Ellen frowned. "What's magic about a basket?"
"Everything is magic, Daughter of Questions. A chant and way of weaving baskets that makes your load of clams or potatoes seem lighter, keeps fresh fiddleheads from wilting in the sun, protects dried meat and fruit and meal from the damp — that's important magic.
"If the proper song for splitting ash and weaving it makes your fish-trap catch more fish, the family eats. Do it wrong, people go hungry. That's magic that makes a difference. Naskeag witchcraft isn't about flying around naked on a broomstick under a full moon or casting warts on your rival's nose. It's about the tribe surviving."
The outside door bumped open, Caroline using her butt as a third hand because the regulation two were full, and she slid bags of groceries into the mess on the kitchen table. Soaking wet paper bags of groceries on the edge of ripping, wet footprints across the floor, wet jacket shrugged off and hung dripping behind the stove, wet Caroline. She looked about as pleased with her condition as a drenched cat. Alice blinked and stepped to the window — now it showed a lead-gray sky, pouring rain, stiff gusts of wind.
An hour ago, the weather had been sunny and clear. Clouds had crept up behind the hills and pounced and started to leak all over the place while she was talking with Daniel. The stereo had masked and blended with the rush of raindrops on the roof. Maine weather. If you don't like it, wait five minutes.
Caroline stood there, dripping and smelling of wet wool, looking from Alice to Daniel. Alice didn't care for the way the girl's eyes narrowed and her lips pinched. "Bit of news on the car radio. Big fire up in Naskeag Falls — the old Paramount Hotel. Looks like arson."
Daniel met Alice's gaze and shook his head, with a side-glance to his daughters and back. "Guess I won't be going back to the big city for a while."
Alice nodded, message received, no need for details in front of innocent young ears. Like, you won't go back there until the dye wears off your hide and your hair grows out brown again. And you can show different papers to any nosy cops.
Funny how people could develop a verbal shorthand, almost telepathy, when they had enough shared experience. And Alice had known Dan Morgan since they'd been kids, Morgans and Haskells plotting out how they'd run the world when they grew up, known him a hell of a lot longer than most couples stay together.
Hell, if she hadn't been a Haskell witch and lesbian she might have married him. She might not be fishing in that pond, but she knew a good catch when she saw one. The two of them didn't need to waste a lot of words.
Shit. Someone heard about Daniel asking questions all around the alleys. Someone who understands forensics and doesn't want to leave evidence hanging around.
Someone who doesn't have any little twinges of conscience when firefighters rush into a burning building.
Alice grunted. Two ritual sacrifices, Aztec stuff, they had to be related. Why destroy the evidence up there and not out at Kate's stone circle? Who hated Kate that much?
That white Ford Explorer was getting on her nerves. The Peruvian brujo had driven a car like that, midnight blue Suburban but all those Detroit monsters filled the same Bad News niche in the ecosystem. Same windows tinted next thing to black. Same sense of lurking menace, like a coiled viper staring you in the eye. Dammit, she'd killed that bastard.
Or Kate had. Without Kate's strength, without her roots deep in Stonefort and that old circle, Tupash would have won. He hadn't expected Kate.
Chapter Eight
Kate switched her truck off, and it stopped. Just stopped. No coughs, no bangs, no running-on and shuddering and rattling like a terminal TB patient. Maybe she'd get used to trusting her transportation after another month or so. She set the handbrake and that worked, too.
She stared out at Lew's house. Her house now, sole heir of all the worldly goods and debts of one "Lew" Lewis, deceased. He'd updated his will after their divorce, sober and before witnesses, just to make sure nobody thought he'd made a mistake or forgotten in his alcoholic haze. Some people still looked at her funny about that. Friendly divorces were rare enough in this day and age. But she'd left him because of the booze, not because they didn't get along.
The house was a typical 1970s Farm Home Loan ranch, twenty years of deferred maintenance, she was fixing it up before putting it on the market. Damn sure she didn't need three roofs to sleep under in rotation, or two tax bills in the same day's mail.
And it bored her. Cookie-cutter house, thousands just like it, no personality. Not like Alice's house. Seemed like that place was nothing but personality, hundreds of years of grafting and pruning like a living thing, but all of it sound and strong and true. Integrity. Not necessarily legal, mind you — the Haskell House seemed to think that the laws of God and man were options.
Not that Kate was squeaky clean. She'd dispensed "law" with her fists on more than one occasion. Some punks and slimeballs heard that clearer, no matter what the ACLU might say, and a kid who fucked up once would get over a few bruises a lot faster than he'd clear a juvie record. And she'd made a habit of ignoring some things that Augusta or Washington considered major sins. Not her problems.
But she drew the line at things like arson and premeditated murder. History said the House didn't. History said Alice didn't. Both of them were completely feral under their civilized veneer. Kate didn't know anything she could prove, and she'd rather keep it that way. What she didn't know, she couldn't say in court.
And that was part of her contract with the Town
