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Mary Anne blinked. Wasn’t this woman peddling snake oil? But she seemed to be encouraging Mary Anne not to buy a love potion.
“Mary Anne,” Cameron said, “I think they work.”
“They work,” Clare agreed. “But usually not in the way people intend.”
Despite herself, Mary Anne found her curiosity piqued. But surely Cameron didn’t believe—
“What do you mean?” Mary Anne asked Clare.
The woman’s gaze was penetrating—a basilisk stare.
“I tell people everything. I give them their instructions for activating the potions. They follow the instructions. Then, unexpected things happen. For instance, you are thinking of giving a love potion to a man who has a girlfriend.”
“Actually, they’re engaged.” The journalist side of Mary Anne was scrupulously truthful. “How did you know that?”
Clare ignored the question. “Yes, well, if he drinks my potion and falls in love with you, things may get messy with the other woman. You need to look into your heart and make sure that this is what you really want, because the person who drinks the potion will fall in love with you with a force you’ll be unable to stop or countermand.”
“That wouldn’t be a problem,” Mary Anne reflected. “For me, I mean.”
Clare gave her an almost disapproving look. “It’s better to let nature take its course, you know. You think you know what you want, but it’s very important you understand that the experience may be different from what you’re expecting.”
Mary Anne was quite sure that all the ways Jonathan Hale could fall in love with her would be wonderful. She shrugged. The love potion couldn’t work, so what was the big deal? “I’ll take my chances.”
That look again, the expression of a woman who was warning against disaster and knew that the person she warned was deaf to the message. Clare donned reading glasses and opened a spiral notebook, making a notation with a short stub of pencil. She was a thin, reedy woman, not at all bent by age. Drawing a resolute breath, she turned a page in the notebook.
“You’ll do it?” Mary Anne said.
“Of course.”
The teakettle whistled. Soon a concoction that smelled like grass clippings sat in front of Cameron. “Nettles,” Cameron said. “They make your hair grow.”
Mary Anne envisioned her cousin with Rapunzel-like tresses—which wasn’t too far from what Cameron actually had already.
While Clare worked, mixing various ingredients into a clear liquid, straining, tapping, the journalist in Mary Anne came alive. What went into a love potion? The only ingredient she could identify was a piece of chocolate. Seeing her looking, Clare said, “Green and Black’s Organic Extra Dark. Here, have a piece.”
Mary Anne took it warily and ate the piece. She had to admit, it was extraordinary chocolate. “It won’t hurt him, will it?” she asked. “The love potion?”
Cameron put her head in her hands and shook it.
Clare simply looked at her. “Write this down,” she instructed. “Just take a piece of paper out of that notebook. A blank piece, please.”
Mary Anne did as directed, picking up the stub of pencil.
“This is what you need to do to activate the potion,” Clare said, working with the clear liquid as she spoke. “You must perform three acts of love, each for a person you dislike, someone you can safely say you don’t particularly love. It can be one, two or three people. Break it down anyway you like. Just make sure it’s someone you quite detest, someone you think is a terrible person.”
Graham Corbett leaped to mind.
“You must give one of these people a treasured possession of yours. You must speak to a disliked individual with kindness. And finally you must perform a secret good deed for that type of person.”
“It can all be the same person?”
“You have someone in mind?” Clare said with no inflection whatsoever. “People usually do.”
“Quite,” Mary Anne said, finishing copying the directions. She read them back to Clare.
“Yes. Well, that’s it.” Clare turned from the sink, twisting the cap on a half-ounce vial of clear liquid. She handed it to Mary Anne. “Slip it into something he’ll drink. He shouldn’t notice any difference in the taste.”
“Don’t you need a piece of my hair or something?” Mary Anne asked, deciding not to repeat the question about the potion hurting Jonathan.
The look the midwife gave her was withering. “No, I don’t,” was all she said. Then, seeing Mary Anne’s still doubtful expression, she seemed to take pity and explained, “Your essence is there. Believe me.”
Mary Anne tore out the piece of paper. “What do I owe you?” If this was expensive, she was going to kill Cameron.
“Twenty-five dollars.”
Cheaper than highlights. Mary Anne readily produced the cash.
Clare stared hard into her eyes and said, “Finally, the most important thing.”
“What?”
“Make sure the right person drinks it.”
Cameron and Mary Anne both laughed. Mary Anne said, “Won’t be a problem.”
CHAPTER TWO
A TREASURED POSSESSION, a kind word, a secret good deed. Graham Corbett was the obvious recipient of all these things. “A terrible person,” Mary Anne murmured with satisfaction as she steered the car out of Myrtle Hollow.
She had forty-eight hours in which to accomplish these tasks. Then, she could slip the potion into a drink for Jonathan at his engagement party. And watch her happiness unfold.
Except that love potions did not work, could not work.
Beside her, Cameron said, “I’ll come back to Nanna’s with you, then walk home.”
A good three miles, but nothing for Cameron.
“I can drop you,” Mary Anne said.
“No, I want some books.”
Aside from a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1969, nearly all the books at their grandmother’s house, where Mary Anne also lived, were romance novels. No pirates, nothing sexy. Also, nothing published since the early 1950s—Mary Anne suspected that sexy romances had been written before then, but Nanna owned none of them. In Nanna’s books, the heroines were constitutionally upbeat virgins who never smoked, drank or kissed on dates, not only because it might be bad for them but also because it might set a bad example for their peers. American heroes and heroines were fiercely patriotic and always punctual. No one ever even mentioned sex. The only historicals Nanna owned had been written by Barbara Cartland—Nanna didn’t even particularly care for Jane Austen. Mary Anne believed that this was because Lydia Bennet had lived in sin with wicked Wickham before Darcy had bribed Wickham to marry the ruined creature. Cameron countered that it was because Fitzwilliam Darcy stirred Nanna’s own repressed sexual nature. Pride and Prejudice was, Cameron maintained, an inherently sexy book.
Both cousins, however, shared an enjoyment of Nanna’s selection of extremely unlikely romances. Cameron claimed that in her own case it was historical research into the evils of the repressed society from which all her clients’ problems sprang, the seeds planted generations earlier. Mary Anne just enjoyed the stories’ improbable plots. “I just finished Stars in Your Eyes,” she recommended.
Cameron frowned. “Which one is that?”
“The girl is driving to Mexico to take care of her brother’s daughter, when she gets a flat tire. A seedy character directs her to a mechanic at the nearest bar, where a total stranger greets her as though they’re eloping together. While he’s embracing her, he whispers, ‘I’m Drex. Danger.’”
“And the heroine falls right into the act with him,” Cameron said, remembering. “Then, the corrupt Mexican military dude forces them at gunpoint to marry, with the seedy guy presiding as J.P.,” she filled in excitedly. “Then, the hero persuades her to keep up the pretense of the marriage—”
“Without ever consummating it—”
“For patriotic reasons involving espionage. Yes, I want that one,” Cameron decided. “Do you think Nanna has made us strange? I mean, she made your mother and my mother strange.”
Mary Anne had little interest in this topic. Her parents lived in Florida and she lived in West Virginia. Another continent might be preferable, but you couldn’t have everything. “Do you think the love potion will work?” she asked. “No, I’m stupid. There’s no way it can.”
“Paul says they do work. He says it’s scary.”
“For someone terrified of commitment, I’m sure it is.”
“It’s like this, Mary Anne. I work in a job that encourages me to believe romance is silly, marriages don’t last and happily ever after is a mundane matter of avoiding men who beat you. But your parents are still married and so are mine.”
“Would you be in my mother’s marriage?” Mary Anne asked.
“No. Nor my own mother’s. I’m just trying to say…” Cameron sighed. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Except that even if the love potion doesn’t work, you shouldn’t stop believing you can have an excellent future with someone.”
“That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard.” It was depressing because she wasn’t in love with a random someone. She wanted Jonathan Hale. “So can you, by the way. Have an excellent future with someone.”
“It doesn’t matter for me. I want to adopt children. I’m not a marriage-or-nothing-else kind of person.”
“And I am?”
Cameron said what Mary Anne knew on some level to be true. “Yes.”
Mary Anne tried to think of a treasured possession she was willing to sacrifice toward the goal of achieving her heart’s desire. What were her most treasured possessions? She treasured the quilt Nanna had made for her and given her when she graduated from Columbia. No way would that find its way to Graham Corbett’s bedroom—a place she pondered only briefly as an imagined horror of dirty underwear and stinky men’s running shoes. What else did she treasure?
Cameron said, “So you’re going to bestow all these things on Graham Corbett?”
“Yes. I detest him.”
“I’m not sure that’s the message you’ll convey.”
Mary Anne heard a slight strain in Cameron’s voice.
She really likes him.
A brainstorm occurred to her. “How’s this? For the really nice thing I’m going to do for him?”
Cameron said nothing, just waited.
“I’ll set him up with you!”
Cameron muttered something entirely uncharacteristic. “I don’t think I’m his type.”
“But don’t you want to go out with him?”
“I want him to want to go out with me,” Cameron corrected.
“He’s truly a jerk, dear cousin. You have no idea. He says the most offensive things to me.”
“I’ve heard some of them,” Cameron replied, sounding more dejected. “It’s called flirting, Mary Anne.”
“Oh, no, it’s not!” Mary Anne replied. “But if you’re game, I can do a thing for him that is far better than he deserves, and set him up with wonderful you.”
Cameron shrugged, as if she already knew that Graham would refuse. “Sure.”
THE VALUED POSSESSION that Mary Anne decided to sacrifice was Flossy. It was ridiculous for a thirty-two-year-old to be so attached to a stuffed white rabbit with plastic fangs. She’d received it as a twenty-first birthday present from her college boyfriend, and she’d learned afterward that it had been made because of something to do with Monty Python. Her boyfriend had loved Monty Python, but she’d never watched the shows and thought they were stupid. Nonetheless, she’d absolutely fallen in love with Flossy, who her boyfriend had always called “the fluffy little bunny rabbit.”
It was going to have to be Flossy. Mary Anne would give it to Graham anonymously. He probably liked Monty Python. She could part with a stuffed animal in the cause of securing the love of Jonathan Hale.
The kind word would be easy. She’d choke down the bile that would inevitably rise to her throat and tell Graham Corbett that his advice to the woman with the mean fiancе had been good. Then she’d set him up with Cameron. What did her cousin see in the man?
GRAHAM CORBETT stopped by the radio station at nine the next morning. His plans for the day included working on his book, the first self-help book he’d ever set out to write. He already had a contract with a major publisher; because of the nationwide broadcasts of his radio show, not to mention a few appearances on national television talk shows, his name recognition—and face recognition—had helped to sell this first project, Life—and Love—with Graham Corbett.
He had noticed the irony, given that his own love life was thin on the ground. He knew all the reasons that was the case. Briony’s death had left him shaken. Not the grief—he had experienced the grief, lived through it. No, it was the way he’d come unraveled, the destruction he’d allowed his emotions to wreak on his life. After a thing like that…Well, he was uneasy about truly binding himself to a woman again.
Uncharacteristically, Mary Anne Drew was at the station when he arrived. He gathered, from her interaction with Jonathan Hale, that she’d just recorded one of her essays. The essays were great. They painted Appalachian life in familiar colors and seemed to always strike an emotional chord. The woman could write and she had a good radio voice, a distinctive alto.
But what did she see in Jonathan Hale? As he stopped near his In basket, Graham could almost feel the longing in Mary Anne…for Hale. She was desperate, no doubt because of the engagement.
Well, whatever.
He stared at his In tray. In it sat a white plush rabbit with vinyl fangs. It was the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it wasn’t his. He picked it up bemusedly and addressed Mary Anne and Hale, the only other people at the station. “Whose is this? It was in my In tray.”
“Then, it must be yours,” Hale replied. “Perhaps you have a secret admirer.” He chimed in then with a near-perfect imitation of the appropriate section of the movie. Mary Anne laughed, and even her laughter, Graham noticed, seemed desperate.
Graham held the rabbit toward Mary Anne. “Do you know anything about this?”
Her face flushed, but it was probably because Hale had just put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Great essay.”
Mary Anne shook her head at Graham.
Graham shrugged and tucked the rabbit under his arm as he collected the other things in his tray. Better not pay too much attention to Mary Anne. She didn’t like him, and it bothered him that she had gotten under his skin a bit. Being attached to a woman was something he didn’t need. Occasional dates, sure. But the rest…
What had happened after Briony’s death still made him ashamed. Drunkenness, failure to appear at appointments or for studio engagements, random couplings with virtual strangers, a sort of unconscious yet full-power course of life destruction. One morning, he had actually awoken naked and hungover on the university athletic field with a broken ankle, like a character from a Tennessee Williams play. And why this descent into debauchery? Because he’d loved her so much? Even after half a year in a grief group and hours of counseling he wasn’t sure. He thought it was the shock of death itself. That someone could be there—then gone. His father had passed away a year after Briony, but that had touched him less. His father’s life had been a celebration, and it hadn’t shocked Graham when an eighty-year-old man slowly dying of asthma had stopped breathing and then become free. Briony’s death had been a different situation. A young woman, vibrantly, almost indecently healthy, an athlete, her life so alive…Then, gone.
And so he’d had to live to the extent of life, had to live so as to constantly court death.
In any case, now his life was ordered as he liked it, and he wanted to hold on to those things that were most precious—his work, his close relationships, his commitment to all that mattered to him.
Jonathan Hale headed for his office, the only actual office at the station—a small room with a view of Stratton Street. Mary Anne said, “Um, Graham. I wanted to talk to you.”
He lifted his eyebrows. Mary Anne never voluntarily spoke to him. And maybe that was part of what needled him about her. Not to mention the sheer waste of her infatuation with Hale.
He stepped toward her. For all his teasing of her, Graham had to admit that Mary Anne Drew was an extraordinarily good-looking woman. She was tall, strong like an Amazon, with straight Florida surfer-girl hair. She could easily have been a model on the basis of her face. Lush dark eyebrows and eyelashes, green eyes, defined cheekbones and chin, generous mouth, a few freckles on that skin that always looked honey-colored. Yeah, he gave her a hard time about her butt, yet it was only because he knew that was the part of her body she disliked the most. He liked it. You could see her glutes, and she wasn’t all skin and bone, like her scrawny cousin.
“I wanted to compliment you on your show yesterday,” Mary Anne said.
