Resting Witch Face Read online

  Resting Witch Face

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2018 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Thanks for Reading

  Catalog of Books

  Chapter 1

  “It’s so nice to have you girls in the workshop.” Gramma Em said as she closed down the retail end of the shop. Quinn noticed she and Aunt Mary, “the Grams,” were staying open later and later. Mary must have caught concern on Quinn’s face.

  “Don’t worry, kid, the big fall sale starts this weekend.” She gave Quinn a reassuring pat. “It kicks off the Christmas buying season. You’ll see.”

  South Fishburn was just this side of the Sticks with the Allegheny National Forest on the other side of the river. Camping season wound down in the fall. Across the street, the Pennsylvania Dairy Farmers’ Co-Op, purveyors of really fresh ice cream, had closed after Labor Day. Fewer and fewer cars parked in the Last Shop to Nowhere down the road. This was the lull before Thanksgiving centerpieces and Christmas décor became hot sellers. Even the bees knew it, and clustered in the hive boxes, readying for the cold of winter.

  “We’re doing Salisbury steak for dinner, if you want to stay, Harvest.”

  Quinn’s younger sister didn’t look up from the scales on a counter. “What is all this? It’s like a magic potion.”

  The two sisters were making candles for the baby in the family, Echo. In order to convince Echo to go to college, Harvest and Quinn agreed to mind Echo’s online candle business. It turned out to be a pain in the ass.

  Gramma stooped down and gave Harvest a kiss on top of her head. “Don’t work too late.”

  “‘Two and a half parts soy to one part beeswax for all scents except lavender, vanilla bean or wildflower—see chart?’” Harvest read. She turned the page. “Oh. There is a chart. Since when do you need a chart to pour candle molds?”

  Like Echo, the sisters had worked in the Chandlery when they were in high school. Unlike Echo, they mostly just worked the front counter. Quinn never had much interest in the candle-making process, and the Grams never pushed. “Well, they’re hour candles. Echo guarantees they’ll burn exactly to the hour. I guess we need to follow the formula.”

  Quinn picked up one of the molds. The antique tin form showed the graduations for the hours in relief. She fumbled with a roll of wick cord, trying to thread the sticky string on a proper zig-zag path. Once the four chambers were threaded, she checked to make sure her work didn’t double up any of the wicks.

  In the meantime, Harvest grumbled over the scale, measuring soy wax beads and dumping them into a boiler. She then shaved a block of yellow beeswax until the old scale balanced. “Ah, shoot, I forgot the color. Let me see...”

  Threading the second and third mold proved easier. Quinn set them aside and found a pouring ladle. She stirred the melting wax in the boiler. Harvest again exploded.

  “What the what? I’ve gotta make some kind of blackberry and sunflower seed tea bag to go into the boiler?”

  Quinn remembered a text from her baby sister and moved to the fridge. A plastic storage container held four bundles made of coffee filters and tied off with a long string dangling. She brought it over and dunked it in the boiler. “I’m glad the kid’s in school. She apparently had way too much time on her hands.”

  Scowling into the boiler, Harvest sat back as the wax turned a pale purple-blue. “If we dump yellow beeswax into that, will it turn a weird green color?”

  “Color theory isn’t really my thing, but I think so.”

  “Awesome sauce. We’re making green-tea-and-melon-scented hour candles.” From the counter, Harvest grabbed a vial. She dropped little black-green beads on top of her weighed beeswax. Flake by flake, she removed the wax until the old scale balanced.

  “What are those things?”

  Harvest hiked her shoulders. “I don’t know, but they sure do stink.” She lifted the pail from the balance scale and dumped it into the melting soy wax. When Quinn gave it a stir, a warm scent filled the room.

  “Oh, that’s nice! I thought I’d hate the smell of tea and melon.”

  Finally, the grumpy expression left Harvest’s face. “That’s always the best part. The awesome scents. Just opening the front door and walking in, the way it hits you in the face—love it. Always will.”

  The thermometer read a hundred eighty degrees. Inside the boiler, wax looked like lime sherbet. “Almost done.” Quinn swirled the ladle and lifted out a scoop of wax, waiting until it stopped dripping. She dumped it in the first hour candle mold. Immediately, wax poured through the wick holes at the bottom.

  “We forgot to stop them up!”

  Harvest grabbed cooled dabs of wax off the counter and shoved them into the open holes on the bottom of the mold, what would be the tops of the candles. “Ow! Ow! That’s hot.”

  Once plugged, the mold filled.

  Shaking out her hand, Harvest grabbed the other two molds and jammed cool wax into the taper holes. Quinn filled the first and stirred the wax in the boiler for a second pour. Despite the hours of prep, the actual pour lasted less than ten minutes.

  “Now we just have to wait a day until they harden. Is there an order for a tea-and-melon-scented green hour candle?”

  Quinn set the molds on a cooling rack. When she sat across from Harvest, she bumped into hand-dipped candles hanging by their shared wicks. A half dozen swayed like pendulums. “Oops. No, I don’t think people order specific candles, Echo just puts up what she has in stock.”

  “All that work for a dozen candles. Maybe offering custom candles would be too much.”

  “And we’re not even done yet.” Quinn stopped the swinging candles. “Tomorrow, when they’ve cooled, we have to paint the marks and Roman numerals with red wax and dip them in clear. Then they have to cool again.”

  Harvest threw her head back, gazing at the ceiling. “Why does Echo think this is a good business model?”

  “Hey. She bought a car, and a laptop for school. And some new—” Quinn gazed at her new sneakers. “Damn it, I got green wax all over my new shoes!”

  “A down payment on a used car, and a rebuilt laptop,” Harvest countered. “At least SUNY Fredonia doesn’t offer classes in chandlery—” Harvest faced the front of the store. “A customer now?”

  Quinn heard it, too. A man’s voice, a light knock on the front door. Her eyes caught the school clock high on the wall. “It’s almost nine.”

  Harvest unlocked the door between the workshop and the retail space. “Quinn, call 911!”

  RED AND BLUE LIGHTS lit up the façade of the Chandlery. Harvest watched the coroner’s assistants flip the sheet over a famili
ar face. They lifted the gurney into a waiting hearse.

  “You and Sheriff Bennet had a beef.” Sgt. Jeff Shafer, investigations commander for Pennsylvania State Police Troop E arrived minutes before. He adjusted his campaign hat and gave Harvest the eye. “A very public beef.”

  For a moment, Harvest didn’t think. The image of the sheriff lying face down, pale hand reaching for the threshold, took over. In rusty red, what could only be blood, a five-pointed star in a circle had been painted on the back of his shirt. She caught Shafer staring.

  “Why would I need to murder him? He had enough rope to hang himself with. Heck, he was already dangling.” Harvest was a State Constable, serving the lower court. Bennett was the sheriff, serving the higher court. He made it known with every campaign speech how the county could save a lot of money by eliminating the constable positions in the county. At the same time, Harvest and her sisters had uncovered evidence on property he owned that tied him to a serial killer from the ’80s.

  One of the coroner’s assistants closed the Hearse tailgate. “Don’t need any lab work to know that man was poisoned.”

  Quinn, who stood back from the crowd of law enforcement, murmured, “Well, duh, he had foam dripping out of his orifices and his skin was green.”

  “Really?” Virginia Stanislas, the county coroner, looked up from her notes at her assistant. “Care to enlighten us on what manner of toxin was involved, Miss Albright?”

  The assistant colored but stood her ground. “This is farm country, they use a zillion different kinds of pesticides.”

  “Exactly why we need lab work.” Stanislas went back to her clipboard.

  “Parathion,” Albright said.

  Dr. Stanislas clipped the pen to the board. “Parathion is restricted to certain crops in the U.S. There aren’t a lot of sunflower farms around here, Miss Albright.”

  “Of course, Dr. Stanislas.” The assistant ducked away from the coroner’s glance and around the other side of the Hearse.

  “Nora Albright may be in medical school,” Stanislas said to Shafer, “But I’m still the coroner around here. You need anything else from me, Jeff?”

  Shafer shook his head. “You sending him up to Erie for autopsy?”

  “Of course. I’ll try to put a rush on it. People will want to know what happened to their sheriff.”

  “Former sheriff,” Harvest corrected.

  Stanislas looked her over. “You’re the constable for Elk Township.”

  “And right now, our only suspect,” Jeff Shafer said.

  “No freakin way. Parathion? That’s an insecticide. I wouldn’t want it a hundred miles from here. The Grams make a living as beekeepers?” She eyed Shafer, giving him the Duh expression. “With all the trouble he was in, Bennett was the last person I had to worry about.”

  “Bennett was in trouble, I’ll give you that. But it seems even dead he’s still got it in for you, Harvest.”

  Chapter 2

  “Another sunny day at SUNY Fredonia!” Bunny sang as she moved around the room, searching for her blue hoodie. This was a challenge, since Echo and her dorm mate wore nothing but Fred Blue sweats, and the clean ones had to be found by smell. “C’mon, sleepyhead, we still have time for breakfast in the caff if we get a move on. Shake a leg. Shag our butts.”

  Dorm life was something she needed to get used to. Echo had lived with two other sisters in one house, but she always had her own room, and Harvest and Quinn were much older. Even though, genetically, the three were triplets (she still hadn’t worked out that impossibility), nearly every school morning was filled with tears over some stupid thing. But this?

  Bunny was blonde haired, blue eyed, curvy, the image of a cheerleader—which she was. While Echo considered herself a morning person, Bunny Bellingham made her feel like a—

  “Let’s go, slug-a-bed, run a comb across your head, why is your butt full of lead? Let’s go eat! Let’s go eat! Gooooo eat!” Bunny rolled her hands as if she had pom poms attached.

  “All right!” Echo rolled off her bunk, grabbed some sweats, gave a sniff, and dressed.

  “Don’t spend an hour in the bathroom, Echo. Break-fast-sandwiches, break-fast-sandwiches!”

  Maybe it was because the two of them shared the first class of the day that made Bunny feel like she had to pair up with Echo. Would she be so obnoxious next semester, when Echo would make damn certain they didn’t share a class? Half an hour later, Bunny skipped next to her as they made their way to Thompson Hall and Sociology 101.

  “Why is Sociology considered general ed? It seems made up,” Bunny did a twirl and continued skipping. “I didn’t get the whole action hero and hip-hop artist thing.”

  “It showed our attraction to figures who defy authority, whether a fictional loose cannon detective or some guy rapping about all his money and women and how you better not cross him.” Echo thought Bunny didn’t get a lot of things. “How are you so animated? We were up until two.”

  “And I thank you again, study buddy. I might actually pass an algebra test for once.”

  They walked with a crowd in blue hoodies into the hall. “Do you want a ride home again this weekend?”

  “Thanks, but one weekend a month is enough. It’s so boring there.”

  The Bellinghams ran a farm near Scandia, PA, which was not far from the Grams’ house. Echo knew it could be boring there. There was little to do, and fewer people to do things with if you lived out in the country. She had always made her own fun.

  In the classroom, they had desks next to each other. Dr. Stagg, the instructor, was not present. Apropos of nothing, Bunny said, “Echo. I never thought about it before, but what a weird name.”

  “Really? Bunny Bellingham thinks Echo is a funny name?”

  “My real name isn’t Bunny.” Bunny made a face. “It’s Snow Bunny Bellingham. I was born prematurely at a ski resort.”

  Dr. Frank Stagg strode in just as the bell rang. “Make sure your name is on the sign-in sheet.” He set up his laptop and projector.

  Echo opened her notebook to a blank page, writing the date at the top. When she looked up, she startled almost hard enough to drop her pen. The word “Witch” was on the screen in big letters.

  “Changing gears here on our work-up to the term paper,” Stagg said, running a hand through wavy brown hair shot with gray. “Let me hear those groans. No groans? Okay, what do you know about witches? Anybody.”

  “They’re victims of a patriarchal society, persecuted by male domination.” Echo thought the speaker’s name was Wendy.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Wendy shuffled her feet. “They were put to death because they were female. Sometimes over property disputes.”

  “Female describes fifty-one-point-nine percent of the population,” Stagg said. “What determines which women were accused?”

  “They was ugly.” Someone said, Echo didn’t see who.

  Stagg nodded. “Okay, could be. “

  “They didn’t go to church, they didn’t fit in,” a girl in back said. “They did their own thing and people didn’t like it.”

  Stagg clicked his remote. The word “Outsiders” appeared under “Witch.”

  “They weren’t all outsiders. In Salem, some women were accused who were regular, I don’t know, housewives or whatever.” Pam, a girl with ginger bangs and big glasses spoke up. “People were superstitious then. They lived in a new world, surrounded by Indians. They were afraid, cut off from the world.”

  The instructor got up, pacing around the room. “Superstitious, isolated, afraid, good, anything else?”

  “Probably really bored,” Bunny said.

  Stagg smiled. “Yes. Go on, Bunny.”

  Bunny frowned, taken aback. “I just mean, well, you live on a farm. You do chores. You go to school, church. But there isn’t any internet or cable TV or, like, sports. Not even a telephone. You couldn’t call your friends back in England.” She put on a terrible British accent. “Cheerio, Aunt Peg, subsistence farming i
n the woods and what all. How’s tricks in London?”

  This garnered a few chuckles.

  “Okay, Bunny made some good points. Not a lot of technology or communication back in 1690, a lot of work, but not much fun. Now, I’m not saying that the accusation of more than two hundred people and the execution of nineteen was exactly fun—”

  “A distraction,” Pam said.

  Stagg waved a finger at her. “At the origin of the Salem witch hunt were four adolescent girls. Probably all of them were bored, afraid, isolated, and perhaps in need of a distraction. Show of hands, anybody know what that’s like?”

  Most hands went up.

  Now the words on the screen were replaced with “Scapegoat,” “Witch Hunt” and “Moral Panic.”

  “Seventeenth century New England isn’t the only place where a witch hunt or moral panic took place. What other kind of witch hunts have we seen?” Stagg gazed out at blank faces. “How about in the political arena?”

  “Oh, the Red Scare,” Pam said. “The government thought there was a communist conspiracy.”

  Stagg nodded. “Actually, in this country, there were two red scares, each of them following a world war, each concerned with radical communist takeovers. Is this the same kind of thing that happened in Salem?”

  “Well, no,” Wendy said. “There really were communists. Maybe they weren’t going to overthrow the government, but they were real.”

  “Okay, right, communists are real. Are witches real?”

  Echo shrank down in her chair. She heard responses: yes, no, Wiccans.

  “Debatable, right? I guess a more pointed question would be, is anyone afraid of witches anymore? Could we, with our modern conveniences, instant communication, constant entertainment, high technology...could we fall into the same pattern as the people of late seventeenth century Salem?”

  This time, there was more of a consensus. “Not in modern society,” Wendy said.

  Echo remained hunched at her desk. Since discovering that she and her siblings wielded power beyond their understanding, she’d been doing a lot of reading, a lot of research about witches. Not knowing why, she blurted out, “Jamestown.”