“Someone came into this neighborhood in broad daylight and broke into your house,” he reminded her.
“True enough. But they weren’t following me down the street before they broke in.”
She waved to a neighbor across the street.
“I heard about your shop, Vanessa,” the woman called to her. “I’m shocked.”
“So was I, Andrea,” Vanessa called back.
They reached Vanessa’s house and she took the keys from her bag as she started up the walk.
“Wait.” Grady took her by the arm. “I want to check around the outside first.”
“Why?” She frowned.
“In the unlikely event that someone’s been back while we were gone, I want to know before we go in.”
“Oh.”
Grady walked up the driveway and to the backyard, and Vanessa followed. He checked the plants under the windows and found none of them trampled down. Next he looked over the area around the back porch and the door that led to the stairs down to the basement, then he walked around to the other side of the house. Vanessa paused to pull a few weeds from one of the flower beds as she passed.
“Doesn’t look as if anything’s changed since this morning when I looked, so I guess we’re okay so far,” Grady told her when he returned to the backyard.
“Good.” She shook the dirt off the weeds. “Oh, these smell nice. I wonder if this is one of Alice Ridgeway’s herbs.” She looked up and smiled. “The previous owner grew a lot of herbs and some flesh-eating plants as well. Isn’t that an interesting combination?”
She raised the thin stalk to her nose and sniffed. “It’s definitely something.” She passed it to Grady, who took a sniff of his own.
“I can’t place it, but it’s nice.”
“Well, I guess I have my work cut out for me back here,” she noted. “I should get all these beds cleaned up, but I’m afraid of pulling out the wrong things. I don’t know the herbs from the weeds from the flowers.”
“From the man-eaters?”
“Flesh eaters,” she corrected him. “Mostly Venus flytraps, the Realtor said.”
Grady walked around the entire yard, pausing to take a closer look at this or that. At the back corner, he stopped.
“Fishpond?” he turned and asked.
Vanessa nodded. “I heard she used to have koi. As soon as I find some time, I’m going to clean that out and refill it, buy some koi and some water lilies. Maybe I’ll get one of those little stone waterfalls.” She loved the thought of having a little water garden and the sound of the water trickling over her very own falls, no matter how small they might be. She’d never appreciated how soothing the sound of water in any of its many forms could be until she lived near the Bay.
An empty black flowerpot sat on the bottom step leading up to the porch, and she tossed the unidentified plant matter into it as she climbed the steps, her keys in her hand.
“The new key works just fine,” she told him as she pushed open the door and went inside.
“Give me a minute to check things out.” Grady walked through the kitchen and into the front of the house.
She heard his footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs and the floorboards squeak overhead as he went from room to room.
When he came downstairs, he called to her from the front hall, “Everything seems secure. No visitors. No pretty wrapped packages.”
“Good.” She went into the kitchen and tossed her bag onto the table. For the first time in days, she felt uncomfortable in his presence, so she found little things to do. She washed a few dishes that were in the sink, and she dried them. She heard him behind her when he came into the room and sat at the table overlooking the driveway.
“What’s that bundle of dried stuff that’s hanging over the back door?” he asked.
“Oh, that weedy stuff?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. It was there when I moved in. I suspect it was some herby thing that Miss Ridgeway nailed up, probably some good-luck thing. I keep meaning to ask Miss Grace about it and I keep forgetting when I see her. I heard some things about her-that is, Miss Ridgeway-and I want to see what Miss Grace knows. She grew up right around the corner.”
He leaned back in the chair and stretched his long legs. “What kind of things did you hear?”
“Oh, that she put spells on people.”
“Good spells or bad spells?”
“I guess it depended on whether you were a friend or a foe.” Vanessa dried her hands and turned around. “I’m thinking that might be why she had so many herbs planted out back, so she could use them in her spells.”
“My, don’t we have an active imagination.” He smiled for the first time since they left the restaurant.
“A lot of people believe that certain herbs have certain powers.”
“Are you one of them?”
“Maybe.” She sat across from him at the table, trying to keep her distance. Something had changed between them over the course of the evening, and she wasn’t sure what it was. “I found some books that belonged to Miss Ridgeway in the living-room bookcase and I started to read them a few weeks ago, then we got busy with the shop and with the wedding and I had to put them aside for a while.”
“Maybe your Miss Ridgeway was a witch.”
“I don’t believe in witches.”
“Where are the books now?”
“Back on the shelf in the living room. Why? Did you want to see them?”
“Yeah. Let’s take a look.”
She turned off the kitchen lights and followed Grady into the living room. He sat on the floor in front of the sofa while she opened the glass doors in front of the bookcase and removed several volumes.
“These look pretty old.” He picked one up and turned to the title page. “This one was copyrighted in 1921.” He opened a second book. “And this one is even older: 1894.”
He paged through them slowly. “This is about the uses for different herbs. Medicinal uses, mostly.” He closed the book and handed it to her. “No spells.”
“Is that what you were hoping to find? A book of spells?”
“It could be interesting.”
She sat on the sofa, her legs curled up under her, and he stayed on the floor. Finally, she sighed and asked point-blank, “Are you angry with me?”
“With you?” He seemed puzzled by the question. “No. Why should I be angry with you?”
Vanessa shrugged. “Since we left the restaurant, you’ve been… I don’t know. Quiet, I guess.”
For a moment, she thought he was going to let that pass and not reply at all, which led her to believe he was in fact annoyed about something. She sighed. It must have been her big mouth back there on the bench, telling him what he should do about the baggage he was dragging around. He probably couldn’t care less about her opinion of his wife or on his life.
“Was your first husband really thirty when you married him?” he asked.
Surprised by his question, she nodded. “That was one of the dumbest things I ever did.”
“Did you love him?”
“I think mostly, I was just flattered that someone older, someone smoother than the boys I knew in high school, wanted to be with me. When he asked me to marry him, though, it was kind of exciting. I thought I’d look like a stupid little schoolgirl if I said no.” She looked up at him and added, “I really was hoping my mom would put her foot down. I was surprised when she didn’t.”
“Were you really such a handful back then?”
Vanessa nodded. “I suppose. But understand, Maggie and I have always had a somewhat fractious relationship. When I got to high school, it only got worse. Her men friends started looking at me the way they looked at her, and I guess she didn’t like that very much. I had wanted my mother to intervene and forbid me to get married, but when she didn’t, I figured she was just happy to be rid of me. Like, I’d be someone else’s responsibility and she wouldn’t have to bother anymore.”
“I didn’t get that impression from her today.”
“She’s looking at herself in her own rearview mirror and she’s seeing what she wants to see.” Vanessa couldn’t mask her irritation. “Maggie is finding herself alone for the first time in a long while and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s hoping to snare Hal again so she’ll have a home and someone to take care of her.”