Witch Read online

  Witch

  Family Values Trilogy

  Book 0 - Prequel

  Patrick Logan

  Part I - Stolen fruit

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II - An Unexpected Visitor

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART III - Spilled Milk

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  EPILOGUE

  END

  Mother

  Prologue (Conception)

  Part I – Sow the Seed

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part I - Stolen fruit

  Chapter 1

  A bullfrog croaked somewhere to Anne’s left, a throaty, resonating belch, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Her heart was already pounding away in her chest, but now it took off like a jackrabbit chased by a rabid dog.

  Her breath was coming in short, tight gasps, and her entire body started to tingle.

  A frog—just a croaker. Calm down, Anne. No one’s here—no one has seen you yet.

  Her calm, rational thoughts did nothing to calm her nerves. Feet rooted in the mud, she waited for a full minute before finally mustering the courage to move again.

  Anne LaForet was not a thief. In fact, over the course of her twenty-four years, she had never committed a single crime. But that was then, and this was now. Then, she had had a husband to support her. Now, she had no choice—the survival of both her and her daughter depended on her breaking the law.

  Anne knew the consequences of being caught, but she also knew the consequence of returning home empty-handed. She swallowed hard and nodded, a silent affirmation of her actions.

  I have to do it. I have to.

  Anne slowly lifted one of her bare feet from the mud. The thick, foul-smelling substance clung to her heel like fingers, but with a sharp yank, it released her. There was a gassy sigh as the mud backfilled the divot her small foot had left behind. Shifting the empty burlap sack to her other arm, she took another step, and then another, her confidence building the closer she got to the garden.

  The moon was full this night, for which Anne was grateful. Not the most sure-footed even in daylight—the scrapes on her knees from the various falls this past week alone were proof enough of her clumsiness—she couldn’t even imagine doing what she was about to do if it had been overcast.

  As it turned out, tonight was perfect: the air was still and calm, and for what seemed like forever, it seemed just a smidgen cooler than it had been all summer. And then there was the moon, smiling down on her with its lipless mouth, a giant, glowing orb of a face that seemed to encourage her.

  Go on, you can do this; you have to do this.

  It took another ten steps before Anne finally made out the outline of the peaked roof of the Thomases’ house that stood out against the ubiquitous background of stars. Her eyes scanned the windows, moving back and forth quickly, desperately, searching for movement, the flicker of a lamp, anything at all that would send her back to the safety of the swamp.

  Nothing.

  Which was good.

  And bad.

  Good because, as she had suspected, the Thomases weren’t home—rumor had it that they traveled north to visit Veronica’s cousin who was full with child. But it was also bad because now Anne had no excuse to turn back.

  Think of Terry. Think of Terry waking up again in the middle of the night, crying because her tummy hurts, that she can’t sleep because it kept talking to her, that it was eating itself because she was so hungry.

  She could have killed Steven Merch for telling her that. And maybe the boy’s parents, too, because undoubtedly the idea of a person’s stomach eating itself from the inside out had come from them first. After all, neither Teresa nor Steven were even four... and what three-year-old could come up with something like that on their own?

  Anne was not oblivious to the fact that others in the swamp talked about her and Teresa. She may have been poor, but she wasn’t stupid, despite what they said. Sometimes Terry told her what she overheard other kids saying, or, like Steven Merch, what they said directly to her, and occasionally Anne heard these rumors firsthand. More often, though, it was what people didn’t say—at least, not with words—that made their disdain for them so plainly obvious. It was in the way that they wouldn’t look directly at Anne when she approached, or the way they stared when they thought she wasn’t looking.

  But Anne knew.

  And it filled her with sadness.

  It wasn’t her fault that her husband had died. And the way he’d died... that was honorable, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t they have been supported by the community, rather than treated like one of the sick women with the oozing sores and the clubbed feet?

  But it was just the way of the swamp; they had their beliefs ingrained, and nothing Anne said or did could ever change that.

  They hated single mothers, thieves, and witches, and it would always be that way.

  Anne shook her head, trying to force these thoughts away; she would have time to reminisce later. Right now, however, she had a job to do.

  For her, but mostly for Terry.

  The Thomases’ garden was more plentiful than Anne could have ever imagined, and greed quickly usurped fear or guilt as her primary emotion. She had never seen so many ripe vegetables—everything from eggplant to pumpkin to lettuce and tomatoes, all perfectly ripe for the picking—in her entire life. Having only seen the Thomases’ house, one of the bigger houses in the swamp, from the road, she had had no idea that their garden behind was so expansive.

  With eyes like saucers, Anne reached down and plucked a tomato that was larger than her fist from the vine closest to her. Its flesh was pliable, just the perfect amount of give between thumb and forefinger. She opened her burlap sack to toss it in, but hesitated at the last second.

  This time, however, it wasn’t guilt that struck her, but something else, something more primal.

  It was hunger.

  Anne bit into the fruit, and experienced something akin to an orgasm in her mouth. The sweet flesh nearly exploded between her teeth, sending seeds and juice squirting from her mouth.

  It was all she could do to contain a giggle.

  Wiping the mess from her chin with the back of her hand, she took another quick bite, then a third, barely chewing in between.

  It was so delicious that she had to fight the urge to sit down in the mud and gorge herself until she was a huge blob, too fat to even roll away when the Thomases finally came home.

  Thoughts of Terry back home pushed this silly idea from her mind, and she finished the tomato, licking her fingers clean when she was done. Then she picked two equally ripe and delicious-looking tomatoes and put them delicately into her bag. Now that she had tasted the delicious fruit, she was cautious not to bruise them. She wanted Terry to try them as she just had, to experience the pure joy that forced her heart-shaped mouth into a massive grin—so massive, in fact, that her cheeks started to ache.

  Anne moved to the cucumbers next, devouring an entire seven-inch vegetable in less than five bites. It was cool, crisp, and goddammit if it wasn’t the best cucumber she had ever eaten.

  Two of those went into the bag with the tomatoes.

  For the next twenty minutes, Anne devoured more fruits
and vegetables, filling first her stomach and then the sack until it was nearly bursting at the seams—until both were nearly bursting.

  Breathing deeply, Anne started to make her way back to the wooded swamp from where she had come. She was both less cautious and less mobile now that her tiny stomach had been filled to the brim, and it took her nearly twice as long to get out of the garden as it had taken to contemplate whether or not she should enter.

  When she finally stepped over the small wooden barrier and was safely on the muddy embankment, she turned back to take a look.

  Her heart sank.

  When she had first come up with this plan, she had promised herself to take just a handful of fruit, three, maybe four items at most. But just the sight of the riches of lush vegetables had overwhelmed her and now, looking back, she could barely swallow. Not only were there large areas of missing fruit, sometimes entire plants devoid of any produce at all, but she could also clearly make out footsteps in the mud that formed tight circles followed by long trails as if someone had been practicing some sort of ritualistic dance.

  Shit.

  With two or three fruit missing, the Thomases might have assumed that the raccoons were back, despite Ken Thomas’s encouraging musket blasts that she could occasionally hear from her place. But the way it looked now, even if all of the raccoons in the entire swamp, and maybe a family of gators, had ravaged the garden, she doubted they could have made as much of a dent as she had.

  And even if Ken Thomas were to believe this, he would also have to believe that the swamp animals had used human footprints to mask their efforts.

  Not even a drunk like Ken Thomas would believe that.

  Anne stood frozen for a minute, wondering if she should try and put some of the fruit back, to go back into the garden and mess up some of her footsteps.

  No, that’s stupid, just—

  There was a flash of light from one of the upstairs windows.

  Anne felt her heart leap from her chest into her throat. Only now she was too full to swallow it, to force it back down again.

  A lantern suddenly illuminated the entire upstairs of the Thomases’ house, and Anne spun in the mud so quickly that she nearly fell.

  Putting a hand down in the warm substance to steady herself, she stood and ran as fast as her legs could carry her, only partly aware that some of the fruit and vegetables that she had collected had spilled from her bag.

  In her mind, all she saw was Veronica Thomas’s face in the window, looking down at her with squinted eyes.

  Anne prayed that the woman was blinded by the moon or that she was hidden in the shadows when the woman had looked out.

  Because she knew what happened to thieves in the swamp.

  And Teresa was far better off hungry than alone.

  Chapter 2

  Anne was too scared to even open the bag the day after she had stolen the fruit, let alone eat from it. Instead, she had stashed it in a box in her closet, worried that at any moment Ken Thomas would come by and search the place. Still, as scared as she was, she was equally as hungry, and this prevented her from throwing the produce away.

  She spent the entire day on the porch swing with Terry playing in the grass and mud in front of her. She told her daughter that it was a hot day and that it was best for her to spend time outside instead of cooped up in the house, but the truth was that she wanted the little girl to be there if Ken came around. After all, he wouldn’t dare do anything too drastic with a three-year-old present, would he?

  In the end, it didn’t matter. No one came, and by evening, as she sat at the table with Terry, both of them choking down dry oats and the last of the bitter berries that Anne had found after a three-hour hike through the swamp, her eyes kept darting across the simple kitchen to the bedroom.

  And her thoughts about the way the tomato had burst in her mouth, the sheer coolness of the cucumber as she bit through the crunchy exterior, and the squeaking of the slick outer skin of the eggplant, pervaded her every thought.

  “Mommy?”

  Anne swallowed a lump of dry oats, wincing as the wad scraped its way down her throat. Then she looked up, a smile spreading across her face despite the tasteless meal, inspired by those large blue eyes.

  “Hmm?”

  “Thirsty, Mommy.”

  Anne pointed at Terry’s bowl with her wooden spoon.

  “Finish your oats, then you can have some milk.”

  The girl’s cute face transformed into something different; it contorted like a balled-up sock.

  “But it’s so dry,” she whined.

  Anne pointed more aggressively.

  “Eat,” she instructed. “And don’t make that face. Makes you look like a dog.”

  Teresa responded by exaggerating the expression.

  “I wish I had a doggy.”

  Anne sighed and scooped another mouthful of the oats.

  “Me too. But this world isn’t for wishes, Terry. Just eat, okay? Then you can have some milk. Besides, I should finish first... I need the energy.”

  The girl relaxed and nodded. Then she scarfed six or seven spoonfuls into her mouth in less than a minute.

  “Done,” she said, her mouth still full. The girl tilted the bowl to show Anne that she was, in fact, done.

  Anne smirked, and Teresa’s smile grew, showing her the gray-beige wad in her mouth that covered her tiny teeth. Anne finished her own porridge in one massive bite. Then she too smiled, revealing her own mouthful to her daughter.

  “Me too,” she said. The words came out like ‘me thoo’ and a speck of oatmeal flew onto the table. Teresa giggled, her small hand covering her mouth to prevent the same thing from happening to her.

  It was all Anne could do not to break out laughing and spew her porridge all over the place. With a thick swallow, she finally downed it all. Then she showed Teresa her bowl, as the girl had done to her moments ago. They both laughed.

  “Okay, you rascal,” Anne said, unbuttoning the front of her blouse. “Come sit on my lap and have some milk.”

  Anne rose early the next day, making a point to be up before Teresa, who often awoke before the sun even had an inkling of rising in the sky. After a quick glance into the morning dawn, and confirming that the red-faced Ken Thomas wasn’t standing on her porch or peeking in through the window, she went to the closet and retrieved the bag of produce. She pulled out every item and laid them on the floor, unable to contain her excitement as she took a mental inventory.

  Three tomatoes.

  Two cucumbers—but big cucumbers.

  Two eggplants.

  One head of lettuce.

  Six radishes.

  Four carrots.

  Three potatoes.

  Anne’s hands were shaking with excitement. It was enough food to last them a month if they rationed it properly—and if they stayed fresh in the cupboard. She was most excited about the tomatoes, her mind racing back to two nights ago when she had stood bathed in moonlight, tomato juice and seeds speckling her chin.

  Still, it wasn’t that much food, and Anne was beginning to think that perhaps she overestimated how much it would be missed from the Thomases’ garden. Thinking back to that night, she considered that maybe the garden hadn’t looked as barren as she had initially thought. After all, her mind had a way of playing tricks on her, and her imagination had a penchant for running wild.

  At least that was what Wallace used to say.

  It took considerable effort to put the food back in the bag, to not test each and every item again, to confirm that not only were they real, but that they were amazing.

  She put all of the fruit back in the bag, save one tomato—the smallest one—and then placed the bag back in the cool cupboard.

  Then she went to the kitchen and put out plates for breakfast. She plopped the entire tomato down on Terry’s plate.

  Taking a step back, she surveyed the scene for a good minute imagining the expression on her daughter’s face when she saw the tomato.

  Wi
ll she even think it’s real?

  Anne chuckled, then tiptoed back to bed.

  “Mom.” The voice was distant and indistinct, as if spoken underwater. “Mom!”

  Anne rolled away from the sound, but then she felt a small hand grab her arm. Her eyes snapped open and she turned to face her daughter, who was standing over her, tears in her big blue eyes.

  She sat bolt upright.

  “Terry? What’s wrong? Terry?” She drew her daughter into her, holding her against her chest as they both sat on the bed.

  “I did something bad, Mommy, I think.”

  “Shhh,” Anne hushed, stroking the girl’s blonde hair.

  Teresa’s back hitched and she let out a sob.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay.”

  After the tears passed, she put a finger under the girl’s chin and raised her gaze.

  “What happened?”

  Teresa looked away, but said nothing. Instead, she interlaced her fingers with Anne’s and together they stood. Then Anne was led into the kitchen.

  “Terry? Just tell me—”

  Anne’s eyes fell on the table and she immediately burst out laughing.

  “Oh, Terry! It’s alright! It’s okay,” she said, trying to get the words out between chuckles.

  Teresa’s face changed again, transitioning from sadness to anger.

  “Why you laughing?”

  “Oh, because, sweetie, it’s okay.”

  Teresa pulled her hand away.

  “Not funny,” she said with a pout. “Not funny, Mommy.”

  Anne stared at the half-eaten tomato and the spray of seeds and juice that arced nearly all the way across the worn pine table.

  “It is funny,” she insisted. “The tomato was for you, dear. Now go eat the rest before I get to it!”

  Chapter 3

  Anne was still chuckling when there was a knock at the door. Her laughter ceased immediately.

  “Mom?” Terry asked, a concerned look on her round face.

  Anne held up a finger to silence her. She waited, thinking that maybe the person would go away—or had never been there in the first place, that she had imagined the knock.