Don't Hex with Texas (2 page)

A glance at the front counter assured me that Sherri had finally returned. “That sounds like a great idea. What are you in the mood for?”

“My dad’s gone for the day. What do you think?”

“Okay, Dairy Queen it is. Double cheeseburger, no onions?”

“You read my mind.” Needless to say, Nita wasn’t a very good Hindu. Since moving to Texas, she’d developed a taste for hamburgers that she had to indulge behind her more traditional father’s back.

“I’ll be right over.” After I hung up, I nudged Teddy’s jeans-clad leg where it stuck out from under my desk. “I’m going out to lunch. Back in about an hour.”

“Okay,” he said, and I doubted it had even registered on his brain.

I got my purse and headed out. The pickup truck handed down to me from Dean when he got his new one sat in the gravel parking lot in front of the store. My New York friends would probably be equally fascinated and horrified to know I was driving something like this. It had definitely been a change from commuting to work on the subway. The feed store was on the edge of town, but in a town our size, it took less than a minute to get to the Dairy Queen on the edge of downtown.

The lunch rush, such as it was in Cobb, had only just started at the Dairy Queen, so I didn’t have to wait too long to get burgers for Nita and myself. Once I had the food, I headed over to the motel on the outskirts of the other side of town.

Once upon a time, the town had been on one of the main routes between Austin and Dallas, but the interstate had been built about fifty miles to the east, which meant nobody came to this town who didn’t absolutely have to. It wasn’t the most profitable place to run a motel, but the Patels had been doing a good job of it ever since they’d moved to town. I’d been in fourth grade, and the teacher had assigned me as a buddy to Nita to help her get used to life in a new country. We’d quickly become best friends, and now Nita was probably more Americanized than I was.

“Omigod, I just had the best idea,” she said as soon as I walked into the lobby. She opened the little gate that let me go behind the front desk as she kept talking. “I’m thinking we could put some potpourri in each of the guest rooms, have bagels and juice in the lobby, call it a bed-and-breakfast, and raise our rates by about twenty bucks a night.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “But who in their right mind would come to Cobb on purpose?”

She took a big bite of her burger, pausing to savor it. “That’s the genius of my idea. We hook up with the antiques stores in town, put together a brochure and a website, and advertise antiquing weekends. We could also throw in a spa package. Do you think Kiki at the Kut ’n’ Kurl knows how to do facials?”

“More important—would anyone want a facial from a place called the Kut ’n’ Kurl?”

“Good point. I’ll give it some more thought.” I smiled, imagining it would probably get about as much thought as any of her previous wild schemes, which included theme-decorated rooms and taking the motel’s look back to its 1930s glory, complete with the metal lawn chairs she’d found on eBay. I recognized her impulse as the urge to do something bigger and better with her life than sit around in a small town and work for the family business. She wanted to stretch and grow, but she didn’t have an outlet for it. I knew the feeling. Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d made the right call leaving New York.

As I suspected, Nita was ready with a new plan before she finished her burger. “What do you say we take off and get out of here? We could get a place together in Dallas or Austin! I’m sure you and I could get jobs.” I looked at her expectantly. “Okay, so my dad might declare me no longer a member of the family, but I’m almost twenty-seven years old, so it’s not like he could bring me back forcefully, and I’m sure he’d get over it eventually, especially if I managed to find myself a nice Indian boy to marry, since it’s not like this town is crawling with them. I just know if I have to stay here one more second, I’m going to explode from boredom.”

“If you do, at least the explosion would give the rest of us something to talk about for a while.”

She threw a salt packet at me. “You know what I mean. What I don’t get is why you came back here. You’d escaped. You were free! New York can’t have been so bad that you had to come back.”

Nita had been my friend forever, and I hated lying to her, but the existence of magic was a secret I wasn’t allowed to share. “Things got complicated,” was all I said.

“Then what do you think about going to Dallas, hmm?”

In the back of my mind, I hoped to move back to New York eventually. There wasn’t any particular reason why I had to live out my exile in Cobb, but it wouldn’t be fair to Nita to agree to move to Dallas with her, only to run back to New York at the first opportunity.

Fortunately, before I could come up with a way to say so without hurting her feelings, she was on to something else. Unfortunately, that something was me. “Now, really, what was it? Broken heart, love affair gone wrong? I know! You had a hot affair with your boss and had to leave your job when he dumped you for someone else, like Bridget Jones.” We’d had this conversation about once a week since I’d been back, and her theories were getting increasingly wilder. Her version of my life was starting to sound more exciting than the reality, even with all the magical warfare.

I looked away, trying to think of something I could say to distract her, and noticed the side window with plastic sheeting taped to it. “Is that what happened last night that spooked your brother?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was the weirdest thing. I was on duty, and I went into the back right before midnight to check something, then when I got back out here, the window was gone.”

“Was anything stolen?”

“Not that I could tell. The computer, TV, and cash were all here. I called Ramesh over, and he sent me home. He didn’t want me working alone at night if stuff like that was going on, so he switched shifts with me.”

“I guess you had a bit of cleanup work to do.”

“That’s the weird thing—there wasn’t any glass. No rocks or bricks inside, either. It was like someone just took the glass out of the window. Isn’t that spooky?”

“Yeah.” She had no idea how spooky it was. I’d actually seen something like that happen once before. Owen had zapped the glass out of a window when the restaurant we were in caught on fire and the doorway got jammed with people trying to escape. Somehow, though, I doubted that was what happened here. Not only were there no magical people in this part of the world, but nothing was missing, so why would someone even bother? “You know, it was probably some senior class prank, part of a scavenger hunt,” I said to reassure her.

“You’re right, but don’t tell Ramesh. I hate working nights, so this new arrangement is fine with me. Well, I hate working here, period, but until my dad enters the twenty-first century and lets me move away, or until some nice Indian boy drops by to take me away from all this—or until you agree to run away with me—I’m stuck.”

I was afraid she’d go back to nagging me about why I’d left New York, but she didn’t. We chatted about how much we hated our current jobs until it was time to force myself to head back to the store.

Sherri hadn’t waited for me to get back from lunch before taking her own lunch break, but Beth, Teddy’s wife, had come to my rescue, ringing up customers with a baby on her hip. She flashed me a smile as I squeezed past her to get to the office, then once I’d put my purse away, I took the baby off her hands. Babysitting sounded a lot more pleasant to me at the moment than dealing with the store.

“Thanks,” I said when the minor rush subsided. “I guess Sherri was hungry.”

She rolled her eyes. “That girl needs a keeper.”

“That girl needs a jailer.”

“Ted said to let you know that the Internet access should be working now. Frank will be here in a moment for the afternoon shift, Dean’s MIA, as usual, your dad’s making a delivery, and Ted’s off checking his test crops.”

“So everything’s about as under control as you can get around here.”

“Exactly. So go sit down and catch up on paperwork. I’ve got the register if you’ll watch Lucy.”

Lucy was teething, so she tended to eat paperwork, along with anything else that came anywhere near her mouth, but it still sounded like a good trade-off to me. It was hard to concentrate on the bookkeeping, though, when all I could think about was Nita’s missing window. When Owen did that spell, the window had returned a while later. I wondered if that would happen this time. And then I reminded myself that it couldn’t be magic. We didn’t have magic around here. I was immune to magic and I’d never seen anything magical being hidden from other people. I’d discovered during my parents’ visit to New York last Thanksgiving that I’d inherited my magical immunity from my mother, and in her whole life in Cobb she’d never noticed anything that made her think of magic. That was one of the reasons I’d come here when I needed to get away. It was the last place where my magical problems were likely to follow me.

“Katie!” Beth called from the front. Her voice was a lot more pleasant than Sherri’s screech. “Someone’s here to see you.” I got the impression from the teasing singsong of her voice that whoever was there was male and good-looking. My heart rate went bonkers, and I could practically feel the adrenaline rushing into my system. I kept an extra-tight grip on Lucy as I stood, for fear my suddenly rubbery limbs wouldn’t be able to hold her.

When I got out into the store, that surge of emotion deflated instantly. The man waiting to see me wasn’t dark-haired, blue-eyed, and just a little shorter than average. He was tall and blond, though he did have blue eyes. “Well, if it isn’t Miss Katie Chandler, come back home from the big city,” he drawled.

“Yes, I’ve been back since January,” I said, shifting Lucy’s weight and trying to get her fingers untangled from my hair. If I wasn’t mistaken, this guy was Steve Grant, the quarterback, football hero, and otherwise big man on campus from my high school days. “How’s it going? Is there something I can help you with?”

Steve took in the baby I held. “I guess that’s why you’re back, huh?”

It was an interesting assumption to make, considering that Lucy was her mother made over, bright red curls and all, and looked absolutely nothing like me. “Um, no. This would be my niece.”

He looked immensely relieved. “Well, whatever the reason, it’s good to have you back. Say, we ought to get together some time, you know, catch up on old times.”

As far as I could recall, we didn’t have any “old times.” We’d had a class or two together, but otherwise, our interactions had been limited to me playing in the band while he played football. The dating pool must have really dried up if he was resorting to asking me out. “I guess this means I’m the only single woman left in town,” I said with a laugh.

“Whoa, what? No! That’s not what I meant. I mean, well, I saw you in the DQ earlier today, and I think the city’s been good for you. You’re so…sophisticated.”

I wasn’t sure the word “sophisticated” applied to someone wearing faded jeans and a seed company T-shirt with her hair coming out of a halfhearted attempt at a ponytail. “That’s awfully sweet of you to say, Steve, but I’m not really interested in dating right now, thanks.” I hoped he didn’t press me for details because it was hard to explain that I was still hung up on the guy I’d left behind in New York and he couldn’t possibly compete. It’s not like I was planning to join a convent if circumstances didn’t let me get back with Owen, but I just wasn’t ready to move on yet. “Is there anything else I can help you with? We’ve got a sale on lawn tractors.”

“Nah, not today. But if you change your mind, give me a shout. I’m sure you know how to find me.” He gave me a wink before strolling out of the store. I had to admit that his backside in Wranglers wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but he wasn’t Owen, and I doubted anything else would do for a very long time.

I hadn’t even made it back to the office before my mother came running up the front steps and burst into the store.

“You are not going to believe what I just saw!” she shouted.

I
flashed back to Thanksgiving in New York, when I’d spent much of the holiday trying either to hide magical things from my mother or rationalize the things she did see. Then I remembered where I was. More likely, Mom had seen one of the local preachers making out in the backseat of a Chevy with the church secretary. Now, that would be news worth reporting, and she could most definitely be counted on to report it. I’d never seen a fairy or elf here, so I could safely rule that possibility out.

“What is it, Lois?” Beth asked cheerfully. I tried to take her cue and calm down. She acted like this was an everyday occurrence, and with my mother, it probably was.

“I was at the drugstore, and Lester Jones actually gave someone his prescription for free!”

I immediately relaxed. Lester Jones, the town pharmacist, was a notorious skinflint. If you were at his house for dinner and asked him for an aspirin, he’d charge you a nickel for it. Beth raised an eyebrow. “Hmm, that is interesting. Maybe he’s had a change of heart and is trying to make up for all those years of overcharging. They did have a revival last week over at the Second Baptist Church.”

“I didn’t know Lester was a Baptist,” Mom said with a disapproving tone. “I didn’t think he was anything.”

“All the more reason he might have been ‘saved’ if he went to the revival,” Beth reasoned.

“Who was the lucky customer?” I asked. “Maybe it was someone who has some dirt on Lester, or someone Lester owes money to.”

“It was that weird kid—the one who got a scholarship to A&M and then flunked out. You know him, Beth, the one who used to be friends with Teddy.”

“Oh, you mean Gene Ward?” Beth asked with a frown. “That would explain a lot. His dad does own half the town. I wonder why he needed medicine.”

“Well, the boy did have his hand bandaged. It was probably antibiotics or something for the pain.” That solved Nita’s mystery as well as Mom’s. From what I knew about Eugene Ward, he’d probably tried to take out the window so he could rob the motel, and then Nita had startled him so he’d run away before getting anything. He thought he was smarter than everyone else and could get away with anything, but he was also a big scaredy-cat. If he had been caught, his daddy would have bought off the Patels and bailed him out. He’d probably already paid off half the merchants in town after Gene’s assorted foolish stunts.

My oldest brother, Frank, showed up then, and his presence settled things down. “Hey, Mom,” he said, giving her a hug and a quick kiss. “What brings you down here?”

“I was out running errands and thought I’d drop by to see if y’all wanted to come over tonight for supper after you get done with work. Are Dean and Sherri around?”

“Sherri left a little while ago,” I reported. “Dean was here before lunch, but I have no idea where he went.”

“I guess I’ll have to track them down and make sure they’re coming. It wouldn’t be a family dinner without them. I’ll see everyone around seven-thirty.”

Beth turned to me once Mom was gone and said, “Now, I believe you’re off duty, if you want to hand Miss Priss back to me.”

I gladly handed over the baby, who clung to my T-shirt with damp fingers until she realized she was going back to her mother. “I’ll check my e-mail and handle a few orders before I go, now that the network’s fixed.”

I had one message in my personal in-box, a chatty message from Trix, the MSI executive receptionist, catching me up on all the office gossip I was missing. Most of it was complaining about my replacement, Kim, and what Trix would do to her if Kim weren’t immune to magic. There was no mention of Owen. I updated orders with our major suppliers, then logged off and headed home.

The house was empty when I got there, which meant Mom was probably at the grocery store. I probably should have offered to help her, but I’d be helping make dinner, so I needed to take what time I could get to myself. I’d also hauled home some of the office paperwork so I could actually get it done without the typical interruptions I faced at the store.

One way my current life beat my New York life hands down was in living space. You could have fit my entire New York apartment into my family’s living room—and three of us had shared that apartment. Funny, though, that I felt less crowded sharing that small apartment with two friends than I felt living at home with my parents.

I’d barely settled onto my bed with a stack of receipts when I heard a voice from downstairs. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home? I thought I saw Katie’s truck outside.” It was my grandmother.

Perhaps this house felt more crowded because it was kind of like living in the middle of Grand Central Station—spacious, but you couldn’t get a moment to yourself.

I put my work aside and headed downstairs to find my grandmother in the kitchen. “Hey, Granny,” I said. “Did you need something?”

“Just dropping by. I was out running errands. Is your mother around?” Without waiting for an answer, she darted into the living room. She carried a cane, but I couldn’t remember her ever leaning on it. She mostly just waved it at people.

“I think she’s at the grocery store,” I said as I ran after her. “She should be home any minute.”

She whirled and headed back to the kitchen. “You wouldn’t happen to have any coffee ready, would you?”

“I don’t think so, but I can make you some if you like.” Before I finished speaking she was already putting a filter in the coffeemaker and dumping in some coffee. “Or you could make yourself at home,” I finished under my breath.

“Katie!” my mother’s voice called from outside. I detected a hint of panic, probably because she’d seen my grandmother’s block-long old Oldsmobile parked in the driveway.

“There’s Mom now,” I said cheerfully. “I’ll help her unload the groceries while you make the coffee.” Without waiting for a response, I ran out the kitchen door and down the steps from the back porch to the driveway.

My mother looked like she’d swooned against the side of her car. “Please don’t tell me my mother is here,” she said.

“Well, then I’d have to lie. She’s making coffee.”

“I did not need this today, not with everyone coming over for dinner tonight.”

I reached into the trunk and grabbed a few grocery bags. “Weren’t you going to invite her?”

“Of course I was. But I wasn’t planning to have an audience while I cooked. She’ll criticize everything.”

“Why don’t I call Molly and tell her to bring the kids over when they get out of school? They can distract Granny.”

“Oh, you’re brilliant. How did I have such a brilliant little girl? It’s too bad you haven’t had children yet so you could pass on those brains to the next generation.” It was a sign of how long I’d been back home that I let the remark about children roll right off my back. When you’re hassled about marriage and children on a daily basis, you tend to get used to it.

“By the way, Beth said Steve Grant came by the store to see you,” she said. And there she went again.

“Yeah, he saw me in Dairy Queen and wanted to know what I was doing back in town.”

“He’s still single, you know. I can’t believe some smart young lady hasn’t snatched him up yet.”

“Yes, I know.” Then we were inside the house. I dumped my groceries on the kitchen table and hightailed it back to Mom’s car for another load while Granny started in on Mom. It was one of those cases where discretion really was the better part of valor.

When I got back inside with the next load, Mom was saying, “And would you believe Lester gave it to him for free? Beth thought it had something to do with Gene’s daddy owning half the town.”

As I went back outside, I hoped the subject had changed by the time I got back with the next load of groceries, since I’d finished emptying the car and I wouldn’t have any more excuses for sneaking away. “That’s the last of it,” I said, dropping the bags on the table.

“Katie, I was just telling Mama about what I saw outside the grocery store. I swear, there were people dancing in the parking lot, right there on the courthouse square. It reminded me of that deli you took me to in New York, the one where the waiters all did the dance routine.”

I got a sick feeling in my stomach. That hadn’t been the kind of restaurant staffed by hopeful Broadway actors. The impromptu dance routine had come about because of Phelan Idris, the rogue wizard Owen was fighting, casting a spell on everyone in the deli to make them dance for his own amusement. “Are you sure it wasn’t the drill team doing some danceathon fund-raiser?” I asked. Magic was supposed to be absolutely impossible here, wasn’t it? This town certainly wasn’t the kind of place where people started dancing in the streets for no reason.

“No, it was most definitely
not
the drill team. Everyone who came out of the store got into it. It was absolutely ridiculous.”

“Ah, spring fever,” Granny said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Back in the day, in the old country, we’d welcome spring by dancing to the spirits of the earth and air.” Her Texas drawl mutated into something out of a Lucky Charms commercial.

“Mother, you’ve never been in the old country,” Mom pointed out. “You were born in Texas, and you’ve never left the state. How on earth would you know what they did back in Ireland?”

“Just because some of you have forgotten the old ways doesn’t mean all of us have,” Granny muttered.

“The only old ways you know are how to get on my last nerve,” Mom said under her breath.

“I’ll go give Molly a call,” I said, figuring that my great-grandchildren distraction plan would be a really good idea about now. I didn’t relish the idea of breaking up yet another fight between my mother and grandmother. Mom was younger, bigger, and stronger, but Granny was armed and usually meaner.

Before long, the house was swarming with my niece and nephews, Frank’s kids. They clamored over Granny in the living room, showing her everything they’d done in school. Mom, Molly, and I took advantage of the relative quiet to get dinner ready. Mom was still going on about the weirdness in the grocery store parking lot.

“Can you believe such a thing?” she asked Molly.

“Did you see anyone else around?” I asked. “Maybe they were filming something, like a commercial for the store.”

“That could be it.”

“Funny,” Molly said, “I was just there on my way over here, and nobody said anything. You’d think that would be the talk of the town.”

“And that’s not all,” Mom said. “I could have sworn one of the antique lampposts on the courthouse square disappeared right in front of my eyes, and then came back.”

Molly laughed. “You probably just blinked. Things do tend to go away for a second when you close your eyes.”

“I know what I saw,” Mom snapped, causing Molly to flinch and then cast a worried look in my direction. I shrugged in response, not sure what to do. While I knew that it was entirely possible that Mom was going nuts, I also knew that there was such a thing as magic and that the things Mom described could actually happen.

I might have been out of the center of the action, but it looked like I was back to investigating. If I saw something weird around town, then I’d know something magical was going on. If I didn’t, we’d either have to get Mom to a doctor or find her a hobby. Neither possibility appealed to me.

Once dinner was over and all the guests were gone, I announced that I was going out and hoped that the fact that I was an adult who had lived for more than a year in Manhattan would mean nobody felt the need to ask where I was going or why. At any rate, I was out the door before anyone had a chance to ask. I drove into town, parked at the courthouse square, and got out of the truck to walk around.

As far as I could tell, everything was where it should be. All the antique lampposts and replacement antique-looking lampposts were in place, as were all the statues and monuments to various wars and local heroes. The gargoyles on the courthouse roof stayed still. Not one of them winked at me. Looking at these lifeless carvings made me miss Sam, my gargoyle friend from New York. Even one of his less-capable colleagues would have been a welcome sight.

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to open my other senses, straining to feel the tingle that told me magic was in use. That wasn’t any special power I had. Anyone could feel the charge in the air that meant someone was using magic nearby, but since most people don’t know magic is real, they write off that feeling as a shiver up the spine. Nothing here gave me shivers other than the thought that Mom might really be losing it this time.

The grocery store across from the courthouse had closed for the night, so the parking spaces in front were empty. Owen would have been able to detect traces of residual magic, but I couldn’t sense anything. I decided it was time for the next-best weirdness detector in a small town: the Dairy Queen.

On a warm night like this one, odds were that a fair number of people would have gone out for a banana split or a malt, and if anything even slightly out of the ordinary had happened, they’d certainly be talking about it. Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly full, and there were people crowded around all the outdoor tables. I went inside and ordered a brownie Blizzard, then looked around for a place I could sit and overhear as many conversations as possible.