"Think I know this car. A woman drove through last night wanting to stay at the Inn. Had to tell her they don"t rent rooms. Looked at me like I had a screw loose."
"That"s what happens when you"re popular," I said. "No vacancies." I"d been around Sugar Maple long enough now to know how to burnish the image.
Jack flipped through all five pages, folded the stack, then stuffed the lot into the back pocket of his sagging jeans. "I can have a replacement brought up from Nashua by this evening."
"Don"t bother," I said. "She found other transportation."
He took a long drag on his cigarette. "Hope she finds herself a square meal while she"s at it."
He finally had my attention. "Wait a second. You met the driver?"
"Like I said, she pulled in last night for a fill-up. Wanted to know if Sugar Maple was close by." He took another drag. "Told her she"d be better off getting a room at Motel 6, then hitting town in the morning. Guess she didn"t take my advice."
"Guess not," I agreed.
"Never met a woman who could let a phone ring like she did. d.a.m.n near drove me crazy."
"I"m not following you."
"Her cell was ringing off the hook. I told her it might be important but she wasn"t paying me any attention until the ringtone changed and you never saw such a little woman kick up such a big fuss in your life."
"Kick up a fuss how?"
He shot me a look. "She isn"t in any trouble, is she?"
"No trouble," I said. "I"m just filling in the blanks."
He nodded and took a third drag on his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground. "Like I said, the ringtone changed and next thing you know she"s digging in her bag like she"s going to China and saying things like, "Don"t hang up, Stevie! Don"t hang up!""
"Steffie."
"Steffie! Yep, that"s it." He looked at me. "Lucky guess?"
"Yeah," I said as I climbed behind the wheel of my truck. "Lucky guess."
CHLOE.
The morning"s cla.s.s, Magic Loop Socks, consisted mainly of a dozen night-shift nurses from the big medical center three towns over, and a handful of townie regulars. Given the bad blood between the Weavers and me, I was surprised that Renate"s harpist daughter, Bettina, still kept coming to my cla.s.ses, but I was happy to see her. It gave me hope that we"d find a way to work things out. Lilith had gone off to a librarians" breakfast in Burlington but Janice and Lynette picked up the slack with lots of knitting chatter and jokes.
Usually I was pretty good with the patter, but today I had trouble telling knit from purl. Every time I heard a car, I leaped up to look out the window, hoping to see Luke"s truck slide into the spot behind mine. How long did it take to hand over some papers to a tow truck driver anyway?
I wasn"t going to breathe deeply until Karen was on the highway headed home.
"Somebody stop this woman!" Sue, one of the older nurses, cried out. "Jilly"s planning to give those socks to her boyfriend."
"What"s wrong with my socks?" Jilly asked, looking up from her knitting. "I know guys hate color and all that so I picked a really nice blend of black and charcoal gray."
Sue shook her headful of bra.s.sy blond curls. "Repeat after me, ladies: knit socks for a boyfriend, then watch him walk away from you."
"That"s a first for me," I said, looking up from my j.a.panese short row heel.
"Uh-oh," Lynette said with a laugh. "How many pair have you made for Luke anyway?"
"Six," I said. "What"s your point?"
At least they could laugh. At the moment I wasn"t finding it funny at all.
"Knit a strand of your hair into the sock," Janice said. "That will bind him to you forever."
"A strand of hair? Oh great." Jilly rolled her big blue eyes. "That means Pete"s going to run off with my cat."
"No knots," Karen said, needles flying. "Knots bring the recipient bad luck." She looked up at us and grinned. "Not to mention it"s lousy knitting."
The conversation leaped from knitterly superst.i.tions to pet peeves and it was punctuated with lots of laughter. To my surprise, the ex was a very capable teacher with a great deal of patience and a dry sense of humor that everyone seemed to appreciate.
Including me.
"I just love Karen," one of the nurses gushed as she served herself more coffee in the storeroom. "You should hire her full-time. I"d take a lace cla.s.s from her in a heartbeat."
It wasn"t that the ex went out of her way to ingratiate herself with the clientele; it was simply that her talent for knitting combined with the magical aspects of my shop were creating a "perfect storm" scenario that was definitely building up my bottom line. I"d never had so many workshop requests in my life, not to mention the totally obscene amount of both sock and lace-weight yarn I"d sold since we opened.
"Now that"s scary," I said to Janice as she dashed past me on her way to the loo. "Bettina and Karen are acting like BFFs."
"Don"t laugh," Janice said, "but I"m ready to dump you for the ex. That woman knows her way around a pair of triple zeroes."
I sighed. "She does, doesn"t she?" I liked to think she was getting a helpful boost from our store"s great knitting juju, but I had the feeling she was a natural.
"Too bad she"s human. I kind of like her," Janice said.
"And you don"t like anyone."
"Tell me about it but I like her."
"So do I," I admitted. "How weird is that." Okay, so maybe I didn"t like her when she was trash-talking the man I loved, but the rest of the time she was pretty good company.
"Not that it"s any of my business, but I"m not getting any crazy vibes from her. Lots of sadness but nothing crazy." She paused for a second. "Except when it comes to Luke. She"s not too crazy about him."
"I know. She told me."
"At least you don"t have to worry about them running away together."
"There"s that."
I went back up front and dived into the fray. Turning a heel was my favorite part of sock knitting. You didn"t need magickal powers to feel like a wizard when a piece of flat, one-dimensional knitted fabric suddenly turned 3-D with nothing more than a few artfully placed increases and decreases. And when you managed it all on one crazily twisted circular needle and a skein of yarn, it was worth applause.
Not that anyone ever actually applauded when I showed them how to turn a heel or pick up the gusset st.i.tches, but I wouldn"t have been at all surprised if one day they did. Sock knitting is that great.
The nurses were enthusiastic students. A few of them were already Magic Loop fans, and the others took to the technique easily. Bettina was struggling painfully with the concept, and I suggested she go back to her familiar double points and not look back. Karen offered to demonstrate the two-circ method (why didn"t I think of that?), and suddenly Renate"s daughter was zipping right along like a pro.
Score another one for the ex.
Not that I minded. (Well, not much anyway.) If we were going to be trapped together in the shop waiting for Luke to show up, at least we were having a good time.
Until we weren"t.
It happened so quickly I didn"t have a chance to deflect the question away from Karen. One second we were chatting away about stretchy cast-offs and the next we were talking about kids.
"How about you?" one of the nurses asked Karen. "How many do you have?"
People say "I feel your pain" all the time, but mostly it"s a self-serving, meaningless statement meant to convey compa.s.sion you really don"t feel. But when that question landed in Karen"s lap, I swear to you I really did feel waves of pain radiating outward from her. The kind of pain I hope I never feel firsthand.
Her cheeks flushed but her expression didn"t waver. "A daughter," she said, then reached into her tote bag and pulled out her wallet. "I only have one photo with me." She sounded sad and apologetic and so achingly vulnerable I wanted to somehow shield her from whatever might be coming her way.
The nurses pulled out photos of their kids, which was all the encouragement Lynette needed. She whipped out her digital alb.u.m, an action that sent Janice digging in the depths of her knitting bag for her youngest"s latest school photo.
"What about you?" the youngest of the knitting nurses asked. "Any kids?"
"None for Chloe yet," Lynette piped up, "but we"re all hoping it won"t be long now."
"We"re thinking it might be anytime," Bettina said, continuing Lynette"s train of thought. "Now that she"s found Luke and all." An awkward silence ensued, followed by Bettina"s muttered, "Oh c.r.a.p. I"m sorry."
"About what?" I asked lightly. Good shopkeepers kept a bright face no matter what idiotic thing their customers just said. "No problem here."
"Chloe"s dating my ex-husband," Karen said in a cheerful tone of voice. "I told her he"s not exactly a family man, but she"ll find that out for herself soon enough."
How does an awkward silence to the tenth power sound?
We all threw ourselves into admiring the photos being pa.s.sed around and pretending Karen had been speaking in a language we didn"t understand. I made the requisite oohs and aaahs over kids I"d never seen before and would probably never see again, nodded approvingly at Lynette"s brood and Janice"s, admired Bettina"s tribe, then felt the world slip out from under me when I saw Luke"s daughter for the first time.
I would have known her in a crowd. The big dark green eyes. The tumble of copper penny hair. The silly gap-toothed grin. She was everything you would want in a little girl: bright and funny and so full of life it spilled from the photograph and through my fingers.
My eyes burned with tears. I wanted to lower my head and cry until I couldn"t cry anymore. I wanted to cry for Luke and Karen, for Steffie, for the little girl of my own that I might never have.
I met Karen"s eyes across the table. What was there to say? Not even magick could make this right.
11.
LUKE.
Five minutes with a tow truck driver named Joe and everything had changed.
There was still a strong probability that Karen had some kind of mental health problem, but for the first time, doubt entered the picture. What if Karen was telling the literal truth and not just the truth as she believed it? The idea scared the s.h.i.t out of me. I didn"t want to think of my baby girl out there in some other dimension, alone and reaching out for us.
Karen and I had been together when Steffie died. Not happy. Not one of those couples you wish you could be. But the three of us were a family, and right or wrong, we probably would have stuck it out together if Steffie hadn"t- No point going there. Steffie was dead and we were still trying to pick up the pieces of our lives in whatever way we could.
I couldn"t go back to town. Not yet. Chloe expected me to drive Karen back down to Boston this morning. Karen expected me to sit down and talk. The truth? All I wanted to do was get as far from Sugar Maple as possible.
How could I make a rational argument against communication with the dead when I lived in a town that was the number one overnight resting spot on the Spirit Trail? There was a reason why the Sugar Maple Inn never had any vacancies. They really were booked up every night, every week, every month, year round, but not with happy h.o.m.o sapiens toting Amex cards and Canon PowerShots. The rooms at the Sugar Maple Inn were occupied by World War II flyboys who died over the English Channel, by Samurai swordsmen and French seamstresses from the time of Louis XIV and Egyptian scribes and Colonial farmers from Brain-tree and any other soul who needed a place to rest during his travels.
I interacted with ghosts every day in Sugar Maple. A werewolf was one of my closest friends. I shot hoops with his kids. Vampires, shapeshifters, and trolls walked through my office on a daily basis. The woman I loved was half sorceress.
h.e.l.l, I didn"t even blink anymore when I found Fae babies asleep inside my glove box.
What I"m saying is that I knew better than most humans ever could that the world was bigger and richer and more varied than any of us living in our familiar dimension could ever imagine.
I got it.
But when it came to my daughter, the little girl we had buried, the unexplained was more than I could deal with. I"d been running from her death from the moment the EMT pulled me away from her and said it was too late. Karen"s wild story about otherworldly phone calls and ghostly play-ground visits had been strangely easy for me to block. I could accept the fact that Chloe could turn me into a Ken Doll, then back again to human size with nothing more than a pa.s.sing thought, but I still refused to believe my daughter"s spirit needed me.
I was a cop. I needed proof.
Proof that wasn"t likely to find me on the highway, a few miles from the New Hampshire state line.
"Come on," I muttered. "Gimme a sign, a smoking gun, something I can hang on to. Call me, Steffie . . . I"m here waiting . . . Call me-"
The shock of the ringtone almost blew me off the road. A cross between Brahms" Lullaby and the old Barney theme song, it filled the cabin with an unfamiliar melody that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
I grabbed for the phone and flipped it open.
"MacKenzie."
The song didn"t stop.
I clicked the ON b.u.t.ton.
"MacKenzie here."
Not only did the song not stop, it got louder.
I started to sweat.
"Say something, G.o.dd.a.m.n it."
But the song kept on playing, an endless loop that made me want to drive into a brick wall if that was the only way to get it to shut the h.e.l.l up.
And then without warning, Steffie"s voice spilled from the phone with the music and I flung the cell down like it was on fire. What the h.e.l.l was happening?
I skidded to a stop on the shoulder. Steffie"s voice, sweet and babyish, blended with the ringtone"s music. I couldn"t make out the words to the song but her voice-Jesus, her voice was unmistakable.
I felt like she was dying all over again, like she was slipping away from me, limp in my arms like a discarded doll, and this pain made the pain I felt the first time seem like a warm hug.