More Than Magic (13 page)

Nick nodded. “Sounds like an investment opportunity to me.” He looked through the glass window into the lab. “What
is
this place?” He made a show of looking outside, toward the chicken house, then back in the lab. “It’s like a farm amusement park. Chickens and sh—stuff on top, shiny scientific stuff buried beneath.”

“I like that! An amusement park,” Jamie said. “But we need rides. Can we build one?”
 

“Whoa! People don’t come up here for amusement park rides,” Grace protested. “Why don’t you tell Mr. Nick about this place?” She leaned against the inner door, still struggling to get her hair to stay up and losing the battle. It wrapped around her fingers, crackling with static.
 

Jamie stood up straight and put on a serious expression. “This is the Woodruff Herb Quality Control Lab. We validate the strength, purity and eff—” Blue eyes glanced in Grace’s direction but she only nodded encouragement. “Eff-i-cacy of every batch of Woodruff Herbs against bio—bio-something—”

“Bio-active,” Grace provided.

“Them,” Jamie said. “Reference standards using the latest—” There was another pause. “Analytical tools and processes.”

Nick started to clap, but Jamie frowned. “I’m not finished yet!”

Holding his hands up in surrender, Nick leaned against the doorframe.

“We also check for micro—microbe activity, like yeast and mold and E. coli and sa—that fishy stuff!”

“Salmonella,” Grace whispered. She’d given up on her hair and let it fall loose.

“That! And we check for heavy metals too. But Woodruff Herbs
never
has any of
that
. To top all that off, everything’s checked again by about three other labs and we have all kinds of seals and certifications and stuff!” Jamie pointed to the wall full of licenses and certificates they needed to stay in business, grinned, and made a flourishing bow.

Nick clapped. “Bravo! Impressive.” He moved in closer to the glass window in the interior door to look around inside the lab. “All this just to test the herbs?”

“Oh, we test our irrigation water and our fertilizer too!” Jamie added. “This stuff’s
hard
work.”

“I can see that.” Nick walked to look at pictures on the walls. He stopped for a moment at the desk to pick up the framed picture Grace had there.

“That’s Pops and my younger brother, Daniel,” Grace said. “And, speaking of Daniel, it’s getting late and there are some bees that need keeping.”

“Awww, they don’t need nothin’. They pretty much keep themselves,” Jamie grumbled.

“Perhaps Mr. Nick would like to have a tour. I have a few things to do at the house.”
 

Jamie picked up on the hint. “Sure! I can show you some cool stuff.”

“As long as it’s a very
sedate
tour,” Grace said, looking right at Nick. When his eyes met hers, her insides went warm and effervescent. Dammit.

“We shall do our best to avoid anything too exciting,” he promised, waving Jamie toward the door.

“But after, we can study on the ciphers, while you’re bakin’ the soul cakes I mean. Then I can help you write all the notes and wrap ’em. Is that okay?” Jamie asked.

“Certainly. Homework?”

“Did it on the bus.” Jamie ran out the door.

Nick started to follow, then stopped.

“It looks great down. You should leave it that way.” He said it in that low voice again, pitched only for her. He didn’t even look back to see her reaction. Good thing, though. He might have seen her jerk her hair around with the pen until she managed a very messy bun.

“So, do you know about soul cakes?” She heard Jamie ask from beyond the door.

“No. Does Dr. Grace make them?”

Grace realized she had been holding her breath, waiting to hear his voice again.

“Mostly she burns ’em,” Jamie whispered, loudly.

Nick’s laugh was as warm as his voice. “She burns
soul
cakes? Is it some kind of Halloween trick-or-treat joke?”

Jamie giggled as they walked beyond her hearing.

And of course, he was good with children too.

Chapter Six

Nick had begun to realize that he wasn’t good at interrogating kids. Especially not after watching Grace struggling with her hair for what seemed like an hour back in the lab. He’d wanted to stride across the room to pull her hands away and feel the hair cascade and cling and wrap around
his
fingers—in that dream world inside his head where she’d let him, that is.

It had left him with no patience. And especially not with Jamie, who liked to talk, but not about the things Nick wanted to talk about.

“And so everybody wants Dr. Daniel to come speechify at them about their bees ’cause he knows that if you farm organic and don’t do all kinds of chemicals and pesticides, they don’t do that disappearing act like the commercial bees do.” Jamie leaned in conspiratorially. “If I was treated like them commercial bees, I’d take off too! Dr. Daniel’s a doctor, like Dr. Grace. But she’s a doctor-doctor and he’s another kind of doctor and—well, they’re both Dr. anyway.”

Jamie and Pooka had just returned from a slow trek down the row of beehives and back, after leaving Nick behind because “the girls mightn’t like his smell” and because he obviously wasn’t bee-savvy, since he was unaware that the worker bees
were
girls. Apparently all was in good order for the snow storm because Jamie was quite cheerful about the state of the hives.

Nick tried once more to focus the conversation. “Is a doctor-doctor a medical doctor?”

“Uh huh—I mean, yes sir.”

“So, why isn’t Dr. Grace taking care of people?”

Jamie spun around at that, fists on hips. “She
is
taking care of people! She’s taking care of whole lots of people with her herbs and stuff! My mom says if Dr. Grace wants to heal people from the inside out, that’s
her
business.”

“That makes sense.” And if friends and family and people in town were questioning her decision not to practice medicine, it would explain
some
of her skittishness.

The youngster peered at him thoughtfully, then back toward the greenhouses they were approaching. Pooka forged ahead of them, sniffing everything that could be sniffed.

“These are the greenhouses. Dr. Grace does a
lot
of wild-crafting and wild-sim-sim something—it’s growed in the woods—but we grow a lot in the greenhouses and gardens too.”

“Wild-crafting?”

“Picking the herbs from in the woods where they grow wild all by themselves. But we always re-seed. And we grow crops in the woods from scratch.” Jamie pointed to the wooden contraption covering an area of the garden. “And we’ve tried to make our own fake woods, but Dr. Grace says it ain’t the same.” Jamie gave him a pointed look, as if expecting the next question. “When she
studies
it in her
laboratory
. All of ’em are different.” She counted on her fingers. “The ones we grow under the fake shade, the ones we grow in the woods, and the ones the mountain grows.”

“So which ones are better?” Nick asked as he looked into the greenhouse, noting the clear absence of illegal plants.

“Oh, the ones the mountain grows for sure. Woodruff Mountain ginseng is the best in the world!” Jamie responded.

Nick looked at the surrounding woods. “So where’s that grown? The ginseng?”

“Only Dr. Grace knows where the best stuff is. It’s an official Woodruff secret. No one knows where the Woodruff ginseng bed is ’cept Dr. Grace and The Woodsman, afore he passed. Now it’s just Dr. Grace.” Jamie chopped one hand down on the other in a gesture of finality.

“Why’s it so secret?” Nick was really curious now. He didn’t even know what ginseng was, other than something in energy drinks, but it might explain some other things—like the way Grace had acted in the woods. It sounded like she had taken on a lot of responsibility when her grandfather died.

Jamie motioned him closer. “Because it’s worth a lot of money being as it’s really, honestly wild and really, honestly powerful stuff. A
lot
. And it takes time to grow to be worth that much. Lots and lots and
lots
of years.”

“So, if it’s worth so much, isn’t she afraid someone will sneak into those woods and steal it?” He had obviously missed this bit of info in his research. Of course, who knew what “a lot” meant here?

“Oh, sang poachers. They do that all the time. Even in the Park! I mean,
The Park
!” Both hands went into the air. “That’s like stealing from Uncle Sam. If they get caught—” The hands swept down and out. “Bam! In the slammer!”

“But—?”

“But, they still try. ’Cause the Woodruff stuff’s worth that much. They been trying for hundreds of years to find that bed. I mean, there ain’t much ginseng left in the wild no more, and most of that’s way up north. But the mountain ain’t gonna let ’em get to it. Not even those stupid—” Jamie suddenly turned a slight shade of pink and pointed to the shed with wood stacked all around it. “Now,
that’s
where we dry the herbs. That’s a hot job.”

“But, about the gin—”

Jamie struck a belligerent pose. “You’re awful curious about sang. Are you a poacher, Mr. Nick?”

Nick blinked, then solemnly raised one hand, looking first at Jamie, then at Pooka, who also stared at him intently. “I don’t even know what sang is and wouldn’t know it if I stepped on it, or in it, or—whatever.”

“Hmmm.” Jamie eyed him. “Well, I suspect so. You don’t seem very smart about natural stuff.”

Nick would, at that moment, have to agree. He had the feeling that when he had driven up that road, he had crossed into a different world—more real and vibrant than the one he lived in.

“But you need ta know something important.” Jamie motioned him closer and Nick hunkered down to listen. “The Woodsman—he showed me some old bones once, up on the ridge. They’d been there a long while. But he said they was someone who probably got lost lookin’ for his sang.” Jamie looked guilty. “It was when he caught me trying to find the bed. I was only wanting to prove I could, but…I got lost too. Even with my compass! And I’m
good
with my compass!”

Nick could
try
to blame getting lost in the woods this morning on a plant screwing his navigation.

“The Woodsman told me that his great-grandpap—he was part-Cherokee—told
him
that if you wanna find sang you have to follow what you’re afeard of. You have to follow the bear or the painter. Something that scares you. Otherwise, if you follow something nice n’ pretty—something that smells good—you’ll end up down a hole.”

If that was the criteria, Nick was lucky he hadn’t fallen in a hole, after following Grace into the woods this morning.

“I’m thinking the Woodruff bed’s
so
old that even if you follow your most fearfulness thing, you still wouldn’t find it. There’s so much ginseng up there. It’s like, well,
magic
,” Jamie ended on a whisper.

That word again. Nick stood and looked around at the shadows creeping across the grounds, and the deepening darkness of the woods surrounding them. He was pretty sure why Grace had gone trekking through the woods alone this morning.

“But, doesn’t that mean Dr. Grace has to tend the sang by herself?”

“Yep.”

“That seems like a lot of work.”

“Well, we don’t sell a lot of
that
ginseng. The Woodsman really hated to dig any of it up, being that it’s better to let it get
real
old and all. But because some folks
really
need it, he did. And she did this year too. Carried the roots out all by herself. She’s the best, you know. But she misses him something fierce, Dr. Grace does. She don’t laugh like she used to or play with Pooka and me, but that’s okay when you’re sad. It’s like she’s worried all the time about something. I don’t think it’s money though, ’cause, if it was, she’d sell some more ginseng. It brings a
lot
of money, let me tell you,” Jamie was almost out of breath. It didn’t last. “The Woodsman harvested a root once that was more’n a hundred years old. There’re people who’d pay a
lot
of money for a root like that only to put it in a case and say they owned it, but he sold it for medicine.”

When Nick sorted through the quicksilver flow of words, he couldn’t reconcile any of it to Grace Woodruff being the chemical mastermind behind powerful illegal narcotics on the streets of Atlanta. Especially if Grace had that kind of money in herbs she could easily, and legally, sell. Yet another puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

Jamie looked around. “Well, you seen the chickens and the lab and the greenhouses and the garden. You wanna see the goats or the honey house next?”

“I’m sure the goats are great—” The look on Jamie’s face made him revise his comment. “And I want to take a look at them at some point, but I
really
want to see those ciphers of yours. I’m in mood for puzzle-solving.”

“And soul cakes!”

“Those too. Assuming they’re not burnt.”

Jamie laughed.

Grace slid the pan of cookies into the oven and set the timer, careful to keep the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder.

“I know. I am
really
so very sorry. I’ve just— I’ve been dealing with my grandfather’s estate and his business and—”
I knew this was a mistake. I shouldn’t have called you at all.
“I’m usually not so disorganized.”