Caroline Haskell stirred her pot of chowder, dipped out a spoonful, blew on it, and sniffed. The taste of Maine, the taste of home. Soul food, Down-east style. God, she'd missed it. Somehow, clams and onions and the lingering thick greasy smell of fried-out salt pork blended perfectly with hot apple pie and woodsmoke. She tasted the cooling spoonful and then dumped a guesstimate of salt into the pot before sliding it all to the back corner of the black iron stove.
Old habits made her duck low to check the firebox, rattle the grates to shake down ash, and cock her head as she gauged the coals. One more stick of oak, that was the call. Cooking on the ancient Atlantic Clarion had little in common with setting a gas burner to "simmer" and turning your back on supper to watch Oprah on TV. Or punching a few buttons on a microwave.
Of course, the House wouldn't have let a TV through the door in the first place. It barely tolerated indoor plumbing and only allowed electricity in three of the newest rooms. The rest of the rambling collage of additions still lived in the eighteenth century. Or seventeenth.
Hell, the heart of it was Neolithic. And Caroline ought to know — parts of the place were as old as the potsherds and chipped flints she uncovered in Anasazi ruins, summer fieldwork for her Anthro post-grad studies.
This sudden attack of domesticity puzzled her. It was out of character — she never had time for puttering around the kitchen, what with her TA class sections and fieldwork and roughing out that damned dissertation. And where would she be finding clams in Arizona, anyway?
But Ray Guptil had dropped off a heaping peck of softshells that had spent a couple of days in clean salt water to wash the mud out of their meat, and Alton Frost had left three sacks of fresh-dug spuds last week, "finest kind," and Amy Wetherall had come by with two loaves of whole-wheat still hot and fragrant from her oven, and then the Greenings were just hanging there on the apple trees out back, calling to Caroline . . . .
Stonefort people took care of the Woman, the Witch, the matriarch of the Haskell House. Women, right now, five witches rather than Shakespeare's three, more bodies than had lived in the House in decades. Aunt Alice, "Aunt" Kate, Caroline, the Morgan girls — poor kids, Maria Morgan murdered by the Peruvian brujo and Daniel vanished into that kinda sorta "dead" that Morgans cooked up if cops or insurance adjusters or rivals started sniffing too close on the trail. "Dead" with a legal certificate and a memorial marker like so many others in the Morgan graveyard, "Lost At Sea."
With Dan Morgan, that dodge had been damn near necessary rather than just convenience. He'd been held prisoner in the Pratt tunnels when Maria drowned, already "lost," memorial mass and all. If he'd come back from the dead after she'd died, he'd have been an obvious suspect. Some of their fights had become Stonefort legends. Not a smooth marriage, by any measure.
So now Aunt Alice was guardian of Peggy and Ellen Morgan, AKA Mouse and Ellie, and sole trustee of the Morgan estate. And it was a hell of a lot safer for them to live here rather than at their house. Less chance of them ending up as hostages again. Plenty of room still — Caroline wasn't sure exactly how many rooms the old pile of dry rot actually held. It probably changed with the weather, and the place would be growing more with winter coming on. Chance of more bodies to shelter, more mouths to feed.
Anyway, the House had to grow, with Kate living here. The big lug almost brushed the kitchen ceiling beams with her buzz-cut and made any room she was in feel cramped. People averaged smaller when the House was built, and Kate most certainly averaged larger. But she strengthened the place, for sure. The floors and stairs didn't creak anymore, just from that magic of wood and stone sleeping under their roof. The chimneys drew better, window sashes didn't rattle in the wind, doors no longer stuck.
Speak of the devil . . . Kate's truck rumbled into the driveway, as distinctive a sound as the foghorn on the Morgan's Point buoy. Aunt Alice's Subaru crunched over the gravel behind it. They must have met up somewhere for lunch, for them both to get home at the same time.
Caroline glanced out the kitchen window, verifying evidence like a good research assistant before she set the table. Then she stopped and stared. Both of the women sat behind their steering wheels for a full minute, shoulders slumped, and then climbed out with a weariness Caroline could feel from thirty feet away. Aunt Alice had to brace herself against her car's doorpost in order to pull her bag out, and then staggered with the weight of it.
Caroline felt a sudden flash of rage. She knew what had caused her sudden impulse to putter around the kitchen. Why she'd felt possessed to pick and peel enough Greenings for a pie.
Damned House.
It wanted hot food, hearty food, easy food, ready the moment Alice and Kate walked through its door. It felt quite comfortable with manipulating people to make it happen. Times like this, she felt like ramming the entire witch thing up someone's ass. Look at where it had gotten her aunt.
Next thing to dead, that was where. And damn few of her line had died of old age, either.
Caroline met them at the door and grabbed Alice's bag. She pulled up just short of throwing it across the room, stopped by the memory of exactly how many sharp and breakable things it held. Sharp and breakable and expensive things. She set it down carefully on top of the boot rack, exactly where her aunt would expect to find it on the way out the door at a dead run.
A shiver ran down Caroline's back, a touch of winter in the air, and she looked up. A big white SUV ghosted past on the road, slow, windows tinted next thing to black, and she felt something in there watching. Something hostile, something nasty, watching and waiting and taking notes. The shiver came and went again, and the car rolled on like a passing cloud that left the warm September sun shining again in the dooryard.
That Peruvian brujo, that Tupash, had driven a truck like that. He'd kidnapped the girls as weapons to get what he wanted from their father. But he was dead.
Caroline shook herself and turned back to where Kate and Alice had slumped into chairs, on opposite sides of the old maple table. She wondered if either of them had the strength left to hoist a spoon, or whether she'd have to hand feed them.
She stood there, hands on her hips, and glared from one to the other. "Why don't you just shoot yourselves? It'd hurt less and be over a damn sight quicker."
Kate didn't even look up. Alice stirred, shook her head, and glanced wistfully at the pot of chowder.
"It's my job."
Caroline ignored her chowder for the moment. Bowls broke too easily. Instead, she grabbed a loaf of still-warm bread, slammed the cutting board down on the counter, and hacked off four or five thick slices. Cutting something, anything, felt deliciously destructive.
"Which job? ER nurse? Ambulance? Guardian of every woman and child in Sunrise County and protector of small furry critters? I add that up to maybe forty hours. Every goddamn day."
As if summoned, Atropos padded across the floor and bounced up into Kate's lap. The calico catlet kneaded her chosen pillow with her front paws, claws snagging gently in Kate's jeans, and then settled down to purr.
"Our people need me."
Caroline slammed the butter dish down in the middle of the table, clattering a couple of knives after it. Sterling silver knives, gifts to some ancestral Haskell Witch.
"You're scaring the cat."
Actually, it was Kate who'd twitched. But Caroline took the message and reined her anger back a notch. She dished out chowder and handed spoons around. She filled glasses with water, cool water brimming with the Power of the House's Spring. She leaned her back against the cold metal of the refrigerator, and glared.
"Our people don't need you dead. Or laid up in the hospital again. And I need you healthy enough that I can get back to having a life. Professor Stevens is getting twitchy."
Aunt Alice chewed her mouthful of bread, swallowed, and sighed. "I thought you'd conned him into another semester free."
"There's a limit to how long he'll swallow the story. I let him fill in the blanks — single mom on the rez, likes men and the bottle a bit too much, raised by the saintly aunt who's lying at death's door, can't get a nurse to stay here on the backside of nowhere, the whole nine yards. Amazing how many stereotypes you can fit into the head of a man who should know better. But he could make one phone call and blow my whole game to shit. He is a cultural anthropologist, you know. He's used to asking questions."
That drew a wan smile. "Lainie will love what you've done to her reputation."
Caroline shook her head. "She thinks it's kinda cool. Suggested most of it in the first place. Laughed and quoted that 'Nobody loves a drunken Indian' bit."
"My sister has a twisted mind. Always did. You take after her."
"I thought you said I got that from my dad."
"No. He gave you a genetic predisposition for carrying a set of picklocks in your purse."
Kate scraped the bottom of her bowl and tilted it for the last spoonful. She looked better now, her back straighter and color back in her cheeks. Maybe it was the food, maybe the water, maybe just sitting and the restful conversation. Maybe the goddamned House. Caroline took a hint and refilled the bowl.
Goddamned House. Caroline felt her anger building again. "I still don't see what good killing yourself does for the Sovereign Naskeag Nation. Or Aunt Kate and the rest of the paleface types, either."
Kate had become "aunt" by custom and courtesy, just like she'd be "uncle" if she were male and married to Caroline's real aunt. And all of Stonefort called the Haskell Witches "aunt" anyway, whatever the blood ties and age, and Kate had moved solidly into the "witch" category with their fight over at the Pratts. Aunt Alice might have shot that brujo through the heart with a silver bullet, but Kate had been the one who actually killed him. She'd drawn on the Power of the whole Stonefort peninsula to burn his body down to ash. The surge had blown out the power grid for miles around.
Neat jiu-jitsu trick, giving him way too much of what he wanted. Even if she didn't believe in magic.
Kate cleared her throat. Both Caroline and Alice focused on her — the big woman didn't talk much, particularly when aunt and niece were bickering. "Funny you should mention that. I had a long talk with Dr. Adams one afternoon, a little after your aunt and I got shot."
She paused, pain twisting her face, and then went on. "Just after Jackie shot us. Anyway. He said he'd run a statistics program on the hospital computers. Odd thing. Based on what he saw, somewhere between five and ten people a year owed their lives to Alice. That's how many fewer patients died while she was on shift, compared to the averages of every other shift. Ten year average. It didn't matter who she was working with, what part of the hospital she was in, ER or OB/GYN or Oncology or Pediatrics. If she was on duty, fewer patients died." She paused again.
"I wouldn't be sitting here if she hadn't been riding the ambulance late one night."
That was a long speech, for Kate. Dr. Adams. He was the head of surgery or some such thing, big honcho at Sunrise General. He'd probably fished the bullets out of both women.
"Sampling error." Caroline shook her head. "He couldn't have found enough shifts she didn't work to make a valid statistical comparison."
Aunt Alice suddenly glanced around, eyes wide, noticing the abnormal quiet. "Where are the girls?"
Damn! That would freak her out. "Mom stopped by and picked them up. She said she'd promised to start teaching them to make baskets, and this was as good a weekend as any. She'll see they get to school on Monday."
Alice took a deep breath, looking bleak. "Just as well. Getting back to your father, I think we need to hold a séance. Pry into some Morgan secrets."
Séance. Summon the "spirit" of Ben Morgan. He'd also played that old Morgan trick — another faked death, another "Lost at Sea." That one was a favorite, what with the number of sailors and fishermen who found that as their real grave. No body necessary to keep up the fiction. Both her father and his brother Daniel had been "lost at sea," twenty years apart.
Kate frowned and pushed back from the table. Her bowl was empty again. "I need a cigarette." Then she was limping out the kitchen door.
"What bit her?"
"Attack of conscience." Alice shook her head. "Got a wild hair up her ass about being a good cop. She doesn't want to hear anything she shouldn't about people with memorial tablets gathering moss in the Morgan graveyard. Don't ever develop a conscience, girl. It'll just get in your way."
"Small chance of that, with you as my shining example."
Alice shrugged. "Like I said, it gets in the way of the job. The Woman does what she has to do. Anyway, how's your Latin?"
"So-so. What the hell's that tangent about?"
"Not a tangent. Most of the earliest Morgan archives are written in Latin, church Latin rather than the classic. That's what their tame priests knew, and they were the only ones who knew how to write. God help us if we had to read their tortured notion of Welsh spelling."
She paused for another bite of bread slabbed with butter — fresh butter from Jed Prouty's farm about ten miles up the road. At least Caroline had handed over a sack of Greenings in trade for that.
Then Alice swallowed and smiled, her first genuine smile since walking through the door. "Hey, maybe you could use those tattered sheets of sheep-hide to finesse your Professor Stevens. Here you've got this unique chance for some research, genuine unpublished source materials covering the first contact between aboriginals and the European settlers. Don't need to tell him any little details like the dates involved."
It figured. Her first real smile would involve some touch of twisty thinking, some way of achieving three ends with one move. Haskell thinking.
On the other hand . . . "Dad's people have caused me a lot of trouble with my field work. They owe me."
Alice lifted her right eyebrow. "Eh? Now who's going off on tangents?"
"Ya ta hey. I had a hell of a time getting past Grandmother Walks-with-the-moon. She thought we were too assimilated to count as real Indians. Not that she used two-dollar words. 'Brown skin, white heart,' that was her exact phrase. We've lived with those damned Welshmen for too long. We live in villages along with the whiteskins, speak English, eat English, work English, don't do sings, don't dance, don't drum or wear fancy feathers. Never got herded into reservations or starved or massacred. Not real Indians."
Alice sat there, her face quiet. "And yet she let you enter the kiva. How did you change her mind?"
"I sat in front of her door."
"And?"
"I sat in front of her door."
Now Alice lifted her left eyebrow. "And?"
"I thought about our Spring. That Arizona sun gets to you after a while."
"How long did it take?"
"She offered me water on the third morning. Said that no English could be that stubborn." Caroline's mouth quirked a smile. "If she thinks I'm stubborn, she's never met you."
Alice just stared at her, quiet, ignoring the jab. Finally she nodded to herself. "That would get you past the first wall, maybe the second. What got you into the heart?"
"I told her about us, of course. After we'd swapped stories for about a year, I chanted her our creation myth. The real one, including the lines about the Sea People from the land of the dawn and their white swan canoes. About how we assimilated the whiteskins, the first time around, them and enough of their diseases that the Colonial epidemics mostly passed us by. About how we used the Sea People as camouflage when the English showed up and tried to take our homes."
Caroline paused, glanced at the door still resolutely shut behind Kate, and cut a couple of slabs of apple pie. She consulted the state of her stomach and added one for herself with a side order of a cheddar wedge. Prouty cheddar.
"Then it got complicated. I had to explain about the difference between the Welsh and English tribes, about how to outsiders they might look the same, like Blackfoot and Crow, but that they were really ancient enemies. About how half the French thought we were English, and half the English thought we were French, and how we dodged them both by being neither. Switching sides so fast the paint never dried on the road signs, was the way I explained it."
That drew a snort from Alice. "You tell her about us?"
Caroline understood the accent on that word — "us" the family, not "us" the tribe. "I had to. You don't get far, trying to hide things from Grandmother Walks. Anyway, as soon as I mentioned epidemics, she was all over that like a tall dog. I had to give her an explanation a lot stronger than that we'd met some of those germs before. Summoning the spirits of the land and air and water, now, that she could believe."
Alice stared down into her glass of water. "You never mentioned any of this. No letters, emails, phone calls. Nothing."
"No. That was half the point of going out West, wasn't it? You kept telling me that I had to stand on my own two feet. Learn to fight my own battles, without you and the House to back me up. The all-powerful Haskell Witch can't ever rely on anyone but herself."
"Jeezum. Nothing says you can't ask for help. Can't accept help when it comes along. I've got Kate . . ."
Time to break this off before it dissolved into tears and words regretted in the morning. "Speaking of Kate, what are we supposed to be plotting behind her back?"
Alice shook herself and then looked up from her glass. "Plots? Nothing dark and sinister, girl. I just want you to comb through those papers for any mention of a stone circle up on Dyers Ridge. Any mention at all. That thing is old and powerful and tied somehow to Kate. It isn't Naskeag — its roots have to be Welsh, damn near as old as the Morgans in this land. We've got to find out more about it. Ask your father to help, if he isn't too busy stealing something from a museum in Bangkok. Ask Gary."
Gary Morgan, the half-brother she'd always thought was a cousin until Alice sorted out some of the local tangles for her. Ben Morgan had the morals of a tomcat. Damned awkward that the only boy in three townships who caught her fancy turned out to be her half-brother. Cousin wouldn't have been so bad. Half-brother was . . . tacky.
But maybe her hormones were just missing Kenny Grayeyes. Damn few Haskell women had much use for celibacy.
Caroline grabbed her wandering thoughts by the scruff of the neck. Back to business. "Ummm. Aunt Alice, you still haven't told me what this is all about. What the hell did you and Aunt Kate get into?"
"Eh? Girl, you've got to work on your mind-reading skills if you're ever going to amount to something as a witch. We've got a problem. A big problem."
Oh, shit.