances, but they spill out across the tabletop like a mouthful of seeds.

He glances at his hands, the soft down of his lashes flickering against his skin, and then peers at me. “Acacia, I…” The breath rushes out of him as if he has lost a fight. “I didn’t come here as a social call.”

“Oh.” I draw my hands into my lap, fingers interlocked, and wait for him to say more.

He looks around, leans forward. “I think you should be careful.”

My knee starts jumping under the table. “You mean because of the Strangler?”

His head shakes and he inhales, regroups. “I thought you’d want to know the gentleman from the other night didn’t make it,” he tells me.

I take a breath. “That’s, um… that’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

“Thank you for telling me. I’ll be sure to pass the word along to Myrtle.” I start to rise.

“I’d hoped to ask you a couple more questions,” he says before I can make my escape.

Thwarted, I lower back down to the chair. “Sure. Go ahead.”

He pauses. “Don’t you want to know how?” he asks, leaning an arm across the table.

“How?” I repeat, not sure what he means.

“How the man died. What killed him.”

“Oh, right.” I laugh nervously. “That how. I thought you meant…” I don’t actually know what I thought he meant. I clear my throat. “Never mind.”

Something slides across his features, the softness there only moments ago now slick as oil. Regis has left. It is just the sheriff sitting before me now. He watches me with a poker face that only makes me want to babble more. “Poison,” he says slowly.

The word sits between us like something barbed. An accusation. A hand grenade with someone’s finger on the pin. I clear my throat again. “P-poison?”

“Uh-huh.” He leans back. “From a deadly mushroom.”

I arch my brows and nod as if I am appraising this information. “Wow.”

His tongue runs over his bottom lip. “The same, actually, as the one you tried to pick that night after getting out of my truck. Do you remember? I told you it would kill you before sunrise. Destroys the liver.”

“Right,” I say, glancing around the room. A woman in pink slacks is watching me from the far wall, a gold chain belt slung across her hips and a cashmere cardigan draped across her shoulders. She seems to know there is more to this conversation than friendly chitchat. I feel like she’s assessing my ability to manage the sheriff, ready to scurry off and report my shortcomings the second I turn around. “What a coincidence.”

“I’d say so,” he responds. “I spoke with the woman at the hospital, too, the one you told me about. Turns out she’s his wife. Only married a few months. She confirmed that he hit her. Seems your instincts are spot-on. Maybe I should give you a job at the department.”

I laugh emptily and he smiles at me. “I don’t think Myrtle could spare me.”

“Maybe not,” he says. “The wife also told me you served the man his coffee right before stepping outside. That it was the last thing to touch his lips before, well, you know. You didn’t mention that.”

“Didn’t I?” I suddenly feel like the room is heating up by a few dozen degrees. I rub my palms together under the table, trying to disperse the sweat. I have to remind myself this is the same man who let me lock him out of his own house. “She’s right, I did. But I—I wouldn’t know, you know, if that was the last thing he had. I was outside, like I told you.”

“Doing?” he asks now.

“Laundry,” I blurt. “Changing stuff over from the washer to the dryer.”

He doesn’t look convinced.

“And restocking the toilet paper,” I quickly add, as though it will make a difference.

“Right, okay.” He taps his sunglasses against the table. “It’s odd, don’t you think, that you and I had that conversation outside my truck right before we end up on either side of this investigation.”

“Investigation?” I don’t recall him saying anything about an investigation before. At the time, it had all seemed very routine. Clearly, something has changed. My eyes slide to the woman in pink slacks, still staring my way. I have got to do better than I’m doing if I want to impress this conclave or venery or whatever the heck it is. Sheriff Brooks is not my only threat at the moment. Leaning forward, I let my hair fall over one shoulder. “You said yourself I wouldn’t be the first to think it was edible. The lack of color and all.”

He inhales, a grin tugging on the corners of his mouth. I can see him wrestling with himself behind those suede-gray eyes, the man and the cop. “That’s true,” he concedes.

I shrug. “They must have pulled off the road before they ever got here and picked it.”

“The wife says they didn’t stop except for gas.”

“She’s lying,” I tell him. “Something like that would take hours to work.”

His eyes narrow ever so slightly. “ Work —that’s an interesting choice of word.”

It takes all my self-control not to screech with frustration. “It’s just a word,” I say. “Maybe she did it herself, the wife. Maybe she wanted out after he used her face as a punching bag.” I feel a little guilty throwing this already battered woman under the bus, but it’s a diversion. Regis can’t get anything on her because there’s nothing to find.

“Maybe,” he says ambivalently, but I can see I’ve got him thinking.

I reach a finger forward, run it smoothly over the gold frames of his sunglasses, let it brush against the skin of his knuckles, electric. “You know, Regis, if you wanted to see me again you could have just come by. Questions or no, I’m always up for a cup of coffee.”

I do it to knock him off his horse, but the moment we touch, I find that I mean it, that I want nothing more than to sit over a cup of coffee with him and stare into those eyes, giving my secrets away.

He breathes deeply, as if steeling himself against something. His eyes find mine over the table, a carefully controlled yearning in them. For a second, we are back at that night by his door, an ocean of feeling between us. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, slowly withdrawing the sunglasses.

I lean back just as Myrtle comes over. “Sheriff Brooks, you here on official business or to monopolize my pretty niece?”

He grins at me as he stands before cutting his eyes to her. “No, ma’am. Just here for coffee,” he replies, looking down at me.

I look away, flustered by how afraid and how aroused I am, knowing that I am playing at a game I do not yet understand.

“Enjoy your thing,” he tells her before stepping away and striding through the front door.

Myrtle watches him go. “What was all that about?”

I stand as his car drives away. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

I turn around to push in my chair, ready to allow myself a sigh of relief, when the jingle of the door opening plays against my already frayed nerves. Looking over a shoulder, I see that it’s her. She is unmistakable. The venery’s matriarch has finally arrived.

Aunt Bella sits in her tufted leather wheelchair like a queen. A mink hat is wrapped around her powder-white hair, a velvet burn-out shawl pinned over her shoulders by a pearl brooch. In her lap rests a wool blanket and a live hen, whose silky, orange feathers fan around her like a pom-pom. The hen is wearing a cloth diaper, I note. Behind her stands one of the women I recognize from Myrtle’s photo, though she’s far older now, with pale yellow hair combed elegantly back from her face and striking green eyes. She is dressed entirely in black.

I freeze, unsure what to do. But Myrtle kicks into high gear. “That’s it,” she hollers. “Closing time. Everybody out.” She begins shooing people from the café, including Ed and some of the remaining guests.

“But it’s only seven thirty,” complains Amos, the other Drunken Moose regular who likes to come in.

Myrtle shoots him an impatient glare. “Which is already far too long to have put up with you,” she hisses. “Now go on! Get!”

He and Ed scoot out the door with sour expressions, and she locks up behind them. The women who remain—eleven not counting myself and Myrtle and the little girl, Scarlet—look around the room at one another. They are the venery of bane witches, the last of our family, here to decide my fate.

Aunt Bella bends over and sets her hen on the floor, who promptly scurries off. “Rowena needs to stretch her legs,” she croaks. When she sits up, her cold eyes fall on me. “The prodigal returns,” she declares. “Well, let me see you.”

Myrtle pushes me toward her, and I stumble forward, standing awkwardly, unsure if I should curtsy.

“Donna!” she barks, raising a hand over her shoulder. “My glasses.”

The woman in black rustles through a handbag and pulls out a pair of delicately framed granny glasses. She hands them to her mother, who slides them onto her long nose.

She proceeds to look me over with agonizing fastidiousness, as if I am a prize mare to be ogled, giving nothing away. At last, she pulls the spectacles from her face without a word and holds them over her shoulder for Donna to put up. Then, she lays her hands in her lap. Everyone around me is achingly silent, hanging on her every gesture as if they dare not breathe without her permission first. I don’t know if I’m supposed to keep standing there or step away or say something. But before I can figure it out, she speaks.

“Let the conclave commence.”