Page 3 of Midlife Witch Unexpected

“Your aunt was The Hayes?” Sheriff Ted mused.

“The what?” I scratched my head. “I don’t know about that. She owned the big house on the hill in the trees. I own it now.”

“Beatrice Hayes,” Sheriff Ted nodded.

I nodded back. We were getting some rapport going. Enough for me to get directions I hoped. “I only met her a couple of times. Mostly when she came down to L.A.” I said. “I’ve had renters in there since she passed away. They moved out a month or so ago and I came up here to check the property. If you’d just be so kind as to give me directions to Silver Forest Road, I’d be most appreciative.”

“Be that as it may, ma’am, I have due diligence to follow protocol here.” Sheriff Ted pushed his hat back. “You may think this is some backwater where no rules apply, but we adhere to the law closely.”

I wanted to slap his jowls and watch them wobble, he was making me so angry. Spinning on my toe I turned to my jeep, preparing to climb in.

“Um, ma’am I’ll need you to come with me,” Sheriff Ted said.

I gave pause. “What about my jeep?”

Sheriff Ted looked over his shoulder. “Delilah? Mind pausing our date to take care of a little business?”

A tall thin, blonde woman stepped out of the side of the passenger side of the truck and walked towards me. “I can drive your jeep for you.” Her voice was kind as if she was speaking to a spooked animal.

My mouth was agape. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I don't know what shocked me more. The fact the rotund Sheriff had a date, the fact the date wasn't half bad, or the fact her name was Delilah. "You can't just let your girlfriend drive my jeep."

“Why not?” Delilah asked.

“Good point,” I muttered. We certainly weren’t in Los Angeles anymore. Southern Oregon was much more redneck than I'd imagined. "Don't you have a protocol?"

“Well, weighing up the options we are going to break protocol to do you a favor,” Sheriff Ted said.

“Do me a favor?” I asked. “I just want to go home to bed. Letting me do that would be doing me a favor.”

“This shouldn’t take too long we just need to find somebody who will take responsibility for you,” Sheriff Ted said.

“Your keys, ma’am?” Delilah held out a hand with long boney fingers.

“Take responsibility for me?” I groaned as I slipped Delilah my jeep keys and walked towards Sheriff Ted’s truck. All I needed was to get to my aunt’s house and get some rest. I didn’t even care what state the place was in right now.

Instead, I was being taken into custody and escorted to the Cougar Creek cop station in the middle of the night. The town was shrinky-dink tiny, but the sheriff thought he’d find someone available at midnight to “help” me.

Forty-nine. Humiliatingly divorced. No income. Even worse, no need for income. I was low-brow bougie unintentionally. No direction. Just this stupid house I inherited in this two-bit Oregonian town.

I was way past help.

Chapter 2

The sheriff’s truck was a high-end white beast that I needed both hands to haul my ass up into. I still had a decent hop to my step, but after so many hours on the road, my whole body was aching.

"You know, you only missed it by half a mile." Sheriff Ted informed me as he drove a short trek down the road and then swung a left, right, and another left. There we were: downtown Cougar Creek. It hadn't changed since the one time I'd been here some thirty-plus years ago in my early teens.

Mom had taken me up here at my aunt’s insistence when their mother had died. Mom hadn’t wanted to do it at all. Not one tiny bit. Even though she’d grown up in this house, even though it was her father’s funeral, she’d wanted nothing more to do with it. My mom was so opposed to the trip I think money actually exchanged hands to get us to fly from Los Angeles up to Eugene then drive to the southern reaches of Oregon.

Aunt Emma was eccentric and not what Mom considered the type one should be related to, much less spend time with if you could at all avoid it. Their father had died when they were young, and the girls had been raised in the old Victorian house in Cougar Creek. My grandmother had supported her daughters as the local psychic and magic potions maker or something like that. Mom had never lived it down. She had left Cougar Creek just as fast as she could and married my father, who was a fry cook the next town over. Together they had worked their way up in restaurants throughout the west until they owned one of their own and finally bought a nice house in Los Angeles. Mom truly left the ramshackle world of Cougar Creek behind.

I ground my teeth together. Little wonder I couldn't find the place. It was tucked behind a double bend on a backcountry road smack dab in the middle of nowhere, Oregon.

And this was where I was going to try to figure myself out. Great Plan.

Of course, first I had to get out of the Sheriff’s clutches.

“I recognize where I am now,” I said. “Witch’s Brew Bakery, the bank, the florist, the gas station, the grocery mart, the post office…” I listed the shops as we drove past. I’d google earthed it before I came and it looked exactly the same. I imagined in ten years the google earth image of Cougar Creek would still look the same. A two-lane street with brick buildings lining either side. The core of a long-gone bustling, logging town that had harvested the mountains and used the rivers for transport to the rail lines. Now many of the buildings were empty but some had been repurposed by resourceful residents. They had a theater built behind one façade and a loft warehouse in another where local artists could rent space to sell their art.

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