A Witch In Time (16 page)

“What makes you think something’s up?”

“Well, for one thing,” I said dryly, “you never answer questions with more questions. Stop using my own perfected avoidance technique on me.”

Steff laughed. “I’ll have to work on perfecting a technique of my own, is that it?”

“Preferably. My techniques never work anyway, so I don’t know why you would want to try them on for size.”

She paused as we waited for the elevator. “Do you feel up to going and chatting somewhere? There’s a nice bench or two outside.”

“Sure. Sounds good, and I’m not going anywhere right away anyway with this thing.”

The difference between the air-conditioning inside the hospital and the sultry air outside was enough to knock you over, but I kept telling myself I just had to adjust. And maybe there would be shade. I hoped. Steff pushed my chair over to a little garden area complete with benches and perennials waving in the dappled shade, then sat down on a bench beside me.

“So.”

“So,” she echoed, then paused, catching her lower lip between her teeth. It was a rare day that I had seen Steff up in arms over a guy, and yet she obviously was. She had always been so confident in herself when it came to men, and Danny obviously worshipped her. I couldn’t help wondering what was up.

“Stephanie Marie Evans, spill it. You know you want to.” She smoothed her hands down her legs and over her trim knees. She looked cute as could be today in a gauzy sundress and bejeweled thong sandals, her curly hair pulled back away from her delicate face and drawn up in a high ponytail that dropped in a mass of ringlets made tighter by the steamy air. Danny had thought so, too—I saw the glint of appreciation in his eye. So why the angst and tension?

“Well,” she hedged, “Danny’s been acting so strangely lately.”

Surprise made me frown. “Strangely?”

Steff nodded. “He’s been avoiding me. We usually make plans for him to come over, but he’s been too busy lately, and when we talk, I can tell that he’s holding something back from me. He’s never been like that, which is why this was such a surprise, and . . . and he’s been distant. Oh, Maggie. What if he’s seeing someone else?”

I reached for her hand. “First of all, let’s not jump to conclusions. You have no real reason to believe that, so don’t even go there. And second of all, are you nuts? Have you
seen
the way that he looks at you?”

“He’s hiding something, Maggie. I know he is.”

Now, all women have at times felt that their man was hiding something from them. You get to the point where you have spent enough time with them that you know the inner workings of their minds, the everyday sense of them, and when their behavior is at odds with what you know, it raises your intuitive antennae. So when Steff said that something was up with Dan, I tended to believe her. The question was, what was that something?

“Maybe he likes me but doesn’t think that his family will approve,” she continued. “I mean, think about it. What if he knows his family—his mother!—won’t like me? That would have to weigh heavily on his mind. Maybe he just can’t think of a way to tell me.”

There was no way that anyone could not like Steff. Absolutely zero chance. “Has he given you any indication of that?”

“Well . . . no.”

“And he’s not going to!” I told her firmly. “Because it’s not going to happen.”

“But . . . it has to be something big, Maggie. Something important. Danny is never like this.”

“Maybe he is worried about something but doesn’t want you to know he’s worrying,” I offered, grasping for explanations.

“Other than whether his family would like me or not, what could he be worried about? He’s almost done with his residency. Then all he has to do is be licensed and certified . . .”

“Does he have to take a test in order to do that?”

“Well, of course he has to take a test for that to happen.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” I said. “It makes sense.”

“It makes sense if you’re anyone other than Danny. He’s a brilliant doctor, Maggie. Smart, knowledgeable, and he has his fingertips on everything he needs when making a diagnosis. I swear the man has a photographic memory when it comes to medicine. When it comes to his keys? Not so much.” She laughed at her own joke, and in that moment I saw her absolute devotion to him. It gave me the shivers, in a good way. “Anyway, there’s no way he needs to be nervous about the test.”

“But that doesn’t mean he’s not.”

“Maybe.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

I watched as she sank back into an uncertainty-driven funk. It wasn’t her usual style, that’s for sure. “You really love him, don’t you?”

She glanced up at me, mouth open and ready to deny it. But at the last minute, she squeezed her eyelids shut and pressed her lips together and just nodded.

“Aw, Steff. Honey.” I reached out and touched her hand, joggling it from side to side for good measure just to try to get her to smile. “That’s a
good
thing. Isn’t it?”

She actually had tears glinting in the inner corners of her pretty green eyes. “Well, I thought so. I did. It’s been coming on so long, you know, little by little, and keeps getting stronger. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to keep it from him.” She lifted her gaze to mine, searching for wisdom, hoping for insight. Anything that could help her find her way through this. “How do you keep something so big inside?”

Her fear was rolling off of her in waves. This was new to her, uncharted waters, and she didn’t even have a star to sail ’er by. I let the fear come into me, using my own energies to filter it and soothe it, in hopes that that would help give her a measure of peace and a chance at perspective. “Maybe you’re not supposed to keep it from him?” I suggested.

“Maybe you’re not meant to hold it inside. Maybe you’re not meant to be in control of it at all.”

Her lower lip trembled, and she wailed, “But I don’t want to not be in control!”

“I know, hon. But sometimes these things are decided for us.”

She sighed, her brow troubled.

“Does he love you?” I asked her. “I mean, he does, obviously—it’s written all over him. Has he ever told you?”

She shook her head. “We’ve come close to saying it, so close that I almost feel that we have sometimes. Without words.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“How can I, when I have this weird . . . feeling hanging over my head? What if he’s just trying to come up with a way to let me down easy?”

There was obviously no reasoning with her. Poor Steff. She had it, and she had it bad. I had never seen her like this before. Not ever. Which meant one thing and one thing only.

Danny was The One.

And because he was The One, I knew that I would do anything to see my BFF happy and content, forever and always.

I patted her on the knee. “Leave this to me.”

“Wait.” She squinted suspiciously at me. “What are you going to do?”

I shook my head and gave her my most mysterious smile.

But I would say Not. One. Word. Mostly because I really had no idea what I was going to do yet. No worries, though—I would come up with something.

To keep her from asking any more questions that I wouldn’t yet have answers to, I decided it was time to distract her with a little problem of my own. But how to approach it? I turned my face up to the sun, blinking through the tree leaves above the little bricked courtyard, searching for inspiration.

“Forgive me, Mags, but I think the popular phrase of the moment is, ‘spill it,’” Steff quipped.

So I told her. I told her about the conversation I had overheard while stuck in the elevator with the power outage, and how much what I’d heard had bothered me. How much it was still bothering me, despite everything else that had been going on. “I know it was all very random. I know it could have been anything. Anyone. Believe me, I know that. But there was just something about it. I don’t know. It’s hard to even explain. There was just something about it that . . . I can’t let it go.” I made a wry face. “Marcus thinks I’m making too much of things.”

“Maybe,” Steff said, frowning. “Maybe.”

“And the truth is, there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. Maybe Marcus is right. I have more important things to worry about right now. It’s just that, with everything that’s happened in town . . .”

“It’s a little worrisome?” Steff nodded sagely. “Understandable.”

“So you don’t think I’m just jumping to conclusions?”

“Oh, Maggie. Who can tell? The voices weren’t muffled? I mean, you could hear clearly?”

I nodded. “It was kind of hollow sounding, but yes, what I heard, I heard pretty plainly.”

She considered this a moment. “Then I guess we hope that it has a perfectly reasonable explanation. What else can we do but wait and see whether anything happens?”

I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. But I didn’t like it.

 

 

Steff had errands to run, and I had taken up enough of her free time on her day off already, so I had her wheel me back up to Mel’s hospital room after trying to reach Marcus using Steff’s cell and failing miserably. I couldn’t go back to my apartment—living in the basement was guaranteed to make life with a casted ankle, shall we say,
interesting
—so for the time being, it was better for me to be with people I loved.

In other words, it was time to face the music.

“Maggie! What on earth! I thought you had gone into work!”

My mother was the first to catch sight of me as Steff pushed the wheelchair through the door, carefully maneuvering through the doorway and around furniture.

“She had a little bit of an accident,” Steff said to the room at large. “Nothing to worry about. Just a little bit of a break.”

From her regal throne on the hospital bed, Mel was peering around the furniture that separated the room. Her mouth fell open as I was wheeled around the second bed, but then closed in a pout. “You broke your ankle? Jeez, Maggie. What were you thinking?”

She was looking at me as though she thought I’d done it on purpose, to steal her thunder. “Well, I didn’t exactly mean to do it, Mel. Jeez.” I explained briefly how it had happened.

Mel sighed. “Leave it to you to try to be healthy and hurt yourself in the process.”

Steff evidently thought this was the perfect time for her to exit, before things got even less pretty. She leaned down and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t let ’em get you down,” she whispered into my ear. Straightening again, she waved.

“See you, Mrs. O’Neill. Mel. Cute babies, by the way.”

My mother waited until she had left the room before telling Mel, “She always was a pretty girl. A little too much for her own good, I think.”

“She could be so much prettier if she straightened that curly hair of hers.” Mel jumped in with her two cents. “Maybe add some blond highlights. And losing a few pounds wouldn’t hurt, either.”

That did it. Mel was officially, certifiably crazy. Steff’s hair was gorgeous and unique and didn’t need to be a cookie-cutter copy of every desperate housewife out there in Stony Mill Suburbia. And her petite figure was curvalicious, yes, but only in the best way possible. We should all be so lucky. So either Mel had gone off the deep end at long last, or maybe it was just the tidal wave of postbaby hormones—one could always hope.

“Never mind that now. We have bigger fish to fry,” Mom said prosaically. “I suppose we could make room in Grandpa’s efficiency apartment.”

“For what?” That was me, clueless as usual.

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Well, you can’t exactly get around your apartment in that cast, can you? All those stairs down? One misstep and you could be lying there at the bottom in a heap for the good Lord to watch over in good faith, waiting for someone to come along and find you. And who knows how long that could take?”

I stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. “Grandpa doesn’t have space for a roomie.”

Mel was no help at all. She was too busy smirking down at the baby in her arms and waiting for the explosion. So much for the nice moment the two of us had shared this morning. And it had been so convincing, too.

“We can always make room for family and people in need.”

How about people in need of a new personality, like Mel? Did that count?

Eh, probably not.

“Excuse me, I have to go check in with work,” I said, already wheeling myself toward the door. I knocked over a stack of magazines in the process, but there was no help for it. They went sliding half under the bed. “Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”

Thank goodness the door to the hall was propped open, or I would have been in real trouble. Managing a wheelchair wasn’t as hard as it looked, but it did have its tricks. I was just grateful I only had to use it until I was able to get crutches, or have someone bring a pair to me. To Do Numero Uno on my agenda.

Well, maybe Numero Dos. First I really needed to figure out how I was going to live with this monstrosity on my leg.

Down in the family waiting room for the second time in two days, I plugged in my cell phone charger, which Steff had been so kind as to retrieve for me from my car before she left, and powered up. Several text messages popped up as soon as I turned it back on: