By Familiar Means (3 page)

3

Being a freelance artist is not a high-wage job. I was doing very well to be making any kind of living, but my move to Portsmouth had brought some money complications with it. The house, which I'd come to think of as mine, was not really mine. It really belonged to Frank Hawthorne. Frank had let me stay there for the summer mostly rent-free because I had been helping him find out what happened to his aunt, Dorothy. But the lease we'd signed was for only three months, and those three months were up in two weeks. Frank had hinted he wasn't in any hurry to have me gone, but I could not and would not take advantage like that. I had always paid my own way, and I wasn't about to stop now.

That meant there needed to be some kind of money coming in, real soon.

The Northeast Java coffee shop had become a regular haunt of mine since I arrived, but as much as I loved the quirky little place, it was no wonder the owners had decided to make a change. For starters, the shop was really easy to miss, sandwiched between a shadowy vintage store and Annabelle's (no relation, unfortunately) Ice Cream. There
was no visible sign on the chipped wooden door, and just a couple of old wrought-iron tables and chairs out front. Other than that, you had to hear the babble of voices and smell the rich scent of fresh roasted beans wafting through the open window to know you'd just found somewhere special.

Despite the chill of the breeze off the river six feet away, both tables were occupied by people in business suits, checking texts and talking on their phones over cups of the heavenly brew served up by the shop's owners, Jake and Miranda Luce.

A pair of young women were coming out just as I ducked into the crowded, noisy café. A line stretched from the counter to the door. There was next to no space for seating, so everybody was jostling for a spot to stand or make their way through. Four of the shop's staff somehow managed to fit themselves behind the tiny Formica counter, and there wasn't anything like enough room for any of them.

“Anna!” called Miranda Luce over the heads of the crowd. “Thank you so much for coming!”

Thanks to the combination of my tiny little caffeine dependency and the fantastic brew the Luces served up, I'd actually spent a fair amount of time at Northeast Java since I'd come to Portsmouth, and Jake and Miranda and I had quickly become friends. Miranda and Jake had been hippies at the height of the sixties. They met as teenagers when they both decided to hitchhike down to Woodstock (no, I'm not making this up) and had been together ever since.

Miranda Luce was a tiny, thin woman who somehow managed to be both peaceful and intense at the same time. Her jeans and her vests were still brightly embroidered, and her preferred jewelry was wooden beads and colored quartz. She wore her silver-streaked hair in a long braid, which she currently had pinned in a coronet around her head.

“Jake!” Miranda called as I edged my way through the crowd of people who were trying to make way as best they could. “Anna's here!”

“Tell her to come on back!” shouted Jake from . . . somewhere.

Miranda beckoned, and I slipped behind the counter and through the Dutch door.

I'd seen closets bigger than Northeast's kitchen. The space that wasn't taken up by the industrial-grade fridge was filled by the blocky roaster. The smell of coffee in here was strong enough to wake up half of New Hampshire.

“Hey, Anna. Got your latte over there.” Jake jerked his chin toward the counter, but his attention was on the crotchety old roaster and its precious beans.

There was no mistaking Jake Luce's vintage. He was a child of the sixties and had the beard, the bandana, round, wire-rimmed glasses and Birkenstocks to prove it. The only reason he didn't look exactly like Jerry Garcia was that he ran ten miles every morning. Like Miranda, Jake was kind and cheerful. They both believed in living and letting live, organic soy milk and better karma through better coffee.

It said so, on the hand-painted sign right above the chalkboard menu.

“Okay, Starbabe, this batch is ready to go out.” Jake scooped the beans from the hopper and handed the container to Miranda, who carried it the very short distance out front to be ground and served with varying degrees of foam.

I sipped my own smooth and perfectly foamed brew and heaved a contented sigh. “Thanks, Jake.”

He grunted.

“Business is good,” I remarked.

“Almost too good.” Miranda laughed as she returned from delivering the beans to the front of the house. “It's Chuck's fault, I swear.”

“What did Chuck do?” I glanced through the door at the young barista with slicked-back hair, stubbled jaw and a rhinestone stud in his ear.

“Turns out the kid's some kind of software genius, and he's built this program—”

“App, Jake. It's called an app.”

“Anyway, somehow it hooks up coffee drinkers and does some kind of rating on their ideal coffee experience and . . .” He waved his hands. “And all of a sudden, we got this.” He waved his hand out front and I swear he sounded annoyed. “He didn't even ask us. Said he wanted it to be a surprise. Kids these days!”

“With the clothes and that
hair
!” Miranda laughed. “Lighten up, old man.”

Jake made a face and Miranda shrugged. “Chuck, Luis, have you got it covered?” she called toward the guys manning the counter. “We're going over to the new space.”

“It's all good,” called back the Rhinestone Barista. “Have fun, you crazy kids.”

Jake and Miranda grabbed denim jackets and we all headed up Ceres Street, which is not really a street. It's a narrow, cobbled almost alley that runs along the Piscataqua River. You can use it only on foot, and there are concrete stairs at either end. The high brick warehouses on the inland side had originally been built to receive the cargos from the oceangoing ships that sailed up into the harbor. Now those warehouses held offices and condominiums, restaurants (and coffee shops) and stores for the tourists. The docks for Portsmouth's famous red tugboats were here, along with ticketing booths for various harbor sightseeing cruises.

“And here it is!” cried Miranda as we reached the top of the stairs beside the cut-in for the little marina. “Our new home!”

Architecture was not my specialty, but to me the “new home” looked like it dated from the turn of the previous century. A freestanding brick building, three stories tall, it was a classic of its kind, with a rolled copper roof and plate glass windows that were currently covered over in brown paper. Farther up the street, I could see the curving white sides of the Harbor's Rest hotel, a Gilded Age behemoth that was one of Portsmouth's landmarks, so it wasn't too much of a guess that this building was of about the same vintage.

“It looks fabulous,” I told them both.

“It used to be a bar back in the 1910s,” Miranda was saying
as she fished in her jacket pocket for her keys. “And then it was a drugstore and soda fountain. It was a gallery for a while, but now it's ours.” She squeezed Jake's shoulder like she thought she could impart some enthusiasm by osmosis.

Jake muttered something under his breath.

“Jake.” Miranda frowned. “You said you were going to be cool about this.”

“Yeah, yeah. I'm cool. I am.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “Embracing change ain't always what I'm best at. We been on Ceres Street since the beginning. People always found us.”

“Moving to a larger place is not the same as selling out to the capitalist establishment,” said Miranda patiently, and I got the sense there'd been a whole lot of conversations on this theme I hadn't heard. “In fact, you were the one—”

“I said, I'm cool,” Jake cut her off. “It's like you say, if the people are coming, we should be able to welcome them. Show them what we're really about.”

“Having the hotel so close should be great for foot traffic,” I tried, but Jake just made another face.

“If any of the yacht clubbers can be bothered to get off their assets and walk . . .”

Miranda sighed and turned back to me. “We're going to have space for community meetings and resources for families with kids. We're going to be able to have a real kitchen to serve locally sourced food, and a music venue and—”

“And it's way too late to back out,” said Jake. “Yeah, yeah, Starbabe, I'm still in.”

Miranda struggled with the lock for a minute and then pushed the door open. An old brass bell hanging from a metal arm rang brightly. Miranda stepped across the threshold and inhaled the smell of plaster and sawdust, her face lit up with excitement. Jake followed, a little more slowly, and definitely not as excited. Me, I hesitated on the threshold.

You see, my whole life, I've had this little problem. Sometimes, when I walk into a place, I'll get hit by a wave of feeling. I call it my Vibe. I will know whether a place is generally a happy or a sad one, whether the people who have lived in it have had good times or bad ones, and all of this
will land on me whether I want to know it or not. Sometimes the event I pick up on has happened long in the past. Sometimes it's more recent. Timing doesn't seem to matter. Whatever has left the strongest imprint on a place, it's going to be streamed straight into my brain.

It doesn't happen all the time. Not every place holds on to its vibrations, which is a good thing; otherwise, I'd never be able to walk into a 7-Eleven, let alone an old building like this one. But it happened often enough that the major focus of my magical training so far had been learning how to keep that flood of emotion from drowning me. Julia Parris assured me that as my skills increased, I'd be able to understand the nuances of the impressions I picked up. I might even be able to tune in to specific happenings or sensations. For now, though, I was just happy to be able to shelter myself, psychically speaking. I just needed to be prepared.

I stuck my hand in my purse to assure myself I had remembered to put my wand in there. Yes, I'm not only a witch with a witch's cat; I have a magic wand. It's not quite as magic as those souped-up models the Hogwarts kids carry. Mostly it's a tool for focus, and I was going to need that focus right now.

I took a deep breath and, with an effort, raised my mental shields.

In need I call, in hope I ask, to stand in the protection of the Light.
Three times I silently repeated the invocation Julia had taught me. I also pictured myself surrounded by a shimmering curtain of positive energy. In my case, it was all blue and green and gold like the aurora borealis, because I am an artist and everything must have color.

I was safe in here. I was the woman behind the curtain. Any unwanted vibrations this building was putting out would be redirected around me.

So mote it be,
I added to close the invocation. I also crossed my mental fingers. Holding tight to my images, my spell, my wand and, most important, my beautiful latte in its to-go cup, I stepped into the new home of Northeast Java.

“What do you think, Anna?” said Miranda to me. “Isn't it marvelous?