It Never Rhines but It Pours (23 page)

I grabbed a loose pillow and bonked him over the head with it. “I don’t suppose you’d like to let the love of your life sleep in while you got the kids breakfast?” I asked hopefully.

He planted a kiss on my forehead, “I would love to do that,” he said, making my heart leap for joy, “but,” my heart sank, “I have a meeting this morning and have to run.”

I groaned some more and buried my head under my pillow. Mark swiped the covers off as he got out of bed and smacked my uncovered rear end.

“Up and at ‘em, sleepyhead,” he said cheerfully. I needed to practice my death glare. It wasn’t working.

“Mommy!” I heard the wailing start from across the house. Time to get out of bed. There were things to do today: Murderers to catch, witches to interview, billboards to spell, just another normal day in the life of Piper Cavanaugh.

“I’m coming,” I yelled back, lying on my back and staring at the ceiling. I
was
coming, eventually. I just needed to build up some momentum.

“Mommy!” The wailing turned to shrieking.

I sighed and rolled out of bed. I was getting too old for this sort of lifestyle. I did not operate well on four hours of sleep. Maybe they could send one of those Guardians out to execute me today. Then I would get some rest. Peaceful rest.

“
Mommy
!” There was the sound of a loud crash and then more screaming.

I trudged across the house, muttering under my breath. Someone was going to get in trouble. I slammed open the baby safety gate and marched into the girls’ room.

“What is going on?” I don’t know how many times I have asked that question since becoming a mother. Probably millions.

“Cassidy says that she won’t be my friend and that I’m a poopy-head,” Megan was sobbing.

I smothered a grin. “Cassidy!”

Cassidy was hiding in the closet. She started hysterically screaming. “No spanking! No spanking! My bottom will break in two!”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Cassidy, come out here right now.”

“No!” her screaming intensified.

“Cassidy, I’m counting to three and then you’re going to get a spanking.”

“Noooo!!”

“One.” There was no movement from the closet.

“Two.” Still no movement.

“Three.” Half way through the word “three” Cassidy stuck her head out of the closet door and slowly inched her way towards me.

“No spanking!” she cried.

“Cassidy, when I call you, you need to come,” I said firmly.

Cassidy did a little dance, covering her bottom with her hands and keeping it as far away from me as she could. “No spanking,” she repeated.

“Cassidy, did you call your sister a bad name?” I asked.

“Poopy-head,” Megan filled in, “she called me a poopy-head.”

“Thank you, Megan,” I sighed. “But we don’t repeat bad words, even if someone else says them.”

“Okay,” Megan had stopped crying and was watching with interest. Probably hoping that her sister would get a spanking.

“Did you call your sister a bad name?” I asked again.

Cassie’s eyes got big and she had to think about her answer. Finally, “Yes.”

“Come here,” I held out my arms and she took forever to cross the room to me. “You need to apologize to your sister.”

“She said I stupid,” Cassie cried.

“Megan.”

Megan found something that looked really interesting on the other side of the room.

“Megan!”

She looked up, a “who me?” look on her face.

“Did you call your sister stupid?”

“Weelll,” she hesitated. “Maybe, I might have said that. But it was just because she wouldn’t give me the doll I wanted. She was being selfish.”

I put a hand over my eyes and longed for bed. “Okay, both of you need to apologize to the other one and then play nicely ‘till I get back.”

I dragged my sleepy bones back across the house and had just reached the master bedroom when I heard, “Mommy, Cassie won’t forgive me!”

I pretended that I hadn’t heard. I just wasn’t up to dealing with toddler nonsense this morning. Or any morning, for that matter, but especially mornings in which I was sleep deprived. A shower helped wake me up a bit. Mark gave me a quick hug and kiss and was out the door before I decided what shirt would go best with my khaki shorts.

“Breakfast, girls!” I called and had to listen to the usual complaints against eggs. Not that I’ve tried to serve eggs in the last year or so, but the memory of that time was fresh in their minds. I don’t think that Cassidy really knew if she hated eggs or not, she was just following her sister’s lead.

I called Sarah over my second cup of coffee. “What’s the status on our favorite witch?”

I heard a loud yawn, “Piper?”

“Sarah?”

“What are you doing?”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it, “Talking to you?” I asked.

“Do you know what time it is?” she shrieked.

I winced and held the phone away again. “Sarah! We don’t really have time to sleep in right now! There are more important things at stake! Like our
lives
!”

“It’s like …” I heard fumbling noises and a crash, “it’s 8:30 in the morning, Piper! I don’t get up this early even on nights when I didn’t go to bed at four o’clock in the morning!”

I sighed - teenagers. “Sarah, are you going to spend the last few hours of your life sleeping, or are you going to help me save the world?” Ok. So that sounded a little dramatic.

Sarah grunted. “What do you want, Piper?”

“I want to know if Pravus is still there. We need to have a little talk.”

Sarah yawned again. “I’ll check. He’s probably cooking pancakes for Mom and Nana for breakfast.”

“He’s cooking?”

“Yeah, he’s got them wrapped around his little finger. They think ‘Cousin Richard’ is the best.”

“What does Dad think?”

“You know Dad. He’s hiding out at work because Nana’s here. I’m not even sure if he knows that Pravus is staying here too.”

I laughed. That sounded like Dad. Work would be having a crisis that required him to work major overtime as long as Nana was in town. “I’ll be over in a little bit. Make sure Pravus doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Uh-huh,” was the noncommittal reply.

“Sarah! You better not be going back to sleep! We have things to do!”

“Uh-huh.” She yawned.

I rolled my eyes. “You better be up and showered and coherent when I get there.”

“‘bye,” Sarah hung up on me.

I glared at the wall for a minute. Was I the only person taking this seriously? I decided that I needed a third cup of coffee. And a pregnancy test. I closed my eyes. I hadn’t told Mark about the new baby. Wait a sec, maybe there wasn’t a new baby. I had nothing to tell him at this point, so it wasn’t like I was lying to him … again.

At that moment the front door bell rang. My little girls ran to the window to see who was here. I was wondering myself. It was a little early for callers. Then I heard the joyful shouts, “Granny’s here! Granny’s here!”

Oh, drat. I should have had that third cup. I should have had a donut. I should have moved to Timbuktu. Too late. Satan’s henchman was here to make sure that I experienced all the horrors of hell here on earth.

I dragged myself to the front door. Was that a coffee stain on the front of my shirt? Had I put on makeup this morning? I reached a hand up to run through my short hair. I had either fixed it or it was now all standing up on end. Oh well, it’s not like anything I could ever do would be good enough for my mother-in-law. I swear the only reason she even tolerates me is because I am the uterus that will provide her with more grandchildren. Nice to be thought of as a baby incubator.

“Good morning, Piper,” Carolyn said coldly when I opened the door. She was dressed to the nines in matching light pink capris with a frilly blouse. “Did I wake you?”

I gritted my teeth. She could care less if she had woken me. She was just laying the groundwork for an insult. “Why, no, Carolyn,” I said with saccharine sweetness. “We’ve been up for awhile.”

“Oh,” she looked taken aback. The horrid actress! “It’s only that you look like you just rolled out of bed.”

“Nope,” I grinned. “Not me.” I gave my hands a shake behind my back to loosen my fingers out of the fists they had instinctively formed. “Won’t you come in?”

She stepped by me into the front hall and ran a finger down the top of a picture frame. Ha! I thought. I dusted that … last week? Crap.

“I had thought to find the girls ready to go,” Carolyn commented, giving Megan and Cassidy a hug and a kiss.

“Go?”

“Yes,” Carolyn sighed the sigh of the martyred. “I’m taking the girls on an outing today.”

“An outing?”

“Yes, Piper. If you have nothing more intelligent to say than to repeat what I just said, perhaps your time would be better served by getting the girls ready to go. I
am
on a schedule.” Carolyn tapped her perfectly manicured toes.

I almost said “schedule?” but closed my mouth in time. “I—” I started, stopped, opened my mouth, closed it, then started again. “I’m sorry, Carolyn. I don’t remember anything about your taking the girls on an outing.”

“I spoke to Mark about it just the other day,” she replied. “He said that you would call if there was a problem. As I received no call …”

I tried to keep the grimace off my face. Darn that Mark! So what if I’d been a little preoccupied lately and we hadn’t spent much time talking? He could have told me about something like this! He
should
have told me about this. I felt a guilty twinge. Maybe he had told me and I had been so busy worrying about the Synod, and Pravus, and trying to avoid lying as much as possible, that I hadn’t been listening.

I sighed and threw myself under the bus, “I totally forgot. So, sorry. Come girls, let’s get ready!”

“Where going?” Cassidy wanted to know.

“Out with Granny,” I shrugged, looking at Carolyn.

“It’s a surprise,” she whispered to them.

“Yay! Surprise!” The girls raced off to put on their flip-flops and I followed to brush hair into somewhat neat ponytails. This left Carolyn alone in the kitchen which still had the dirty breakfast dishes on the counter. Tough. She would just have to suffer until she could escape with my children.

I had Megan and Cassie ready to go in record time and trailed them into the kitchen.

“Piper,” Carolyn had screwed up her face into a grimace. “What is that smell?”

I narrowed my eyes into an annoyed slit. She knew darn well what that smell was. It was dog. And it wasn’t like he was that smelly. He just smelled like a dog.

Harvey, guessing that someone might be talking about him, looked up from cruising the floor for fallen scraps and wagged his tail happily. “That’s Harvey,” I sighed.

“Oh.” The tone was eloquent in its distaste.

“Well,” I clapped my hands together. “Time to go. We mustn’t keep Granny waiting!”

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the little traitors cried and were out the door without even giving their mother a kiss or telling her that they would miss her. They wouldn’t miss me. But they could at least pretend.

I ran down the front walk to ask an important question. “When will you back?”

Carolyn smiled sweetly. “I’ll have them back around dinner time,” and she pulled smoothly out of the driveway.

“Whose dinner time?” I yelled after the departing car. “Ours or yours?” There was a big difference. Carolyn thought that a proper dinner began at eight o’clock at the earliest. We always sat down at six. It made for lots of fun when she had us over for dinner.

There was no reply and I watched helplessly as the car disappeared around the corner. Well, at least I was free for the rest of the day. I could go take a nap! Reality crashed back in. I had a witch to deal with and the human species to save. A nap would have to wait.

Chapter Twenty-four:

The Request

“Mom?” I called, opening the front door with my key. “Anybody home?”

“We’re back here!” came the response.

I dropped my purse and keys on the hall table and kicked my flip flops off by the door. Then I walked quickly through the main part of the house to the back porch. Once, only a slab of concrete with a metal roof, my dad had turned the porch into an air-conditioned Florida room, with wood floors and comfortable furniture. It was a favorite spot for the family to congregate.

Nana was seated in the rocking chair, telling a story when I walked in. Mom was sitting on the couch, and Sarah was slouched on the floor, a bored look on her face. I almost smiled at the tableaux until I saw Pravus leaning back on the couch, a satisfied smirk on his face. Drat him! I needed him to be here right now, but I really wished he’d gone away. No such luck.

“Thieves! I tell you!” Nana was saying, and Mom gave me a finger wave and a hushing motion. “All of them are filled with thieves!”

“They can’t
all
be filled with thieves,” Mother interjected.