Bliss theater, the only place in town showing first-run movies. Afterward, he figured he might cup her knee with his hand, then run it ever so slowly upward on her thigh….
“Ah,” murmured Pappy, following Jeb’s gaze, “The Teasdale Terror House.”
“Now, are those witches really related to Matilda?” asked Marsh, speaking of the Andersons—the great-grandmother and two generations of daughters. A fourth Anderson, Ariel Anderson, had flown the coup years ago. “Maybe they really did kill their husbands,” he added darkly. “That’s what some people say.”
“I don’t think they’re witches,” Pappy chided. “When you see them in town, you know as well as I do that they’re always polite.”
“A cover,” assured Jeb.
Pappy chuckled. “They do dress weird.”
“All in black,” added Marsh. “Like someone died.”
“Their husbands.” Jeb nodded with assurance. “The oldest one’s got to be a hundred years old. They say she still moves like lightning, and uses a broomstick, instead of a cane. None of them ever go to the movies or take vacations.”
Marsh looked vindicated. “And they sell those teas.”
Pappy smiled. “The ladies do own a tearoom, boys.”
“They don’t have friends,” Marsh continued.
“And no one will go up there in the winter,” added Jeb, although he’d done so on a dare once. It had been a snowy night, and when he’d reached the wraparound porch and prepared to ring the doorbell, the wind had picked up, howling in his ears, and he’d wrenched around, staring toward the woods where Marsh and their buddies had sworn they’d wait. He’d seen only evergreens, which he’d figured sheltered everything from ghosts to bobcats.
Just as he’d been about to press the doorbell, Jeb had heard a branch break. Wolves in the woods, he’d thought, then leaves had rustled, and Jeb had realized, someone—or something—was pushing aside the underbrush, moving toward him, steadily.
That’s when Sam Anderson—Sam was short for Samantha—had swung open the heavy front door so swiftly that it had snapped backward on its groaning hinges; the heavy brass demon-head knocker clanked and wind ruffled a white apron Sam had worn over a long black dress. She was Granny Anderson’s daughter and Ariel’s mother. “What are you doing out there, Jeb Pass? Why, you’d better come in. It’s colder than a witch’s—” Chuckling, she’d cut off her speech and scrutinized him through devilish eyes.
Spinning around, he’d run all the way down witches mountain, sure that whatever he’d heard chasing him was huge and hairy, with claws that could shred him to pieces. Of course, that had been years ago. Way back in seventh grade.
“In the winter, all they do is read books from the library,” Marsh was saying.
“Giblets is the only one they ever talk to. Miss Gibbet,” Jeb corrected. Elsinore Gibbet, the librarian, was well past sixty and as scrawny as a chicken, with extra skin under her chin and a chirpy voice that had inspired local kids to call her Chicken Giblets. Jeb continued, “At the library, she showed me a history book that says weird stuff’s always gone on in Bliss, Pappy. Starting in the 1700s—”
“After Matilda came to town,” Marsh put in.
“They say there started to be periods of time when…”
“Something goes…well, buggy,” Pappy suggested.
Jeb nodded. “And because of it, Miss Gibbet said people used to come from all over the place, just to swim in Spice Spring.”
“From as far away as China,” continued Marsh.
“Especially during summers like this one,” Pappy added. “When the water’s been chilled by a series of cold snaps, then the weather heats up again. And during such a summer, when the sun, moon and stars align just right, they say a dip in Spice Spring can change your life. Especially your love life.”
Jeb thought of Michelle and felt his cheeks warm.
Pappy went on. “At the end of the summer, folks used to come here from bigger towns to bottle the water. And of course, they’d head up the hill, to the Andersons’, for medicinal teas.”
Jeb thought of the mysterious book of tea recipes said to have been handed down by Matilda. According to rumor, the book had a cloth cover and pages so yellow and brittle that it had to be kept in a safe in the witches’ root cellar.
As every kid in Bliss knew, the Anderson women had taken to hiding from the public and wearing black. Except for the youngest one, Ariel. When she’d kissed the witch house and tearoom goodbye and roared out of Bliss on her Harley Davidson motorcycle eleven years ago, she’d been wearing red fishnets, a tight leather miniskirt and a top that had looked more like fancy underwear. Jeb had only been five years old, but it was the sort of moment no one ever forgot.
Later, he’d heard all the hot gossip about the sexy things she’d done with Studs Underwood, years before he’d gotten elected sheriff. Even now, Jeb’s face colored, since some of the local guys could get pretty descriptive when it came to tales of Ariel.
“When the moon’s just right and the stars align,” Marsh began again. “And they make teas with water from Spice Spring…is that when you get cured from whatever’s bothering you?”
“Not so much illnesses,” said Pappy. “But matters of the heart. You know, sadness. Loneliness. That sort of thing. At least, that’s what I always heard. And of course, those women make love potions.” Pappy raised a bony finger. “But don’t you start getting ideas about stealing that book of theirs. Attempts have never been successful.”
“I’d hate to get the widows mad,” admitted Marsh.
“I remember,” Pappy continued, “just a couple years back, the sheriff got called up to the tearoom. Somebody had taken a hatchet to the root-cellar door, tied a rope around the safe and tried to drag it up the steps.”
“Guess they couldn’t get it open,” Marsh offered.
“I heard about that,” said Jeb. “It took three men to haul it back downstairs.” He followed his grandfather’s gaze over the water. The source of the spring was deeper than Jeb and his buddies could dive, although they’d spent summers trying. Once, Jeb had gotten close enough to feel the heat bubbling from beneath; it was as if a hole had opened onto the earth’s fiery core.
The spring’s source was directly under the mountain on which Terror House was perched. It was as if the spring itself had given rise to the steep, conical, lushly vegetated hill, as well as the house that sat on top, like a dark cherry. It was weird, Jeb thought, how the spring, rather than coal, had become the town’s black gold. That, and the visitors summering there.
“At least the Core Coal Company didn’t wind up strip-mining here,” Jeb said.
Pappy nodded his agreement. “If they’d done that, you wouldn’t see a spot of green left in these hills.”
Jeb had been studying that piece of town lore, so he knew that, in the late seventies, when the economy had been at its worst, the Lyons family had begun to buy land,
