Page 34 of Crossroads Magic
“Mom!”
I looked up and blinked, bringing my sight back into focus.
Ghaliya stood a few steps in from the apartment door. The door was shut. She held a coffee mug in her hand, one of the pottery ones that Hirom had used for my coffee this morning. Steam rose from it, a thin wisp. A stack of dry crackers was in her left hand.
“That was the third time I called,” she said.
“Have you been sick again?”
She grimaced and hefted the crackers. “Hirom said these would help.”
“Is that coffee?”
“Mint tea. He said that would help, too.” She looked around the room, which didn’t look the way she had left it.
A dozen of the bigger picture frames hung from their hinges, thrusting out into the room, revealing the shelves, cupboards, and in one case, a pair of drawers, which had been hidden behind them.
I’d checked the width of the wall by opening the doors into both bedrooms. The three steps up into each room, with their wallboard and paint on either side, hid the fact that the wall was nearly two feet thick.
On the floor in front of the wing chair I sat in were most of the contents of those recesses. I’d begun to sort them into piles that made sense to me, but there was a knee-high mound of manila folders with documents in them. Next to that mound was a stack of cheap notebooks, all of them filled with my mother’s spidery, nearly illegible handwriting.
“Wow…!” Ghaliya murmured, turning on her heel to take in the whole room. “Old houses are so cool. Guess you found her will, huh?”
“I think it’s in one of these folders.” I waved my hand over the top of the knee-high pile.
“What’s in the notebooks?”
I looked down at the book open on my knees. “A diary. Journal. A daybook. There’re all sorts of things in the books I’ve flipped through.”
Ghaliya sat on the edge of the other wingchair, balanced the crackers on one knee and blew on the mug of tea. “Like what?”
I read aloud the section of the journal I had been reading when Ghaliya came in.
Ghaliya screwed her face up in a comical expression, then sipped the tea. She hissed at the heat, then said, “Nanna thought she was a witch, or something?”
“I’m not sure. The bits I’ve read are full of talk about spells and stuff, but she often calls them ‘recipes,’ like she was experimenting in the kitchen.”
“But magic isn’t real. Cooking is.”
“And that’s the way Nanna was dealing with this stuff. She was trying out recipes, to see which one worked.” I looked down at the diary again, at the smear of ink on the corner, and on the left page, a darker spot where the wood the paper was made out of hadn’t been properly pulped, leaving a sliver of actual wood buried in the page. It was a prosaic container for the strange world my mother had inhabited. But was that strangeness only in my mother’s mind?
“Did she ever talk to you about spells when you spoke to her on the phone?” Ghaliya asked, almost as though she had been following my train of thought.
“She talked about the inn, sometimes. About it being busy, or quiet, or the weather, or funny stories about the guests, but never a hint about any of this.” I touched the diary.
“Nothing about the people here?”
“No one we’ve met, so far, has a name I remember her speaking about. But she wrote about them in the notebooks.”
“That’s strange, isn’t it?” Ghaliya bit into a cracker. “Most people talk about their friends.”
“It never occurred to me that it was strange. The impression I always got from her was that she was busy and happy. And that was good enough for me.”
“Happy…” Ghaliya grimaced. “Not everyone can say that about their life.”
“Or just the period they’re living through,” I amended quickly. “Things change. Theyalwayschange.” I did not want Ghaliya sinking into a mental trough just because her life looked bleak right now.
I shifted the direction of the conversation. “Nanna seems to feel that she needed to protect the whole town, that it would be very bad if she didn’t.” I tapped the notebook.
