THE WITCH AND THE TEA PARTY (A Rachael Penzra Mystery) (32 page)

He thought it over. “So the chances are that my wife isn’t in any danger,” he sighed with relief—a little prematurely in my opinion. “That makes me feel better. We can still keep up our vigilance, and I’ll be back to bring her home when the shop closes, but I won’t be quite so worried. Thank you, Rachael.”

“Well, ah, sure,” I muttered. I wished I could be as much comfort to myself as I seemed to be to him. He left and I returned to work. Right on schedule he returned to pick up Moondance. I wondered how long that would last. The three ladies liked to spend all their spare time together and they’d been somewhat deprived for quite a stretch.

Aunt Myrtle hurried home, too, but she had an ulterior motive. “I thought I’d bake a pie for poor Mac,” she explained. “And invite him to eat here, too. He shouldn’t have to hurry home and cook.”

I doubted that Mac’s cooking amounted to slaving over a hot stove. Opening cans and using the microwave sounded more like his style, but who was I to cramp my aunt’s? I told her I’d go over and stay with Dora if she didn’t want to come over and eat with them. Patsy, I knew, had plans of her own. I figured David and I would have to wait another night. I was getting almost numb about it. We did have that one night, but I had thought it was merely the prelude to many more following.

Dora definitely wasn’t moving. Aunt Myrtle had told me to promise her a meal as soon as the food was ready. Mac, apparently, was designated as the waiter. I would dig out something simple
to eat later.

“When’s the last time you were out of here,” I asked Dora, sitting on what was either a genuine antique or an old chair. It was wobbly enough to be either one.

“I don’t need to go out,” she declared, loosing Eloise to run around the store. “I have plenty of food on hand, and Mac brings me anything I need.”

“Are you afraid to go out?
” I wondered.

“No,” she looked disgusted at the idea. “I just don’t feel like leaving things here unguarded.”

“That makes sense,” I agreed. “But it might be a good idea to have me come over and man the place sometime, during my lunch hour or after our stores are closed. I can handle any sales, or keep the shop open until you get back. Whichever works for you. It would be good for you to get out. Take Mac with you.”

“He’s doing more than enough,” she grumbled. “I’ll never be let forget what I owe him. And I don’t need to go out. I’m quite content, thank you.”

Well, that should show me. I returned to the attack. “As far as Mac goes, I imagine he’s the one who decided to stick around, not you who asked him.” A short nod proved me right. “And as far as owing him anything, put my aunt to work. She loves baking and she can make him a fresh pie and some other treats every week. You can buy the supplies if it makes you feel better.”

“It’ll take forever to make up the cost,” she insisted.

“Not really,” I countered. “I know you moved a television into the back room for him, along with a comfortable chair. What else would he be doing if he was at home?”

She gave that some real thought. “You have a point,” she conceded. “And Myrtle would like baking for him. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,
and all that nonsense. It might work with my brother. That would help. And I could buy him a fancy new television for his house. I’d have it delivered and set up.”

“Sounds good,” I told her as she warmed to the subject. “
Only it still doesn’t get you out of here for a change.”

“Don’t need one,” she returned to her original position.

“Why?”

She looked uncomfortable, but I’d been watching her eyes follow the sight and sound of the little rat around the shop.

“Just don’t need to.”

“I imagine you’re worried about Eloise, aren’t you?”

She looked startled that I’d figured it out. Duh. One mother recognizes that maternal instinctive watchfulness.

“I don’t leave the cover off during the day
any more,” she suddenly was in a rush to talk about it. “I’m afraid someone will drop something into the tank. I’m not even comfortable with her running around like this. Someone might have left something poisonous on the floor for her to find.”

I recalled the horror of the days when George had been close to death because someone deliberately poisoned him. “I remember how it was with George,” I reminded her. “It’s foolish, but I don’t blame you. There’s no reason on earth for the murderer to hurt Eloise, but knowing that doesn’t really help much, does it?”

“I would kill someone who hurt her,” she said, with so much vehemence that I felt that she’d do just that. “The problem is that she’d still be dead and I might not know who to go after.”

“Best not to let it happen,” I agreed.
“It doesn’t make sense to worry about something so unlikely, but it’s how we feel. So if you want to trust me to watch over her, believe me that I will watch over her like a mother.”

She sighed. “This kind of rat doesn’t live very long, you know. I’m hoping she was really young when you found her. But she’s not going to die at the hands of a murderer.”

“No, not if we can possibly help it,” I promised her. “If I sit with her, it should be after hours. You’ll feel better about her safety that way. And when I said you had to get out more, I didn’t mean on your own. You need Mac or Patsy or David along with you. If you worry about Eloise dying, stop and think about how she’d feel if you died because you were too stubborn to take proper precautions. We’d take care of her if something happened to you, but we both know it wouldn’t be the same thing.”

For the first, and maybe the last time, I saw tears in her eyes. She frowned them away immediately. Moondance and my aunt might be her best buddies, but she recognized a kindred soul about pets in me.

“It’s terrible that pets don’t live very long,” I groaned. “But at least ours are living good, happy lives. There are so many out there that need homes. Binky is hardly everybody’s choice of dog, but we love her. When she and George die,” my voice cracked a little. “I’ll get more dogs when I get over the worst pain. My dogs won’t be replaced, they’ll never be replaced, but I know I’ll be able to love the new ones, too. My mother always insists that the more love you give, the more you have to give. It doesn’t drain you; it fills you.”

We sniffled a little together, but pulled ourselves together when we heard Mac at the door. “Here’s your food,” he told his sister. “Got to get back across before mine gets cold.”

“Thank Myrtle for me,” she called after his retreating back.

“Smells good,” I told her. “Go ahead and run upstairs and eat. I’ll wait down here. I never get the chance to really wander around and check things out. And you sell so much
so fast that your inventory keeps changing. This will be a great chance for me.”

Being Dora, she didn’t bother with any false modesty about her store. I would have dithered around, thanking her for saying that about my store. She called the rat,
who poked her head out from under a shelf and rushed up the stairs after her owner. At least we humans saw things that way. I had no doubt that Eloise felt she owned Dora.

It was always fun to wander around the shop. I never did make it
beyond the first rows of the huge building attached to the back. It would take hours to see half the stuff. Dora seemed to know everything and where everything was. She also knew the prices. Here and there were tables with a sign with the price for anything on that table. People tried to switch things now and then, but she always knew the difference.

I found a large, leaky
aluminum tea kettle, sans cover, that I grabbed to buy. I would use it as an outside planter, maybe fill it with cascading flowers. There was an old washboard I had absolutely no use for. I grabbed that, too, telling myself that I could find some artistic way to use it in the store. I rarely go shopping for clothes or shoes or other feminine things, but let me loose in a bookstore or at a yard sale and I was the seller’s dream come true. By the time Dora returned, I had amassed a nice pile on the counter, including an old children’s book that I recalled from my own childhood, “Little Black Sambo”. It was certainly politically incorrect nowadays, just mentioning his color, but I’d loved the story and worried that little Sambo would be eaten by the tiger.

Dora, being Dora, toted up my purchases without mentioning giving me any discount. If she did, it was done without my knowledge. It just wasn’t how she functioned. She never bothered with any of the social niceties that rule the rest of us.

Mac returned as the stuff was being packed into a bag. “Little Black Sambo,” he laughed, spotting the book. “Let me buy it, Rachael. I remember wondering if a tiger really could be turned into butter. I used to hope I’d meet a tiger so I could trick it, but I never had any fancy clothes to trade. I loved when the tigers all got jealous and chased each other in circles. It was my favorite book for a long time.”

I nodded to her to show that I didn’t mind if he kept it.

“It was
my
book,” his sister argued, acknowledging my nod, but not losing sight of the argument. “I just let you read it. But you can have this one for free.”

I left them, two siblings with a sad childhood behind them, bickering over whom the
original book had actually belonged to.

Fortune telling, whether with crystal ball or tea leaves—or anything in between—is generally accepted as being open to change. There are advocates who insist that what is written in the stars or seen
through the veil is irrevocable, but for the most part those who tell fortunes tend toward warnings rather than statements. When they foresee danger, they see it as something that is potential rather than decided. “Beware the dark stranger…” can mean many things. On a certain day the stars might be in an alignment that signified danger for you. None of these warnings mean that you hide in your house and curl up in a closet. They’re signs for you to heed, to be more careful, more cautious, on that day. Other days might be good ones for you to add a little zing to your life. Bet on that horse, flirt with the cute guy across the way. Never let fortune telling rule your life. It’s a guide, not a decree.

Chapter Fifteen

“Joe says they have someone in mind for the killing,” Patsy told me first thing the next morning. “He didn’t actually say it in words, but all those psychology courses I’m taking do work. They have someone special in their sights.”

“I wonder which one it is,” I said. “Maybe you can get it out of him by elimination. You could bring up one person at a time and see how he reacts.”

“Tried that,” she told me. “But it gets awkward to keep bringing them up one name after another. He kind of clammed up on me.”

I laughed. “We forget that he’s had some of those courses, too.”

Meanwhile, I had my own niggling worry, something that had been bothering me, mostly subconsciously, for some time. It hadn’t risen fully to my consciousness until Nicholas had made his snide remark about it being time for me to put my psychic ability to work. Other than very weak flashes, and those of anger, I hadn’t been experiencing any images. A lifetime of suppression had taught me to ignore almost all the things that flashed through my mind, but now that they were gone, or greatly reduced, I felt a little disorientated. Was it possible to quit being psychic? I understood that children lose a great deal of their ability through the years, those who don’t nourish it. I certainly had done my best to starve it, but it seemed to be too strong to be denied entirely.

Until now.

Now, when I was finally trying to develop the gift, it seemed to be in the process of being taken from me. I desperately wanted to talk to someone about it, but I was superstitiously afraid that saying it out loud would make it irrevocably true. David would just comfort me. Not that I didn’t want comforting, but I wanted answers more. I decided Elena was the logical person for me to approach.

I called her during my lunch break, determined to make an appointment before I once again convinced myself that it was a fluke. She listened to my outpouring without comment and let me run down before she said anything. “So I don’t know what to think about it,” I wailed, winding down to a finish.

“What can you do about it today?” she asked, always practical. I conceded that I could do nothing at the moment. “Then put it aside and we’ll talk it over when you get here this evening. It sounds as though you’re busy there with playing guardian to your aunt and her friends. Come whenever it works out best for you.”

Surprisingly, since I tend to be an expert at worrying things to death, I did put it aside. It was a relief to know that someone I trusted was going to advise me, whether the advice would be welcome or not.
I did a repeat of the evening before, sitting with Dora while Aunt Myrtle fed her man.

“Worked out good, finding that Black
Sambo book,” she told me. “I have another copy if you really want one for yourself. They’re fairly valuable, you know, so it might be a wise investment.”

Hmm. No freebies for me.
I took her up on the offer.

When Mac returned, I went home and grabbed a bite before I called Elena to warn her of my coming. She greeted me at the door of her small, cozy house. “Come in and have a cup of tea,” she said. “Then we can read the leaves if you want later on.”