Page 11 of The Aura Answer
The little blond schoolteacher was putting supper dishes away. Nick was glad she wasn’t his type either—he was a bit of a bounder, and she was a freaky neat mother of a six-year-old.
She glanced over her shoulder at them. “Would either of you be interested in taking Pris’s truck and rescuing my daughter’s clothing chest from my house? Now that you’ve moved some of those cartons out of our room, there’s space for it.”
Dante frowned. “Shouldn’t you have moved everything into storage? A hole in the roof can’t be good for your furnishings.”
She dried her hands and shrugged. “They cut the tree off the roof and covered the hole with a tarp. I can’t afford storage while the contractors and insurance company argue. I’ve brought over our winter clothes and bedding, but Pris is using the only other small dresser for the twins. It’s hard for Aster to dress herself out of boxes.”
“I’ll go for the heavy lifting,” Nick offered, grateful that Jax’s family had taken him in while he wasted away waiting to give evidence against his family and former employer. “But I’m tryingto be legal these days. I don’t have an international permit to drive.”
Priscilla emerged from the pantry with jars of canned fruit. In the few weeks Nick had known her, she’d worn her mouse-brown hair striped in red, purple, green, and orange. Tonight, he saw the streaks were naturally a dramatic silver, emerging from a widow’s peak and flopping over her eyes. She was taller than Gracie, but still far from the stylishly lean London sophisticate Nick preferred. And she only had eyes for Dante.
“You go to the auto club in Charleston, show your passport and license, and get a permit.” Pris unloaded her jars on the butcher block and dug underneath for bowls. “Besides, unless you run over a policeman, no one in Afterthought will stop you if you’re driving my truck. They know better. But Gracie should go with you. She can load up a few other things while she’s there.”
“All right, then, I’ll go if I have company. With my luck, the neighbors will report me as a thief otherwise. Let me go down and grab a coat.” Nick headed for the door.
“I’ll look after Aster. You’re the one who needs to go, Grace.” Pris unloaded her implements on the counter. “And Dante, we need you to reach the wallpaper near the ceiling if Gracie is abandoning the ladder.”
And that was how Nick ended up driving through the winter night in an ancient Ford truck with a respectable schoolteacher at his side. He had no idea how to converse with a teacher, beyond the snark of his adolescence. The fashion models he usually dated preferred compliments, but he had a notion Gracie would smack him if he said he liked her dimples. She didn’t flash them very often anyway.
She directed him to a modest cottage on a narrow, tree-lined residential street. Stacks of the huge oak’s tree trunk still sat at the curb. Blue tarp had been nailed over the roof, and plywood covered the windows and doors in front. He drove thetruck down the driveway where a child’s playground equipment sat untouched by the windstorm that had hit right after Thanksgiving.
She sniffed quietly, and he knew she was crying. He’d probably do the same if he owned a nice little place like this. He climbed out and went around to assist her out. She took his hand but hers was gloved against the chilly night air. He hadn’t realized how much he missed skin-to-skin contact. It had been a long drought since he’d moved over here to promote now-defunct boutiques.
She unlocked the back door and led him to a tiny pink-painted bedroom. At her direction, he carried out a white dresser decorated in unicorn stickers. The back of the huge pickup had plenty of room for more.
“That’s a nice rocker,” he told her, indicating the antique mission oak rocker. It was an American style he’d learned about from the hotel chain. “Why don’t we bring that with us?”
She patted it fondly. “It was our grandmother’s. I suppose we can find a place for it. I hate leaving it in this cold damp.”
They went through the house, looking for bits and pieces to rescue. Most of her furniture was cheap trash no better than his parents had owned. But she had some good quilts and porcelain that shouldn’t be left at the mercy of contractors. He didn’t know art, but a few pretty pieces had been knocked off the walls. Several of them appeared to be pencil sketches of local buildings he recognized.
One showed a couple in front of this house. He held it up in the dim light from their flashlights. “Is this you and your husband?”
She added it to the cedar chest they were filling. “Craig, yes. He told me he didn’t like nine-to-five jobs and preferred working with his hands. Apparently that meant picking locks and hotwiring cars.”
Ouch. Nick winced. He had a juvenile record for joy-riding in a moment of adolescent rebellion, a stupid move that had seriously reduced his career opportunities. “Where is he now?”
“Georgia prison. I divorced him after we bought this place, and I discovered he was selling stolen auto parts from the garage. Aster never really knew him.” She added a few more pictures to a trunk stuffed with books.
Evidently agitated, she insisted on hefting the cedar chest on her own. Nick rushed to help her. The thing was solid wood, crammed full, and should have weighed a ton. He grabbed the other handle. It lifted far too easily for its weight, and caught off-guard, he staggered backward, bumping into a bookshelf—which tilted to cascade books.
“Sh—sugar,” she muttered—before the shelf righted itself.
Instead of falling on Nick’s head as they ought, the books slid neatly to the floor. “Sugar?” he asked, still in shock at not being crumpled under his own clumsiness.
“We try not to curse.” Without acknowledging the anomaly, the schoolteacher hefted her end of the chest as if it were nothing and led him through the debris to the kitchen door.
“Because of the kids?” he asked, just to distract himself. Floating books had probably been an optical illusion. The house might be off its foundation and leaning the wrong way. Lucky him. Those had been some serious tomes on those shelves. The little schoolteacher was a reader.
“Because of our reputation. If a family of witches saysdamn you to hell,and something bad happens to the person they cursed... Just imagine it.”
A family of witches, right. Yup. Got that. Go with the flow, Nick.
“Should we take the books too?” he asked as they heaved the chest into the truck.
She cast a longing look over her shoulder at the house but shook her head. “Another day, maybe. Evie’s house is too crowded as it is.”
“There’s the bookless library. It just needs shelves.” He waited, giving her a chance to think about it.
