Girl's Guide To Witchcraft Read online

  I swallowed hard and realized that the worst bit of news remained untold. After all, the costumes had been the good news. I braved her gaze. "And the bad news?"

  Evelyn answered in the grave tone of a physician diag­nosing a fatal disease. "The board discussed salaries."

  No one became a librarian because they wanted to be rich. And absolutely no one took a job at a small private library—a library that had to dress its librarians in eigh­teenth-century embroidered silk just to get patrons through the door!—because they thought they'd retire early. I'd originally come to the Peabridge on an internship while I was studying to get my master's degree, and I'd stayed because I liked the people—Evelyn, the rest of the staff. The patrons. I wasn't expecting to become a millionaire.

  Still, I wasn't prepared for Evelyn's next words. "We're going to have to cut your pay by twenty-five percent." She rushed on. "I argued against it. I really did. But you know that there are still board members who don't think that we need a reference librarian at all, that we only need an archivist."

  I couldn't say anything.

  I'd already reduced my vacation budget to a one-week car trip to the beach. I brought my lunch every day (or snuck a gigantissimo latte from the bar). Breakfast was a Pop-Tart when I bothered at all.

  Well, at least I wouldn't need to waste money on a pro­fessional work wardrobe anymore. But twenty-five percent? Not possible. Not even in my worst nightmares.

  "Rent," I croaked. "If you take a quarter of my pay, I can't pay my rent. I'll be out on the street, Evelyn. I'll be living beneath Key Bridge, pushing a shopping cart to the library's front door every morning."

  "Now, Jane," Evelyn said, moderating her tone as if she were talking a jumper down from the top of the Washing­ton Monument. "I told the board that twenty-five percent was too much, that we couldn't do that to the staff. We es­pecially couldn't do that to you—I know that you're already relatively underpaid, even in our field."

  Well, it was nice to hear her say that, at least. In fact, she actually looked pleased as she prepared to make her grand announcement. "Jane, I came up with something better. I'm offering you a home. Free of charge, for as long as you work at the Peabridge."

  "A home?" I blinked and wondered if I'd slipped into some alternate universe. I resisted the urge to glance around for hidden cameras, for some signal that this was a wacky new reality show.

  "It's perfect!" Evelyn raised her chins from her choco­late-colored blouse and gave me a broad smile. "You'll continue to work for us, we'll make the salary cut, but you'll live in the guesthouse, in the garden out back!"

  The guesthouse. What guesthouse? The Peabridge gardens were extensive, but there was no guesthouse. There was a gazebo, and a pagoda, and an obelisk and... Then it hit me like an ice pick to my belly.

  "Do you mean the old caretaker's shed?"

  "Shed?" Evelyn's laugh was a bit forced. "You've obvi­ously never been in there. It's practically a mansion!"

  Sure. In someone's sick nightmare. Every time I walked by the ramshackle building, it gave me the creeps. The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end, and the walls seemed to create their own clammy drafts. "Evelyn, I can't live in a dusty toolshed."

  "It's not a toolshed! It used to be home for a gardening professional, for a trained specialist in colonial horticulture! It has a kitchen. And a separate bedroom."

  "And a toilet? Is there even running water out there? Electricity?"

  "Of course! Do you think that we're barbarians?"

  I stared down at my black slacks and my favorite silk blouse that was cut to show off my, alas, minimal décolletage. The outfit was my "Monday best," chosen to lure Jason's attention right at the start of the week. This would be the last time I'd wear it to work. Starting next week, I'd be dressed like Martha Washington.

  Barbarians? No, but I thought the Peabridge board was entirely out of line with reality.

  What else was I going to do, though? Move back in with Gran? Park myself on the floor of Melissa's one-room apartment? How was I ever going to move Jason from the Imaginary Boyfriend category to the Real, if I lived in a cardboard box under Key Bridge? If I was arrested for de­faulting on my student loans?

  "Rent free?" I asked.

  "Rent free."

  "Utilities included?"

  "Utilities included."

  I was tired of fighting with my landlord to fix the leaky ceiling in my current apartment. Thieves had broken in twice in the past year (not that I had anything worth stealing). My commute by public transportation was nearly an hour, each morning and each afternoon.

  A one-minute commute.

  I could sleep until 8:00 a.m. and still make it to work on time. I could dash home during the day and whip up a quick lunch. I could offer to help Jason with a research project, stay up late working beside him at my kitchen table then offer him a nightcap.

  I could have it all—a real boyfriend, a successful library job, a home of my own, Scott Randall and missing magic wand be damned. I held out my hand, smothering my flash of embarrassment when I saw my chewed fingernails. Hmm... Another goal, breaking that lifetime habit. "Done," I said.

  Evelyn's fingers were cool on mine, and her smile was encouraging. "Done." She smiled.

  There. My job was secure. I had a new home. I was going to be spared wear and tear on my admittedly limited war­drobe.

  Then why did it seem as if I was about to tumble headlong over a precipice?

  "This might be the craziest thing you've ever done," Melissa said on Sunday as we clambered out of Gran's black Lincoln Town Car.

  She would know. We'd been inseparable since the second week of third grade, when we went stomping through puddles during one waterlogged recess. We were wearing identical peacock-blue knee socks that day, and our feet and legs were stained for weeks. It's amazing how closely bonded two girls can become when they're laughed at by every child in their P.E. class. The experi­ence wouldn't have been so scarring if Mrs. Robinson hadn't chosen that week to introduce our science class to the fauna of the Galapagos Islands. Especially the blue-footed booby.

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence." I was already wrapping a bandanna around my hair, trying to lasso my curls. As I often did, I wished that I'd been blessed with Melissa's perfect hair. She wore it shoulder-length, so that the honey waves framed her gamine face. Everything about her was petite; she was only five foot two. But she packed more energy into her overalls than I'd ever imagined having.

  Case in point: she was already emptying the trunk, fishing out dozens of bags filled with the finest cleaning supplies that Target had to offer. If a chemical shone, sparkled or wiped, we had purchased it, relying on a grandmaternal grant for funding. I collected my share of the loot.

  Even in the full light of a spring Sunday morning, I felt the chill of the cottage's strange power as we approached the front door. A cool finger walked down my spine, making me unable to resist the urge to look behind me to be certain that nothing was looming over my shoulder. "There!" I said. "Don't you feel it?"

  "You still think the place is haunted?"

  "Not haunted," I said, feeling slightly foolish. "It's just that there's a power here. A... presence."

  Melissa whistled the theme from Twilight Zone before lowering her voice to a Rod Serling rumble. "Jane Madison thought that she was moving into an ordinary cottage in an ordinary Georgetown garden."

  I couldn't help but laugh. Of course it was cold, even clammy, next to the building. I was standing in the shade. How silly could I be?

  I dug the keys out of my pocket and selected the new one that Evelyn had given me. She had been as good as her word; a locksmith had come out during the week and in­stalled a solid dead bolt on the door. I hadn't had the nerve to try it alone. Now the brass key glinted, bright as gold, as I slipped it home and turned.

  I took a deep breath before pushing the door open. "Ready?" I asked Melissa.

  "Ready as I'll ever be." She stepped forward, Gran's mop and
broom looking like pikes in her hands.

  The door opened without squeaking. The locksmith must have seen to the hinges. The rest of the cottage, though, looked as if it hadn't been touched by human hands in more than a century.

  Billowing white sheets clumped over furniture in the parlor, disguising shapes that might have been couches or chairs or massively mutated ottomans. Dust was thick on the floor, and the front windows were so flyspecked that they looked like some rotten form of stained glass. A braided rug was rolled up against the far wall, and the hardwood floor looked dull and diseased. By craning my neck, I could just make out the appliances in the kitchen, and I thought they might once have been white.

  "I don't even know where to start," Melissa said, even her spirit daunted.

  "Might as well tackle the worst bits first," I said grimly. "Do you want the kitchen or the bathroom?"

  "I spend enough time in a kitchen at work. I'll take the bathroom. Besides, it's smaller." She grinned.

  We split up the cleaning supplies and activated our divide-and-conquer strategy. I asked myself, how bad one kitchen could be when it hadn't even been used for decades?

  The answer: bad.

  I started by sweeping, figuring that it made sense to get rid of the dry dirt before I tackled the wet. I disturbed enough spiders to repopulate every farm this side of Char­lotte's web. I discovered that my new home had mice—or at least it had hosted them in the past, when there was some semblance of food around. I learned that contact paper detached from shelves when the glue was old enough. And it left behind a gold-colored dust that made me sneeze if I peered at it too closely.

  Even as I swept, though—and scrubbed and scoured and mopped—I couldn't help but be pleased. This was my home that we were cleaning. This was my pied-a-terre; my escape from the hustle and bustle of the workaday world. With every squeeze of a spray bottle, I was beating back the cottage's chilly atmosphere. I was subduing that Twilight Zone specter, pushing away my whispering fears.

  Some time well after noon, I glanced out the kitchen window (newly glinting from a liberal application of Windex). I couldn't help but laugh out loud. The cottage lined up at the end of a garden path. While the yellow cowslips and deep pink candytuft had died back at the peak of the summer's heat, I could still make out the bright white stars of foamflower stalks.

  Endless volumes of colonial horticulture had not been wasted on this librarian.

  And Gran's housekeeping lessons weren't wasted, either. When Melissa and I folded back the dustcovers on the fur­niture in the living room, we were pleasantly surprised to find a pair of deep, overstuffed couches covered with hunter-green fabric that looked untouched by time. In the bedroom, we discovered a four-poster with an actual feather mattress. My own clean sheets fit it perfectly.

  We rolled out the rug in the living room and admired its tightly braided pattern. Gran's vacuum cleaner worked like a charm, sucking up the last stray evidence of the cottage's abandonment. After I coiled up the vacuum's power cord, we collapsed on the couches and surveyed our handiwork. "I don't believe it," I said.

  "Still feel your Ghost of Christmas Past haunting the place?"

  "Any ghost who was living here has been asphyxiated by ammonia." I brandished the nearest spray bottle. "Fairies, begone, and be all ways away."

  "Titania. A Midsummer Night's Dream."

  It was an old game that we played. Smiling to acknowl­edge Melissa's Shakespeare skills, I glanced over her shoulder. "What's that door?" I asked, gesturing toward the hallway.

  Melissa followed my gaze and shrugged. "The basement? I tried it and it's locked."

  Just as well, I thought. There was no telling what creepy crawlies lurked down there. I sighed and pulled myself to my feet. "So, are we going to reward ourselves with burgers?"

  "And fries. Your treat."

  Neither of us could bring ourselves to shower in the sparkling new bathroom; we wanted the fruit of our labors to remain unblemished for just a while longer. I did take a moment to splash some water on my face at the kitchen sink, and I removed my grimy bandanna, allowing my hair to spring out around my ears. Taken together, Melissa and I looked like refugees from a stowaway's convention, but that was going to have to do.

  Besides, Five Guys Burgers and Fries did not exactly require the height of fashion to set foot inside its doors. The counter was already three-deep when we got there, and we took a moment to stare up at the menu, red letters stamped on a broad white board. Simple: ham­burgers, fries, toppings (extra charge for cheese and bacon). Cold soda. Peanuts to munch on while we waited. The smell of hot grease made me salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs.

  It was a sign of how long I'd known Melissa that I could order for her without confirming what she wanted. I stepped up to the counter and asked for one good burger (cheese, bacon, grilled onions and mushrooms, lettuce, tomato) and one pitifully flawed burger (mustard, ketchup, nothing else at all in the world, poor bare thing), along with a large order of fries for us to split. Before I could finish giving Melissa grief over her denuded choice of lunch, we found ourselves at a Formica-covered table.

  The first bite was heaven. Hot beef and melted cheese and crispy bacon, with juice running down my fingers and a tiny rivulet snaking beside my lips. I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to moan out loud.

  "Hey," Melissa said. "Isn't that your Jason?"

  I whirled around without thinking.

  So much for cool. So much for suave. So much for calm and self-possessed and witty and urbane. If my whiplash motion had not drawn his eyes to me, my explosion of coughing would have. Five Guys Burgers made a perfect meal, but they were lousy down the windpipe.

  When I was finally able to breathe again, I saw the true extent of the disaster. My Imaginary Boyfriend was not merely sitting in the same divey restaurant that I shared with Melissa. He hadn't just seen me choke on a bite of hamburger the size of a pack of cards. He wasn't only privy to my dirt-streaked arms and my stained T-shirt.

  He was eating with another woman.

  A woman who, even seated, clearly had the body of a classically trained ballerina. She was tall and thin—willowy is the phrase that you read in books. She had soft brown hair with chunks of buttery-blond that I could tell weren't highlights—it was her own naturally perfect coloring. Her eyes were pale blue, framed by the longest, darkest lashes that Lady Maybelline had ever touched.

  Who was I kidding? Maybelline? That woman didn't buy her cosmetics at a drugstore. Even Sephora would be too downscale for her. She probably had colors mixed by hand at some boutique in New York. But the most astonishing thing about her mascara? It was totally, completely water­proof.

  The woman was crying.

  And that made me even more jealous of her. Not only was she sitting across the table from my Imaginary Boyfriend. Not only did she have a body to die for and a face to match. Not only did she have more elegance in her elongated pinky than I had in my entire body. But she could cry without her nose turning red and her face going blotchy. I hated her.

  "Don't look!" I hissed to Melissa. Well, as much as anyone could hiss a command that had no s's in it. I made a big show of eating a French fry. One little French fry. One that wouldn't put too many inches on my hips. "What are they doing?"

  "How can I know, if you won't let me look?"

  "Melissa," I warned, swallowing some Diet Coke as I tried to wash away the scratchy feeling left over from choking.

  She gave in with a grin. "He's offering her his napkin. She's wiping her nose. No. She's dabbing at her nose. My God, she looks like a princess."

  "I don't need to hear that!" I stuffed three emergency fries into my mouth, and the salty, steamy potato almost drowned out the report.

  "Hurry up," Melissa said with a sudden urgency. "Finish that bite. They're coming this way."

  I gulped and swallowed and even found a second to take a sip of soda. By the time Jason stopped by our table, I'd pasted a smile on my lips, but it felt fake to me. An Imag­ina
ry Smile for an Imaginary Boyfriend.

  "Jane," he said, and my heart leaped somewhere up to the vicinity of my larynx.

  "Jason," I managed before prompting, "Urn, I think you've met my friend Melissa. Melissa White." I needed to find out the name of the woman who was with him.

  He nodded. Almost as an afterthought, he turned toward the spectral creature who drifted behind him. "Jane, Melissa, this is Ekaterina Ivanova."

  Ekaterina Ivanova? Just like some Russian princess. Like Anastasia's long-lost granddaughter. I waited for her to extend her hand, but she didn't. It was just as well. My own chewed nails and greasy fingertips would have defiled her forever. She inclined her head toward us, and I felt as if the very Queen of the Wilis had deigned to acknowledge our existence. She said, "Jason, I need to leave," and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  He shrugged and smiled at me, and I told myself that there were volumes behind that grin. He would rather sit with Melissa and me. He would prefer to help himself to some of our fries. He wanted to joke and relax with real women, rather than his ice statue of a companion.

  Melissa came unstuck first. "It was nice meeting you," she said to Ekaterina. "Good to see you again, Jason."

  I muttered something, and then they were gone. "Who do you think she is?" I asked, before the door had closed behind them.

  "I don't know, but she definitely wasn't happy."

  "She must be Russian. Did you hear that accent? Didn't she sound Russian to you?"

  "I could barely hear her speak."

  "She's Russian, though." I heard the words tumbling out of my mouth, faster and faster, as if I needed to reassure myself. "She must be one of his grad students. A lot of Russians study American history. You know, there's a whole tradition of foreign students specializing in the colonies. Alexis de Toqueville wasn't the first, and he certainly won't be the last."