Page 10 of Woods of the Raven

I invited her home with me—the former cheerleader captain, homecoming queen, and 4.0 student who’d been nothing but mean to me. There she met my grandfather and fell in love with him, as everyone did. She sat at our table and ate a full meal for the first time in weeks, enjoyed his homemade pumpkin soup with thick, crusty, right-out-of-the-oven sourdough bread.

“I was so horrible to you,” she’d said later that evening as she sat on my bed, crying.

“Yes, well.” I hugged her. “Maybe you were just hungry that whole time.”

She nodded quickly. “Yes. That was absolutely it.”

My grandfather drove her twice a week to a psychiatrist in Westfield who traded therapy for baked goods, homemade preserves, tinctures for her sciatica, and enough vegetables that she never had to go to the market for them. She also very much enjoyed what she called art and what I knew to be protection wards my grandfather gave her to adorn her walls.

Amanda and I became inseparable, and I taught her about putting rice in a small bottle by the front door every month to collect negative energy, as well as blowing cinnamon into your home to invite in prosperity. She learned to bake and brew tea, how to knit and make beeswax spell candles people bought every year at the harvest festival.

From her therapist she learned to have a plan for bad days, to breathe even during scary times, and to believe in her own power. She learned tactics to help her anxiety, cope with her fear, and find her way from victim to survivor.

From my grandfather she learned to trust that people could love you and want nothing in return. All the lessons took root, and I watched her bloom. When we graduated from high school, both of us newly eighteen, a lawyer visited us one evening. Lo and behold, her grandmother, who passed right after she was born, had set up a trust fund for Amanda no one knew about.

Grandparents. You had to love them.

She continued to live with us for that summer, though she was now rich, and when she said she wanted to repay our kindness, my grandfather replied that she already had by showing us her great heart.

“I love him so much,” she’d told me through her tears later that night.

When she left for college, she paid for mine as well. She got a degree in business, I got mine in folklore, and she made certain the gas for the house would always be paid, come rain or shine, year after year, forever, as long as there was someone living on the land. I appreciated that very much, especially since I had no income at the moment.

“Oh,” she exclaimed out of the blue, bringing me back from my stroll down memory lane, “you’re never going to guess whom I got an email from.”

“Who?”

“My mother,” she announced with a cackle.

I winced.

“She wants to borrow money so they can keep their yacht, since Daddy made some bad business dealings.”

“And you said?”

“I said,” she began with a snicker, “that perhaps she should not be asking the person who bought her home just so I could bulldoze it to the ground.”

“I think you have an overdeveloped sense of revenge.”

“Who? Me?”

She had bought the country club just so she could kick the Lanyons out. She also bought the majority of stock in their company and then sold it out from under them. Their house was also razed, and she built a counseling center where it had been. She named it after my grandfather: the Arthur Corey House. I got to cut the ribbon at the opening celebration.

She had taken the two million her grandmother left her and grown it into forty times that amount. I was very proud of her. Once her business took off—a clean makeup line that was now a household name—she created a charity foundation that gave loans to women wanting to start a business. I’d been thrilled when she returned to Osprey, having married a guy from Buffalo, New York, who was an actuary, which meant he could work from anywhere. He fell in love with our hometown and its charm on sight.

She was the pinnacle of power and success, and people who’d once snubbed her were now snubbed in return. Her memory was long, and she was vengeful. I cautioned her often to be forgiving. She said that certainly, in her next life, she would be a saint. But not this one. Kip Lanyon smartly moved out of town the moment he heard she was back.

“And don’t be mad I told the chief you’re a witch because come on, he was going to find out eventually anyway. Everyone knows who you are, and everybody loves you.”

I scoffed.

“Who doesn’t love you?”

I grinned slyly before taking a sip of my tea.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Elsie Abernathy.”