“Clifford! Abigail! It’s Calliope,” I hollered, banging on the combination split wood and wire enclosure. Trinkets hanging from bits of string and knotted straw rattled every time the side of my fist hit the frame of the homemade gate. One last forceful smack of the heel of my palm and the rusted latch acquiesced to the pull of entropy and dropped from loosened screws. As the gate creaked open, its bottom edge scuffed a break in the curving line of salt placed across the surface of the dull brown dirt.
“Cliff! Abi…?”
A filmy silence settled over my shoulders, flowed down my body, and pooled over the ground. No insects, bird calls, or rustling leaves interrupted the leaden quiet. I sucked in a breath and peered into the shadows between the trees to my right and to my left. Nothing moved, even the breeze held its breath.
Anchoring my boot-clad feet, I raised my hands, fingers spread and palms facing out, and tested the strength of the salt circle’s magical charge. If it was active—like an electrical wire—I’d feel a resounding zap if I got too close.
Nothing.
No vibration, no sensation of skin meeting invisible membrane, no static, no…nothing. Stepping farther onto the Pearmain’s property, I crouched, brushing my fingertips over the salt’s pearly-white crystals before bringing a few to the tip of my tongue.
A pungent darkness rolled over my taste buds and coated my nostrils, a sensation akin to swallowing a surprise mouthful of seawater. For a moment, my shoulder-length hair flowed away from my body like kelp from an underwater rock, and the light that penetrated my eyelids filtered a murky emerald green.
Mama.
I swayed in place, spitting the dirt and undissolved crystals off my tongue. I knew this salt; it was produced locally, from seawater pulled out of the deep trench off the coast of British Columbia. But why it called forth memories of my mother and the Atlantic…
I left that for another time.
Straightening, I brushed my fingers over my pants and headed away from the circle and the gate. When I last walked this property earlier in the spring, the grass was newly trimmed and the fruit trees were covered in delicate, pale pink blossoms. But in the heat and sharp yellow sunlight of high noon, the place appeared deserted. I pulled out my cell phone, brought up the Pearmain’s phone number, and waited for theirs to ring.
In the distance, long, insistent peals from a landline pierced the stillness. Rounding the final curve in the road, I stopped and gaped, the cell phone forgotten in my hand.
Clifford Pearmain sat upright in a once-red rocking chair on the farmhouse’s wrap-around porch. Abigail sat in another, her hands resting on a faded, flower-print apron. Both stared forward, rocking slowly in time with an invisible force. Abigail’s feet left the porch every time the front of her chair lifted and settled softly on the boards when she pitched forward.
Competing telephone rings snapped my attention off the zombie-like couple. I thumbed the red circle on my phone and ended the call, stopping the other phone in the middle of a trill. The rockers continued their syncopated rhythm. Beside me, grasshoppers clung to chest-high stalks of Sea Holly thistle and kept their silence.
I pocketed my phone and crouched again. Knees and palms to the ground, I spread my fingers and waited. The soil was dense underneath its warm, powdery surface. I took a slow breath, exhaled in a stream through pursed lips, and pressed down, reaching toward the house and the gate, the woods and the orchard.
Earthworms slumbered. Tree roots remained mute to my probing.
The quiet underneath my waiting palms connected with a dull pang feeling its way blindly from the vicinity of my heart. Once again, I would be forced to admit my magical skills were functioning below par, call it a day, and count on local law enforcement to solve whatever mystery I’d stumbled onto.
Chapter 2
I stood, made a fuss of brushing off my hands to give my urge to mourn a moment to ease, and palmed my wand before heading toward the porch. Scanning Clifford’s face and chest for signs of life, I stopped beside his rocking chair and placed a hand on his shoulder. A short-sleeved, tattersall plaid shirt draped over the protruding bones.
Closing my eyes again, I sensed my way through the threadbare cloth to the ropey muscles of his bare upper arms. I could do this; Cliff was connected to his land through his years of stewardship and the dirt clinging to his boots, and at the very least, I was adept at reading dirt.
I waited. The grasshoppers remained silent.
A pulse rose—a heavy, viscous bubble—and bounced against my fingertips before it turned and made its way back toward the innermost chambers of the older man’s bones. I squeezed Cliff’s arm. Not a flinch or a quiver. Whatever held him mute was heavily cloaked.
I gave Abigail a quick glance and stroked the old woman’s gnarled fingers and wrist. More of the same lethargic slumber. A momentary breeze lifted wavy strands of silver hair off her cheek and settled them on yellowed skin sagging with the weight of her seventy-plus years.
Catatonia.
Once, I could read my aunt’s basic spell books, and before I understood that waving a wand around had very real consequences, I practiced magic on our barn cats. As soon as my aunt de-spelled the catatonic felines, the book disappeared. And I never saw that wand again.
Shaking off the memory, I rechecked Cliff and Abi’s pulses. Satisfied they were alive and hopeful they would remain so, I opened the screen door and stepped into the farmhouse’s dark interior. In
