Don't Hex with Texas (8 page)

“Mom already got him,” I said. “He’s in Dean and Teddy’s old room.”

“I’ll have to talk to her about competing with me, but I don’t blame you. We don’t have breakfast here. I’m still trying to convince my dad that we should turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”

I looked over and saw that the window was back in place, the plastic gone. “Hey, you got the window fixed.”

“Yeah, Ramesh must have done it last night when he got bored enough—goodness knows the night shift gets boring. It was like that when I took over this morning.”

Owen wandered over to the window in question and placed a hand on the glass, as if out of idle curiosity. While he was occupied, Nita flipped up the desk gate to run into the lobby, grab me, and pull me off to the far corner. “Oh my God, Katie, he’s, like, gorgeous! Why didn’t you say anything? I knew it was a broken heart! And now he’s come to get you! You’ll have to tell me everything when you get a chance.”

“Later,” I promised her. Then I raised my voice to a normal speaking level. “I guess we’d better move on. I’m showing Owen around the town today.”

“And hiding out from your mom, I bet,” Nita added. “How big a family dinner did she try to plan for tonight?”

“The works, but we scored a one-night reprieve.”

She smiled up at Owen and extended a hand to shake his. “It was very, very nice to meet you. Have fun!” As we left the lobby, I glanced over my shoulder to see her miming, “Call me!”

“Well?” I asked Owen once we were in the car.

“Magic,” he confirmed. “It was sloppy, oozing all over the place, but I think I recognized the remnants of the spell.”

“So if our guy isn’t actively, knowingly using bad magic, he’s at least trying to use magic to commit crimes. Why else would he have removed the motel window? He was probably trying to rob the place, but Nita almost caught him.”

“This could get ugly,” he muttered.

“Next stop should probably be the pharmacy,” I said. “There are a couple of possible suspects there, and that’s the place where Mom thought Gene was getting prescriptions for free. But I think that if anyone in that transaction was using magic or would use magic to shake people down for money, it was Lester, the pharmacist. He’s a mean old skinflint. Think Scrooge before the ghosts, only with less hair and with a stockpile of drugs.”

“Who’s your other suspect?”

“This one’s a stretch, but there’s a hippie chick who runs the card and gift part of the store. She’s someone I could totally see trying to explore magic. I could certainly imagine her wearing robes and dancing around the courthouse square. I’m just not sure I can imagine her doing anything mean or greedy. Though I guess she might have been collecting the money for charity. How does this work, anyway? Can you tell someone’s magical just from talking to them?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple unless I’ve been around them actively using magic. Right now, I’m getting a sense for things. Then I might know how to go about testing.”

I directed him to park on the square, and then we walked over to the pharmacy. A blast of incense hit us as we entered, and not far behind it was Rainbow, which I was pretty sure was not her real name.

“Greetings and blessings!” she trilled. “Is there anything I can help you find? I got a new shipment of healing aromatherapy candles that you might enjoy. There are some that balance your energy into harmony, and others that encourage the full bloom of love.”

Owen turned bright red again, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of the suggestion of encouraging the full bloom of love or because he was coughing and gasping for breath from the heavy, scented smoke in the air.

“No, thanks,” I said. “We just dropped in to get him some allergy medicine.” Then I dragged a still-coughing Owen back to the more sterile-smelling pharmacy part of the store.

Lester was around the pharmacy counter before we reached the first set of shelves, not so much because he wanted to offer great customer service, but because he was afraid we might be shoplifters. Never mind that he’d known me almost since birth—the word “trust” wasn’t in Lester’s vocabulary.

“What do you need?” he demanded. If one of the chains moved to town or if someone else decided to open a pharmacy, as long as they had the basic customer-service skills of the Soup Nazi, Lester would be in huge trouble.

I grabbed a box of Benadryl off a nearby shelf. “Just getting some antihistamines for him. It’s his first time in Texas.” Owen coughed obligingly, and Lester glared at him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Visiting Katie from New York,” Owen wheezed.

That was the wrong thing to say. Lester didn’t trust the townfolk he’d known his whole life, so he certainly didn’t trust a Yankee. He snatched the box from my hand and went back to the register to ring it up. Owen paid for the purchase before I could get my purse open, and the sight of money thawed Lester ever so slightly. “You in town long?” Lester asked.

“Just for a visit,” Owen said vaguely.

“If you need something stronger than that, I have some prescription antihistamines. You normally would need to see a doctor to get them, but I’m sure we could work a deal.”

Owen took a deep breath before we crossed through the gift part of the store and didn’t let it out until we were safely on the sidewalk. “Please don’t buy any of her aromatherapy,” he said as he gasped for air. “I’m not sure I could take it.”

“Her aromatherapy doesn’t exactly encourage the full bloom of romance in you, huh?”

“Well, there is some magic in it, but it’s not done right, so the effect on a magical person isn’t quite what’s intended.”

“You mean, that stuff is for real?”

“There’s a bit of a benign influence spell on the candle she was burning. You wouldn’t notice the effects, of course. On a normal person, it might promote a feeling of well-being. To a magical person it’s like…Well, it’s like being a person with perfect pitch and listening to a singer who’s just slightly off-key. Other people might find it perfectly pleasing, but someone with perfect pitch would be climbing the walls.”

“I guess she’s one of our suspects if she’s selling magical products.”

“Probably not. If she can tolerate it, she isn’t magical. It could be something the supplier has done, and she has no idea that magic’s involved. All she might know is that the candles make her feel good. Just in case, you’ll need to go in there without me and buy one so the company can investigate. I can’t go in there again.”

“Hey, there’s a test for our magical person. We herd the whole town through the pharmacy and see who goes into convulsions.”

“That actually could work. Maybe you should buy a couple of candles and we could set a trap.”

“It’s also a good sign that Lester isn’t our rogue wizard. He seems to be selling prescription meds under the counter, but he couldn’t be magical and survive spending all day around those candles.”

“Unless maybe the constant exposure to those candles is what makes him so irritable. What’s next on your agenda?”

“The grocery store. Mom swears people were dancing out in front, but nobody else seems to recall it happening. Idris did do that while Mom was in New York, so I thought it sounded like one of his spells. If it happened.”

We walked around the square to the grocery store. He stepped off the sidewalk into one of the empty parking spaces in front, then shook his head and rejoined me on the sidewalk. “If there was any residual magic there, it’s faded by now. But if it did happen, perhaps someone who works in the store could be our culprit. They’d have access to the square, which seems to be the focus of magical activity. That in and of itself is proof this person doesn’t know what he’s doing. The square is the weakest magical point in the area. They’d be much better off in that park along the creek.”

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anyone at the grocery store resembling a mischievous rogue wizard. They were all nice, small-town folks who knew their customers by name and greeted everyone like a long-lost relative. I had to introduce Owen at least half a dozen times, and I knew they’d all know his name the next time he came into the store. We bought a couple of nonperishable items to explain our visit, then left.

“That was a bust,” I said with a sigh. “I guess all that’s left is the Dairy Queen. We can get dinner while we’re there. We’ll have to be careful what we talk about, because a conversation there is as good as dictating it to the town newspaper, but we can overhear a lot. It’s also one of about three restaurants in town, so it’s our best shot for a dinner out.”

“Just point me in the right direction.”

I’m not sure I would ever have imagined Owen Palmer fitting in at the Cobb Dairy Queen. He was so shiny and handsome, like a movie star, and even if you didn’t know he was a powerful wizard, you couldn’t help but sense that there was something special about him. But amazingly enough, he blended in almost as well as I did. The women all noticed him, of course, but no one seemed to regard him as an outsider. I supposed he was a small-town boy himself, even if he was from another part of the country.

Steve and his gang showed up not long after we’d ordered and found a table, and I couldn’t help but enjoy the look he gave when he saw Owen with me. Having a man with matinee-idol looks sitting across from me was quite a personal coup. I hoped Steve would accept his defeat and move on, but he came over to our table after he placed his order.

“So, Katie, who’s your friend?” he asked, hooking his thumbs through his belt loops and adopting a challenging stance.

“This is Owen, who’s visiting me from New York, and Owen, this is Steve. We went to high school together.”

They called our number from the front counter, and Owen got up to go get our food. “I guess I’ll leave you two alone on your hot date,” Steve said. If he’d been an air quotes kind of person, he’d have put air quotes around the words “hot date.” Then he moseyed off. I could have sworn he was giving his behind a deliberate sway for my benefit as he walked away.

“Ex-boyfriend?” Owen asked as he returned to the table with two steak finger baskets.

“Hah! Back in school, I’m not sure he knew I existed, other than as the younger sister of my brothers. I’m merely one of the few single women in this age range left in town, and the few others aren’t impressed with his type, either, so he’s getting a little desperate.”

As we ate, we assessed the other patrons for their magical potential under our breath, not entirely seriously. “Silver-haired lady at three o’clock—your three o’clock,” I muttered. “I know she’s got a heck of an herb garden. She’s probably brewing potions.”

“How about the junior vampire scouts on your right? If they could do magic, you know they would.”

I turned my head ever so slightly to see the group of teens dressed all in black with white makeup and black lipstick—boys and girls alike. “Nah,” I whispered. “If they’re dancing in robes at the courthouse, they’re doing it at midnight, not broad daylight, and they’d be doing it in a group. Nonconformity is no fun unless everyone else is doing it.”

He grinned, and I felt for the first time since he’d shown up that he really was my Owen, the guy who’d become one of my closest, most trusted friends even while I had a huge crush on him. I’d always been at ease with him, in spite of the shivers he sent up my spine with every touch. That’s what had been different about him when he walked into our store today, I realized. He’d been closed off from me.

“You know, I really did leave because I thought it was best for both of us,” I said. “I didn’t want to put you in that kind of situation again.”

“I know. I got a lecture or three about it.”

“So you understand?”

He paused for a long moment, his eyes searching mine as if trying to find the exact words to say. Finally he said, “I can see why you felt you had to do it.”

That hadn’t quite answered my question. He was still sidestepping the issue, and I still couldn’t tell what he really felt about me. But maybe I wanted too much, too soon. He was barely off the airplane. “Thank you for coming,” I said, trying to pour all my sincerity and all my feelings into my words.

He turned an almost purple shade of red and shrugged. “Any time you need me, I’ll be there, you know that. No matter what.”

His intensity was enough to take my breath away. “I do,” I managed to whisper. Then, as much as I wanted to stay in that moment, I couldn’t help but be distracted. “Don’t look now, but one of our prime suspects just walked in.”

“I
’d like to talk to him,” Owen murmured. “See if you can get him over here.”

I waited until Gene finished at the counter, then called out as he passed, “Hey, Gene! What’s up?”

He looked around as if trying to figure out who was calling to him before he focused on me. Then he looked suspicious. “Why?” he asked, a defiant, challenging tone in his voice. I made a mental note to ask Teddy if their friendship had actually broken up or if they’d just drifted apart over time. He hadn’t seemed too hostile with us the other day in the store, but the glare he gave me now made me wonder if he had issues with the Chandlers, with Teddy, or maybe even with me.

“Just saying hi,” I said with a shrug. “Oh, this is my friend Owen from New York. Owen, Gene and I were in high school together.”

Owen stood and stuck out a hand as if to shake it, but Gene ignored him. “I was way ahead of you in school,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, he and my brother Teddy were big-shot seniors when I was a lowly freshman. But we were all in marching band together.”

“Yeah. Well, see you,” he said with a grunt and wandered off.

“He seems nice,” Owen said, his lips quirking like he was trying to keep from smiling.

“Very charming guy. I think Teddy hung out with him mostly because he was the only other kid in the school who could understand what he was talking about. So, are you ready to head out, or do you want ice cream?”

“Can we get ice cream to go and then take a walk? I’d like to check out that creek with the walking path alongside it.”

“Sure. I recommend the brownie Blizzard.”

We were watching the girl behind the counter make our ice cream treats when Dean came in. Every female head in the place turned to watch him. I usually didn’t notice it, since he was my brother, but he was almost as good-looking as Owen. “Why, if it isn’t my baby sister,” he said, grabbing me in a one-armed hug and kissing the top of my head. “Looks like you escaped for the evening. And this must be that boyfriend I’ve heard so much about. Hi, I’m Dean, the middle brother.”

I wormed my way out of his grasp and introduced them.

Dean held out his hand for Owen to shake. “Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. We may torture you some to make sure you’re good enough for our little Katie, but it’s just a formality. It’s rare enough for her to get a guy that we don’t want to risk scaring him off—unless he needs to be scared off.”

“Dean!” I protested, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Just kidding, Kitty-Kat. You know I love you. Say, are you two here for dinner?” I suspected Dean was really angling for an invitation to join us for dinner that would result in someone else paying for his meal.

“Sorry, brother of mine, but we just ate. And now we’re on our way out, since it looks like our Blizzards are ready. But don’t worry, Mom is planning to kill the fatted calf and throw a huge shindig tomorrow to celebrate the fact that I have a live one on the hook, so you can grill Owen then.”

Owen handed me one of the cups of ice cream that had just been put on the counter for us. “It was nice meeting you, Dean,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll talk later.” Once we’d strolled out of the parking lot and were heading down the sidewalk to the park, he said, “I get the feeling he’s not as nice as he seems. You really tensed up around him.”

“Wow, you are good. Actually, he’s not bad. He just tries to slide by on charm rather than bothering to develop any other skills. He makes Rod look like a rank amateur. We got along fine growing up, but I think his wife has been a bad influence on him. He might have made something of himself if she hadn’t been so much like him.”

“His wife was Sherri, right? The blonde in the tight clothes?”

“Hey, you may not need that chart, after all.”

“I’d still like it before the big family dinner—names and relationships annotated.”

“Okay, I’ll get to work on it. Now, what was it you wanted to see down by the creek?”

“The sense of magic is stronger here.”

“Really? So we’re not entirely empty of magic?”

“No place is entirely empty of magic. There’s just more magic in some places than in others. In this area, the magic is concentrated in a few spots, including areas around running water. The power comes from the earth rather than from the atmosphere, so it’s highly localized and more difficult to draw upon.” At the creek bank he bent over the water, holding a hand out with his eyes halfway closed. He dipped his hand into the water and let it flow around him for a while, then stood up, shaking the water from his hand. Then he went over to a nearby tree and put a hand against it.

I ate my ice cream as I watched him. “Is there something I could help you find?” I asked him after a while when he seemed to have forgotten I was there. It looked like he’d gone back to being distant. Or maybe he was focusing on work, I reminded myself. After all, he hadn’t come just to see me.

“Did you ever see anything unusual around here?”

“I’ve told you, I saw nothing to do with magic until I came to New York. Was there something in particular I should have seen?”

He continued looking around, nudging clumps of grass with his foot and poking into bushes. “Any unfamiliar creatures? Or were there any local stories about seeing something odd down here at night?”

“Creatures? You mean like fairies and stuff?”

“Not quite like you’ve seen before. These would be wilder. There may be a few isolated species in the area.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen any, and I used to play down here all the time.”

“Did you ever come down here after dark or during twilight?”

“No. It was a big make-out spot back in my school days, which left me out, and now I hear it’s where kids go to drink and use drugs.”

“Then you wouldn’t have seen anything.”

“I guess it would explain all of my grandmother’s talk about the wee folk. It also says something about how she must have spent her youth if she was here to see them. Go, Granny!”

He looked around some more, and I wondered if I should have been helping, but he hadn’t responded to my offer of help, so I left him to it since I had no clue what he hoped to see. “They may not be here anymore,” he said at last. “The drinkers and drug users might have driven them away. They’d have been drawn by the auras of the lovers, but the drinkers have a more negative energy.”

“What good would it do to find these creatures?”

“They could be allies. They also might have seen something that could help us. It was just a thought, since we don’t have much to go on.”

“I guess we could always get a few of those candles, set them up around the house, and then get Mom to throw a big open house and invite the whole town.”

“Hold on to that idea. We may need it later.”

“Do you have any ideas about any of our suspects?”

“Not really. And there’s always a chance that it’s someone you don’t know.”

“There aren’t too many people around here that I don’t know. This isn’t the kind of town people move to on purpose.”

“I think it’s a nice town. It’s like something out of an old movie.”

“Yeah, lost in time, that’s us. We’re the Texas version of Brigadoon. And now we even have the magic to go with it. So, what do we do next?”

“We wait for our wizard to make another move and see if that tells us anything.”

We walked back to the Dairy Queen where his car was parked. Dean’s flashy new truck was still outside, and I felt a tiny bit guilty about being relieved when he didn’t come out while we were there. The relief grew stronger when I noticed Sherri’s little convertible parked nearby. If she’d joined him for dinner, I really didn’t want to run into the two of them.

That desire grew even stronger when I looked through the windows into the restaurant and saw Sherri and Dean yelling at each other, having yet another one of their very public fights. “Uh-oh,” I said. “You may have to move into the other guest room tonight, unless Dean doesn’t mind using Frank’s old room.”

“Why?”

“He and his wife are at it again. They do this all the time. They have a big fight, then she kicks him out. A few days later they make up and start all over again. I guess it works for them, but it sounds like hell to me.”

We got home and chatted a little with Mom and Dad, then Owen called it a night. I stayed downstairs to get the interrogation over with. Mom barely waited until he was at the top of the stairs before she started in on me. “Why didn’t you say anything about him?” she demanded.

“Well, the last guy I dated didn’t stick around too long, so I didn’t want to say anything this time before I knew for sure where we stood. His visit here was a complete surprise.” Pretty much all of that was the truth, more or less.

“But to come all this way, just to see you! He must really like you. Or is there something else going on?” She elbowed Dad. “What do you think, Frank?”

Dad moved his attention briefly from the television. “He seems like a nice enough kid. But maybe you should wait awhile before booking the church. Don’t want to get ahead of yourself.” Then he went back to watching people sift through crime scene evidence.

“How do you two know each other?”

“From work. And before you ask, we hadn’t been going out that long. We started dating a week or so before Christmas, and then I moved back here right after the new year, so things hadn’t gone very far. We haven’t even begun discussing marriage plans, so get that out of your head. I spent Christmas with his parents, who were very nice. Is there anything else you wanted to know about him? The floor’s open for questions.”

Mom opened and closed her mouth, and I escaped before she could think of something else to ask.

I woke in the middle of the night to hear a tapping sound on my window. It persisted, so I crawled out of bed and pulled back the pink ruffled curtains to find Owen crouching on the porch roof. I opened the window and mumbled, “What is it?”

“Sam says our suspect is up to something.”

“And you couldn’t have knocked on my door from inside the house to tell me this?”

If it hadn’t been so dark out, I’m pretty sure I would have seen him turn bright red. The moonlight glinted off his glasses, making it hard to read his eyes. “I didn’t want your parents to catch me sneaking into your room.”

“But they’ll be okay with you crawling around on the roof, I’m sure.”

“You did tell me how to sneak out of that room.”

“Give me a second to put some clothes on, and I’ll be right out,” I said, a little less crabby now that I was fully awake. I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and redid my ponytail so it didn’t have so many scraggly bits hanging off it before I climbed out the window onto the roof. Owen kept to the outside of the porch roof as we made our way over to the tree. He dropped down first, then waited as if to catch me in case I slipped on my way down. As old a pro at this as I was, I didn’t need his help.

His car was parked far enough away from the house that the sound of the engine starting wouldn’t wake anyone up, and his rental car’s engine was much quieter than my truck’s. It took only a couple of minutes before we were downtown. He parked a block away from the square, and then we went on foot the rest of the way.

There wasn’t anyone dancing in robes under the moonlight on the square, but we could tell right away that someone had been there. The “whoop, whoop” of the security alarm at the jewelry store was the first clue. The front windows on most of the businesses on the square were missing. It looked like a lot of the goods inside were gone, too.

Sam joined us from his vantage point on top of the courthouse. “I only noticed him at the last place he knocked over,” Sam said. “He was pretty stealthy about the whole thing—may even have been veiling—so I didn’t spot him sooner. Sorry about that. And then when I tried to catch up with him, he vanished. Seems like he’s learned how to veil himself even from magical folk, but he can’t multitask and do serious veiling while working magic.”

“He’s not here now,” I said. “I don’t see anything.”

“He can’t have gone too far,” Owen said. He held his hands up and said something in a foreign language. I felt a surge of power, but saw nothing change.

“Hey!” Sam protested. “You’re blowing my cover. I thought the boss told you not to pull that stunt again.” I assumed that meant Owen had just removed every magical veiling in the area, including Sam’s. The last time Owen had done that, it created a real stir in midtown Manhattan and got him into a bit of trouble.

Owen waved a hand at Sam, restoring the veiling illusion. “This is the town square at midnight, not Times Square, so it’s not like there’s anyone to spot you. Now go see if you can find anything.”

Sirens sounded in the distance, probably responding to the jewelry store’s burglar alarm. “We’d better get away from here,” I said. “If someone sees us here, we’ll be the suspects.”

“They won’t see us.”

“Oh, right. Magic, invisibility, and all that.” Since I could see us, I didn’t feel great about standing in front of a burgled store with missing windows when I heard police sirens approaching. Owen didn’t seem at all bothered. He just stood there, scanning the sky for Sam.