The Witch Hitch, page 7
“Actually, a friend is having an emergency.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing.” I could tell by his tone that he thought I was fibbing. “If something comes up today, I’ll tell Janine to bump it over to Paige.”
Oh, God. That was the last thing I wanted. “Couldn’t Janine bump it over to Tim?”
“Tim’s not the go-getter that Paige is.”
Exactly. Tim was the kind of employee who took the expression “Ninety percent of success is showing up” at face value. He didn’t have a competitive corpuscle in his body.
After ending the conversation, I headed back to Zenobia.
When I rang the decrepit farmhouse’s doorbell this time, Esme Zimmer answered with a rapturous smile, as if she’d been expecting me.
“I knew you’d be back.” She took my arm and whisked me inside.
The house seemed completely different on the inside. The living room was decorated in mid-century modern, with teal walls. My eyes needed a moment to adjust to the eye-popping retro look.
Esme blinked up at me expectantly.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” I said. “I came here for one reason only. I know all about you.”
She stepped back. Her fist tapped her breastbone as if there was something lodged in there. “Y-you do?”
“That’s why I’m here. So there’s no reason to be cagey. Just tell me the truth.”
A typhoon of tension rushed out of her. She tottered backward toward the nearest chair and picked up a large clothes box that was sitting on it. “I thought you came for the dress. I have it here, but—” She looked up at me, lips trembling, eyes brimming with tears, and dropped the box again. “I’m so glad you know. I’ve wanted to tell you for the longest time.”
Wariness seized hold of me. “Tell me . . . ?”
“I never forgot you. Never. I want you to know that. All these years, I’ve thought of you every day.”
She thought about her insurance agent every day? “Why?”
“They all say that you should just forget and move on. And I was in very difficult circumstances, but—” To my horror, she flung her arms around me, and burst into tears. “I’ve dreamed of this day for so long. So so so long.”
I tried without success to pry her off, but she was attached to me like a cephalopod on an undersea boulder. “What are you talking about?”
Her shoulders shook with emotion. “This is a dream come true.”
I finally wriggled free and stepped back to put space between us. “Why should it be?”
Her head tilted. “You didn’t come here for a reunion?”
Could finding Seton be called a reunion? I’d only met him last night.
Before I could work up a response to her odd question, she grabbed both my hands in hers.
“You said you knew.” Her desperate, needy gaze fastened on me. “Izzie, I’m your mother.”
Chapter 7
Her face, which had been fixed in an expression of exultant expectation, slackened. “You didn’t know. But now, you must see—”
Before she could repeat the absurd assertion, I lifted my hands and interrupted her. “Please. Stop. You are not my mother.”
“Your real mother, Is.”
“Stop calling me that name!”
It was the only thing I could think of to react to at first. Her claim to be my mother was too ridiculous.
“That was the name I gave you,” she said. “Isadora. Izzie. It suits you.”
“No, it doesn’t. You know what name suits me? Bailey. Because that’s my name—the one Lloyd and Deb Tomlin gave me. My real mother lives in Rochester. She raised me. She plays bridge and gardens and thinks every minor ailment or problem can be alleviated by egg custard. She dropped me off at my first day of school and was there when I graduated from high school and college.”
“So was I,” Esme said.
Yikes. As if I weren’t creeped out enough already. “You are not my birth mother.” I’d only questioned Mom once about the woman who’d given me up. I could tell it had felt like a betrayal to her for me to even bring up the subject, but she told me the woman’s name. Actually, Mom had called her a girl—my birth mother was seventeen when she gave me up. “My birth mother’s name wasn’t Esme Zimmer.”
“Of course not. It was Stefanie Pickles.”
My breath caught.
How could this woman have discovered that name? My birth records were sealed. Even I had only seen the birth certificate that had been issued after my adoption, listing me as Bailey Tomlin, daughter of Debra and Lloyd Tomlin.
“I’m Stefanie Pickles,” she said. “It was a fake name.”
“Why would you have called yourself Stefanie Pickles?”
She tossed up her hands. “I was stuck in a place in the country all by myself for several months waiting for you to come along, doing nothing really except eating too much and lying around in thrall to eighties TV reruns. I watched lots of Hart to Hart. So when I had to think of a name for a sadder-but-wiser girl giving up her baby, I guess I had Stefanie Powers on the brain. Only I couldn’t actually call myself Stefanie Powers—that would have been weird. So I gave myself the surname Pickles, in honor of all the sweet, sweet gherkins I’d been devouring along with pints of Ben and Jerry’s. Had a whimsical ring to it, I thought.”
Whimsical? “I don’t care how you came up with the name. Why did you have to use a pseudonym at all?”
“I was in a spot of trouble at the time.” Her fingers twittered nervously. “Long story.”
“A birth certificate is an official document. You can’t just lie.”
“Turns out, you can. I had very convincing fake IDs, of course. And it was mostly all on the up-and-up, apart from that.”
Mostly? A bitter laugh burbled out of me. “Apart from completely misrepresenting yourself?”
If what she was telling me was even true. The woman was bonkers. Why, why, why had I come here? Every time I set foot on this property, it was like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole.
She leaned forward. “Would you like to sit down? You’re looking a little pale.”
“I won’t be staying.” Nevertheless, my boneless legs buckled and I sagged down into the nearest seat—a stylish Heywood-Wakefield wood chair with an orange seat and back cushions.
“Care for a drink?” Esme asked me. “Tea? Coffee? Tranquilizing potion?”
“What?”
“I also make a mean whiskey sour.”
Even though it was just half past ten, that last option sounded very appealing.
I shook my head. “I don’t understand any of this.”
She sat down opposite me, her face tensed in an expectant smile, and clasped her hands primly on her thighs. “Ask me anything you want to know. I’m here for you.”
Looking at her, I couldn’t forget what Sarah had said about her when I described her. So she looked like . . . you. She did look like me. The spitting image.
I wanted to cry, but not from joy.
I’d never been unhappy to be adopted, for the simple reason that I never felt anything less than adored by my parents. My dad took pictures and videos of me, and recorded every inch I grew. Every mundane milestone of childhood and adolescence had been celebrated as if it were a phenomenal achievement. When I finished kindergarten, you’d have thought I’d earned a PhD. My first piano recital, when I played “The Happy Halibut,” could have been held in Carnegie Hall as far as Lloyd and Deb Tomlin were concerned. I might not have been spoiled in material possessions, but in terms of love and attention I was richer than a Kardashian.
And yet . . .
Occasionally—very occasionally—when I wasn’t allowed to spend the weekend at Lake Placid when I was thirteen, or allowed to attend a concert, or when Mom made me return the leatherette miniskirt I’d bought at the mall, I’d sometimes wonder about that seventeen-year-old girl who’d given me up. Stefanie Pickles wouldn’t have been an old fogy like my parents were. She would have been Cool Mom, signing off on all the school trips, okaying every sleepover, and understanding that seeing Apocalyptica at the Kodak Center was an imperative cultural event for a twelve-year-old.
And now, here she was. Stefanie Pickles. Aka Esme Zimmer. My dream Cool Mom was a kooky client who’d apparently been shadowing me for years. It was more than a little unnerving, not to mention disappointing. This was my flesh and blood?
My gaze traveled down to her neck, which was starting to wrinkle. My future.
That is, if she was who she said she was.
“The neck thing is genetic,” she said.
My face flamed. Had I been that obvious?
“My mother’s was even worse than mine,” she said. “By the time she was my age, it looked more lined than a crosscut section of an old-growth sequoia. But don’t despair—you’ve got the Zimmer coloring, but maybe in other respects you’ll take after your father. Odin’s a remarkable specimen.”
Father? Odin?
“You’re still with—?” I refused to say my father.
“Actually, that’s a recent development,” she said. “He and I were separated for decades—not by our own choice.”
“A star-crossed lovers story?”
“Sort of. Odin was hexed out of existence for several decades.”
“Hexed.” Oh, God. I’d been so distracted by Esme’s bombshell that I’d forgotten why I’d come here—to find Seton, who’d accused Esme of being a kidnapper, and a witch.
“There’s so much to explain.” She scooted forward. “It was complicated. That’s why I had to let you go.”
“You never considered raising me yourself?”
“They wouldn’t have allowed it.”
“Who is ‘they’? Your parents?”
“The Grand Council of Witches.” She reeled the name off as if it were a humdrum entity like a co-op board. “I was cursed.”
“You said my”—I stopped myself—“Odin was cursed.”
“Yes. Both of us were—different curses, you understand.”
“Sure.” My hands tightened around the arms of my chair.
“It’s a long story, going back decades.” She stopped, fidgeting anxiously. “But my real trouble started when your father was cursed. That’s all worked out now. Well, mostly. He’ll be able to tell you all about it.” A shadow of worry fell over her face. “I hope.”
“You haven’t told him about me,” I guessed.
Her eyes widened. “Of course I have. He’s eager to meet you. It’s just that I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”
“Where is he?”
“Right now he’s still in the early twentieth century.”
I should have taken her up on that whiskey sour.
“I was with him,” she said, “but we got separated in 1930.”
I lifted my hands. “Okay—stop. Is that how Seton Atterbury got mixed up in all this?”
She sucked in a breath. “You’ve met Seton? Do you know where he is?”
“That’s what I came here to ask you. Seton jumped in my car last night and spun a wild yarn about having been snatched from 1930 when he was falling out of a window.”
“It’s true. Odin and I were walking down the street and I saw this man falling. Odin and I both gasped, and without thinking I grabbed the falling man before he hit the pavement. It was just instinctive. I wanted to save him, and the safest place I know is my home.”
My mouth opened to speak, then snapped closed. She actually believed what she was saying.
“Now I’ve got him here and the poor fellow wants to go back,” she continued, “and I’ve lost track of Odin, too, so a huge responsibility rests on my shoulders alone. If I send Seton back too early, it could change history. That’s a no-no. But if I return him just at the same time I found him—if that’s even possible—within seconds he’ll be splattered all over a Wall Street sidewalk. Talk about your ethical dilemmas.”
“So you’re saying you really zapped Seton into the present.”
“Of course.” She flicked an impatient glance at me. “How else would a person cross nine decades? Did you think he’d built a time machine?”
“Oh, no,” I said dryly. “That would be preposterous.”
She finally twigged that I didn’t believe her supernatural claims. “You can’t be a doubter. You must have felt the power within yourself.”
“No.” I shifted, forcing my gaze away from my hands. Those electric sensations I’d been having . . .
And then there was Django. Just last night I’d seen that woman Gwen talking to her cat and thought she was crazy. Then I’d gone home and had a conversation with a bird.
“I’m a rational person,” I insisted. “I don’t believe in the occult. I don’t even subscribe to woo-woo things like karma, or love at first sight.” I stood. “I don’t mean to be insulting. I’m sure you mean well, and that you have many good qualities.” I struggled to come up with an example. “You’ve been a very loyal Genesee Insurance client.”
She hopped up, too. “That was all for you. To help you in the small way I could.”
“We’ve appreciated your business,” I said. “We really have. But I’m afraid I don’t believe you about all this. You seem to be genuinely convinced that you’re my birth mother, but you also think you’re a witch, so . . .”
“I’ve handled this all wrong, haven’t I?” Tears of frustration brimmed in her eyes. “I wish Odin were here. He’s better at explaining things than I am. I spent half my life under a curse.” Her expression brightened. “Of course! You must know I was a witch. You first saw me before. I looked completely different.”
She’d looked like a crone. That had been her curse?
But Wes was right. Plastic surgery could easily account for the changes in her appearance.
Thinking of Wes made me want to flee back to my solid, sane life.
“I’m very busy,” I said. “I really just came over because I was worried about Seton and thought he might have come back here.” That seemed even more unlikely to me now. No one would come back here once they’d escaped—me included. “He took a saxophone from a friend of mine, who’s going to call the police if he doesn’t return it this afternoon. Please inform Seton of that if you see him again.”
“You’re not leaving,” she said, hurrying after me as I crossed the room.
The black cat I’d seen last night was standing in the arched doorway that led from the living room to the hall. I stopped next to him.
“I thought we could have lunch,” Esme said. “A mother-daughter thing. We have so much to catch up on.”
She had to be joking. Hands fisted at my sides, I drew up as straight as I could and looked her firmly in the eye. “Look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. You obviously have a sincere belief” —sincere delusion—“in what you’re saying. But I’m sorry, I’m skeptical that you’re my mother, and I definitely don’t believe in witchcraft.”
“You definitely don’t believe, eh?” Her face tugged into a scowl, and I glimpsed the crone she had been when I’d first seen her. “I suppose you want proof, but what will you do when you have it?”
She was a little scary when she was riled, but I’d indulged her nonsense for long enough. “I’m not worried about that. There is no such proof.”
“Isn’t there?” In her anger Esme seemed to swell before my eyes, her hair and skin flushing a deeper red. “You want bippity-boppity-boo, I’ll give it to you.” She raised her arms. “Voilà—the dress of your dreams.”
In a flash, all the oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the room. I tried to inhale a breath, but my chest suddenly seemed made of stone. The air shimmered and fragmented like a cubist painting, and it was as though a vise were pressing me from all directions. I shrieked in pain—or did I? I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think.
When the atmosphere was righted again, I stumbled back in blessed relief. Then I looked down at myself and gasped in a breath. I was standing in a long white dress. I lifted my silk-clad arms. “What is this?”
Esme must have mistaken my amazement for impatience. Her lips twisted. “I forgot. You need mirrors.”
“No, I—”
Before I could finish, she did the arm thing again. I flinched. Faster this time, the living room around me juddered as if the very molecules required a moment to rearrange themselves. When I blinked my eyes open, mirrors stood all around me. In those mirrors was me, in a silk shift covered with a lace overdress done in the most beautiful beadwork, giving it a vintage look. The dress was fitted to mid-thigh, then the skirt flared and draped into a train. I twisted slightly to get a view of the back, which plunged down to mid-spine. The cut was both old-fashioned and modern. Unique. Exactly what I’d hoped to find.
And it fit perfectly.
Esme crossed her arms. “So. Do you like it?”
I was too astonished to lie. “It’s just what I’ve been looking for.”
She rocked back on her heels, pleased by my reaction but completely absorbed in her handiwork. Had she made this . . . or was it really some kind of magic dress? One second I’d been in my boring clothes and the next I was wearing this gorgeous creation. It had been magic. I gaped at her as she frowned down at the hem.
“It’ll look better when you’ve got the right shoes,” she said. “I left yours on—I wasn’t sure how much of a heel you’d want. I’ve got bunions myself.”
“My feet are fine,” I said, still stunned by it all.
“They won’t be if you don’t take care of them.”
Were we really talking about podiatric health when I’d just witnessed sorcery?
“But you like the cut?” she asked, reaching out to tug at the waist. “It feels right? You don’t want to feel constricted on your big day.”
I blinked at myself in the mirrors. She’d not only conjured this dress onto me, she’d styled my hair into an updo with artistic ringlets. I hoped I’d be able to re-create those—or explain it to the stylist Joan had hired for the wedding party.
That fleeting thought of Joan Haverman was like having a bucket of cold water poured over me. What am I thinking?
I stepped back. “Please get this off me.”
