Free Wish Club by Kim Strickland

woman; she must have dropped it. Although anyone visiting this section could have dropped it. Claudia hadn’t noticed it earlier, though. She grabbed her purse and the copy of
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way.
Maybe the woman was still on the first floor, and Claudia had missed her when she’d looked. She hurried to the escalator and walked down, doubling her pace. She scanned the large room as she descended, but the woman wasn’t there.
    Two people stood in line ahead of Claudia at the register. On the sale table next to her, she saw, under a sign that declared, “Buy This Book!,” the stack of three books the woman had been carrying when she’d walked away. Claudia picked them up, then looked at the door.
    “Next please.” The annoyed tone in the cashier’s voice indicated to her that it wasn’t the first time he had called to her.
    “I just—” Claudia walked over, carrying the stack of books with her. “Did you see the woman who put these here? She was…I think I found something of hers and—”
    The clerk was the same man who had intimidated her into two years of writer’s block.
    “I think she left this.” Claudia held up the crystal.
    “Do you want those or not?” He nodded at the pile of books in her arms.
    Claudia looked down at her stack, now made up of four books. “Yes,” she said.

Chapter Six

    Claudia
walked into her kitchen and put the bag of books on the counter.
What was I thinking?
She put both hands on top of the bag and blew out through her lips, letting the air flutter through them with a sound of flatulent disgust. One hundred and thirty-two dollars. What had possessed her to buy all of these books? Dan was going to kill her.
    The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way
was on top,
Bell’s Complete Astrologer and Ephemeris
was in there, as was a book called
The Modern Witches’ Grimoire
and then last, a small, hardcover book called
A Beginner’s Guide to the Tarot.
    Claudia pulled out the tarot book and scanned the cover. Three cards were fanned out on it, number VIII, the Strength card, on top. The woman on the card stared back at her with fierce black eyes, her image drawn in several shades of dark ink, cross-hatched in a manner that made it look very old and somewhat childish. Claudia flipped through the pages, the color templates of the cards flashing past. They looked mysterious, complicated, and scary.
    “The Suit of Cups, Hearts in a conventional card deck, represents water and emotions,” she read. “It is a feminine suit, with the properties of the water signs Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.”
Water signs? There are water signs? What am I getting myself into?
    Claudia set the tarot book down on her kitchen countertop. Their coffee cups from this morning were still sitting out, hers with an imprint of her lipstick on the rim, his with an inch of cold coffee still in the bottom.
    He’d had to leave a little earlier than usual this morning—some big meeting about a new project at his firm. Dan tended to keep irregular hours at the architectural offices of Taylor, Glickman, Bleeker and Associates. When he told her he would be home at the regular time tonight, she’d had to ask, “And what time would that be?”
    “Six”—he’d pulled up one side of his mouth—“ish?”
    Claudia had smiled at him doubtfully.
Really?
    Dan had ignored her skeptical look. “Hey, how about I make my famous stir-fried beef and broccoli for dinner? What do you think? I’ll pick up everything on the way home. You won’t have to lift a finger.” He picked her hand up off the counter and kissed the back of it, raising his eyebrows up into the boyish brown hair that curled over them.
    She had smiled. “Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.”
    Claudia walked the coffee cups over to the sink. Dan would be home in less than an hour. She could start getting things ready for him. Get the wok out, slice some onions.
    The light went on in her neighbor’s kitchen across the gangway and Claudia turned