LITMIR.BIZ

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patch financially that summer. Things were always tight, but then she had her purse snatched and there went the rent money. My father…” Her voice faltered. “He’d been gone three years by then, but hadn’t yet dropped out of my life completely. She called him, asked for help.”

      “Did you go stay with him?”

      “Not exactly. He was working toward his master’s and didn’t have a penny to spare. So he said, anyway. I wound up being shipped up here to stay with the judge and my grandmother. My father drove up on weekends, or sometimes we drove into Denver to see him.”

      “You didn’t get along with your grandparents.”

      “That’s putting it mildly.” She shrugged out of her jacket and opened the hall closet. “Can we drop the subject now?”

      “In a minute. Your grandmother knew you were in town. She claimed you’d told her you were leaving.”

      “She and the judge ate at the lodge one night. I waited on their table.” She grimaced. “Not a happy encounter for any of us.”

      “Why didn’t you—”

      “Ben! Stop interrogating me. You need to sit down, get off your knee.”

      I didn’t want to sit. I couldn’t pace very well, dammit, but I sure didn’t want to sit. “If I don’t ask questions, you won’t tell me anything.”

      “Why should I?”

      “Why shouldn’t you? Lord, I never knew a woman so good at turning away questions! If I ask a single personal question, I end up talking about my own father. Or the best color for the hall bath, or how to repair damaged plaster.”

      Anger waved flags in her cheeks. “You’re exaggerating.” She spun and headed for the living room.

      “Am I?” I hobbled after her. “You led me to think you didn’t know anything about your father’s side of the family. If we hadn’t run into your old witch of a grandmother—”

      Her laugh was short, sharp and ugly. “Oh, but she’s not the witch. That’s the problem. My other grandmother is. Literally.”

      God help me. I leaned my stick carefully against the wall. “Your mother’s mother is, uh…”

      “A witch.” Mockery gleamed in her eyes.

      “Okay.” I nodded slowly. “I got that part. You mean like Wicca and all that?”

      “That’s what people call it nowadays. Granny doesn’t, and really, I’m not sure how much a New Age witch would have in common with Granny’s brand of the Craft.”

      She believed this. She honestly thought her grandmother was a witch. “And do you think…uh, are you one, too?”

      “The word is witch, Ben. And no, I’m not. But I’m the granddaughter of one, which makes me Satan’s get in the eyes of Mrs. Randall Burns. Didn’t you hear the part about me being a devil child?”

      “Somehow that didn’t immediately bring witchcraft to mind.” Muddy floors, yes. Witchcraft, no.

      “I suppose not. Will you get off that damned knee?”

      “I don’t think I’ve heard you curse before,” I observed.

      “You could make a saint curse!”

      “I’ll sit down if you’ll tell me about your grandmother. Your other grandmother, not the one I just met.”

      She muttered something unflattering about my antecedents, then flung up her hands. “Okay. Her name is Alma Jones. She’s eighty-four and the top of her head barely reaches my shoulder. She lives…sit, Ben!”

      “I’m sitting.” I lowered myself onto the couch.

      “She lives in a tiny cottage in the Appalachians and makes the world’s best chicken and dumplings. Fresh chicken, mind, from her henhouse. She also makes simples, little charms and cures to sell to her neighbors, and she has the Sight.”

      “Ah…the Sight. That’s a Celtic thing, isn’t it? Irish or Scottish?”

      “Her maiden name was Sullivan.” The laid-back woman I’d known for a week fairly bristled with feeling. Even her hair seemed agitated. She began pacing. “She’s a darling. She’s helped people all her life. She didn’t ask to have the Sight. Who would? But it runs in our family. Like the curse.”

      The curse?

      Seely reached the end of the room and spun around, making her hair fly out like a curly cape. “Do you know what that self-righteous old prune called her? A bride of Satan. My granny! She taught Sunday school for thirty-two years!”

      A Christian witch. Well, if you could believe in witchcraft in the first place, why not? “What curse?”

      She grimaced. “I didn’t mean to mention that.”

      “Too late now. What curse?”

      “The one another witch put on my great-grandmother for stealing her man about a hundred years ago.” She flung up her hands. “Why am I telling you all this? You don’t believe a word of it.”

      “I believe several parts,” I said cautiously. Her granny probably was a good, loving woman who’d taught Sunday school and made up little herbal remedies for her neighbors. And thought of herself as a witch.

      Seely’s expression softened as the corners of her lips turned up. “Poor Ben. You’re trying so hard not to tell me that I’m nuts. If it’s any consolation, I don’t believe in the curse, either.”

      “Okay. The curse doesn’t count. But you said it was passed down in your family like, uh, the Sight.”

      “I’ve heard about it all my life. I don’t really believe in it, but…” She shrugged, which gave her breasts a gentle lift.

      I wanted to tell her how much I liked that sweater. I didn’t even let my gaze linger, an act of willpower for which I deserved a lot more credit than I was likely to get. “I know how family stories stick with you. We learn things when we’re kids that cling like burrs long after we’ve figured out they aren’t really true.”

      “Yes!” Her laugh was shaky. “That’s it exactly. I don’t really believe in the curse, yet I can’t completely forget it, either. Daisy believes it.” Her feet started her moving again. “She thinks my father left us because a witch cursed the women in my family to unhappiness in love.”

      “Hmm.”

      She paused by the window, shrugged. “I guess it’s easier to believe in a curse than to think that he didn’t really love her. Or that he’s a noodle.”

      “Cooked, I take it.”

      She nodded and ran her fingers along the edge of the drapes, as if she found it easier to talk to them right now, instead of me. “I made it sound like I don’t remember anything about him. That isn’t quite true. He read me bedtime stories. He used to take me out in this little sidecar attached to his bicycle. I remember the way the fields smelled, the tug of the wind in my hair.” She swallowed. “The sound of his laugh.”

      “Sounds like a noodle, all right.” I came up behind her and rested my hand on her shoulder. “He loved you. For some reason he wasn’t man enough to be responsible for you, but he loved you.”

      “You aren’t on the couch.”

      “Nope.” I folded my good arm around her and eased her up against me.

      She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’trelax, either. “Ben…”

      I had a hunch she’d like it better if I made a pass. She’d know what to do when a man crossed that kind of boundary. Comfort was harder for her.

      Tough. I stroked a hand down her hair. “So what’s the noodle’s name? Burns for the last

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