Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen Read Free Book Online

with me, if you want to. My room has a view of the blue house next door.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’m going to start bringing in our things. Come with me.”
    Bay looked at her hopefully. “Can I stay up here?”
    She was too tired to argue. “Don’t leave this room. If you want to go exploring, we’ll do it together.”
    Sydney left Bay, but instead of going downstairs to get the boxes and bags left in the car, she walked to her old room. When she was young she spent a lot of time by herself in her room, sometimes imagining that she was trapped there by her evil sister, like in a fairy tale. For two years after her mother left, Sydney even slept with sheets tied into a rope under her bed so she could crawl out the window when her mother came back to save her. But then she grew older and wiser and realized her mother wasn’t coming back. She also realized that her mother had the right idea by leaving in the first place. Sydney couldn’t wait to leave, to follow her boyfriend Hunter John Matteson to college, because they were going to be in love forever, and even if they came back to Bascom it would be okay, because he had never treated her like a Waverley. Not until the very end, at least.
    She took a deep breath and entered the room reverently, a church of old memories. Her bed and dresser were still there. The full-length mirror still had some of her old stickers on it. She opened the closet and found a stack of boxes full of old linen that mice had gotten into. But the room didn’t have an air of neglect. There wasn’t any dust, and it smelled old and familiar, like cloves and cedar. Claire had taken care of it, hadn’t turned it into a sitting room or filled it full of things she didn’t need or use anymore or taken Sydney’s old furniture out.
    That did it.
    Sydney went to the edge of the bed and sat. She put a hand over her mouth as she cried so Bay, singing quietly in the next room, wouldn’t hear.
    Ten days on the road.
    She needed a bath.
    Claire looked prettier, and cleaner, than she did.
    Grandma Waverley was gone.
    Bay liked it here, but she didn’t yet realize what being a Waverley meant.
    What was David doing?
    Did she leave behind any clues?
    So much had changed, but her room was exactly like she’d left it.
    She crawled to the pillow at the top of the bed and curled into a small ball. She was asleep seconds later.

 
    CHAPTER
    3
    T here was an art to the male posterior. That’s all there was to it.
    Well, that was most of it.
    The young runners on the university track had such verve and tone and, probably best of all, if Evanelle ever felt the need to give them something, she could never catch them. Obviously her gift knew that and never decided to kick in at the track during the school year. But in the summer there were slower, older people on the track, and sometimes Evanelle had to give them little packets of ketchup and tweezers. She even had to give one old woman a jar of sourwood honey one day. They gave her strange looks on the track in the summer.
    That morning, instead of going to the track, Evanelle decided to walk downtown before the shops opened. There were always runners around the square. She followed a few of them until she came to Fred’s Gourmet Grocery and happened to look in the window. It was well before he normally showed up for work, but there was Fred, in his stocking feet, getting a container of yogurt out of the dairy section. His rumpled clothing was an obvious indication that he’d spent the night there. Evanelle supposed the rose geranium wine didn’t work on James, or maybe Fred decided not to use it after all. Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren’t. Memories, even hard memories, grew soft like peaches as they got older.
    Fred and James were a steadfast couple, everyone knew that. The fact that they were gay had been overlooked a long time ago, when it was obvious they were one