Sand Witches in the Hamptons (9781101597385) (18 page)

Now he blushed, but no one disputed my right to choose my own fortune, which had always been my goal all along. That and spending the night with Matt. Harris had to stay at my house with his surveillance equipment in case Deni came there. He'd be the best one to confront the stalker anyway.

“But what about the old dogs?” I could leave them here with Harris, but they could never go out in the yard, not when a maniac animal abuser could be lurking.

Lou said, “The boys and I will take them to Rosehill. It's all fenced in, and electrified. They'll be good for Jimmie. He still misses that damned parrot.”

Lily wouldn't be happy, but Dobbin and Buddy were no trouble, and she did have that smaller fenced-in area where the previous renter had kept his poodles. “What about Monteith? He'll hate having them there.”

Lou grinned, something he seldom did. “He sure will.”

We all laughed for the first time in hours. It felt good.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-THREE

I
had to tell my mother where her dogs were. And where her husband had been.

Oh, boy.

By the time I got the dogs packed up, food, bowls, meds, beds, and schedules, plus more clothes for me, my drawing supplies, my super high-res scanner and printer so I didn't have to return here while Deni was loose, we were in a hurry to leave. No time to call my mother. Whew.

I'd see Grandma Eve at the council meeting in the morning and ask her to do it. Maybe Doc Lassiter's calming influence could work over the phone. If not, maybe it'd work on Grandma Eve after the bound-to-be explosive conversation.

I decided to ask Carinne to the meeting, to let everyone see her at once and get it over with, so she could walk down Main Street without people gawking at her. Jimmie ought to come, too, because he knew as much about the Andanstans as I did, which wasn't nearly enough to develop a plan to reclaim our beaches.

Matt couldn't go with me to the meeting. He had too many patients waiting too long and the new receptionist to train, but he'd have Harris pick me up and bring me back to the vet clinic. We could have lunch together if no emergencies showed up. He made me promise not to strike out on my own, unprotected by anything bigger than a six-pound ankle-biter.

I wasn't worried about Deni, now that I was out of my mother's house. I had a lot of questions, like how he knew I left Manhattan, if he'd respond to the emails Special Agent Krause helped me write, and if I'd have nightmares about the story he'd sent. But worried about him showing up in Paumanok Harbor? Not much. Strangers stuck out in the village, especially at this time of year with fewer tourists around, and people would be on the alert for a suspicious looking young man. I'd bring the sketch of Deni I'd drawn from Mrs. Abbottini's description to the meeting and hand out copies, along with the picture I'd done of the Andanstans. I didn't know if anyone would ever see them but me and Jimmie, maybe Matt, but I was the Visualizer, wasn't I? And the picture was all I had, other than a half-assed theory about them stealing the sand.

That was tomorrow. Tonight we drove fifteen minutes to Amagansett and picked up Chinese takeout. I stayed in the car with Moses and Little Red. The Pom wore the doggie jacket I'd bought him in the city, with the hood up so he didn't look so fluffy or so fox-colored. We were both in disguise. I wore a baseball cap.

Moses drooled the whole way back to the Harbor, salivating at the smell of the food. He'd have eaten it, too, except Matt put it on the floor at my feet. I found the noodles and shared with everyone.

Matt's house was like him, attractive without being pretentious. The classic saltbox cottage had two small bedrooms with exposed beams under the slanted roof, a small home office, one and a half baths, a narrow deck out back and a tiny unfinished attic room Matt couldn't stand up in, but I could. It had a window and an old stuffed chair and a card table. I put my work things there.

The living/dining area had big, comfortable furniture, but not much of it, so Moses had enough open space to sprawl in.

Of course he sat on my feet during dinner. “You can tell him to stop guarding me now.”

“He's guarding those vegetable dumplings.”

We didn't talk much over dinner, until time for the fortune cookies. Mine read:
Trust your instincts
.

Matt's read:
Trust her instincts.

Weird. What were the chances of those two fortunes appearing together out of the bin of cookies? Next to zero, I'd guess. Unless you lived in Paumanok Harbor.

After supper Matt offered to change the sheets in the guest room for me. He made a point of saying that Marion had slept there.

“I know.”

“So you do trust me?”

“That, too, but I know that if she'd slept with you, she never would have left.”

“That good, huh?” He smiled.

“From what I remember . . .”

“We better refresh your memory, then.”

We would have started new memories to replace the sickening images still in my mind, but my damned nose started bleeding and my lip instantly started itching again. So did Matt's cat scratches. He found me ice cubes and towels and the cream my grandmother had made up for the townspeople. “That's pretty odd, both our rashes coming back, like the matching fortune cookies. Unless we're allergic to each other. Do you think that's possible?”

No, I thought the Andanstans were sending a message, a reminder of their presence. I don't know how I knew, but I just did. I saw it laid out, like a maze, one step leading to another. Everyone's hives started clearing up as soon as I planned to return to the Harbor. All the rashes diminished more or disappeared as soon as we went searching the beaches. Now, with my mind on other things, like Matt and sex, and everyone else concerned with Deni and Carinne, the itch was back. I tried not to scratch. I even tried Grandma Eve's lotion.

Trust your instincts.
Mine said run in the opposite direction, but that wouldn't help. Chances were, I'd bleed to death from a nosebleed and Paumanok Harbor would be swallowed by the sea.

“Does that make sense?” I asked Matt.

“I trust your instincts. You see the connections. So let's go deal with the Andanstans.”

We both knew we couldn't enjoy the evening with that council meeting looming. We couldn't think about the bag from the drugstore, the king-size bed in Matt's room, the big soft sofa, not while knowing we should be looking for possibly hostile beings, ones who could determine the fate of the whole little town.

Even the rocky road ice cream Matt scooped out didn't taste as good as usual, but my nose stopped bleeding.

We went.

I saw them. Matt didn't. I think maybe he tried too hard, or was too empirical by nature. I mean, a sick dog has symptoms, things you can see or test for. Or maybe he kept thinking of me instead. I'd like to think so.

He didn't hear them either, not that I had any idea what they were saying. They weren't talking to me, but shouting at each other, just the way I'd drawn them, the way I saw them in my head.

I used to think the characters in my books—the sea serpents and trolls and magic horses—were just that, figments of my imagination that existed only in my mind. Then they turned out to be real beings, just not of my real world. Did I dream them up, call them here, or did they intrude on my thoughts, tickling my creative impulses, suggesting themes for my stories, heroes, and villains?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I did not know. This time, though, the idea for the Andanstans didn't come from me. They were in Professor Jimmie Harmon's notes. I just drew them. Or brought them to life. Or brought them here. Who knew which? Not I.

We'd gone to the beach near my mother's house and Grandma Eve's farm, with sleeping bags and firewood, as Matt promised. First, we dug a shallow pit. I kept apologizing for disturbing the sand. “Sorry, sorry.” Then we lined it with rocks. “Sorry if this hurts.” And piled logs and kindling on top. “I promise we'll clean up.” We carried a bucket of water back from the tide line, too, like good little campers, just in case.

We gave up on the marshmallows because we'd forgotten sticks and couldn't find any in the dark. Neither of us wanted to go searching among the beach grass and underbrush at the landward edge, not with ticks rampant and poison ivy possible, to say nothing of creepy crawlies who lived at the shore. I ate the marshmallows out of the bag. Matt had pretzels. I ate a handful of them, too, blaming the Chinese food for my appetite. Matt just smiled and handed me the bag again.

By now the fire caught, and I shifted my sleeping bag—“Sorry”— so the smoke didn't blow in my face. I crawled in for its warmth and because I didn't trust my concentration if I shared Matt's body heat instead. I rolled onto my stomach, leaning on my elbows, and I drew.

I used broad marker pens, so I could see what I was doing without the flashlights we'd brought. This time I didn't try to focus my thoughts on the alien sand-nappers, sending out images to them, trying to communicate. I used all my intensity creating a story I could tell to YA kids. I worked like I usually did, making it up as I went along, sketching in some of the action, a word or two here and there to indicate what had to come next, or should be put in sooner. Soon I had a storyboard, boxes of drawings and text, none finished or complete, but a tale of jealousy in a love triangle, made of grains of sand.

I didn't love it. So I flipped the page and drew three siblings, fighting for their father's crown. No, three banditos, falling out over the division of the loot. Three contentious neighbors, arguing about property lines and how loud this one's pool filter sounded, how that one's dog barked too much, how the third one threw wild parties and didn't invite the neighbors.

Matt fell asleep, but I had a great time, inventing petty wars among half-inch-high folk who fell apart when wounded, only to regroup later, ready for revenge. I loved playing with the ideas, feeling that rush of possibilities, that euphoric high of creativity.

And there they were, in a bit of wind-blown foam that drifted toward our site like tumbleweed. They landed near our fire, inches from my nose, like Horton's Whos on a flower head, amid the bubbles and sand. Even as I watched, tiny bits of the seafoam broke apart, letting the sand spill. Then individual grains gathered again and coalesced into vague man-shapes, with the fire's glow visible through their forms.

“Matt,” I whispered, but he made a whuffling sound. I refused to call it a snore. How could I move in with a man who snored? How could I take my attention away from the sand people to climb out of the sleeping bag, crawl to the other side of the fire and nudge Matt awake? I couldn't. I stayed right where I was, watching a minuscule melee while he slept.

“Hello,” I tried. “I'm Willow.”

They pushed and shoved and shouted at each other. Contentious? The Hatfields and McCoys were pacifists compared to these dudes. Now that I could see them, I saw them everywhere. Trying to carry sand away, trying to knock down the ones whose hands were full, using shells to sweep sand away from their foes, making sand-drip mountains from the damp area where our fire bucket had sloshed, digging trenches to hide in ambush. Everyone tried to defend something, steal something, or just batter the nearest sand person. Some made tunnels, or were tunnels, to funnel sand through on its way back to the water. I found it hard to tell where inanimate sand left off and sand warriors began, all in a few inches of beach. Unless the entire beachfront consisted of Andanstans in various stages of cohesion or dissolution. What if every single grain of sand had the potential to become part of a temporary individual being? No one would ever see them farther away than the tip of his nose. The professor had never said anything about the size of the creatures or the size of their population. Just small. He did say there were three varieties, and I could begin to see how some were darker in color than others, as if freshly cast up by a wave. Others had finer grains to them, from being older, more worn down. A third tribe, for want of a better word, had rougher edges.

The longer I watched, the better I could differentiate between the groups, although I had no idea if the individuals were male or female. The amazing thing, beyond seeing itty bitty soldiers wearing a scrap of seaweed here, a blade of dried grass there, was how they didn't form coalitions, or friends, it seemed, not even among their own kind. They fought each other as often as they fought the darker or the finer or the rougher. All they had in common was an effort to get the sand—Paumanok Harbor's sand—into the bay.

I watched as a glob of damp sand fell near the fire. I pushed it away. Fire couldn't hurt sand, could it? These guys must be nearly indestructible, the way they fell apart and regrouped.

Except they hadn't rebuilt the sandbar the Coast Guard blew up. They hadn't brought back the sand swept out in the tsunami. “How can we give back what we don't have?”

No one answered. Matt groaned in his sleep.

“Do you know how much money it would take to dredge out the Sound? Or the ocean near Montauk?” More than Paumanok Harbor has budgeted for the next five years. I had no idea if these beings understood budgets or money. What could they spend it on? How could they carry it? Maybe the single grains were their currency. They seemed to covet them and consider them worth fighting for. Oh, how I wished I could understand their talk. These guys didn't appear to be telepaths like the other beings from Unity I'd encountered. Or they chose not to talk to me in any manner. That didn't stop me from speaking.

“Why don't you go home to Unity?” Which would solve a lot of our problems. “Maybe you can go to an arbitrator or find an impartial umpire. You could call a truce while someone negotiates boundaries for you. War is no way for people to live.”

They kept fighting and ignoring me. What terrible little creatures, battling their brethren over—”

“Eggth.”

“Matt, wake up, they're talking to me! Together maybe we can reach out to them, start a dialogue to find out why they're still here.”

“Eggth.”

Damn, Matt did snore! The sound wasn't coming from the little folk, though now I could hear their tiny grunts and groans and battle cries.

I tried to send encouraging thoughts their way, to get their attention, but they were too busy trying to beat each other back from the brink. I was afraid to move, thinking how many millions of them I could wipe out with one footstep.

As fascinating as they were, watching their antics got tiresome. Didn't they ever quit fighting? Maybe they remained here because no one wanted them back in our parallel universe. The rulers or masters or gods of Unity banished a sea monster to the center of our world, after all. I couldn't think of another good reason why the Andanstans stayed here.