They say, "Everything's all right."
They say, "Better days are near."
They tell us, "These are the good times."
But they don't live around here.

--Warren Zevon,
“The Vast Indifference of Heaven”

 

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Margaret Mary-Catherine O’Neill--Maggie to those who know and love me best--and I have a secret.  A big secret.  The kind of secret few here in my hometown of Stony Mill, Indiana would understand, let alone accept or even tolerate.

Big breath here.  You see, I am an empath.  An intuitive who can feel another person’s emotions, and sometimes even know the reasons behind them.

For those of you whose only exposure to the world of an empath was through Star Trek, allow me to explain.  I can’t read your mind (well, not often), and I can’t see what you had for dinner last night (unless you’re still wearing it on your tie).  A psychic I’m not.  It’s just that sometimes I feel things, in the same way that you feel them.  As though your emotions and motivations were my own, residing within my own body.  And, well, sometimes I sense things--disturbances--in the world around me. 

I won’t go into the dreams.  Everyone has dreams . . . right?  Mine can’t be that different. 

Can they?

I know what you’re thinking.  I’ve been where you are.  In fact, until six months ago I would have called myself an outright skeptic.  Heaven knows I wasn’t raised to think any of this was even possible, let alone normal.  Being an empath . . . well, as you can see it’s not something I’m especially comfortable with, but as my Grandma Cora always said, we all have our crosses to bear.  There have been many days since where I’ve wanted nothing more than to sink back into the comforting oblivion of ignorance.  To go back to the time in my life when skepticism reigned supreme.

Truth be told, I’ve seen and felt too much lately to have the luxury of skepticism ever again.

My name is Maggie O’Neill, and this is my story.

 

The winter had been a hard one--two brutal deaths and several months solid of howling winds and bitter temperatures were enough to break the backbone of even the most stalwart of personalities.  But the snows had at long last receded and, if the robins twittering about in the thickly budded bushes along the mean streets of Stony Mill could be considered definitive proof, spring had sprung.  For better or for worse, I thought as I maneuvered my 1972 Volkswagen Bug, long ago christened Christine due to her testy mechanical idiosyncrasies, through town toward River Street and the lineup of Rockwell-esque storefronts that housed Enchantments, Antiques and Fine Gifts.  In other words, my place of employ and home away from home. 

If my mood that morning seemed overly fatalistic, well, I had my reasons.  I’d worked at the unique gift-shop-slash-antique store-slash-witchy emporium since the autumn just past, and I’d come to love the peaceful environment, not to mention having the most perfect boss a girl could ever wish for in Felicity Dow.  No matter that she called herself a modern-day witch and follower of the Old Ways, and by every indication appeared to be telling the truth.  All the same, ever since Christmas when a much respected Stony Mill resident had broken our trust in the worst way imaginable, I hadn’t been able to feel comfortable in my own skin.  I felt . . . on my guard.  On edge.  Always watchful, always anxious, always waiting for the proverbial axe to fall.

Except that it hadn’t.  January had passed without anything more gruesome than a few fender benders caused by icy roads and blowing snow.  When February eventually drifted into March without incident, by all rights I should have been able to breathe a sigh of relief and resume the carefree and somewhat frivolous life of an almost thirty-year-old single girl on the lookout for the ideal life . . . but I couldn’t.  Something was wrong in Stony Mill.  Something.  And I knew that eventually it would raise its head again.

The question was, when?

And that was the problem.  I didn’t have an answer to that question or any of the other questions that had been plaguing me for months.  I’d been completely knocked out of my comfort zone, and I wasn’t sure how to handle anything anymore. 

To be fair to myself, I didn’t know many who would have felt comfortable with all that had happened.  But I’d come to accept was that people without the gift of sensitivity had no idea what was happening right beneath their noses.  Not one.  Loosely translated, that amounted to about 99.8 percent of the town proper.  While your average Stony Miller went on about their daily lives--working, shopping, going to basketball games, and hitting the Elks Lodge on a Saturday night--the level of spirit activity in town was getting worse.   Outside of Felicity and the N.I.G.H.T.S. and perhaps a few nameless and faceless others, the town was clueless.

The N.I.G.H.T.S. could best be described as Stony Mill’s version of the Ghostbusters.  All of them friends of Felicity’s and now of mine, all talented in some area of the paranormal, and all sensitive to the same types of strangeness I had been picking up on.  With Felicity as my mentor and the N.I.G.H.T.S. as a kind of metaphysical posse, I had been on a mission to understand the whispers, feelings, and thoughts my newly realized empathic abilities had brought into my life.  But as the winter passed, a new reticence had overtaken me, and I had found myself conjuring up excuses whenever Liss had raised the subject of tutoring me.  I’d even begged off the last few N.I.G.H.T.S. meetings, inventing family obligations so I wouldn’t have to chase down pesky spirit orbs.  

Call it a change of heart.  Call it self-preservation.  Call it spinelessness, if you must.  You probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.  All I knew was, I was being led down a garden path toward an uncertain future, and I wasn’t at all sure the shoes I was wearing were sturdy enough to stand up to the muck.

And yet, I have always been a sucker for a good mystery. 

It was a sunny April Saturday morning, and for once my mind was as far from floating orbs and spirit messages as it could be.  Enchantments was my first destination, but not for my usual pre-opening rituals of filling the coffee and tea makers with fresh water and checking for new web orders.  Instead, this was to be the first Saturday in six months that I would not be manning the cash register.  That honor would go to my two young protégées, Evie Carpenter and Tara Murphy, while I accompanied Liss to the opening day of the county farmers market/craft bazaar in search of new local goodies for the store.

I felt like a newbie mother leaving her baby with a sitter for the first time.  Despite knowing I needed to give myself a little time to refresh and renew, like any new mom I was exhibiting the first signs of separation anxiety well before the deciding moment.  But I forced myself to be strong and persevere.  Going to the bazaar had been Liss’s idea, and I would drink a gallon of root beer before I would let her down. Besides, on some level I was hoping to absorb some of the spiritual peace that seemed to surround my lovely employer like a mantle of light.  Regardless of whether or not I embraced her religious beliefs (and the jury was still out on that), there was still a lot I could learn from her about life, the universe, and everything.

Who needed Douglas Adams when you had a new witch in town?

“Morning, girls!” I sang out as I sailed through the back entrance into the store office.  As usual, it was piled high with boxes to be opened, receipts to be filed, bills to be paid.  I dropped my purse onto the desk, as transported as always as I breathed in the store’s cinnamon bun scent.  God, I loved this place.  I loved everything about it.  Perhaps that was the reason for the reticence I felt at the thought of abandoning it this morning.

Slouched in the desk chair with a ginormous cup of coffee sheltered in her hands, Tara scarcely flashed a heavily mascara’ed eye my way.  “G’morning,” she muttered.  Or at least, I thought that’s what she said.  The words did kind of meld together.  For all I knew she might have said gallbladder . . . or goose mallow . . . though I suppose those would have made slightly less sense.

 “Are you and Evie all set for today?” I asked in the same breezy voice I would have used to persuade my pretty little nieces to put smiles on their faces.  “I don’t know if we’ll be away the entire day or not, but you can reach us on our cells at any time.”

“Yeah, yeah.  We got it.  No worries.”  She yawned big, her jaw cracking with the effort. 

“Great, good, thanks.” I paused and looked around the office, half expecting to see Evie slumped on a chair in a different corner.  “Where is Evie, by the way?”

Right on cue, I heard light footsteps tapdancing down the floorboards in the front of the store.  “Here you are,” Evie sang as she swept past the purple velvet curtain that separated the front of the store from the back office.  Catching sight of me, she waved but did not falter in her mission.  “One great big cup of double fudge mocha, complete with whipped cream and a thick caramel swirl, just for you, Tar.  This’ll open those sleepy eyes right up.” 

Tara gave her the evil eye.  “You’ve been taking lessons from Maggie, haven’t you, Swiss Miss?”

I laughed.  I was beginning to think our Tara was not a morning person.

“All right, all right.  Enough with the maligning of our characters,” I scolded good-naturedly.  “Besides, it’s after nine.  The store opens in a little under half an hour.  Is everything good to go?  Do you need my help with anything before I take off?”

Evie snapped-to with a mock salute.  “Everything is ready, Capt’n.  Water’s on for coffee and tea, the morning delivery of scones and cookies has been lodged in the glass cabinets, the dusting has been done, and the floors vacuumed.  The only thing we need from you is the key to the cash register, and then that will be humming right along, too.”

I raised my brows.  “My, you have been busy.  What time did you girls get here?”

“Evil here picked me up at seven o’clock,” Tara grumbled.  “On a Saturday!”

I mock-whispered to Evie:  “Soooo, Evil, do you think a scone might help?  Or should I go to Annie’s to pick up a fritter to sweeten her disposition?”

“I heard that,” Tara said, scowling.  “For your information, my disposition doesn’t need sweetening.  It just needs more sleep.  S-L-E-E-P.  Haven’t you people ever heard that a teenage girl needs her beauty rest?  Sheesh.”  Then she sighed.  “I’ll have a cookie.  Chocolate and macadamia nut.”

From the depths of my purse, my cell phone began trumpeting the 1812 Overture, my ring-tone of the mo’. 

Evie headed for the front.  “I’ll get the cookie, you get your phone.”

There was something insistent about phone calls in general and cell phone calls in particular that made me feel just a little bit anxious, as though I was being tested on how quickly I could answer.  I grabbed for my bag and made my usual desperate scrounge through the contents at the bottom.   At last my fingers closed around the sleek case, and I flipped it open. 

“Hello?”

 “Maggie?  Liss here.  Listen, ducks, I know I’m supposed to be on my way there, but . . . is there any way you could find it in your heart to pop out to pick me up?”

 “Of course I can.  Is there anything wrong?”

 
*************  Find out by buying Hex Marks the Spot today!  ************

Copyright 2007 by Madelyn Alt.