Garden Spells (2 page)

Fred took it, looking embarrassed, then he handed her an envelope with a check in it. The act was completely innocuous, because he always gave her a check when she delivered her jelly and vinegar, but this check was a full ten times what his normal check to her was. And the envelope was brighter, as if filled with lightning bugs, lit by his hope.

“Thank you, Fred. I’ll see you next month.”

“Right. Bye, Claire.”

Fred Walker watched Claire wait by the door for Evanelle to pay the cashier. Claire was a pretty woman, all dark hair and eyes and olive complexion. She didn’t look anything like her mother, whom Fred had known in school, but then, neither did Sydney. They obviously took after their fathers, whoever their fathers were. People treated Claire politely, but they thought of her as standoffish and they never stopped her to talk about the weather or the new interstate connector or how sweet this year’s crop of strawberries was. She was a Waverley, and Waverleys were an odd bunch, each in his or her own way. Claire’s mother had been a troublemaker who left her children to be raised by their grandmother and then died in a car pileup in Chattanooga a few years later, her grandmother rarely left the house, her distant cousin Evanelle was forever giving people strange gifts. But that was just how the Waverleys were. Just like Runions were talkers, and Plemmons were shifty, and Hopkins men always married older women. But Claire kept the Waverley house in good shape, and it was one of the oldest homes around and tourists liked to drive by it, which was good for the town. And most importantly, Claire was there when someone in town needed a solution to a problem that could be solved only by the flowers grown around that apple tree in the Waverleys’ backyard. She was the first in three generations to openly share that particular gift. That made her okay.

Evanelle walked over to Claire, and they left together.

Fred clutched the bag containing the bottle and walked back into his office.

He took off his blazer and sat back at the desk, staring again at the small framed photo of a handsome man wearing a tux. The photo had been taken at Fred’s fiftieth birthday party a couple of years ago.

Fred and his partner, James, had been together for over thirty years, and if people knew the true nature of their relationship, it had gone on so long now that no one cared. But he and James had grown apart lately, and little seeds of anxiousness were starting to take root. Over the past few months, James had been staying overnight in Hickory, where he worked, a few nights a week, saying he was working so late that commuting back to Bascom didn’t make sense. This left Fred at home alone far too often, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. James was the one who always said, “You make wonderful pot stickers, let’s have that for dinner tonight.” Or, “There’s a movie I want us to see on television.” James was always right, and Fred questioned every little thing when he wasn’t there. What should he have for dinner? Should he set the things he needed to take to the dry cleaner out at night or wait for the morning?

All his life Fred had heard things about the Waverleys’ rose geranium wine. It signaled in the drinker a return to happiness, remembering the good, and Fred wanted back the good thing he and James had. Claire made only one bottle a year, and it was damn expensive, but it was a sure thing, because Waverleys, for all their blindness to their own way of living, were extremely accurate in helping other people see.

He reached for the phone and dialed James’s work number. He needed to ask him what he should make for dinner.

And what meat did you serve with magic wine?

Claire arrived at Anna Chapel’s home late that afternoon. Anna lived in a cul-de-sac neighborhood just outside Orion College, and the only way to get to it was through the campus. The neighborhood had been for the instructors at the college, the houses built at the same time the campus was constructed a hundred years ago. The intention was to keep the academic community as insular as possible. A wise move, considering the opposition to a college for women at the time. Today, the chancellor still made his home there, and a few professors, including Anna, lived in the original houses. But the neighborhood was dominated now by young families who had no association with the college. They simply liked the privacy and security of the place.

“Claire, welcome,” Anna said when she opened the front door to find Claire on her porch, carrying a cooler of things that needed to be refrigerated immediately. She stepped aside and let Claire enter. “You know the way. Do you need help?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine,” Claire said, though late spring and summer were her busiest seasons and the time when she had the least help. She usually hired first-year culinary students at Orion to help her during the school year. They, after all, were not from Bascom and the only questions they asked were culinary ones. She’d learned the hard way to avoid hiring anyone local if she could help it. Most of them expected to learn something magic or, at the very least, get to the apple tree in the backyard, hoping to find out if the local legend was true, that its apples would tell them what the biggest event in their lives would be.

Claire went to the kitchen, put away the things in the cooler, then opened the kitchen door and brought in the rest of the things through the back entrance. Soon the farmhouse-style kitchen was alive with the steamy warmth and crafty scent that eventually flowed through the house. It welcomed Anna’s guests like a kiss on the cheek from their mothers, like coming home.

Anna always wanted to use her own dishes—heavy pottery ones that she’d made herself—so Claire arranged the salad on the salad plates first and was ready to serve when Anna told her everyone was seated.

The menu tonight was salad, yucca soup, pork tenderloins stuffed with nasturtiums and chives and goat cheese, lemon-verbena sorbet between dishes, and the violet white cake for dessert. Claire was kept busy, monitoring the food at the stove, arranging the food on the plates, serving and then deftly and quietly taking plates away when the guests had finished a course. This was as formal as any affair she catered, but these were art professors and their spouses, casual and intelligent people who poured their own wine and water and appreciated the creativity of the meal. When she had to work alone, she didn’t focus on the people, just what she had to do, which was painfully exhausting that evening considering she had slept the night before on the hard ground of her garden. But it had its positive side. She was never very good with people.

She was aware of
him
, though. He was seated two places down from Anna, who was at the head of the table. Everyone else watched the food as it entered the room, as it was placed in front of them. But
he
watched her. His dark hair almost touched his shoulders, his arms and fingers were long, and his lips were fuller than she’d ever seen on a man. He was…trouble.

As she was serving dessert, she felt something almost like anticipation the closer she got to sliding his plate in front of him. She wasn’t quite sure if it was his anticipation or hers.

“Have we met?” he asked when she finally made it to his place. He was smiling such a nice, open smile that she almost smiled back.

She put his plate in front of him, the piece of cake so perfect and moist, the crystallized violets spilling over it like frosted jewels. It screamed,
Look at me!
But his eyes were on her. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

“This is Claire Waverley, the caterer,” Anna said, happy with wine, her cheeks pink. “I hire her for every department gathering. Claire, this is Tyler Hughes. This is his first year with us.”

Claire nodded, extremely uncomfortable that all eyes were on her now.

“Waverley,” Tyler said thoughtfully. She started to move away, but his long fingers wrapped gently around her arm, not letting her move. “Of course!” he said, laughing. “You’re my neighbor! I live beside you. Pendland Street, right? You live in that large Queen Anne?”

She was so surprised he’d actually touched her that all she could do was give a jerky nod.

As if aware that she’d gone stiff or of the slight shiver along her skin, he immediately let go of her. “I just bought that blue house next to you,” he said. “I moved in a few weeks ago.”

Claire just looked at him.

“Well, it’s nice to finally meet you,” he said.

She nodded again and left the room. She washed up and packed away her things, leaving the last of the salad and cake in the refrigerator for Anna. She was moody and distracted now and she didn’t know why. But as she worked, she kept running her fingers unconsciously along her arm where Tyler had touched her, as if trying to brush something off her skin.

Before Claire took her last box out to her van, Anna came to the kitchen to rave about the food and to tell Claire what a good job she’d done, either too drunk or too polite to mention Claire’s odd behavior with one of her guests.

Claire smiled and took the check from Anna. She said good-bye, picked up the box, and left by the back entrance. She slowly walked down the short driveway to her van. Fatigue was settling low in her body like sand, and her steps were slow. It was a nice night, though. The air was warm and dry, and she decided she was going to sleep with her bedroom windows open.

When she reached the curb, she felt a strange gust of wind. She turned to see a figure standing under the oak tree in Anna’s front yard. She couldn’t make him out clearly, but there were tiny pinpricks of purple light hovering around him, like electrical snaps.

He pushed himself away from the tree, and she could feel him stare at her. She turned and took a step to her van.

“Wait,” Tyler called.

She should have kept walking; instead, she turned to him again.

“Do you have a light?” he asked.

Claire closed her eyes. It would be much easier to blame Evanelle if the old woman actually knew what she was doing.

She set the box down and reached into her dress pocket and brought out the yellow Bic lighter Evanelle had given her earlier that day.
This
was what she was meant to do with it?

She felt like she had water against her back, pushing her toward the deep end, as she walked toward him and extended the lighter. She stopped a few feet away, trying to keep as much distance as possible, digging her heels in as whatever force it was tried to take her closer.

He was smiling, easygoing, and interested. He had an unlit cigarette between his lips, and he took it from his mouth. “Do you smoke?”

“No.” She still had the lighter in her outstretched hand. He didn’t take it.

“I shouldn’t. I know. I’m down to two a day. It’s not a very social habit anymore.” When she didn’t respond, he shifted from one foot to the other. “I’ve seen you around. You have a wonderful yard. I mowed my yard for the first time a couple of days ago. You don’t talk much, do you? Or have I done something to offend the neighborhood already? Was I out in my yard in my underwear at any point?”

Claire gave a start. She felt so protected in her home that she frequently forgot that she had neighbors, neighbors who could, from their second stories, see down into her sunroom, where she’d taken off her nightgown that morning.

“It was a wonderful meal,” Tyler said, still trying.

“Thank you.”

“Maybe I’ll see you again?”

Her heart started to race. She didn’t need anything more than she already had. The moment she let something else into her life, she would get hurt. Sure as sugar. Sure as rain. She had Evanelle, her house, and her business. That was all she needed. “Keep the lighter,” Claire said, handing it to him and walking away.

When Claire pulled into her driveway, she stopped by the front yard instead of pulling around back. There was someone sitting on the top step of the porch.

Claire got out, leaving her headlights on and the car door open. She jogged across the yard, all her earlier fatigue gone in a panic. “Evanelle, what’s wrong?”

Evanelle stood stiffly, the glow from the streetlights causing her to look frail and ghostly. She was holding two packages of new bed linens and a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts. “I couldn’t sleep until I brought you this. Here, take them and let me sleep.”

Claire hurried up the steps and took the things, then she wrapped an arm around Evanelle. “How long have you been waiting?”

“About an hour. I was in bed when it hit me. You needed fresh sheets and Pop-Tarts.”