The Pumpkin Café Witch

The town of Bellweather appeared out of the fog the way something remembered appears out of sleep: slowly, and then all at once, until I was driving down a lane lined with maple trees so orange they looked lit from within. I had been awake for nineteen hours, had eaten nothing since a gas station sandwich three counties back, and had promised myself, somewhere around the second wrong turn, that this would be a quiet transition. Inspect the café. Sign whatever needed signing. Figure out how to unload a dead woman's business without unraveling further than I already had.

The Pumpkin Café sat at the corner of the square like it had grown there instead of being built, its brick front softened by ivy and a crooked wooden sign that read simply VANCE'S in letters that had faded to the color of weak tea. Pumpkins lined the front steps in a way that felt less like decoration and more like a fire department turning out in force. I parked, took one steadying breath that did not steady anything, and pushed open the front door into a wall of sound.

Porcelain met tile with the particular crash reserved for the most expensive dishware in any given room, followed immediately by a young man's voice saying several things very quickly, none of which were actual words.

He was tall in the unfinished way of someone who hadn't grown into his own limbs yet, with sandy hair escaping a knit beanie and a face gone the color of old milk. Around his feet lay the wreckage of what had probably been, thirty seconds earlier, a full tray of porcelain saucers.

"You must be Ms. Benson," he said, already crouching to gather shards with hands that were shaking too hard to be useful. "I'm Victor. Victor Sterling. I work here. Worked here. Still work here, I hope, unless this changes your mind, which, given the timing, I completely understand if it does."

"Please don't cut yourself," I said, which was apparently the wrong thing to say, because he immediately did.

He sucked air through his teeth and stuck his thumb in his mouth, looking at me with the wounded dignity of someone whose disaster had just been personally witnessed by a stranger holding a suitcase.

"It's been like this since your aunt passed," he said, once the thumb had been removed. "The dishes don't want to sit still. The lights flicker when nobody's asked them to. And the oven." He said the word the way other people said the name of an ex. "The oven's the worst of it."

I set my suitcase down carefully, as though the floor itself might object, and looked past him into the dining room. Mismatched chairs, a fireplace gone cold, herbs drying along the window in bundles that had clearly been there since before my aunt died and possibly since before I was born. It smelled like cinnamon and dust and the particular staleness of a room that had gone too long without steam rising from a kettle. I had expected the café to be sad. I had not expected it to feel like it was waiting for something.

"Show me," I said, and Victor led me into the kitchen at a pace that suggested he would rather be leading me anywhere else.

The oven took up most of the back wall, a huge black iron thing with a hearth mouth and a chimney that vanished up into brick I assumed dated back at least a century. It looked less like a kitchen appliance and more like something that had opinions about kitchen appliances. I approached it the way I approached most enchanted objects after eleven years of filing incident reports about them: cautiously, and with a healthy respect for what could go wrong.

"Just light," I told it, reaching for the iron latch. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "That's all I'm asking. One small, ordinary fire."

The oven answered with a groan that traveled up through the floor and into my boots, followed by a metallic shriek that made Victor flinch backward into a rack of copper pans. The door burst open on its own, and something flew out of it in a smoking arc, hit the wall above the worktable, and dropped onto the floor in a scatter of blackened crumbs.

I stared at what remained of a pumpkin scone. It had been baked, thrown, and singed in what could not have been more than four seconds.

"It does that." Victor drew his shoulders up toward his knit beanie, edging half a step closer to the safety of the doorframe.

"I gathered."

I was still crouched over the wreckage, trying to decide whether the smell was more insulting than the mess, when the bell above the front door chimed and a voice I did not recognize called through the dining room with the easy confidence of a man who had never once worried about being unwelcome.

"Please tell me that crash was the oven and not the new owner already breaking things."

He appeared in the kitchen doorway a moment later, tall, dark-haired, with sleeves rolled to the elbow and the kind of unhurried smile that suggested he found the entire scene delightful rather than alarming. He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe and nudged a smoking crumb with the toe of his boot.

"Arthur Pendleton," he said, extending a hand I did not take. "Vale Remedies, next door. I heard the commotion and thought I'd come offer my condolences. To the scone."

"We're not open," I said.

"I'm aware. I'm not here to buy anything." His gaze traveled slowly around the kitchen, the crooked shelves, the smoking oven, the dishware still scattered across the dining room floor, and something in his expression settled into satisfaction rather than sympathy. "I'm here because your aunt's will contains a clause I find rather charming, all things considered. If the café fails to operate through Halloween midnight, the lease reverts to me."

I straightened slowly. "Excuse me?"

"Section, subsection, several dense paragraphs of legal Latin. I've read it more times than is probably healthy." He smiled again, unbothered, as though he'd just delivered a weather report rather than a threat wearing very good manners. "I'd offer to help clean up, but I suspect you'd throw something at me."

Before I could confirm this suspicion, a throat cleared from somewhere above the mantelpiece in the dining room, dry and imperious and entirely too amused for someone who had been dead for several weeks.

"Clara," said the portrait of my aunt, in a voice like good sherry, "you're holding that broom like it insulted your mother. Elbows down. Honestly."

I turned to find Eleanor Vance regarding me from her gilded frame with an expression of fond exasperation I recognized instantly, even though I had not seen it in fifteen years.

Arthur's smile widened.

"Welcome to Bellweather," he said.