Page 66 of Crossroads Magic
I picked up the package. “I really do have a lot to do, today,” I admitted. I paused. “Broch said that Juda was not himself, on the solstice.”
“He’s not himself so often, one could say he was being himself,” Hirom said. “He was acting up, for sure.”
I lifted the package a little. “Thank you, again.”
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My morning had been so intense and revelatory that mundane chores like making lunch and dinner were exactly what I needed. One of the items in the groceries that had been delivered was a large frozen whole chicken. I had let it defrost and I would put it on to roast after lunch. Now the chicken seemed doubly appropriate. I would also put all the extras out tonight. Stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits.
There was a can of pumpkin puree on the shelf, so I made a pumpkin pie, too.
Hirom’s gift sat untouched on the counter by the door until lunch was done. I took it upstairs and settled in the wing chair. On the little table next to the chair was one of my mother’s notebooks. I stared at the cover, not really seeing it.
Everything in the notebooks was true.
My mother had not been suffering from a strange form of dementia. She had not been living in a fantasy world. Well, she had been, but that world was as real as the one I had left behind in Los Angeles.
I let out a deep sigh. I would have to read her journals far more closely. I would read them again, this time with my receptors open. My mother could teach me a lot about this world she had pulled me into.
Chapter Twenty
Juda, son of jinns…of course he would be the one to sense the borders of our home were crumbling. He is so sensitive to enclosures and boundaries.
Even Trevalyan missed the signs, and of everyone in the Crossing, I thought he would see them. He misses nothing, as a rule.
I am grateful to Juda for drawing my attention to the failing wards. But now I worry that I won’t find the recipes needed in time to renew them. There is so little time left…
I put the notebook down. It was the last notebook my mother had been working on. Now I was reading her words with a different mindset, I was learning somuchabout the people I had met.
Juda was the son of jinns. I had read that before and thought it was my mother being fanciful or indulging in poetry, for the alliteration ran off the tongue easily.
The son of jinns. Genies, in western parlance. How literal was my mother being? Was his father literally a jinn? And his father before him? WasJudaa jinn? He did not live in a bottle, nor was his lower half made of vapor, but that might simply be Hollywood embellishment. But clearly, jinns were sensitive to boundaries. Were they used to being captive and held inside tight borders? That would explain why Juda had sensed the failing wards.
I couldn’t discount anything my mother said, anymore. I had to take everything at face value until I had a better understanding of how this new normal worked.
While I contemplated that, my gaze fell upon Hirom’s gift. I still hadn’t unwrapped it.
I put the notebook aside and picked up the parcel. The string was tied in a bow, and I tugged it undone, and withdrew a scuffed shoe box from the paper, and opened it.
A statue lay in a nest of paper strips, the wood glowing, for it was highly polished.
I withdrew the statue carefully and put it on the table to admire it. It was a lovely thing, showing a woman in what looked like Roman clothing, her hand resting on a deer’s head. The deer had antlers.
The flat bottom of the statue had a name carved into it.
Diana.
My heart beat harder. Had Trevalyan told Hirom about the deer that had approached me? But that had only been yesterday…and I was almost certain that Hirom had carved this statue himself. He must have started carving it the moment I arrived in town.
Or perhaps even before then, for as soon as my mother had been found dead, the town would have known the next of kin would arrive.
But what had moved Hirom to makethiscarving?Thisversion of Artemis? And for a woman he’d never met?
Haigton Crossing is different.
I cleared off space on one of the shelves opposite the sofa and put the statue on it. Then I went downstairs to finish the preparations for dinner.
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