Free Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton

thrown in to keep it interesting. Nothing out of the ordinary.
    I scanned the rest of the area as I started back to the truck. Not that I expected to find anything, but without a police presence in town, it was possible major pieces of evidence might have been left behind. Suzanne’s death was probably accidental but there was a five percent chance it wasn’t. And that five percent was where I needed to put my energy.
    There was no pattern to any of the vegetation, at least not as far as I could see. Except for the rental shack and the bench, humans had walked softly on the land, which was why the tree caught my eye. A scruffy maple flanked by a pair of stubby Douglas firs, it had suffered its share of lightning strikes and all-you-can-eat deer buffets. The bark had been stripped in spots, gnawed in others. The surprising thing was that the tired old tree was still standing.
    Scratch that. The really surprising thing was the circle gouged into the bark on the north side. I’m no naturalist but even I knew that deer weren’t into decorative munching.
    In a way I was glad to see a sign of teenage rebellion in Sugar Maple. Maybe it was cop humor, but there was nothing like a little defacement of public property to humanize a town, and from what I’d read, this town needed it.
    It took two tries to get the engine to turn over, but it finally caught and I headed back toward Osborne Avenue and went east. The stores were shuttered. The streets were empty. Nobody out walking the dog. Nobody on a quick run to the convenience store for milk and bread. I had a strange sense of déjà vu as I drove around but chalked it up to the fact that there was a built-in sameness to all northern New England villages. It was part of what made people love them the way they did.
    Certain things were nonnegotiable and Sugar Maple had them all. The village green. The skating pond. The old whitewashed church with brightly painted red doors and stained glass windows with lights blazing from inside.
    At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night in December?
    I cut my lights and rolled down my window as I moved closer. A blue and white school bus with the words SUGAR MAPLE ASSISTED LIVING painted across the side was parked in the no-parking zone along with a beat-up VW van. Tomorrow that might be a problem but tonight I was still a civilian. I let it slide.
    Loud voices spilled out into the street. It didn’t sound like a religious service to me unless liturgical language had changed a hell of a lot since my days at Saint Aloysius. And it definitely wasn’t a party.
    I made a left and parked along the dark side of the narrow wooden structure. Snow drifts lined the cleared sidewalk and the path that led around to the front of the building. I slipped into the shadows and made my way toward the small window near the rear door.
    I melted a small circle of ice beneath my thumb then peered inside. I couldn’t see much, but my line of sight landed on a knot of people who stood where an altar would have been. They were all vying for the attention of a tall, skinny blonde, one of those disheveled types who always seemed on the verge of a meltdown. A taller, blonder man stood next to her, nodding in agreement at everything she said.
    I melted a larger circle and zeroed in on the skinny blonde. I know a fair bit about body language, and it was easy to see she was in charge and the tall guy with the six-pack was probably riding shotgun. A Julia Roberts type with long red hair was talking animatedly while a Catherine Zeta-Jones curvy brunette texted someone on a Blackberry. Even the old guy in the wheelchair looked like an aging Cary Grant. The skinny blonde was the plainest one in the group and she would rate a second look just about anywhere.
    What the hell was in Sugar Maple’s water anyway?
    The meeting, or whatever it was, finally came to an end. The blonde started bulking up beneath layers of sweaters and scarves while the tall guy waited patiently. Poor bastard.