Chapter Nine
THURSDAY, APRIL 14
68 DAYS UNTIL THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
Honey’s Helpful Hint, from
Honey Frost’s Southern Cookbook for Recipes Gone Wrong:
Garden-fresh cucumber Benedictine will keep tongues—and tempers—cool.
Just as I open the fridge on a morning a few days later, I hear the sound of utter disaster pulling up in the driveway.
I know that old, curious humming, like the beginning of a menacing, minor key hymn.
Buick motors.
Oh no. I bolt for the foyer. If I can intercept—I fling open the front door to find an entirely new kind of cyclone of chaos.
Too late.
Sure enough, the church ladies of Foxe Holler are wearing holes in the front porch. May the gods of neighborly duty spare me.
I tighten my apron, battle ready, and step out onto the porch, blocking the door. “Good afternoon, ladies,” I say, extra sweet while I scream internally. Maybe I can fake a plague.
What are theydoinghere? No one has bothered with the Warlock for twenty-five years, and now they pick the minute I arrive to work up the nerve. Their fear seems only as strong as it is convenient.
“I see you’re still wearing those clogs, Miss Frost.”
Seems I’m not the only one ready for a fight.
The older woman in front steps forward, her chin high in the air, red lipstick popping against her dark skin. Her cane echoes each time it strikes the porch. She’s known to wield the thing like a scepter, as much for style and show as support. Forever in charge of church luncheons, she’s the unofficial monarch of the church ladies. Even though she has no magic herself, her power over the Holler works like the most brutal spell. Or curse.
“Hello to you as well, Ms. Fudge. And I need the clogs for my job, since I stand and bake all day.”
Gertha Fudge and the ladies behind her drop their gazes in unison. It’s not Sunday, so their dress code is humble, but there are still straw hats and pantyhose for days.
“No good for the hips,” mutters one.
Another clicks her tongue. “Or the posture. Look at the poor girl.” Murmured agreement goes up from the cloud of perfume.
Just as I’m plotting how to warn the Warlock, Lazlo, Ms. Zeen—Run for your lives!—a bark comes from the back.
Beulah Buchanan pushes to the front, her poodle in tow. Beauregard sniffs around our feet, caring only for smells and not this sideshow. “You move like the dead, Gertha. Quit taking up the whole porch with your clucking and make room.”
Ms. Fudge leans away from the poodle. “Why you insist on bringing that hound everywhere, Beulah, Lord only knows.”
“At least he’s got bark to his bite.”
Most of these women have come to me for help with an ailment at some point, when Gertha Fudge wasn’t looking. Nothing like pain to make a believer in magic. What experience I do have with their memories tells me something nostalgic will encourage some needed calm before this gets out of hand and I’m refereeing a church-lady brawl. Some of their strongest memories are Gertha’s church luncheons… An idea comes to me.
“If y’all stayright here, I can whip us up some LouisvilleBenedictine sandwiches.” I usually add bacon, but with this group, the pork fat might close one too many arteries and off someone.
Ms. Fudge strikes her cane against the porch once more. “This is no social call, girl.”
Now that’s almost more worrisome than anything. Guests refusing refreshments? But I can barely corral these women in my own shop. What makes me think I can thwart the Golden Girl intervention here, now? Not that Gertha Fudge visits my shop.
Fudge has despised magic for as long as anyone can remember, since the Widow Witch took her husband, but frankly, there’s not much she does like. If she didn’t hate magic so much, I’d thinkshe’sa Hedgewitch. The woman practically lives off terror, and she doesn’t need anything more powerful than her own streak of meanness—that’sauthentic.
