Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton Read Free Book Online Page B

“I’ll have to wax the Griggs boys and give them pedicures. Did you see them last night? The shock stopped Transformation just before the finish line.” She pretended to shudder. “It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
    All I had noticed were the bristly hairs piercing their skin and the tips of their pearly claws. Janice was acting like it was a scene from An American Werewolf in London. We never used to sweat the small stuff in Sugar Maple. Aerynn’s spell would have taken care of everything, smoothing strangers’ perceptions and creating the illusion of the expected even when the expected was nowhere to be found. Now we had no way of knowing when or where the protective charm might let us down. More and more, we were on our own.
    I took a deep breath. “They’re not sending a cop just to ask questions, Janice. They want to open a police station in the shop next door.”
    Despite our tourist town popularity we had managed to fly below the scan of bureaucratic radar. We followed the letter of the law. We sent our kids to school. We voted. We paid our taxes on time. We were an asset to the state, and in true Yankee fashion, they had let us do our thing without interference. But I was afraid we were about to find out how much of that laissez-faire attitude was the New Englander’s love of freedom and how much was courtesy of Aerynn.
    The Muzak’d Manilow stopped abruptly and I motioned for Janice to be quiet.
    “Got a pencil?” Joe Randazzo barked and then started rattling off a to-do list that made my head spin. “And one more thing,” he said over a noisy slurp of liquid. “Pull together town records from 1946 to the present and make sure to include death certificates.”
    Uh-oh.
    “Death certificates?” I asked in my best who-me-worry tone. “What do you want with death certificates?”
    “I’m telling you what they’re asking for.” He took another loud swallow of either coffee or single malt. With Joe you never knew for sure. “They haven’t been able to find anything up there in Montpelier since they decided to digitize the archives. They’ll probably want birth and marriage, too, but right now death is all they’re asking for.”
    The only death certificate we had that I knew of was my father’s. This was going to be a problem.
    “What’s the rush?” I asked. “I mean, we’ve been doing fine without help for a long time.” Almost three hundred years, but who was counting.
    “Get the paperwork lined up,” Joe repeated. “They want it, and between us, you’d be smart to provide it. In fact, maybe you should knit the new guy one of those fancy sweaters of yours while you’re at it.” He laughed. Joe Randazzo was a fan of his own humor. “You want to make both of our lives easy? Do what they want and don’t ask questions.”
    “Don’t ask questions?” A bead of perspiration slid down into my hairline over my right ear. “What does that mean?”
    “It means what it means. This isn’t my idea. I’ve got enough on my plate right now without opening another precinct up there in the mountains. Don’t fight it because this goes all the way to the top.”
    “The top?” I asked but I was too late. Joe had already hung up.
    “What’s going on?” Janice demanded when I turned to her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
    I couldn’t help it. I laughed until I cried.
    News travels fast in a small town. By lunchtime everyone in Sugar Maple knew about the police station and they were up in arms. I was flooded with so many phone calls and anxious visits that I finally had to shut down the shop and call an emergency meeting at the Town Hall for 8 P.M.
    Gunnar came by the cottage around seven thirty to drive with me over to the abandoned church we used as our central meeting place. The girls loved Gunnar and they converged at his ankles like a furry Welcome Wagon. You could barely hear yourself think over the roar of purrs.
    “Tell the truth,” I demanded as I offered him one of my