"More bullshit!" Kate stood there, hands on her hips, about nine feet tall and two axe-handles across the shoulders, eyes and tongue ready to scorch the grass Alice sat on and Alice with it. "I saw you up there on the ridge, running rings around the cops. Ripping Wescott's ears off and making him swallow the pieces. Don't tell me that frigging 'earth magic' wasn't talking to you."
Alice shook her head. "That was you, not me! Those stones were protecting you! They know you. I used their magic, damn straight, but anything they gave me, it was to use for you. If you hadn't been there, I wouldn't have even felt it. Damn sure I wouldn't have been cussing out a state cop at a crime scene. Your sacred stones were using me!"
"Fuck." Kate bit off whatever she was going to say next. "Screw this. I've got a roof to shingle. See you around town." She turned back toward her idling truck.
"Kate . . ."
The big woman stopped with one hand on the truck's door, but she didn't turn around.
"Kate, why didn't the lawyers tell you about this years ago? A trust like that, you the beneficiary, that's skating the edge of professional malpractice. Which edge, I ain't sure, but I think it's the far side."
That drew a bitter laugh, almost a bark. Kate still didn't turn around. "Remember good ol' Frank. The lawyers sent a whole package of stuff to me, about ten pounds of paper, on my eighteenth birthday. They got back a letter telling them to fuck off, signed Katherine Rowley. Or close enough. That stepfather of mine always was handy with a pen, signing Mom's war-widow checks and all. He didn't have big enough balls to try to steal the trust fund, though. Bet he fed all the papers to the stove." Then she climbed into her truck and slammed the door again.
Eighteenth birthday. That would have been about a month after Kate had cold-cocked her bible-spouting snake of a stepfather and moved out to work in the cannery. But her mail still went to the old house. Lovely timing.
Alice stared after the retreating truck, tears blurring her eyes. The way Kate said that, sounds like you're back to sleeping alone. Cold bed, old girl. Empty bed.
With luck and God's grace, she might simmer down enough to speak to you in a month or so. Might. Hasn't spoken to her mother in twenty years.
And that's what you get for a few hundred years of Haskell witches pretending to know everything that happens in this town. Sometimes it twists around and bites you on the ass.
She stood up, slowly, painfully. Soft warmth brushed her ankles, Atropos offering what little solace a half-grown kitten had to give. Alice bent down and gathered the ball of fur in her hands, standing up with a grunt of pain. "No more back-rubs for a while, youngster. For either of us. The House is gonna miss her, too."
Blind to the world, Alice drifted back into the House by the kitchen door, the real door of the House where life came and went. The kitchen felt empty in spite of the savor of garlic and onions and sage from a chicken roasting in the oven. For a single customer. Caroline gone, Peggy and Ellen gone. Now Kate gone. Back to square one for the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Haskell Witch. The damn room looked blurry. Alice set the calico on the kitchen table, forbidden ground but the cat had sense enough to jump right to the floor.
Or the House had jogged her memory with a slight jolt to the paws. The damned place wasn't above doing that. It had stolen Alice's slippers from the bedside more than once, when it felt she needed the rude awakening of bare feet on a cold floor. Kate said it had popped a circuit breaker just to get her attention.
Kate.
Highlands Trust.
That stone circle, and a couple thousand acres of land.
Six hundred and forty acres to a square mile — that worked out to some three square miles, maybe a mile wide and strung out for three miles along that woods road. A riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a whatever, the quote eluded her.
Kate Rowley, Kate Rowan-lea, who thought her family name sailed from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony back in the 1600s. Highlands Trust and Caroline's notes both argued for an earlier date.
Alice really wondered what had been in that package from the law office. More than just legal mumbo-jumbo, for sure. There'd be copies of that in the files. But Grannie Rowley might have left other stuff, sealed stuff, no copies. A letter, a journal, original blueprints and operator's manual for Stonehenge, something.
And Alice couldn't help with it. She'd told Kate the truth. Anything the stones had given to Alice, they'd been helping Kate. The big woman would have to work this out on her own.
But . . . a tan deerskin pouch lay on the table, next to a flat pack of cigarette papers. Kate's tobacco. Alice could beg some help for her friend's quest. Earth and water, sun and wind and stone, the powers talked to each other. They lived together. Between the storms, because of the storms, they found a balance.
Like a family.
Alice gathered the tobacco pouch, a lamp filled with olive oil, and her courage. The Spring hid dangers. More than one Haskell had been found dead in the cellar, over the centuries they'd tended this sacred water. The Spring hoarded its power and preferred to sleep.
Fur brushed her ankle again. "Me!"
Alice shook her head, staring down at Atropos. "No. House rules, you know that. You have to wait outside.
