Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 9

Esther's lawn ornaments, she explained as she lit a white candle with a lighter, were talismans on which she had cast charms to protect her home. "The deer detect evil," she explained as she handed the lighter to Laura and from her accepted a long white feather. "Hold still," Esther commanded, and I straightened up my posture and tried to not move around too much while breathing. "When they sense it, they alert me. It's kind of a witchcraft version of a home security system, if you will."

I had a million questions to ask about those deer and where they'd run off to, but I didn't feel comfortable asking until after I'd been "cleansed." Esther used the feather to wave smoke from the flame atop the candle in my direction, starting above my head. She walked around me in a circle repeatedly in silence, the whole time still wafting smoke I could barely see toward my body. Trey made his um, okay skeptical face at me from where he stood a few feet away, and I tried to ignore him. He might not have been so humored by the situation if he'd been the one to turn cement lawn figurines into real, live animals. While I held still, Esther's gray dog attacked Trey with licks.

"That's Lester," Laura said, nodding at the dog. Lester had certainly taken a shine to Trey, who welcomed the dog's enthusiasm. Dogs always loved Trey; my old dog, Moxie, used to bark at him from our living room window whenever he stepped outside his house back before she died in the fall.

"Alright, that should just about do it," Esther said after waving smoke toward my ankles.

"What about the deer? Will they come back?" I asked.

Esther raised her hand to her forehead and peered toward the trees that separated her property from the neighbors, into which the deer had run. "I would imagine so. It's very sweet that you're worried about them, but they're not real deer. They won't starve to death or anything."

Despite Esther's reassurance I felt a little strange about stepping inside the house without catching another glimpse of the three fawns who'd just bounced away. As I passed through the threshold of the house, I wondered for a fleeting moment if Esther's beautiful gray dog was also some kind of fake animal, a mere charm, with some kind of magical duty to perform in the household. It seemed unlikely, however. The dog smelled like a real dog and never stopped drooling or wiggling around.

The interior of Esther's house featured interior design as sophisticated and rich as the Simmons' mansion. From the front hallway, we could see the parlor. A railing along the second floor overlooked the room, which featured an enormous cathedral ceiling. A plush rug covered the hardwood floor, and an intricately designed iron grate stood before the impressive fireplace. It looked like a parlor out of an architectural digest magazine; there was even a big Chinese porcelain vase from which dried eucalyptus branches splayed, filling the home's entryway with a sweet, clean odor.

We followed Esther down a long hallway, passing a bathroom, library, and carpeted stair case leading to the second floor. The kitchen we entered was sun-filled and overlooked a sprawling back yard, which I imagined probably would have been heavily gardened whenever it wasn't covered in a light dusting of snow. Esther put on a pot of tea and Laura pulled four white mugs out of a cabinet, which she set down on an antique oval wooden table where Trey and I took seats. Laura measured loose tea from a fancy canister into metal infusers, and dropped one into each of the mugs. Before sitting down herself, Laura gave me a quick smile of reassurance.

Lester the dog sat down right next to Trey, and Trey balanced one hand on his head. The dog kept looking up at Trey with delight in its eyes, and practically looked like he was smiling a doggie smile.

"So," Esther said as she approached the table while the water boiled. "In January when I returned from a conference in London, I immediately sensed a dramatic change in energy at the store. Laura had emailed me while I was away about the visit you'd made, but I never would have guessed just how disruptive the spirits you'd channeled have proven to be. They are quite unhappy with what's happened to them and they've been a bit of a handful to deal with."