“True.” She chewed on an already short thumbnail. “Hexing is looking better every day, you know that?”
“No.”
“At least let me do a protection spell for you. Bind both of them, keep them the hell away from us and here.”
“I don’t know if that’ll work against assholes like them.”
“Can’t hurt.” She brightly grinned. “And if that doesn’t work, I can always offer to take them skeet shooting with me. Alone. In the woods. At night.”
Mandaline had an errand to run that morning. A few minutes before ten, she excused herself and tried to make it out the door without playing twenty questions with Sachi.
No such luck.
“Where are you going?” Sachi asked.
“I need to go somewhere.”
“You’re not taking your car?”
Mandaline felt heat fill her face. “I’ll be right back.”
“So why all the secrecy?” Sachi wore a playful grin.
Mandaline knew her friend was enjoying the hell out of this. “No secrecy.”
“Then where are you going?”
“I’m going to fire you.”
Sachi snorted. “No you won’t. You luuuuubs me.” She turned to head back to the counter. “Tell the doc I said hi.”
Mandaline stopped in her tracks. “How’d you know that?”
She laughed. “He called this morning to confirm your appointment. Duh.”
Dr. Smith was one of those rare, dying breeds of small-town family doctors who might even be persuaded to make house calls on occasion. His nurse only worked part-time in the summer, when business was at its slowest. So it wasn’t uncommon to find him manning the phone at the front desk when someone walked in for their appointment.
Which was where Mandaline found him when she entered his waiting room. Alone in the office, he looked up at her arrival. “There you are. Let’s go back to my office.” She followed him back and sat at the chair in front of his desk. “Now, what can I do for you today, Mandaline?”
She felt her face heat. I’m really getting tired of that. “I need a prescription.”
“You’ll need to be a little more specific.”
She sighed. “I need a prescription for birth control pills,” she mumbled.
He chuckled kindly. “May I ask why you didn’t call your ob-gyn for that?”
“She’s booked up until next month for non-emergencies. I need them a little sooner than that.”
“Ah. You do realize you should take a full cycle of them before you can really consider yourself ‘safe.’ In other words, use a backup form of protection.”
She nodded.
He reached for a file at the corner of his desk. He was her primary care physician, and had been since she was a teenager. She didn’t always get to see him every year, and she didn’t even have health insurance at the moment, but she also didn’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for an office visit, either.
He glanced through her file. “I need to get current weight and vitals on you. When did you last see your ob-gyn?”
“Last year.”
“Did you get your annual and a pap smear?”
“All normal.”
He nodded. “Good.” He stood, carrying the folder. “Follow me to my lair and let’s get you checked out.”
Fifteen minutes later she left his office with a proclamation of good health, a script for birth control pills, and thirty dollars poorer for the office visit. She walked over several blocks to the closest drugstore to get the prescription filled before returning to the store a little before eleven.
Sachi was setting up a reading appointment for a new customer. When she finished with that, she followed Mandaline into the office. “Well?”
“You realize talking about this makes me very uncomfortable, right?”
“Duh. Why do you think I do it?”
“You’re lucky I lubs you.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She glanced out the door to ensure no one was within hearing distance. She lowered her voice, her expression momentarily turning serious. “You all right?”
“I need serious Sachi to stay here for a moment.”
Sachi made a motion of crossing her heart with her right index finger.
“I’m scared.”
She smiled. Not her rapacious, teasing smile either, but a kind, gentle smile. “That’s good. It’s healthy. I’d be equally worried about you if you’d dove into this headfirst without a second thought.”
“You would?”
She tilted her head the other direction. “Duh. Your aura looked so gorgeous this morning when I walked in. Brilliant, pure, clear, beautiful pink. You’ve been grey and cloudy and so, so sad for such a long time. I don’t even mean since Julie…” She cleared her throat. “Your aura’s been getting cloudier and darker, like aquarium water no one bothered to change, for a couple of years now. I’ve been really worried about you. Fish go belly up if they stay in that crap too long, and I couldn’t imagine that it was doing your soul any good either.”
She sat back and stared at her friend. “Why didn’t you say anything?” she quietly asked.
“Honey, what was I supposed to say? I wouldn’t have been telling you anything you didn’t already know deep in your heart. Why rub your face in it? It was easier for me to play comic relief sidekick whenever the opportunity arose.”
“You’re damn good at that.”
She grinned. “Why thank you. Sarcasm is just one of the many services I offer.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh! Almost forgot. Jenny Nyland is coming by later to get you to notarize some sports camp forms for her.” Mandaline had become a Notary so she could perform weddings for clients, but also signed forms for friends when they needed it.
A thought passed through Mandaline’s mind. “Why do you think Julie didn’t have me witness those forms for her?”
Sachi tilted her head again, back to serious. “Why do you think? For starters, she left things to you. That’s probably a conflict or something. And because she probably didn’t want you to know. My guess is that, based on her taking the paperwork with her, she suspected something bad might happen and she wanted her ducks in a row in case they did. And if they didn’t, you’d never be the wiser.”
Mandaline thought back to the day before Julie died. “She saw something,” she told Sachi. “She had a vision and wouldn’t tell me what.”
Sachi slowly nodded. “Yeah. Probably. She was always good like that. Prescient flashes. Spooky good, even in my book.”
“She still went. And wouldn’t let me go with her.”
“Don’t go there again,” Sachi warned. “Past is past. Written. Done. Unchangeable. She made her choices. She also likely saved two lives. Maybe three by not letting you come with.”
“Sounds like you’re starting to warm to Sami and Matt.”
Sachi suddenly found her cuticles very interesting. “I’ve held too many grudges in my life,” she quietly said. “Some deserved, some not. This is one I know I have to let go because they don’t deserve it. They deserve my friendship. That’s one way I can honor Julie’s spirit.” She gave Mandaline a quick hug and darted out the door.
Once again, Sachi the enigma had briefly appeared. Sachi the wounded spirit. Sachi the lonely one.
“Hey!” Mandaline called out after her.
She stuck her head in the doorway. “Yeah, boss?”
“You shooting tonight?”
“Six rounds. I reloaded after I got home yesterday. Why?”
“No reason. Just wondering. Don’t forget we’ve got that investigation tomorrow night.”
Sachi cocked an eyebrow at her but gave her a thumbs-up before she headed back to the counter.
Mandaline turned to the computer to do some work. She knew if Sachi was going shooting tonight, it meant she would unwind and come in tomorrow relaxed and back to her usual playful, snarky self.