Hex and the Single Girl (12 page)

“The museum is two blocks that way.”

“Hell of a wrong turn,” she said, pulling her veil down and her coat close. “Chilly tonight.”

“October,” he said. “Please, sit.” He sat down on a stone bench at the head of the rose garden. He patted the spot next to him.

Okay, this was weird. Dearborn was asking her to hang? Some lost little old lady?

“I know you heard my conversation with that woman,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of spying.”

She was spying. He glanced furtively at Emma and then looked away. She got it: He felt guilty about what he said to Marcie. He wanted absolution from an impartial bystander.

She shuffled slowly toward him and sat down, making sure she didn’t make physical contact—yet. “You treated that woman atrociously,” she said.

“She was using me,” he said. “And she lied. When someone lies to me, I go berserk.”

“You were rude,” said Emma. “Regardless of what she did.”

He looked at Emma more closely—too closely. She pulled her veil down. “You remind me of someone,” he said.

Her heart thundered. Did he recognize her? “Your mother?” she asked.

“My grandmother,” he said. “My mother died way before she got old.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Emma immediately thought of her own mother.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure the exit is that way,” said Emma, pointing, her hand shaking genuinely with cold. She wanted to do her job and go. Sitting with him, talking. It was wrong. He was an invention in her head, just as she was on his computer screen. Talking, sitting, they were in danger of getting to know each other. More accurately, she’d get to know
him.
He was talking to an old lady who didn’t exist. She was lying to him too.

“I like this,” he said. “Talking to a stranger in the dark. I feel like I can trust you.”

How wrong he was. Emma frowned, felt guilty. But then she pinched herself. Stay focused, she thought. Don’t look at his lips. Or his eyes. Her hands itched to touch his hair, only inches away.

She said, “I like your accent.”

“It’s pretty faint by now. I’m half English. My dad is an American. My English mother was paralyzed in a car

accident when she was thirty-five. In London. She died of a lung infection a year later, and that’s when my dad and I moved to New York. I think I’ve held on to the accent for her. I can still hear her voice.”

Emma could still hear her mother’s voice, too. And smell the cinnamon that seemed to rise from her skin. Whenever Emma got a vicious headache, she imagined her mom’s fear in those last minutes of her life.

“Did you hold on to your mother’s language, too?” asked Emma.

“Her language?”

“English words like chuffed and barmy and kip.”

He shook his head. “I use American slang, not British. Sometimes I use her phrase ’a cracking headache.’ I like that one.”

A cracking headache?
Had he really said that? She felt a chill, not just the air.

He laughed to himself. “That woman, the blond. I dated her for a month and never told her about my mother. I tell you in three minutes.”

Emma said, “You sensed something. See, I also…” She stopped herself. He’d almost sucked her into a genuine

conversation. “I also pour out my heart to little old ladies. We’re irresistible.”

“If only I could find an irresistible woman my own age,” he said.

An opening. “What about other women in your life? Someone you might have overlooked. Perhaps a colleague?”

He said, “I did meet a woman a few days ago. Sort of met her. I can’t stop thinking about her. This is going to sound very odd, but she talks to me in my head.”

As did he, in hers. “What does she say?” asked Emma, almost whispering.

“She says, ’Come and get me.’ She screams it, actually. But I can’t find her. She’s disappeared—like magic.”

Like magic. The Good Witch dared to sneak a peek at his face. He was looking at her and their eyes (hers behind glasses) connected. A surge of energy rocketed through her. She was shaking—from cold, fear, or desire, she wasn’t sure. “I’m absolutely freezing,” she said.

Taking the hint, he stood up. “I’ll walk you out.”

She would send a telegraphopathic transfer on him now, to matter what he’d said or how she felt about him. The sooner this case was concluded, the better. She could get back to her life as it was, secure and happy, in the bubble.

Emma held out her bare hand, closed her eyes, and concentrated. But he lifted her, two handed, by her upper arm.

“Your arms are pretty muscular for an old lady,” he said.

Accidentally, he brushed his knuckles against her breast. Her breath caught. “Let go,” she snapped.

He dropped her arm instantly. Embarrassed, he said, “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to grope you or anything.”

Emma’s throat got tight. She wanted him to grope her, brush her breast with his knuckles—and much more—every

day, for the rest of her life. But what she wanted didn’t matter. Emma and sex didn’t mix.

She must have looked mightily upset. He said, “I’m sorry! Honestly, I didn’t mean to offend.”

Emma said, “I was just thinking.”

“What?” he asked.

“I was thinking that roses could be
our
flower.”

He laughed, hardy and loud. “If only I’d met you forty years ago.”

“When you were in diapers?”

“I would have liked you, even then,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

Emma took a deep breath. She said, “Young man, it’s obvious to me that you could have your pick of girlfriends and probably always will. But you squander yourself on women like that blond. You have no respect for your power. If you did, you’d choose a woman who had power of her own.”

“What, like super powers? A woman who can lift huge restaurant bills with a single finger?”

Emma laughed, catching herself in time, made it sound old. She said. “Choose a woman who is your equal. Someone who’s successful, confident. A woman who doesn’t want to use you or change you. A woman with vision.”

“Artistic vision?” he asked.

“Someone who has plans, someone who can see into her own future,” she said. “Now, close your eyes and try to

imagine a woman—someone you might already know—who is powerful, attractive, and successful in her own right.”

He closed those beautiful green eyes. Emma closed hers, too, concentrating. Her fingers icy from cold, she put them gently on his cheek. The portrait images of Daphne appeared in her mind, all three of them, clicking one after the other behind her eyelids. Emma breathed rhythmically and sent the pictures into William Dearborn’s mind. Daphne’s white pose with the backlight; the red pose, a human flame; the blue one, electrified. She managed three rotations, and then Emma’s fingertips got hot.

She pulled her hand away. The entire transfer had taken several seconds.

He said, “I just had the most peculiar experience.”

“Were you thinking about a woman?” asked Emma. “Someone who’s your equal?”

“My cheek feels hot,” he said. “Right where you touched me.”

Emma rubbed her forehead. The brain fuzz was coming on strong, proof that she’d done a successful transfer on Dearborn.

“I’ve really got to go,” she said. “Sudden headache.”

“Is it cracking?” he asked.

A flashlight beam flitted across her face. A loud voice said, “That’s her. Oh, my God! She’s with Dearborn!”

The two cops—those who’d granted her an hour some two hours ago—started running toward Emma and William. If

they caught her, her cover would be blown.

Emma looked around and saw her only way out. She dropped her cane, hiked up her skirt, and galloped in her orthos to the fence surrounding the park. Adrenaline speeding in her blood, she scaled the fence like a monkey and heaved herself over the barbed wire on top—scratching her thigh, losing a patch of velvet on her opera coat, but otherwise uncut—and landed solidly on her thick rubber soles. And, bonus, the exercise cleared her headache before it got bad.

The cops, meanwhile, had reached William. The three men stared at Emma from the other side of the fence,

speechless. They weren’t going to pursue her, she realized, so she waved goodbye and walked away.

Before she got too far, she pricked up her super ears, and heard one cop say, “Ever seen a geriatric scale a fence like that before?”

“Hardly seems possible,” said William. “It’s almost as if she were a young woman dressed up like an old lady.”

Silence. Then the two cops in unison: “Nah.”

The wrinkle lines didn’t want to come off. Emma scrubbed and scrubbed until the skin underneath was red and raw.

She’d go at them again in the morning.

It was midnight when Emma got home to the Village from Brooklyn. The cab ride cost twenty dollars. Victor had left two messages via cell from the museum. Emma half listened while shedding her granny gear. There’d been, as Victor reported, some scuttlebutt when Dearborn and Marcie went MIA. When Marcie returned alone and upset, she began stuffing cheese chunks down her gullet with frightening speed. Daphne dragged her weight-loss spokesmodel out of the museum before Marcie started eating the table. “Not the food on the table, Emma,” Victor noted in this message.

“But the table itself.”

Daphne left Emma a message from her Town Car. She said, “I’m taking a friend home from the party, and I’ll have to stay with her for a little while. But my cell phone is on. Call me the second you get in. It’s VERY IMPORTANT.”

Before Daphne clicked off, Emma could hear Marcie shouting at the driver to pull into a McDonald’s drive-thru.

That conversation could wait, she decided. Emma took two Tylenol PM tablets. She wanted sleep to come fast. And it did. She had dreams of William at ten, a mop-haired English schoolboy in a blazer, short pants, knee socks, and a cap.

Chapter 14

THE FIVE QUESTIONS EMMA IS ASKED MOST OFTEN ABOUT HER SKILL

1. Are your parents gifted too?
When in a bitchy mood, Emma told people, “My mother was Nancy Reagan’s personal psychic—don’t believe those Joan Quigley lies. My father has bent spoons with his mind all over Europe.

He’s currently in India, studying with the Maharishi.”

The truth:
Anise, Emma’s Mom, could guess—accurately, within a few days—the last time someone had sex. She could also guess—accurately, within a few pounds and months—someone’s weight and age. Anise had long credited her keen intuitive powers to “a soft spot in her brain,” a prescient description that haunted Emma daily. Her father Harry was a muggle.

Both her parents were gifted with patience and tolerance, necessary attributes for raising a loner child who seemed to see and hear everything she shouldn’t. Emma’s peculiar eye and hair color only exacerbated her chronic friendlessness.

Anise and Harry tried to help her fit in, moved to the Village from suburban New Jersey when Emma was twelve, assuming city kids would be more inclusive. And they were, to a point. Emma was an oddball’s oddball, even in a private school full of “gifted” children. She put herself in a protective bubble and stayed there. Emma called it self-imposed isolation with a dash of self-pity. Anise called it adolescence.

2. Have you always had your power?
Clients loved this answer: “My skill awakened when I lost my virginity.”

The truth:
She’d always had it. Anise claimed that, while breastfeeding Emma, she had beautiful kaleidoscope visions. Anise hadn’t been afraid of the visions; she claimed to dig them, telling Emma years later that the colors and patterns were like, “being on mushrooms—the magic kind,” said Anise. “In fact, I was high on mushrooms when you were conceived, so it made sense.”

3. Wouldn’t you like to see what’s in other people’s heads, instead of just putting images into them?
Emma’s rap:

“I have a giving nature, and ask for nothing in return.”

The truth:
She’d love to receive messages, thoughts, ideas, anything and everything, from someone worth taking from. Try as she might, she couldn’t do it. Simply put, Emma was a pitcher, not a catcher.

4. Where does the power come from?
The usual response: “God only knows.”

The truth:
God only knew. At Berkeley, the researchers told Emma that brain waves could be amplified via heightened senses of hearing, smell, touch, taste, and sight—and Emma scored off the charts in those areas. Her talent could be genetic. Her mom
was
intuitive. And, as a matter of fact, Anise did have a soft spot in her brain, which resulted in a deadly aneurism. Since Anise’s fatal burst, Emma had undergone numerous CAT scans to see if the soft spot was inherited or if there was anything unusual about her brain. Did she have an enlarged cerebral cortex? A nerve-dense oblongata? Scan after scan showed the same thing: normal. No weak vessels, no peculiar areas, no uncharted nerves. The annual confirmation (which Emma paid for out of pocket to the tune of two thousand dollars per scan), didn’t erase the fear that someday, something would spontaneously pop in her brain. And it wouldn’t be a sexy picture of a man in his skivvies.

5. If you could, would you give up your power to lead a normal life?
The rap: “I’ve been given a gift. Helping others find happiness makes up for any personal sacrifices I’ve had to make.” She’d said as much to Daphne when they first met. And Daphne had laughed at her.

The truth:
Would she like a passionate sex life? A regular job? One that didn’t land her in the sticky wicket of helping another woman seduce the man Emma wanted for herself?

Of course she wanted a normal life! But since Emma had been an isolationist for so long, she didn’t think it possible to work in an office, fit in with ordinary people. She’d started The Good Witch, Inc. because it addressed all of her needs to: (1) use her unique skill, (2) maintain a safe emotional distance from the people she worked with, and (3) acquire a steady supply of vicarious romantic thrills. The job both suited and doomed her, by her own design.

Although, since Dearborn came into the picture (as it were), Emma wore the doom more than the suit.

“Hit me,” said Deirdre, Emma’s favorite waitress at her favorite breakfast spot.