Okay, how the heck did we get here?
Shane started to protest, but the chief waved him off. “I’ll be seeing you later, Shane.”
With that, Tuney Sluggs left the bar, and I stood staring at him, dumbfounded. “How did I suddenly become the bad person in all of this?”
Shane shot me a sympathetic look. “Don’t worry about him. I’m sure in a few days he’ll forget all about it.” He smiled, revealing the dimple in his right cheek. It made him look so sexy, and suddenly I couldn’t wait for our date.
I felt heat rise in my cheeks. “Thank you for standing up for me.”
“Hey, how could I not?” he said, striding back to the bar. “We’re all in this together, aren’t we? We’ve got to take care of each other in Peachwood.”
“We sure do.”
From behind, Hannah cleared her throat. Oh wow, I’d gotten so sucked in by Shane’s dimple that I’d almost forgotten all about Sadie’s mother.
As Shane took his place behind the bar, I squeezed back into the booth. “Sorry about that. I want you to know that I don’t usually have the police eyeing me like a criminal.”
Hannah scoffed. “Old Tuney Sluggs was in power when I lived here. That old coot thinks he owns the world. He’s either all together or he’s the exact opposite.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “And most of the time he can’t figure out if he’s supposed to be ironing his phone or charging his pants.”
I laughed. “Please, don’t make me cry tears right now.”
Hannah took the last sip of her whiskey and set her tumbler down with a thud. “When I buried all the spells, Tuney had an uproar on his hands. The problem was, he didn’t know why everyone in town was fighting one another.”
“Wait a minute.” I lifted my palm, gesturing for her to stop. “You buried the spells?”
These had to be the same ones that Rufus and I had searched through.
She glanced at her glass, seeming ashamed. “There were a lot more of our kind here at the time. But lots of folks were doing bad things to one another—making it so that their enemies couldn’t find their eyeglasses when they woke up, or causing their neighbor’s spells to backfire. There wasn’t unity, and I was tired of dealing with it. It was just like a whole bunch of wizards and witches had nothing better to do, so they would prank each other all day long. It was exhausting not knowing when a spell would blow up in my face or when I’d step outside and my grass would suddenly become a bed of biting weeds.”
I stared at her, mouth slack. “That is unsettling.”
She nodded. “So I hid all the spells. Every single one of them. It was hard and it took all the strength I had, but I gathered each and every one and scattered them to the outskirts of town.”
The spells that Rufus had found. Those were the ones Hannah had sent there. “And everyone got angry about it?”
“Because they couldn’t see them. I magicked the spells so that they wouldn’t be found.”
“But what if someone could see them?”
She hiked a shoulder to her ear. “Impossible. I hampered everyone’s magic so that all they could work were simple spells, nothing complicated.”
“Ah, no wonder they were mad.”
I remembered Norma Ray saying that Sadie was as bad as her mother. Malene and Urleen hadn’t agreed, but they hadn’t disagreed either.
“So mad I had to leave, which was fine by me.” She sighed heavily. “And that’s why I never returned until now. But anyway,” she said, scooting out of the booth, “I suppose we should be going. I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”
We headed toward the door and I understood why folks were now angry at Hannah.
And I also realized that this meant that Malene and her quilting bee were witches.
Chapter 17
Idropped Hannah off at the bed and breakfast and couldn’t stop thinking about what Willard and she had told me. The spells that Rufus had somehow summoned or dug up or whatever could be seen by the two of us but not by anyone else.
What did that mean?
I shook my head. It didn’t mean anything. It was probably simply that Hannah’s spell was wearing off, that’s all. Whatever she had done to make sure the magic was dead and buried to the residents, it was just changing and breaking.
