New Witch on the Block Read online

  New Witch on the Block

  Midlife in Mosswood - Book 1

  Louisa West

  Copyright © 2020 by Louisa West

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For the Rosie in all of us.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Thank You

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Coming Soon

  Jealousy’s A Witch

  Chapter 1

  Rosemary listened to the sound of birds twittering outside of the bedroom window. She instinctively strained to hear the hum of traffic from a nearby expressway. A gentle breeze in the trees played harmony to the birdsong, and she could hear the faint sounds of someone chopping firewood not too far away. But that droning of cars and trucks that she had become accustomed to was gone.

  She opened her eyes to an unfamiliar room. Her small suitcase stood, still packed, by the open bedroom door. Her daughter, Maggie, dozed on the bare mattress beside her, curled toward her mother for warmth and comfort. And as she reached out to stroke Maggie’s soft dark curls, everything came rushing back to her.

  The panicked snatch of what little personal belongings she would be able to carry. The hasty departure. Bundling a half-asleep Maggie into a cab. Urging the driver to go and slipping him cash she couldn’t afford so that he would spirit them away into the night. Arriving in a strange town right on closing time for the local real estate office. Managing to secure a small, furnished cottage on the outskirts of town, no questions asked.

  So many coincidences had to come together to make their escape from Randy a success—and Rosie was thankful for every one of them.

  For all her adult life, she had been Randy’s woman. In biker language, that meant she was his property. She moved when he said she could move, ate when he said she could eat. She did as she was told when she was told to do it, and above all, she kept her mouth shut.

  At seventeen, running away with a man on a motorcycle had been exciting. The freedom, the thrill of the road, the roar of the bikes between her legs. He’d promised to keep her safe, which was something she’d rarely felt in the foster homes she had passed through. It was just a damn shame she had been too naive to realize at the time that ‘safe’ also meant ‘imprisoned.’

  His promises and compliments soon gave way to yelling, broken things, and bruises. Then came the apologies, the promises to do better, and the reminders of how great their years on the road had been. The cycle left her so mentally exhausted that she didn't have time to think about leaving, much less act.

  And then at twenty-nine, Maggie happened. She remembered sobbing over the toilet with Raquel and Mimi when she read the pregnancy test. She could still hear Randy's voice when she told him.

  “Guess you won't be runnin' out on me anytime soon, then, will ya?”

  Letting out a tense sigh, Rosie unzipped her hoodie and shrugged it off. She laid it over Maggie, who snuggled into the soft material. First order of business: coffee.

  The small tote bag of essentials she had brought sat on the white tile counter in the cabin's tiny kitchen. She didn't have the energy to inspect the place the night before. She waved dust from her face as she looked through the cabinets for something to make coffee with. She opened a cupboard to the left of the sink and found an old-fashioned kettle, wine glasses, and a dusty bottle of red wine. Jackpot!

  She read the label on the bottle, cracked and peeling up at the corners.

  FOX COTTAGE 1881

  MUSCADINE

  Well, alcohol was alcohol, cheesy labels or not. She turned on the kitchen tap and watched with a wrinkled nose as red-brown water spurted into the sink. Gross, she thought to herself. How long had this place been vacant? The water did eventually run clear, and she hoped the kettle would brew out any other impurities.

  She set the kettle to boiling and decided to check out the rest of the house. Starting at the front door, she meandered into the living room. It was a small but cozy rectangular room with a bay window overlooking the front yard and a little fireplace at the other end. The couches, rug, and curtains looked like they could use a good clean, and she could tell the mattress they had slept on needed an airing out. She started making a mental to-do list.

  Fox Cottage had been vacant for some time, according to the realtor. It had been ‘a while’ since she'd done a showing of the property. The thick layer of dust on everything suggested her understatement was deliberate—Rosie would be shocked if anyone had been in here in decades. But the owner would be so glad to have any rent coming in that the price was low, and improvements were welcome. It was fully furnished, which was useful for a family starting over, and the place was ‘very private.’ There was only one neighbor, a man who lived in a camper trailer an acre or so away.

  Rosie took five steps from the living room to the breakfast nook, where a round table sat cramped in the corner. They might brush elbows, but Maggie could do her homework and the two of them could eat dinner, which was all they needed. The back hall was more like a hub and only hosted two doors. The one at the end of the hall revealed a small bedroom with a single bed and a strange round window that Rosie knew Maggie was going to adore.

  The other door opened into a washroom. She gasped with excitement to see a large claw-foot bathtub there, even though it was filthy. But her heart sank when she noticed the aluminum washtub and scrubbing board that substituted for a washing machine. Clearly, no one with children had lived here since the Civil War was a thing.

  It would be a long while before Rosie would be able to afford a luxury like a washing machine. Right now, she wasn’t even sure how she was going to pay her rent. She’d taken every cent from the meagre account Randy maintained with her for appearances and stolen the small roll of bills in his underwear drawer. But her funds acquisition had only netted her enough for a month’s rent upfront and the bare essentials. And, Rosie knew it would spend quicker than it had come to her.

  Her head churned with thoughts on how she was going to make this work. She would need a job, but who would hire her without a high school degree or any professional experience? With no credit, would the electric company even approve her as a new customer? Or a cell phone company give her a new contract, or a bank give her an account? Randy had controlled everything since she was seventeen. She didn't even know how to do most of these things, and she worried doing any of them might allow her husband to track her.

  Her gaze eventually settled on the filthy bathtub. Well. She might as well get down to business. Living in a grungy cottage just would not do.

  Rosie opened every single window in the house to harness the breeze in her efforts. She cleaned the old clawfoot tub with a ratty towel she found under the sink and some clumpy baking soda from the kitchen pantry. When she found a clothesline and bedsheets in the tiny linen closet in the washroom, she was so excited she didn't stop to think what might be already be sleeping in them.

  A palmetto bug. A palmetto bug was sleeping in them. The cockroach slash water bug, every bit as big as her thumb, was startled by her scavenging and flew—yes, flew—out of the line
n closet in a panic. And like a yawn on a summer day, the panic was catching.

  “Aaargh!!” Rosie made a sound somewhere between a scream and a strangled noise of indignation. She flung her hands to stop the roach from flying straight into her face and spun to swat at the sound of its huge wings flapping around her. It landed on the open windowsill, and it scrambled outside.

  “Ugh!” She slammed the window behind it lest it get any more ideas, and then breathed heavily. Maggie joined her, bleary-eyed and with bed hair that would make a young Shirley Temple wild with envy.

  “What are you doing?” she muttered, watching Rosie catching her breath. “It’s like dumb o'clock.”

  It was about 9 am. Ten-year-olds could be so melodramatic. She knew she couldn't mention the giant cockroach without Maggie sleeping in her bed for the next few days, so she skipped that story entirely.

  “Getting a start on cleaning this place up!” she replied cheerily, hoping that some of it would rub off on Maggie. It didn’t. The child stood there, arms folded, looking for all the world as though she might turn tail and go back to bed.

  “The sooner we have it all spic and span, the nicer it’ll be to live here, right?”

  Maggie quirked a brow. “Seems like it'll need a lot of spicking and spanning.”

  Rosie turned off the faucet on the tub and ushered Maggie out of the bathroom. “Good thing we’re not afraid of hard work then, isn’t it?”

  Maggie slumped as she let herself be propelled through the house. “Can I at least have breakfast first?”

  The summer sun warmed their hearts as well as their skin as the pair set off for the small, sleepy-looking town that lay nestled in the valley below the cottage. Rosie squinted down the road that wound its way from Mosswood almost to her doorstep. It was a good thing that they both liked being outside; she only had to hear one instance of ‘How much further?’.

  Rosie took in the layout of the town. Residences clustered on the southwest side of town, with the commercial district hugged by a lazy river to the east. They passed by a large brick building that hulked over the intersection of the main road and the highway. A faded sign announced that Hayes Sugar and Syrup had once been a prominent fixture of Mosswood, but now the building looked abandoned.

  “It’s prolly haunted,” Maggie announced. She peered at the building like a true Scooby-Doo connoisseur.

  “Ya think?” Rosie asked, raising a brow.

  “Duh. See the cobwebs in that broken window?” Maggie nodded her head in the direction of the building. “Dead giveaway.”

  Rosie hid a grin, resisting the urge to tease her child about how many spirits must be couch-surfing at Fox Cottage if cobwebs were a sign of ghostly presence.

  The sweet smells of summer seemed more prevalent down here on the flats. Soft scents of magnolia blossoms mixed with the earthy aroma of long grass growing by the road. An old ranch-style house spruced up with white paint and green trim sat opposite the abandoned factory. A small, empty corral jutted out on one side of the building, with fields beyond it hosting two horses. A smart-looking sign nailed to the fence said it was the Mosswood Vet Clinic.

  They continued down the highway, passing a squat little motel-slash-mechanical repairs shop call the Beep ’n’ Sleep. It looked like a grease pit and had the smell to match. Granny’s Diner on their right made Rosie’s mouth water at the tempting scent of fresh fried chicken. A large but outdated sign out front said 'HAVE A GOOD SUMMER COYOTES' in big black removable letters. Old-school jukebox tunes drifted out of the drive-thru window. With a 'maybe’ from Rosie that they could stop for milkshakes on the way back home, they stopped at the gates of Mosswood Elementary.

  “So that’s the new torture chamber,” Maggie mused with a tone of long-suffering resignation. Rosie chuckled.

  “I doubt it’ll be all that bad, Pumpkin,” she said.

  Maggie wrinkled her nose, scuffing the toe of her sneaker across the blades of grass that poked up through the cracks in the old cement sidewalk. “Is this school gonna be full of rednecks?”

  “That’s not polite,” Rosie schooled her. “Of course not.”

  “My last school had over six hundred kids. That school looks like it could barely fit twenty!”

  Rosie rolled her eyes. Kids! “There are a hundred and thirteen students at Mosswood Elementary,” she told Maggie with confidence. “I Googled it. Now c’mon, we got ourselves some explorin’ to do!”

  Main Street was a thin two-way road that was little more than a place for necessities to park themselves for consumption. A handful of people wandered along either side of the avenue in the shade from curbside trees. They took time out of their errand-running to rubberneck at the newcomers. Rosie put her arm around Maggie and ignored them.

  The road seemed in good repair if a little weather-worn, with parking on either side. A single police cruiser sat outside a poky looking building that must have been the Sheriff’s Department.

  “Healthy critters!” a kid who looked like he lived in a swamp called out to them hopefully, gesturing at a battered bucket by his bare feet. He couldn’t have been much younger than Maggie and didn’t look half as well off as they were, which sure was saying something. “Itty bitty baby turtles! Ain’t no pet like ‘em,” he said to Maggie as they continued down the sidewalk towards him. “Just fi’ dollars’ll get ya a turtle!”

  Maggie immediately rounded on Rosie, eyes full, and hands clasped in front of her chest. “Can I get one, Mama?” she all but begged. “Look how cute they are!”

  Rosie cringed. She couldn’t think of anything worse than a slime-covered snake-with-a-shell stinking up their soon to be de-stinked cottage. She stepped forward reluctantly and peered into the bucket.

  “I dunno that it’s a good idea having them in a metal bucket on such a hot day,” she told the kid, who seemed unperturbed by the welfare of his meal tickets.

  “Naw,” he shrugged before he sniffed and spat on the sidewalk. “They’re reptiles – they like the warm. ‘sides,” he grinned, showing off that one of his front teeth were missing. “They’ll sell like Granny’s hotdogs on game day right sure enough. Fi’—”

  “dollars. Yeah, I know,” Rosie finished for him before turning to Maggie. “Sorry, Pumpkin, but we got ourselves some settlin’ in do to first.” She nodded at the kid and put her arm around Maggie’s shoulder to guide her further down the street. “Maybe he’ll have some for sale later on when we’re ready to keep company.”

  Maggie didn’t sulk for too long. Not ten steps further down the street, they found exactly what Rosie had been looking for.

  A convenience store. Hallelujah!

  They wandered into the aptly named Go-Go Mart through modern sliding doors. Like everywhere else in town, the place was immaculate, but it smacked of the city convenience stores that Rosie knew so well. It was a little slice of cosmopolitan living, right in the heart of the backwoods.

  Maggie had already dashed for a display of teenage girl magazines she knew her mother would never buy. Rosie noticed an array of her favorite cosmetics that made her heart leap. Oh, thank goodness! She picked up two different face creams and held the tubes gratefully to her cheek, the way one would a puppy or a kitten, or a container of collagen filler after two days without one.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  She froze and then looked over her shoulder. Yep, a man was talking to her, the crazy lady hugging face cream. She shoved them back onto the shelf and straightened her shirt as she turned to face him.

  She glanced in Maggie’s direction, hoping for back up. She could see two hands and the top of her daughter’s humidified frizz around the cover of Girlfriend. Traitor.

  “Oh,” she said a touch too brightly in a last-ditch attempt to cover her faux pas. “Well, um... yes. I suppose you could! You see, we’re new in town, and—”

  The man was younger than she was, had light brown hair, a handful of freckles across his nose, and kind green eyes. “You must be the folks that have rented
Fox Cottage.” He gave her the once over, and she suddenly wished she’d had something nicer to wear, or somewhere nicer to live. Carol-Ann hadn’t mentioned that a reputation came hand in hand with her cheap rent.

  Rosie hadn’t wanted to announce their arrival in town, but she could see that the horse had already bolted. “We must be,” she said, lifting a hand to brush her dark bangs out of her eyes.

  “Rosie,” she said then, because it was the least awkward and most logical thing to allow out of her mouth. She nodded in the direction of the magazine rack, her ponytail bobbing. “And that’s my daughter, Maggie, short for Magnolia.”

  Ben glanced over. “Oh yeah?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Looks like Taylor Swift to me.” Maggie peered over the top of the magazine before disappearing again. He held out a hand.

  “I’m Ben Major,” he smiled. He exuded an easy manner that she liked tremendously.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Ben,” Rosie said, resting her hands on her hips and taking a proper look around. She could see a display of vegetables in a market stall to the right, followed by fridges for meat. The rest of the store consisted of four narrow aisles that carried small household goods. She saw nothing that looked like fresh linen, much to her chagrin. The thought of sharing her bed with any other freeloading bugs was enough to turn her into an insomniac.

  “I need some home staples. Food, of course,” she smiled, “some decent coffee. I notice y’all don’t seem to sell much in the way of homewares. Is there anywhere in town I can find stuff like that? And appliances,” she added hastily. She was already dreaming of replacing the bathtub and scrubbing board with an actual washing machine of her very own.