“I’ll restack them now, Aunt Ash,” I said, pleased with her praise. Inside, part of me squirmed, but I squashed that traitorous self and started moving wood about with TK. Frankly, if I could use TK all the time, I never would have needed Robbie, but that much unwarded power was like a sonic boom mixed with a strobing flash of light. Every sensitive within miles would feel it.
“Maybe we need just a bit more, lad, and I’d say we’re more than ready for even a Vermont winter,” Ash said as I adjusted the piles with my mind, pulling energy from the earth under my feet.
“I’ll get it done today, Aunt Ash,” I promised.
“Easy, lad. I did not intend ye to become an automaton, ye know,” she said. “Ye should get your bike and visit your friend Rory. All work and all that.”
My heart thumped a second time when she said automaton. But she was smiling. I wasn’t sure there was anything wrong about Robbie but even I realized that a seven-foot-tall monster-shaped robot of wood and mud would alarm anyone who saw him. Hmm. Maybe I should disguise him.
“Okay, thanks, Aunt Ash. I’ll ride over and see if he’s around,” I said, already aware that Rory was out with his parents visiting Church Street in Burlington. But I had a sudden errand that needed running.
Forty minutes later, I was pawing through the men’s clothes at the Castlebury Goodwill store. There wasn’t a great deal to choose from, but much of what was hanging on the racks was XXL and XXXL stuff. I was able to get a pair of great baggy canvas pants and an old beat-up Carhartt jacket in faded tan that looked like it would fit my giant. The colors and cut of the clothes were bland enough, common on farms and job sites around our place… but just not usually when the weather was as warm as it currently was.
When I got back to Rowan West, winded from my long bike ride, I found both Darci and Levi’s cars in the lot, along with an unknown Honda Accord. I stored the clothes just inside the empty metal storage container that had been on the property since before I was born. My bike and skateboard were usually stored in it as well. We had been careful to keep people out of the barn where I played Wytchwar ever since a food delivery guy had wandered into it, looking for someone to sign his paperwork, and then asked questions about the model landscape he’d seen. Inside our living quarters, I found my aunt sitting with Darci on the couch across from a man and woman I didn’t know while Levi made coffee in the kitchen.
I entered quietly, but my aunt noticed me instantly even when the ex-soldier and the deputy sheriff didn’t. “Declan, please come meet these nice folks,” she said, something odd in her tone.
I stepped into the family room as the couple turned my way. At first, I had thought them husband and wife but now something, some subtle body language that I couldn’t pinpoint, told me that they were just co-workers or something.
“Here is Monica Flaherty and her associate, Gatik Dhingra, and this one, folks, is me nephew, Declan.”
“Ah, hi,” I ventured. They were both fairly young, at least as adults, maybe in their mid-twenties. She had red hair, freckles, and green eyes, and he had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and light brown skin. They were sitting so it was hard to tell, but I guessed them average in height, both slim of build.
“Hi Declan,” the girl, Monica, greeted me, flashing white teeth as she smiled. Gatik nodded my way but his attention scarcely strayed from my aunt, eyes flicking to me and then back.
“They be researchers, lad, from New Hampshire,” my aunt said.
“We’re from the White Mountain Paranormal Research Society,” Monica said, studying me.
Her partner had looked back at me when Aunt Ash said that they were researchers, so he missed the look of warning that she gave me. Instantly I checked my center, then tamped down my energy levels.
“Are you here for books?” I asked, frowning deliberately and flicking a glance toward Levi.
“No, but your shop has a wonderful selection,” Monica said. “It was the energy of this place that drew us in. We’ve got a case not far from here, in Saint Albans, but your aunt’s lovely restaurant pulled us in like bees to honey.”
Which meant that one or both of them were sensitives.
“A haunting?” I asked.
“So we’re told.,” the guy, Gatik, said with a frown. “The preliminary reports are intriguing, so we’re joining a local Burlington team to check it out.”
“But imagine how exciting it is to stop for dinner and find you all in such a place,” Monica said, clearly picking up on Rowan West’s energy.
“You’re mediums?” I asked.
“Monica is,” Gatik said. “Quite gifted, at that.”
“Aw thanks, Gat. But I’m definitely feeling outclassed by your lovely aunt here,” she said.
“Now, don’t be that way, lass. I’m no medium. Just a bit sensitive is all,” Aunt Ash said.
“Hah. I’m not buying that,” the young woman said. “My guides are just about genuflecting, when they’re coherent at all.”
“Oh, that’s probably the tree,” I said.
“Tree? I kept seeing a tree the whole drive here, didn’t I?” she turned to her partner, who was looking at me and nodding.
“The restaurant be named for a big rowan tree out back,” Aunt Ash said. “It’s a special one.”
“Oh, can we see it?” Monica asked.
“Sure, I’ll show ye myself,” Ashling said.
“Oh, I don’t want to be a bother. Perhaps Declan could just show us so as not to bother your busy schedule any more than we have?”
“Well, it’s no bother at all and the lad has firewood to clean up down in the forest before the rain comes tonight,” my aunt said, her eyes
