Spell or High Water Read online

  “We did?” Five minutes ago I’d been watching as the long, knobby length of an alligator slowly made its way just beneath the surface of the murky water that lined the narrow path we were traveling on either side. “I guess I was distracted.”

  “It’s easy to lose your focus when you’re in an unfamiliar environment, but it’s best to keep an eye out. There are all sorts of things out here we’ll want to be aware of.”

  I swallowed hard. Snakes, alligators, and bobcats. What was I thinking?

  “I think it’s safe for us to continue,” Cody said as he took a tentative step forward.

  “Cody,” I said as I took a step to follow.

  “Yeah?”

  “Was this what it was like for you when you were with the SEAL team?”

  He turned and looked back at me. “I guess. In a way. I never had to make my way through a bayou, but I did have missions that took me into hot jungles that had a similar feel. Of course, most of my missions were in the desert, and when I was with the SEALs I was part of a team. It was different because I knew we could all take care of ourselves, so I only had myself to worry about.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself,” I shot back, even though at least in this situation we both knew I’d have been alligator bait by now if Cody hadn’t been with me.

  “You are very capable,” Cody diplomatically agreed.

  I wanted to make a remark about the capable label, but it was too hot and I was too tired. Being moody and unreasonable was a lot of work, and I knew it was better to conserve my strength. As the heavy air threatened to suffocate me, I tried to focus on Cody’s back rather than the darkness all around me. Shapes outlined in the shadows seemed to whisper in the muggy night as we made our way deeper and deeper into the bug-infested wetland. I was pretty sure it was only my imagination that caused me to see movement within those shadows. At least I hoped it was my imagination and not a predator lurking under the cover of dense foliage.

  “There,” Cody said after what seemed like a lifetime. “I think this is the clearing where we’re supposed to meet Baptiste.” He looked at his watch. “He’s supposed to be here at ten. It’s nine-forty. We’ll have to wait.”

  I considered our immediate surroundings. An owl hooted from atop a tall oak, while rodents and small mammals, hidden by low-growing foliage, scampered here and there. I was too afraid to stand in one place. Too afraid to go on. I’d faced down cold-blooded killers, yet they hadn’t left me feeling quite so terrified as the nameless, faceless sounds in the night.

  Cody took my hand and led me over to a fallen tree. He shone the flashlight over its surface before suggesting we sit down on it to wait. Sitting still in one place made me feel a bit like the goat that was tied to the tree in Jurassic Park, just waiting for an unseen predator to make him a tasty meal. Of course, in this particular situation, standing wasn’t much better.

  “What’s that buzzing noise?” I whispered, afraid to allow even the sound of my own voice to penetrate the night.

  “I’m not sure,” Cody whispered back. “Perhaps insects of some sort. I’ve been in places with a similar hum, but this is quite unique.”

  “It almost sounds like a power tool. A saw or a grinder. I know it can’t be, but that’s what it sounds like.”

  “Maybe we can look it up online tomorrow,” Cody suggested.

  “It would be interesting to find out what’s behind all those beady green eyes I keep seeing watching us. I wasn’t expecting so much activity at night, but it seems as if the bayou is as full of life now as it is during the day. Maybe even more so.”

  I was quiet for a while, listening to my breath as it competed with the strange noises all around us. As it had been every night since we’d been in Louisiana, the heavy air was hot and moist. I wondered how people lived here. I supposed you had to get used to it, the way I was used to the cool nights and frequent rain of Madrona Island.

  “And the bugs are the worst,” I said as I slapped my neck as one of the voracious little vampires who lived in the moist undergrowth of the thick trees bit me. Normally, I wasn’t bothered all that much by mosquitoes, but apparently, swamp mosquitoes found my Irish skin sweet and tasty. Cody had been slapping at himself for most of the journey, so I had the feeling we were both going to be covered in welts by the time the night was over. “How much longer?”

  “About ten minutes,” he answered.

  I snuggled in closer to him, even though his body heat was as stifling as my own. Still, there was comfort to be found in his large frame. “I wonder how the cat knows,” I said.

  “Knows what?” Cody responded.

  “Knows when it’s ten o’clock. It’s not like cats wear watches and tell time.”

  Cody turned and looked at me. “After everything you’ve seen the magical cats on the island do, you’re wondering about that now?”

  I let out a breath. “No. I guess not. I’m just really nervous sitting here. It helps to keep the conversation going.”

  Cody leaned over and kissed me on my forehead, even though it was covered in sweat. A true testament, I decided, to how much the man really loved me.

  “I looked Abigail Beaumont up before we came out,” Cody said, I was sure in an effort to keep my mind occupied.

  “And?” I asked.

  “The woman was brilliant and very beautiful, and she could be your twin. Even more so than the woman in the photograph in the gallery. It seems she had a big heart and a slightly reckless streak. She also was stubborn and strong-willed. I’m not saying I believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that you shared a life force with that very remarkable woman.”

  I took a moment to consider that. The whole concept of reincarnation seemed pretty out there to me, but over the past couple of years I’d come to believe in some other pretty out there things. “She never married?”

  “No, she didn’t. She studied history and literature in college. After she graduated she became a teacher at a high school on the Gulf. Abigail loved the sea and wrote a series of essays about its beauty and danger using the pen name Andy Bradford. When she was twenty-five she published her first novel. She wrote four more during the course of her short life.”

  “How did she die?”

  “When she was thirty-four she drowned off the coast of South Carolina while trying to save a young boy who’d been caught in a riptide.”

  I felt a catch in my throat. “Did the boy live?”

  “Actually, he did. Abigail, or Abby, as she preferred to be called, was able to pull the boy onto a raft before she was caught up in the tide. A spectator on the beach was able to save the boy, but he couldn’t get to Abby in time.”

  I suddenly felt like I was the one who couldn’t breathe. I put a hand to my throat and inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with warm air.

  “There he is.” Cody stood and pointed into the distance. “The cat. The cat is Baptiste.”

  I willed my heart to slow as I waited for the cat to approach. I greeted him with a mixture of dread and relief. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go where he was going to take us, but I did know I was ready for this night to be over. I glanced at Cody, who indicated I should go forward ahead of him, and we both set off after Baptiste.

  After a few moments he left the trail we’d been following to wander even deeper into the dense wetland.

  As the canopy of trees grew thicker, the light from the moon disappeared completely. The lack of even a small amount of natural light added to the eerie feel of the walk, but at least the cat seemed confident in his journey, which in an odd way gave me confidence as well. Over the past several years I had worked with more than a dozen cats on Madrona Island. Each had been sent by Tansy to help me solve whatever murder or mystery that had occurred at the moment. Most of the cats had disappeared from my life as abruptly as they had come into it, but each one had captured a piece of my heart and my soul.

  “Do you think it’s much farther?” I asked Cod
y as we trudged through the bayou. I wiped my wet brow with my wet arm, which really didn’t seem to help. I felt like someone was slowly baking me to death.

  “I don’t know. The map Eden gave us ends at the point where we were to meet Baptiste. There’s no way to know how much farther we’ll need to travel now.”

  “What was that?” I jumped as a short scream penetrated the night.

  Cody took my hand. “You don’t want to know.”

  “But?”

  “Don’t think about it. Just keep walking.”

  I nodded. I supposed I could wager a guess as to which small creature had let out the forlorn scream, and I guess I didn’t need Cody to spell out the circle of life for me. I knew how it worked, but Cody hadn’t been wrong when he’d counseled me not to think about it.

  “There.” He pointed at a small cabin that literally was in the middle of nowhere.

  “It looks dark.”

  “There was a flash in the window. I think it might have been a candle.”

  Cody and I followed the cat to the front door of the small building. I hoped he was going to stick around to lead us back to the car because I didn’t think there was any way we could find our way back on our own. Of course, Cody had been trained as a Navy SEAL. He could probably retrace our steps himself if he had to.

  “Should we knock?” I asked as the door slowly opened. I didn’t see anyone standing on the other side of the door, so I pushed it open wider and took a tentative step inside. “Hello,” I called out as the cat disappeared up some stairs.

  “I’ve been expecting you.” A tall woman with dark skin and white hair appeared from beyond the shadows.

  “Jasmina?”

  She nodded.

  “We’re here for the stone,” I informed her.

  “Come.” Jasmina turned and walked toward the back of the structure. When she arrived at the back wall, a door appeared. She walked through it, indicating that I should follow her.

  Okay, this was odd. The doorway didn’t seem to lead anywhere. It was just an empty space filled with an eerie gray light. I didn’t notice any of the scents or sounds of the bayou inside, and I wasn’t able to make out any shape or forms beyond the light. After we’d taken several steps into this very strange void, Jasmina stopped. She held out her hands and said a chant of some sort, again in a language I didn’t understand or recognize but suspected might be Haitian Creole. A blue stone that seemed more of a crystal appeared in Jasmina’s hand. She turned and held it out toward me. I accepted the smooth, cool stone, which appeared to shimmer even in the dim light.

  “This is the stone I’m to take to Tansy?”

  Jasmina nodded. “The stone will restore the magic that has been lost. Tansy will know what to do with it.”

  I was about to thank her, but the next thing I knew I was standing on a path in the middle of the bayou. Cody was at my side, though there was no sign of Baptiste. “What in the heck happened? How did we get out here?”

  “I’ve been waiting out here the whole time,” Cody said.

  I frowned. “What do you mean? Didn’t you go with me into the cabin?”

  Cody shook his head. “It disappeared the moment you stepped inside.”

  I frowned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you weren’t right behind me.”

  “I tried to figure out how to follow you, but both you and the cabin were just… gone, so I waited for you.”

  “Well, that must have freaked you out a bit.”

  Cody smiled. “Before getting to know you better, I would have been terrified, but since coming back from the Navy I’ve seen so many amazing things happen on the island, having a cabin disappear with my fiancée inside it seemed like just another walk in the park. Was Jasmina inside the cabin? Do you have the stone? Are we all right to go back to the car?”

  I nodded, feeling the weight of the stone in my hand, then showed it to him. “Can you find the car without Baptiste’s help?”

  Cody nodded. “I can.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Cody began to walk and I fell into step behind him. I focused on his broad shoulders and strong back and tried not to think about things that hummed and buzzed and went screech in the night. I thought of home and the life that awaited me on my return. My mom and four siblings, the new nephew we were about to welcome into the world. The bookstore I owned with my best friend, Tara, and the cats my aunt and I had been rescuing and housing in the Harthaven Cat Sanctuary for several years. This time in New Orleans had certainly been an adventure, but I couldn’t wait to get home to the people and places I loved.

  Madrona Island

  I’ve spent my entire life on Madrona Island, the one farthest to the north and the west of all the islands in the San Juan chain. Born to an Irish Catholic family, I grew up in the blue-collar town of Harthaven, which was developed when twelve fishermen had settled in a colony there generations ago. I loved Madrona Island with all my heart and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. But the past few years had seen more change than the hundred before that, and at times I found myself pulled between the opposing forces of change and tradition. My great-great-grandfather was one of the founding fathers of Madrona. He’d worked hard, established a fishing business, and raised seven children. One by one, most of the descendants of those twelve founding families had left the island or died off, and now very few of us remained.

  When the ferry began to stop on the island every day, its culture began to change dramatically. The town of Pelican Bay was established and the commercial fishing businesses that had created Madrona all but died, leading to the closing of the cannery and the loss of many jobs. That old economy gave way to a new one based on tourism, which continues to be a hot topic. I can understand both sides of the conflict. Like many members of the founding families, I have no desire to see condominiums rising up along the shore, destroying the natural beauty and solitude of the island. On the other hand, without the inflow of cash that tourists bring, most families, old and new, couldn’t afford to stay on the island. Many have already been faced with the worst and have moved altogether.

  As an adult, I’ve come to live in a world made up of boxes. There’s the Sunday box, which I also think of as my Harthaven box. It includes the village of Harthaven, my mother, the church, and the Sunday dinner every Hart on the island is expected to attend each week. While I’d had a wonderful childhood filled with love and fond memories, there’s a part of me that longs for something more than can be experienced in this blue-collar environment, where hard work, family, church, and tradition are the cornerstones of everyday life and are thought of being more than enough.

  During the other six days of the week I live in the Pelican Bay box. Pelican Bay is a modern town that was built on the idea of personal enrichment, spiritual freedom, and economic prosperity, and its residents are an eclectic lot. That’s where I co-own Coffee Cat Books with Tara O’Brian and share my life with wonderfully free-spirited souls, including a hippie couple, Banjo and Summer, who are most definitely stuck in the sixties, other neighbors from all walks of life, and my witchy friends, Bella and Tansy.

  In the center of this magical place I call home is an area known as the hollow. It’s a mystical place, where the magic Madrona Island is purported to possess seems to live. The hollow is uninhabited except for the feral cats who live in the dark spaces between the rocks. While most of the island’s residents stop short of referring to the hollow as haunted, it’s widely accepted that not everything that happens there can be explained.

  The cats that inhabit the island are the main reason Cody and I had risked life and limb to obtain the magical rock Jasmina had assured me would restore the magic, which had somehow been lost. Our journey really had begun when Tansy had noticed cats were leaving the hollow for no apparent reason. We’d done some research and discovered the water in the hollow had been tainted. We’d thought if we could fix whatever was wrong with the water the cats would return and the magic would be restored, but that hadn�
��t happened yet.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go on my own?” I asked Tansy as the trail narrowed and steepened. I had no idea how a woman who was all but bedridden by the time Cody and I returned from New Orleans with the blue crystal-like stone was able to come as far into the hollow as she already had.

  Tansy paused and took a deep breath. “I’m fine. We must continue together. We’ll need all the magic we both possess to place the stone in its rightful place.”

  I worried that Tansy seemed to be drawing on the last of her magic to put one foot in front of the other but continued. The trail was steep and covered in shale, making for a difficult and dangerous passage. I was in pretty good shape, so I was well equipped for a laborious hike, but I could sense a storm coming and was afraid it would arrive before Tansy and I could make our way back down the trail and out of the hollow. Still, I’d learned to trust her, so I kept on despite the risk. The trail narrowed as it wound steeply up the mountain. Even my legs burned as I struggled to keep my footing on the unstable ground.

  As I walked, I looked for a sign that any of the islands cats were here now. No one knew for certain how the cats came to be here in the first place, but local legend had it that a man named Ivan Valtranova, a merchant from Russia, had found Madrona when he was blown off course during a storm. He took refuge in the hollow with the twelve cats with whom he’d traveled. If folklore is to be believed, he fell in love with the beauty and isolation of the island and decided to stay after the storm passed. Most assume the cats Valtranova brought with him were the base from which today’s cat population had been bred.

  According to the story, Valtranova lived alone on the island for a number of years, until the founding families arrived and built the fishing village that became Harthaven. It’s said one of the settlers killed the Russian in a land dispute. Although the account of his demise had most likely been sensationalized, it did seem that after a hard-fought battle to regain his isolation, he was beheaded and his headless body was left in the hollow. The legend claimed the head was never found and is, in fact, buried somewhere in the hollow. There are those who believe the Russian’s spirit is trapped there, and that he still wanders it, looking for his head and exacting his revenge on anyone who comes by night to disturb his solitude.