“That sounds like backwards logic to me.”
“I’m eating the onion.”
His lips quirked. “Fine. I guess I can put up with it ... for love.”
“Aw, so sweet,” Tyler cooed. “Go back to the story. I’m going to puke if I have to watch another second of this schmaltz.”
“Fine.” Hannah grabbed another hunk of onion for good measure and went back to the book. “They lived on top of a mountain, built a homestead and turned the land, that shouldn’t have been able to yield a crop, lush and green.”
Cooper dipped a hunk of steak in his mashed potatoes. “More magic.”
“It sounds like they were walking a dangerous line,” Hannah noted. “One of the few things Jackie stressed to me when talking about magic was karma. Everything you put out in the world comes back to you threefold. So, if they were constantly using magic for personal gain, there had to be a limit of some sort.”
“Maybe the limit was the earthquake,” Cooper suggested. “The mother was supposedly killed by an earthquake, right?”
“Yeah. Let’s see.” Hannah read a bit further. “Okay, when the girls were eight, they were out in the field when the sky turned red.”
“Red?”
“Helga says it looked like the blood of a million enemies was washing across the sky.”
“She had quite the imagination,” Tyler said on a laugh.
“Thunder followed the red sky, a torrent of rain fell, and the earth began to shake at the same time the girls began fighting with one another,” Hannah related. “Supposedly, up until that point, the girls were inseparable. They wore the same clothes, liked the same foods, and played the same games. That all changed the day the sky turned red.
“Josette ran out to the field to squelch the fight and was caught in the earthquake,” she continued. “The ground shook so hard a fissure opened and she fell inside. Then the rain came and filled the fissure, to the point where it turned into a creek.” She was dumbfounded.
“Wait, is that our creek?” Tyler queried.
“I guess.” Hannah found the story ridiculous, and yet she couldn’t look away. “Clement raced to try and save her, to hold off the water, but he couldn’t because the trees had come alive and were trying to eat his daughters.”
“Wait ... are you saying that trees can come alive?” Tyler looked horrified at the prospect. “That is something I could’ve lived my entire life never knowing.”
“Clement chose to go after his girls, and in the process sacrificed his wife to a hungry earth and an angry sky,” Hannah said. “He took them back to the house, asked what happened, but they refused to tell him. All they would say is that they fought ... and it was something that could never be forgiven on either part.”
“It must’ve been bad then,” Cooper said. “Like ... really bad.”
“Years passed and the girls grew into young women,” Hannah read. “They were no longer close, to the point where their father had to build two separate houses. One night he would stay in Amelia’s house and the next he would move to Bettina’s house.” She wrinkled her nose. “You don’t think they were doing gross stuff, do you?”
Cooper involuntarily shuddered. “Let’s not go there, huh?”
“Yeah, I agree with Cooper.” Tyler focused on his food. “That’s going to give me nightmares.”
“Me, too,” Hannah agreed. “Anyway, the girls reached the age when they could be married and men started calling. They asked Clement for permission to marry his daughters — both of them — but he always declined. Some men even tried to buy the girls because they were reportedly the most beautiful women in the land.”
“What are the odds of that?” Cooper prodded.
“Well, since they were twins, it might not be that hard to swallow,” Hannah pointed out. “The girls reached the age of twenty-two without getting married, which believe it or not, made them spinsters.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” Tyler teased. “Over the hill at twenty-two. It’s like a bad teenybopper movie.”
“No joke. Clement grew ill out of nowhere and the girls rallied to his side, both trying to cure him. His illness was short, though, and he died on the mountain. The girls couldn’t agree where he should be buried and split his body in half so they could each bury him how they wanted.”
“They split the body in half?” Tyler blinked at his steak. “Let’s not talk about that when I’m eating.”
“It doesn’t say how they did it, so don’t worry,” Hannah said. “Once Clement was gone, the girls started openly fighting. They attacked mercilessly, not caring if innocent people were hurt in the process.”
Hannah flipped a page, perplexed. “There’s nothing in here about why they were fighting, or how it all worked out. It just says they fought until they killed one another. I don’t understand.”
Cooper reached across the table to snag the book, leaning close so he could peer at the binding. “It looks as if two pages have been removed from this book.”
“What?” Hannah was incensed as she grabbed the book and confirmed what Cooper was saying. “Why would someone remove the pages?”
“My best guess is that there’s something important on those pages,” he replied.
“We need to know what it was.”
“We don’t know that what’s happening now has anything to do with Amelia and Bettina, though,” Tyler argued. “The missing pages might not be important at all. Besides, we don’t know when they were removed. Helga could’ve removed them. It could’ve been Abigail, too. It also might’ve been someone else. We’re talking hundreds of years in the life of a book.”
“That’s true.” Hannah looked one more time to see if she could find what she was looking for. Of course, it wasn’t there. “I wish Abigail would visit. We need help.”
“Baby, it’s going to be okay.” Cooper rested his hand on top of hers. “We’re going to figure it out. We’re already partially there.”
Hannah could only hope he was right.
10
Ten
Hannah was visited by visions of foggy witches and
