Chapter 33

Annie had to be sure.

The first thing she did when she went home was head for her bedroom and flip on her laptop and look up Cookie Crandall. Nothing. Was her name even Cookie? Did people really name their kids Cookie? Maybe it was another name, like Catherine? There was a Catherine Crandall . . . an obituary. That couldn’t be her. That woman was 102 years old.

Oy. So Detective Bryant was right. Cookie Crandall was nowhere on the Internet. She checked all the information services she subscribed to for journalistic reasons. Was she in any of the government records? Taxes? Social Security? Nothing. Click. Click. Click. Birth certificate? Nothing.

What could this mean? It could mean that Cookie was running away from something or someone. It also could mean that she just liked to live “off the grid,” and Annie had known people like that. It would make sense. The only thing Annie knew about Cookie’s past was that she’d spent time in India, learning yoga. She’d also recently mentioned Eastern Europe. She’d certainly have a passport, then. She’d have to call the passport officials on Monday.

“Why would a witch choose Cumberland Creek? A place that still has the Sunday blue law and is extremely conservative?” The questions Bill had asked earlier nagged at her. Even she and her husband were starting to reconsider their move. If she could afford private school, she’d pull her sons out of the public school so fast. If she thought she could homeschool, she would.

Maybe Cookie was pulled in by the lower cost of living and by the beauty of the area, like she and Mike were. Maybe that was all there was to it. You think you can manage being different in a place like this, with its bucolic hills and valleys. You allow the beauty and softness of the views to lure you into thinking that the people are soft and beautiful, too. You think eventually you’ll find other people like you or that others will learn to like you despite your differences. But it took Annie over a year to find even one friend. Then, the next thing she knew, she had several—all in the scrapbook club except Beatrice.

Now she was considering leaving again, going back home to Bethesda. She was not sure she was the person to take on the school system about their religious “education” program. She didn’t think she had the heart to put her boys through it. She could take anything they dished out. But she didn’t want to place her boys in any more sticky situations.

“It’s not education if they are teaching just about Christianity,” Cookie had said quietly, matter-of-factly, at one of their last crops. “And they are doing the children a disservice by not teaching about the rest of the world’s religions. It feels cruel to me.”

“They’ve been doing it for years,” DeeAnn said. “Nobody’s died from it.”

“But religion shouldn’t be used as a way to divide. It sends the wrong message. We are all one, no matter how we choose to connect to the universe,” Cookie said.

Annie loved it when Cookie spoke up. She was so eloquent and steady about it. Annie herself couldn’t talk about religion sometimes, because she was so afraid to offend someone. But how could you be offended by that statement?

Annie’s stomach lurched when she thought of Cookie in jail. As a reporter, caught in the thick of investigations, she had spent nights in jail herself and knew it to be an unpleasant place, where it didn’t matter how nice of a person you were.

“Hey,” Mike said and sat up in bed. “Is Cookie out yet?”

“No,” she said, standing up and taking her clothes off. She reached for her nightgown, slipped into it, and crawled in bed beside her husband.

“You smell like beer,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.

Mercy, he felt so warm and so hard. Smelled so male.

“Turn you on?” she said and grinned.