Page 28 of Under the Orchard’s Spell

“Sorry.” I plop into the old, squeaky chair next to her and hand her the mug of tea.

She sniffs it skeptically. “What’s this?”

“Black tea.”

“It smells funny.”

“It’s flavored. Sweet harvest pumpkin. I like to drink it in the fall.”

Her lip curls as she takes another skeptical sniff.

I roll my eyes. “Try it. You’ll like it, I promise.”

Logan, who has taken a seat across the table from us, says, “The journals mention glowing beetles?”

Val tentatively sips. “Sure. We’ve always had weird critters on this land.”

I raise an eyebrow. Yes, our land is different—and, yes, I’ve seen my fair share of fireflies on the East Coast—but I wasn’t aware there was anything like a faintly glowing beetle in Oregon.

Brows knitted, Logan picks up the journal in question and starts reading for himself.

Val slurps from her mug. I resist the urge to say I told her so.

“What other ‘weird critters’?” I ask.

She lifts a shoulder. “Some black fox was hanging around the barn a while back. Martin and I saw an albino deer when we were kids.”

Logan looks up from his journal. “And how about multicolored butterflies?”

Our eyes meet and my mind leaps to a razor-sharp memory: a whirl of butterfly wings circling Logan’s awestruck smile. Then, a kiss. The kiss. My first ever.

I blink hard.

“Could be,” Val says. She chases her tea bag with a spoon. “Like I said, farm’s got weird fauna.”

“But why?” I press.

“Bizarre microclimate. Same reason this land shits out nothing but perfect pears while they won’t take anywhere else in the valley. Probably something about the soil. Could be a geothermal vent underground, or some old hot spring. Maybe we’re on a terminal moraine.”

Eyebrow cocked, I cross my arms and lean back in my chair. The back rest, which has been hanging on by a thread for years, screams a protest that’s almost exactly the pitch of my next question. “And that makes beetles glow?”

Val frowns at my chair. “You ought to get rid of these nasty old things.”

“I helped Uncle Martin pick them out at an estate sale when I was twelve,” I say, “and they have pears on the backs. Explain the beetles, please.”

She shrugs. “Funny soil makes weird plants, and weird plants make even weirder bugs.”

I regard her skeptically and she crosses her arms.

Logan pushes the journal toward her and taps a finger against the word visitors. “And do you know why Martin was making notes on this?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“The rest of the entry is about the land, the trees, the weather conditions,” he says. “All directly relevant to the fruit. This isn’t.”

Val chews at her lip like she’s checking the flavor of her answer. “There wasn’t always accounting for what was in that man’s head.”

This, at least, I know to be true. Still, Val is being cagey.