A Broom With a View (9 page)

It
had been a…
interesting
day to say the least. Liza was more than ready to get home. She’d spent hours at the police station, talking to the detective again.

That
hadn’t gone anywhere.

There was a gas station before she reached the turnoff to her road and she stopped there, first. She was out of caffeine at home, which would’ve been a real travesty considering the day she’d had, and she could use bread and sandwich makings.

The icy weather had brought others out as well so the store was unusually crowded when she walked in. It had been her go-to place for essentials since moving in so she knew which aisle she needed to visit. It didn’t take her long to shop.

With arms full, Liza approached the front and stood in line. And ended up right behind Cotton Hashagen.

Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him
, she chanted to herself.

But then he turned around, saw her, and flashed her a smile that was so smug, so condescending, and so much like Mode’s that she’d lost it.

“I
know
it was you, Cotton,” she exclaimed, not even bothering to keep her voice down.

“What?” he asked innocently, looking around at the rest of people who were starting to stare and giving them a “women, what do you do?” look.

“You trashed my store! You ruined my things!” she screeched. “I saw you hanging around outside my door!”

Cotton’s face reddened and his eyes darkened as he stepped back from Liza. Everyone else had already taken their own steps back and were looking at her a little nervously. She was unaware of the fact that the hair around her face was flying outwards in her anger.

“If you come near my business again Cotton, I will kill you. Do you understand? I will
kill
you.” Though she said the words softly enough, someone standing behind her gave an audible groan and there was a massive shudder that went through the crowd.

Then, forgetting her snacks and drinks, she left the building.

It wasn’t until she was back in the car and turning onto her gravel road that she realized she’d shoplifted.

“
W
e’re just going to pretend that most of that didn’t happen today,” Liza Jane grumbled to herself as she turned onto her road. It was five miles to her driveway from there. Her driveway was nearly a mile long itself, and gravel. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get out when it finally snowed. Shit. She really hadn’t thought about that. How was she going to get out? How had her grandparents managed it?

“They didn’t,” she answered herself as she passed by a yard inexplicably full of topless toddlers. Shouldn’t they have been cold? The toddlers, that was, not her grandparents. Although they’d probably gotten cold as well. “The older people knew how to do it right. They froze enough meals for three months, chopped firewood, and hunkered down.”

She wasn’t going to be able to do those things. Plus, she
had
to get out. She enjoyed her own company but she’d go stir crazy. And she’d still have to earn money to pay the bills.

Liza went over recent events in her mind.

First, there was the phone call from Mode. That had gone…swell.

And then there had been the visit from her neighbor, Jessie. Jessie seemed like a nice enough girl but Liza was afraid she’d terrified her with the bottles. Who knew what she would go off and repeat? By the time she finished with the story, Liza Jane would probably be flying her furniture around the room while she stood in the middle and stuck pins in a voodoo doll.

Of course, if she were a different kind of witch, the voodoo doll would definitely have come in handy with Mode and Jennifer Miller…

“I should’ve just erased her,” Liza sighed, still thinking of Jessie. 

It was true; there were ways that she could’ve made Jessie forget what she’d seen and heard. Liza saved those spells for special occasions, though. The universe liked to work in balance. For every
one
thing that happened,
another
thing had to occur to even it out. She’d learned that when she erased someone else’s memory of something, she herself lost a memory. If she were lucky it would be something like ever having married Mode in the first place. She was never that lucky though. More than likely it would’ve been a nice memory.

Like when she lost her virginity after prom on the picnic blanket on Revere Beach when she was seventeen.

(It was a lot more romantic at the time.)

Then she’d lost her temper at the library.

“I ought not to have done that,” Liza sighed with regret. “Way to network with the locals. And get my business trashed.”

“I promise I’m not always this moody and unstable!” she shouted at the scenery that passed her by. “I’m usually pretty normal!”

Then her business had been trashed.

Of course, there was also the lake that wasn’t really there. In hindsight, she was embarrassed and a little upset that she hadn’t known about the not-there lake as soon as she turned onto the road. Her senses weren’t as sharp as they used to be. She needed to fix that.

Then again, she
had
met Colt. That was something. Those cowboy boots, those eyes, those
hands
…

“Too soon, Liza Jane, too soon,” she warned herself as an image of Mode, smug and self-assured, flashed before her eyes. “You’re not even divorced yet.”

Like that had stopped him
, another little voice spat.

Well,
she
was going to take all the time she needed to get her act together. She’d settle into the town, make some friends, re-open her business, and
then
she might start thinking about dating again.

“The detective is useless but I guess the day could’ve been worse,” she admitted as she took the last turn onto her gravel driveway. “At least I have a little bit of money, my health, my house, and a car.”

Her car bounced a few feet over the tiny rocks before giving a shudder, making a loud “popping” noise and coming to a complete stop. She listened in horror as the engine died and went silent. Nothing surrounded her but the overgrown dogwoods and sycamores and the sounds of birds calling to one another (
probably making fun of her
, she thought).

Liza Jane knew nothing about vehicles. She couldn’t fix things she knew nothing about, not even on her best day. Still, she tried to envision the car starting, tried to see it rolling smoothly towards her house. Despite her ignorance, it
did
sputter for a moment but then went dead as a doornail again.

It wasn’t going to happen.

Letting out a string of curses that would’ve made a sailor blush, Liza grabbed her purse, keys, and light jacket and jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her in resentment.

It was a mile to her house. She wished she was wearing better shoes. 

Welcome home
, she thought wryly as she began the long walk, her thin spiked heels disappearing in the gravel, sending up clouds of white smoke.

Welcome home
.

“DRUGS,” BRYAR ROSE
declared with authority. “Had to be. He was probably waiting for a pick up or something. Then he saw you and trashed your store as a warning. You should carry some mace with you.”

“The other day I was wondering if I should get a gun,” Liza admitted.

“A
gun
?” Bryar scoffed. “You’d blow your damned foot off.”

“I’ll probably just start parking around out front from here on out,” Liza sighed, hating the fact that she’d let someone spook her so much. “I
know
it was him…”

“I can take a look if you want,” Bryar suggested. “Let you know what I see?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.”

Long ago both had promised to stay out of the other’s business, at least where their magic was concerned. If they wanted to know something then they’d have to do it the old fashioned way–pry. They were close to one another, but boundaries were important. So was trust. Liza knew that her sister wouldn’t do anything unless Liza told her she could. And vice versa.

“Although I still think you should’ve let me curse Mode,” Bryar grumbled on the other side of the phone.

They might have promised not to involve the other in any ritual work or violate any boundaries where their thoughts or dreams were concerned, but they were still sisters.

“If you’d done anything to him it would’ve come back on you, and even worse,” Liza said. “Need I remind you of Emily Tingly in the seventh grade?”

“Yeah,” Bryar shuddered dramatically. “Let’s not do that again. I’m even more attached to my hair than I was then.”

When the middle school basketball star had dumped Bryar for Emily, the only girl in school with breasts, Bryar had taken her revenge female-style. Knowing that she was getting her hair permed the next day, Bryar thought she was being clever when she’d locked herself in her bedroom and thought up a hex in which the perm not only left poor Emily with a big ball of frizz on her pretty little head, but had turned most of it into an extremely unflattering shade of orange.

Emily had been mortified, inconsolable to her friends.

But Emily hadn’t been half as upset as
Bryar
was when her alarm went off three days later and she discovered that more than half of her hair stayed behind on her pillow when she crawled out of bed.

It had taken more than a year for it to grow back, and according to Bryar, she still had a few bald spots.

“
I
t is going to be a
good
day today!”
Liza Jane lectured her reflection in the bathroom mirror later that morning. “I don’t care what happens. It’s going to be a good day.”

Yes, someone had tried to ruin her. Yes, she’d somehow made an enemy and didn’t know why. But she was determined to be positive, to have a new outlook on life.

The fact that she didn’t have a vehicle to get her to town was a problem, of course. She’d walked back down the road to Christabel again, hoping for some wild reason that letting it rest overnight would somehow rejuvenate it, but the car was still as dead as it had been the night before.

“Stupid,” she’d muttered to herself on the long walk back home. “It’s not like the car just needed a little nap.”

First things first, after she brushed her teeth and put on her makeup she used her phone to call information for a local garage. Of course that had gone over like a lead balloon. It was the automated operator and her combination of country/northeastern accent.

“City and state please?”

“Kudzu Valley, Kentucky.” (It started out well enough.)

“What listing?”

“A garage.”

*Pause*

“You’re looking for ‘Garden City.’ There are currently no listings for Garden City in your area. Would you like to try another option?”

“Not ‘Garden City.’ Garage.
Mechanic
.” (Now she was growing impatient.)

“Thank you. One moment please.”

Liza Jane had waited.

“There is one listing for Mayfield Landfill. The number is–“

“No!” Liza had shrieked. “A
mechanic
.”

“One moment please.”

Liza started pacing around the room. –

“There is no listing for Mountain Knife Works. Would you like to–“

“Operator! Operator!”

Even with a live person on the phone it had taken several tries to get what she needed.

She wasn’t going to let that get her down, however. It was going to be a
good
day.

Information provided her with three numbers. Nobody answered at the first one. It didn’t even go to a voicemail. The second one told her it would be at least two weeks before they could get to her car and she’d have to find her own way to get it to them.

By the time the third one picked up, Liza was on the verge of panic.

“Jimmy Dean’s Autos,” the gruff voice on the other end of the line barked.

“Hi, I’m new to town and I live really far out and my car stopped running. I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s just dead. I need someone to look at it and I also need them to come and get it. Do you all do that?”

“Nope, sorry,” the voice barked again. “You’ll have to bring it to us.”

“Yes, but see,” Liza did her best to keep her voice level, even though she felt like screaming. “I can’t
get
it to you. It won’t start.”

“We don’t got a tow truck,” the man laughed. “So unless you want to push it…”

“I’m twenty miles outside of town,” she lamented.

“Best get started now then,” he laughed again. “We close at five.”

And then, though she knew it was wrong, she turned on a charm of a different kind. Covering the speaker with one hand, Liza closed her eyes and muttered a few words her own grandmother had shared with her and advised her to only use when it was an absolute emergency. Liza felt the word could be used to describe her current situation.

She could feel the air around her changing, growing warmer. The tiny hairs on her arms stood at attention. The blood inside her churned and bubbled until she felt like she might explode and then a wave of goosebumps rippled across her skin from head to toe.

When she opened her eyes she could hear Jimmy Dean talking on the other end of the line.

“Well, I reckon we can come up there and get you. I can borr-y a truck and chain from a fellar I know. Where’d you say you was at? Can’t leave a woman up in the mountains all by herself.”

And with that, she had a ride into town.