As entertaining as arguing with Khalil was, she had enjoyed talking with him even more. She tried not to dwell on that too much, either that evening or the next day.
After she put the kids to bed, she took the baby monitor and tackled the stairs to dig through her wardrobe for more clothes. She seemed to have broken through some sort of emotional barrier about the scars on her legs. Not only did she collect several pairs of shorts, she also rediscovered a couple of pairs of capri pants she had forgotten she owned. She shook her head, exasperated with herself. If she hadn’t been so frozen over examining her summer wardrobe, she could have been wearing those all along.
In the morning, she took the children to the library. The early learning program for babies Max’s age was at nine o’clock. It involved little more than sitting in a circle, playing with soft, plastic-coated books and singing nursery rhymes, but he adored it. Chloe declared she was too big to sit in the circle and sing with the babies and their caretakers, so she usually sprawled nearby with a coloring book and crayons, and hummed along with the songs.
On the way home they stopped at a few stores to pick up some essentials that Super Saver didn’t carry. Then it was naptime for Max, lunch, back to the library again for Chloe’s story time, home again and a nap for both of the children in the afternoon. While Max and Chloe slept, Grace finished polishing one resume and worked on tweaking the other version.
A knock sounded hesitantly at the front door. She peeked out the office window. A middle-aged couple stood on the porch.
She braced her shoulders and stifled a sigh. When an Oracle died, the witches’ demesne sent out a public notice to ask that people grant the new Oracle three months’ transition time before approaching her with a petition. For Grace, that transition time was now over. More and more people would begin to petition for a consultation. She went to answer the door.
The couple turned out to be a brother and sister, Don and Margie. Their mother had been deceased for many years, and their father had died of a heart attack the week before. Shocked and grieving, they hoped to say good-bye.
Grace couldn’t help but soften. She invited the couple in and called Therese, the next witch on the roster for babysitting duty. When Therese arrived, Grace took the couple out to the cavern. “I want you to understand, I can’t guarantee that your father will come,” she told them as they walked the overgrown path. “We can only try.”
“Trying means everything to us,” said Don.
They reached the back meadow where the cavern was located. The Ohio River ran along the western border of the property. Sparkling glints of blue water were visible through a tangled border of trees and underbrush.
Earlier in the summer, she had explored, briefly, trying to sell some of the riverfront acreage in order to raise some cash. The Oracle’s Power had bristled, clearly antagonistic toward the idea, but it wasn’t writing the checks for her monthly bills, so she shoved it aside and made some phone calls.
The venture quickly became too complicated to pursue with any real hope of financial return. The real estate agent she had spoken to had been blunt. Granting access rights to anyone who potentially built along the shoreline meant they would be driving past her house in order to get to their patch of land, and she would lose any hope of privacy. Also, the land had too much of a reputation for being haunted to have any wide market appeal. In the current housing slump, it was unlikely the agent could move the parcels of land at all.
The path to the cavern cut north through the meadow then veered a little east, where the land rose into a short, rocky bluff that was dotted with trees and bushes. The entrance to the cavern was set into the bluff.
When Grace was a child, she used to climb the bluff and have picnics on the squat, flat rock at the summit. The bluff was tall enough, and the land sloped downward at a steep enough angle, that she could see over the tops of the trees that grew down by the shoreline and watch the river for boats and barges.
She gave the bluff a wry glance. It was unlikely she would ever see the top again. She could probably take her time and climb up the way she climbed the stairs, using her sound leg to haul herself up, but that seemed like a useless expenditure of energy when she had so many other things that needed her attention.
She led Don and Margie across the meadow to the old doorway that had been built into the side of the bluff. The door was locked to keep exploring children out, and the key was stored in a small rusted coffee can that rested on the top of a wooden lintel.