Witch Water

“Quite a bit of incest went on in that room for quite a while.”

Fanshawe blinked. Seconds ticked by. “Oh, you mean with Evanore.”

“Uh-hmm. Pretty icky stuff, and it didn’t end until Wraxall was well into his seventies, and, well…” She caught herself, then stepped away. “Be right back, I forgot the bar towels.”

She disappeared into a side door.

Fanshawe chuckled, shaking his head. The old Keep A Jackass In Suspense Routine. He couldn’t figure her. Any other time he’d suspect that she was only trying to spark to his sense of curiosity, and was embellishing detail for the sake of it. But—

I don’t think so. I can always tell when I’m being played.

Another scarlet shooter sat before him, which he’d scarcely noticed. He sipped it this time, thinking. Incest. Terrific. At least Wraxall was a bigger pervert than I am, but that was hardly a consolation.

Through the window, full darkness welled. Beyond, dim wedges of light from streetlamps cut Back Street up in a fuzzed luminescence. Fanshawe saw undefined figures wander into and out of the light, like content specters. Some were holding hands. When was the last time I was doing that?

He didn’t answer himself; the realization was too dismal. The normal people are out there…

Where am I?

So much for sipping his drink; what remained went down in a gulp. When he looked back up, his eyes found the mirror again; in the reflection, behind his shoulder, he saw a face disappear. Had someone been standing behind the bar entrance, peeking in? Fanshawe thought so, and he turned.

It looked like Mr. Baxter, he thought.

But why would Mr. Baxter be frowning into his own bar?

No one stood in the entrance when Fanshawe turned. A shadow fluttered, or seemed to. “Mr. Bax—” he began, but then shrugged it off.

“I’m back.”

He traversed on his stool to find Abbie hanging up towels. “I forgot to ask. Would you like to see a menu?”

“No,” Fanshawe said good-naturedly. “I want you to finish saying what you were saying about Jacob Wraxall.”

She opened a menu before him. “The Lexington-Concord soup is out of this world, or try the Valley Forge Pan-Seared Crabcakes. I’ve never had better, and I’m not just saying that ’cos my father owns the place.”

Fanshawe closed the menu. What does Valley Forge have to do with a friggin’ crabcake? “It all sounds great, Abbie, but all I want is for you to finish what you were saying.”

She was a fragrant dervish behind the bar. Now her back was to him again, but she returned an instant later, to place a third Witch Blood Shooter before him.

Fanshawe laughed to himself. “Trying to make me forget the topic won’t work.”

She grinned. “What topic is that, Stew?” and the she turned again, to lean over a reach-in. Fanshawe’s next words were lost; he was staring at her rump in the tight jeans.

He took a deep breath and looked away. “Jacob Wraxall’s room. Incest.”

“Hmm?”

“The tone of your voice implied that things other than incest took place in that room. Worse things.”

The act was over. She leaned again the service bar, facing him, and pursed her lips. “You really want to know, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s gross, Stew. It’s lousy bar talk.”

“I love lousy bar talk—I’m from Manhattan.”

She slumped. “I just told you that Wraxall and his daughter had incestuous relations well into Wraxall’s seventies. It’s not that hard to figure out.”

He thought back to the grim portrait in the other room; in it, Wraxall appeared to be in his fifties while Evanore looked more like late-teens. And the old warlock was doing it till his seventies… That’s a long time for a guy to be hobknobbing with his daughter.

Then—Moron!—the answer snapped into his mind. It dismayed him how someone so instantaneously analytical could be so thick-witted when it came to the plainly obvious.

“They had…children?” he said more than asked.

“How did you ever guess?” she shrilled, amused, then the amusement leveled off to stolidness. “They had a lot of babies.”

“Well, then, what happened to the family line?”

The amusement drained fully. “The Wraxall family line died when Wraxall himself died, in 1675.”

Fanshawe leaned forward, piqued. Suddenly, this morbid curiosity overpowered his attraction. “What do you mean? If the line died with him, then what happened…,” and the rest of his query melted like wax on a hearth.

“What happened to all those babies?” She crossed her arms just under her breasts and in a voice almost gravel-rough said, “Nobody knew for sure until after Jacob’s death, when they found his diary but…from time to time over the years, Evanore would disappear. So when the townsfolk asked Jacob where she was, he’d say she was traveling.”

“I’m not scoring high marks for perceptiveness today, but I’ll take a wild guess and say she probably wasn’t really traveling.”

“No. She wasn’t. She was in the house the whole time for…nine months at a time, if you catch my drift.”

“So none of the townspeople would ever know she was pregnant,” Fanshawe reflected. Then the rest kicked in. “Oh, don’t tell me—”

“Right again, Stew. Evanore wasn’t traveling, she was pregnant, with babies sired by her own father, but the babies were never seen by anyone, ever. Not to spoil your night completely but—hey—you asked.”

“That I did.” He knew he had the rest, but he needed to hear her say it. For this, he merely looked at her in morose beseechment.

“It wasn’t cats Jacob was sacrificing for his occult rituals.”

Fanshawe downed his drink as he went pale at the bar. “On that note…could I have another shot, please?”

««—»»

Fanshawe spent the next hour avoiding all conversion relative to Jacob Wraxall, witchcraft, warlocks, and the like. Instead he made small talk, which was much nicer, and unique because only then did it occur to him that he hadn’t sat in a bar in a long time, much less talked to a woman who wasn’t either his wife or someone connected to one of his businesses. He learned that Abbie had grown up in Haver-Towne, had attended a local community college for a certificate in hotel management, and, after spending a year in Nashua—”I thought I’d test the water in a small city before plunging headfirst into a big one, like New York”—she’d opted out of a shot at the glitzy metropolitan hotel bizz and decided to stay right where she was at. “I’ve never been much of a carrot-chaser,” she’d said. “A lot of people spend their whole lives wanting things they don’t need.” Why leave when she was happy here? “Better to help run my father’s place, which he’ll pass on to me some day.” In truth, she’d never even been to New York, and had never felt a desire to see it or any other big metropolis. “Slow-paced, peaceful, no rat-race—I know myself enough to realize that’s the only kind of life I really want to live,” she’d said. “So what if the money’s crummy?” His fetishist’s attraction notwithstanding, Fanshawe discovered that not only did he admire her for her polar-opposite ideals, but he envied her. Look what lots of money and the big city did for me, he thought. I’m a super-rich clinical pervert in recovery. I lost my marriage and even went to jail. What a great guy, huh? What a winner. He knew she’d be disgusted to know the truth. Billionaire or not, her father would throw him out of the hotel.

But he also learned that not only was she unmarried now, she’d never been