smiled widely, showing surprisingly healthy teeth. “His mother is Tina Ames.”
The way she said Ames suggested something different and derogatory. T. Laine’s body tightened, almost imperceptibly. “We’ve heard things about the family,” she said.
“Shoulda. Most folks around here is good God-fearing Christians. The Ameseses,” she said, adding syllables, “are different.” She hesitated and dug in a pocket. Occam and T. Laine nearly drew their weapons before Ethel pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She had trouble getting a cigarette out of the pack and took her time lighting it from the smoking butt of the other one, squinting at the smoke curling up to one eye and tangling in the strands of her red wig.
She puffed several times, coughed hard, a wet, racking sound, and seemed to enjoy making us wait, standing in the sun. Her voice went bitter. “Witches is what everyone figgers. The Ameses had money back in the day, before the Great Depression. The Ames women had stones in the backyard.” She leaned in and whispered, “In a circle.” She grinned at whatever she saw on T. Laine’s face. “Ask anyone. The old Ames farm.” Ethel turned and went back inside, the screen door banging behind her.
“And why didn’t the sheriff tell us that?” T. Laine asked softly.
From inside the house Ethel shouted, “He’s young. And he’s a man.” The last word was caustic and bitter. “The young don’t know nothing and men stick together when it comes to banging a woman. Men and their secrets.”
We trudged back to our cars and motored down the street, driving slowly as JoJo worked back at HQ, widening her search into the Ames witch family, tracking down the family line through county land records and birth and death records for the last hundred years, and giving us the address of the old Ames farm, which had passed from Ames to Ames, mother to daughter. JoJo was brilliant.
“Check it out,” FireWind instructed needlessly.
* * *
* * *
The property was an abandoned, heavily overgrown fifty-acre farm, the closest neighbors out of sight in the trees, the house itself long gone in a fire that had left two soot-blackened chimneys standing in hip-high brown weeds and twenty-year-old saplings. Away from the house the trees were older, larger, as if they hadn’t been cut in seventy years. Maybe longer. We got out and T. Laine and Occam waded in where the house once stood, searching among the trees. I carried my gear away from the chimneys, until I found a small open space between the trees. I placed my faded blanket on the ground, sat with the cabbage in my lap, and touched the earth.
The grass wasn’t a lawn. It didn’t have that snooty feel of cultivators or sod. The land had been fallow for decades and the plants had begun to breathe in wildness and freedom and to spread their roots, making communities. Instead of reading down, I stretched out across the land in a widening circle around me, the earth sparking with life. In the first few inches of soil, there were the roots of dozens of species of grasses and wildflowers and fungi; there were seedlings just getting started. The larvae of bugs. Colonies of ants. There was a large rabbit community living on the property, bird nests in the grass and trees, and snakes basking in the sun. Feral cats. Homeless dogs in a small den. Opossums and foxes and raccoons. A dry streambed flowed through the property, underground water following similar contours. No graveyards. No battlegrounds. As I read broader and deeper, I found the older deep roots of mature trees. A true forest in the making, some hardwoods over a hundred years old, far older than those found on most farms, which were cut every forty years for wood.
I could take this land and make it thrive, could bring the water back to the surface, encourage the trees to full forest and health.
If I was willing to kill and spill blood and claim it.
But it was doing well enough without me and neither it nor my bloodlust called to me.
And . . . there had to be another way. There had to be a way to heal the earth—and the Earth—without death and bloodshed.
I read deeper and found a layer of limestone containing a water table with clean happy water. To the east was broken granite and a near-vertical shelf of marble, hard and jutting, that had once reached the surface. To the north was an ancient