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  Theresa knew what her clientele looked for, whether online or in person. They craved authentic Tennessee country, and this place had it stacked to the rafters. Rocking chairs, homemade dressers, mirrors so old the silver had bubbled off the backings. She’d have to be careful to spot reproductions, but she could tell new from old.

  She stopped at one estate that caught her eye. A full set of Victorian silver, hundreds of pieces of fine china, a newer dining room set, a collection of wall hangings. Most of the pictures were prints, but a few were original oils, portraits done in a consistent semipro way that said they had more sentimental than artistic value. Had a family member painted them? Were they of family members?

  Theresa appreciated the context. An individual item brought into her store might have some historical significance, or could be a rare example of a type of craftsmanship. It stood alone and told a short story, if it told one at all. But that same piece, set here among others with which it had shared a home and a family, now it spoke volumes. Theresa imagined that silver sitting on that table one Christmas Eve, scraping against those china plates under the watchful gaze of old Great-Grandfather So-and-So, then generations of people reenacting the scene year after year. How sad that now the family line had come to an end and soon this collection’s connections would cease to exist.

  She compared her internal checklist of hot-selling items to each lot, searching for buried treasure. A few rows later, a roll-top desk in the corner of one estate caught her eye. The finish had the inimitable patina of age. Several cracks leaked light through the scalloped cover. Water damage swelled the right side panel. She’d seen better examples. Still, something about it…

  She reached in and tried to slide the roll top back. It jammed in the track. She smacked it loose and slid it up. Singed pockmarks gouged the writing surface, like someone had soldered electronics at the desk. Each crooked, open storage slot used its own personal definition of vertical. She examined a few tiny, empty drawers.

  One rectangular drawer in the center had a keyed lock. Theresa reached out to open it. Her fingers touched the pitted metal pull and her arm went numb.

  Visions overwrote the world around her. Flapping wings, like a great dragon, pounded the night air. Flames flashed, dozens of feet high, with a heat she could feel curl her hair. Screams rang in her ears, high-pitched, unnatural screams, the primeval reaction to an incomprehensible reality.

  She yanked back her hand and the connection broke. The calm world of the cavernous warehouse returned. The soft hum of dealers’ voices replaced the cries of the imperiled. The swoop of ceiling fans substituted for the beat of batlike wings. She closed her eyes to calm her racing heart.

  “You find something worthy?” Ruby said over her shoulder.

  Theresa composed herself. “Uh, yes. This desk.” She reached out like she was testing a hot stove and touched the center drawer again. Nothing. The psychic message had spent its fury, as usual. She tugged at the pull. Locked.

  “I don’t know antiques like you,” Ruby said. “But this one looks seriously worse for the wear. You sure?”

  Unfortunately, she was. The gift that kept giving told her in no uncertain terms. And it was never wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Theresa had the men deliver the battered roll-top desk from Nashville to the back of Treasured Things. She didn’t want some customer making an offer on it before she could unearth its secrets.

  Two light bulbs hung unshielded from cheap ceramic fixtures at opposite ends of the storage room ceiling. The desk cast twin shadows on the floor, as if part of its essence was being pulled in opposite directions. The roll top was open in an uncomfortable mimicry of a great whale’s gaping mouth.

  Dustin was safely at school. She’d flipped the sign on the door over to Be Back Soon. This was Theresa’s time to investigate, to find the source of her warehouse premonition without interruption.

  Her search for answers was always a solo flight. Ever since she was a girl and the premonitions began, she never included others as she investigated their origins. Even when she had helped Laura with the spirits at Galaxy Farm, she only shared half truths about what she saw and felt. Perhaps it was because only she experienced them. Perhaps it was because having the strange gift isolated her from the rest of the nonseeing world. Probably it was because, though she carried the burden of indistinct insight into horrible futures, there was no need for others to share it. Not until she understood each message in full.

  She pulled a ring of keys off the wall. Over the years she’d accumulated quite a collection of common keys: flat head, round head and a host of the ones she needed for the old desk, skeleton keys. On the old, worn tumblers, a close fit was usually close enough.

  One by one, she selected and attempted a key. A few could be forced to fit, but none turned. Finally, one slid into the keyhole without encouragement. She twisted it clockwise. It hung. She jiggled it. Its rotation finished with a metallic click.

  She took a deep breath at this moment of truth. She slid open the drawer.

  Inside was a brown, leather-bound volume, not a printed book, but one to be used as a diary or record book. The dry-rotted leather shed a flurry of brown flakes as she lifted it from the drawer. It left a ghostly rectangular impression behind in the drawer’s decades of dust.

  Theresa flipped open the cover. The rough, thick pages feathered into irregular edge cuts. In an archaic, quilled cursive, the first page read, “A Journal of Witchcraft”.

  There was no date, no author’s name, no note of this journal’s birthplace. She wondered how long this book had laid hidden, locked away in the desk’s center stack, keys lost to time and chance.

  The writing went dense on the second page. The paper hosted a scattering of small holes, like a player piano’s paper roll, where the acid in the old iron gall ink had burned through the paper. In a few places, whole words were nothing but lines carved into the brittle page.

  From the stilted English and inconsistent spelling, Theresa guessed the book was early nineteenth century. The first page explained the author’s intent: to document the true nature of witchcraft, specifically not the ranting of some ill-behaved girls in Massachusetts (a Salem reference, no doubt), but the methodical practice of the dark arts of the natural world.

  What Theresa wouldn’t have done to get her hands on this book a dozen years ago. Her gift of prophecy had led her down so many paths in search of an answer to, an explanation for, her strange power. Her investigation of witchcraft had gone this same route. Not the world of black cats and broomstick riders, but a serious search for access to powers hidden in the natural world, powers inevitably too strong for humans to contain and control once released.

  The writer was female. At least Theresa assumed so, as the author described gaining the trust of witches in her area. No man could have breached that wall of secrecy, especially not back then. Much of what the author gathered was from women who had abandoned the practice, “God-fearing women” terrified by the destination of that chosen path. The journal was not to be a how-to manual, the author wrote, but a cautionary tale. The separation of the two worlds was critical to this world’s survival.

  Theresa wondered if that was why the journal had survived. Locked away and secure, it stood ready to be deployed if the craft of witchery reared its serpentine head. The book was possibly passed with whispers, from generation to generation with the family heirlooms, until it arrived at the dead end of some lonely woman’s spinsterhood.

  Further reading confirmed that the book was surely passed down a maternal line. The witches’ world detailed within was strictly matriarchal. Men provided for procreation, and little past that.

  The second page spoke of the coven, the conclave of witches needed to truly release the powers and creatures hidden within the natural world. The psychic power of three, a sturdy tripod of strength, was the minimum needed to call forth essences from the earth. She wondered if Shakespeare knew this when he had three witches stir a cau
ldron in Macbeth. The larger the coven, the greater the hole they could punch to the other side. In the 1800s, small-town America appeared to be an unknown natural bulwark against widespread, powerful witchcraft.

  When witches did gather, the sabbat was to be feared. This was the Black Mass of Medieval Catholic theology, the concentration of power to release spirits of the earth. Unbaptized children were sacrificed, bacchanalian rituals performed. Whether the author witnessed this or was reporting hearsay was unclear, but she stated it as unambiguous fact.

  Someone rapped on the glass of the shop’s front door. Theresa startled and slammed the book shut. The clock read half past three. Eleanor Beasley was here to pick up the chipped vase Theresa had repaired. Where had the time gone?

  “Coming!” she yelled.

  She put the book on the roll top’s writing area and flicked off the lights as she left the room. A waterfall of tiny flakes cascaded down the book’s outer edge. The cover sagged as words within returned to the ether from which they had first been summoned.

  Chapter Thirty

  The last student for the day left Laura’s tiny space at Moultrie Elementary. Laura was confident the little girl would be another success story. She was below grade level more from neglect than innate ability. If her parents kept up their end of the homework bargain, she would be caught up by the end of the year, perhaps ahead, if Laura dared dream.

  A knock brought her attention up from her computer screen. Dalton Gowan stood in her open doorway in a navy suit, yellow- and black-striped tie, with a leather valise in one hand. Laura smiled at the memory of their dinner together. She mimed looking at an invisible wristwatch.

  “Playing hooky from work again?”

  “Banker’s hours,” he answered. “No, seriously, it’s hooky. Late lunch break, etc.”

  The bell rang and the hall filled with noisy students. Dalton closed the door behind him. He sat next to Laura and laid his valise on the table. She relaxed, revisiting that warm, stress-free evening they’d spent at dinner.

  “I wondered if I could get a closer look at Luther’s records,” he said, “the ones you mentioned at dinner, see exactly what is in there.”

  “That’s a bit irregular,” Laura said. “The front office or his homeroom teacher usually handles the big picture like that.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “But, honestly, as the out-of-towner just moved in from out of state, I get a kind of cold vibe from the staff here.”

  Laura immediately sympathized.

  “Then there’s Luther’s disability, I get the feeling everyone here would just as soon write him off. Everyone but you.”

  Laura’s heart softened a bit more.

  “I thought that you could explain the whole thing to me, make sure I understood it all. I’m sure that you have access to his records here.”

  “Sure, I can call them up here.” She shouldn’t, but she couldn’t ignore Dalton’s earnest appeal.

  She turned to her laptop and clicked on the Moultrie Elementary Staff icon. She typed in her ID and password, then she opened the Records folder. A quick scroll down the list and she selected Luther Gowan. The file popped up and Dalton leaned in closer. His cologne reminded her again of their dinner.

  “These are his grades and evaluations from Mississippi,” Laura said. “His teachers’ recommendations were way off the mark.”

  Dalton pointed to a column at the right edge of the screen. “What’s this here?”

  “Aptitude assessments,” Laura said. “The results of various standardized tests taken over the years.”

  “All students take them?”

  “Even the homeschoolers,” Laura said. “The results usually confirm a teacher’s assessment rather than create one from scratch. You can see that Luther’s are at or above average, at odds with his previous teacher’s comments.”

  Dalton shot a glance at the clock and grabbed his valise. “Whoa, I need to get going. This was very enlightening, just what I needed to know.”

  “Sure.” Laura smiled. “Anytime.”

  “I’m sure that I’ll see you soon.” Dalton opened the door and the hallway had reverted back to empty, quiet. He left and closed the door behind him.

  Laura caught her breath as it struck her what she had just done. That was a major privacy violation. Teachers were not supposed to access students’ records online for parents, just review paper copies. And she wasn’t supposed to even do that. Like she said, that was front-office-level stuff.

  Well, no harm done, she rationalized. She only showed a parent the file of his own son. And that parent was Dalton, an educated professional, carrying the weight of child-rearing responsibility alone after the death of his wife. It served the greater good.

  Dalton went straight home. The bank could wait.

  He tossed his valise on his desk, next to his laptop. He pulled out a flat, rectangular black-plastic box. A green light glowed on one end, with a flashing, yellow light next to it. A quick connection to his laptop and a black pop-up jumped onto the screen. Numbers and letters raced across it in a mad dash as the skimmer replayed the sequence of operations from Laura’s computer.

  The Moultrie Elementary icon appeared on the screen and immediately clicked open. Laura’s ID and password populated in microseconds. The records he needed were one keystroke away. He pressed Enter.

  A red error message popped up. He cursed under his breath. It read: You are not accessing the school’s secure database through a registered computer. Only use your Shaw County issued computer to access these records.

  He’d just done a lot of work for nothing. He’d again wasted some of the precious bewitching herbs from the coven on Laura. He’d killed an evening indulging her small talk and now risked his cover by missing work. All done with nothing to show, and the clock ticking down to the great sabbat. He stopped himself before he hurled his laptop against the wall in frustration.

  There were now five openings in the ritual. He’d committed to fill them, including the second most critical position. It would all be over if he didn’t deliver. Not only would he not be leading the coven, he’d probably be their victim.

  He calmed himself. The plan was good. The execution flawed. He’d proven that Laura’s computer could access the records he needed. He’d never get his hands on it at school though. That meant he’d need to get access to it after school.

  A midnight break-in at her house came to mind, but his limited spell casting didn’t cover such tasks. No, he’d proven his aromatically enhanced romantic mettle at dinner. He could press that advantage again.

  He rummaged through the desk drawer and found the leather pouch. He pulled it open and looked inside. There was still a quarter ounce of herbs inside. That was more than enough for one more mix. The scent had been effective at relaxing her at dinner, and the little dose he’d just applied gained him enough trust that she opened the school database. He could mix up one more potent batch and get access to her laptop after work was done.

  He smiled. With a little persuasion, perhaps he could get access to more. No point in making this all about work.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  There were two reasons why Theresa had never set foot in this business. First, Princess Day Care had opened a year after Dustin had started first grade, so Theresa’s day-care needs had disappeared. And, second, it catered to a strictly girl clientele. Disney princesses covered the walls and any traditionally male toys had a female twist, like pink dump trucks with flowers. She guessed the plan was to acclimatize the girls to gender-free roles.

  When Theresa led her son into the play area, he gave the décor a sideways glance.

  “Mom, it’s like, all for girls.”

  She held back her agreement. The meeting was only for an hour. Surely he could manage to play within the coral-colored walls for sixty minutes without contracting cooties. One of the boys from Dustin’s class ran over from in front of a television screen, where dinosaurs crushed a miniature version of New York City before sev
eral other enthralled boys.

  “Dustin, c’mon! You gotta see this on TV!”

  Ms. Gentry, a perky young woman with a poodle-like perm, gave Theresa a bright smile and a wave from the end of the room. The scene seemed safe. No prophecy bells rang, not that their warning chime was reliable. She patted her son on the back. “Go on in.”

  Dustin and his friend parked themselves in front of the TV screen. Rampaging dinosaurs seemed to purge his concerns about the estrogen-enhanced environment. Theresa entered the side room where the main meeting was about to start. A third of the lights were off, and the dimmer lighting seemed to make the room more comfortable. She stood in the rear.

  A half-dozen women sat in chairs facing a single microphone on a stand before a fold-up table at the far end of the room. Theresa thought these things were usually done in a circle, but maybe that was just in movies. Most of the women stared at the floor or off into space. Theresa recognized a number of them and already knew the whispered, and sometimes police-blotter-documented, stories of their lives.

  “I’m glad you could come,” a woman behind her said.

  She turned to see Tammy Lawson. She recognized her more by reputation. She and Aileen Petty and a third woman she thought was named Janice lived with two foster kids at the old Petty place outside of town. The Moultrie grapevine had them pegged as lesbians, but the grapevine said that about her and Laura, so she gave that no credence. It also incredulously tagged them alternately as witches and as right-wing survivalists. While Theresa didn’t buy either of those, the whole setup was a little weird. The fact that the three of them rarely came into town made it all that much weirder.

  “I’m Tammy,” she said.

  “Theresa Grissom.”

  “Oh, I know. You have the antique shop on the square, with the old brass birdcage in the window.”

  “I did. That piece sold.”

  “There you go, shows you how often we get into town.”

  An uncomfortable silent moment followed as Theresa wondered how to respond.