Lavender-Green Magic Read Free

“old Lute,” not “Mr. Wade.” Somehow that disturbed her to remember. And—Mom
had
been different there at the very first, almost as if she expected Mrs. Pigot to be unfriendly. Holly wished Grandpa would hurry and come and they could get—no, no, she would not think of it as
home!
Now the gingerbread had no taste at all as she had to swallow it past a big lump in her throat.
    â€œQuite a ride in from the old Dimsdale place.” Mrs. Pigot did not sit down with them, but leaned against the side of the door and chattered on. “In this weather Lute might find himself having to take it slow. That old truck of his has to be humored a mite, I wouldn’t wonder. You gonna stay at the junkyard long?”
    Junkyard? Holly stopped chewing to stare at Mrs. Pigot. “Old Lute” and a
junkyard!
    â€œI’m going to be on the staff at Pine Mount,” Mom was saying cheerfully. “The children will stay with their grandparents.”
    Mrs. Pigot nodded. “They’ll find that a lot of young’uns in this town will envy ’em. Why, I don’t know a boy hereabouts as doesn’t like to go grubbing out there whenever he can get a chance. Treasures for young’uns, some of that trash is, or at least that’s their way of seeing it. Was like that myself when I was their age. ’Course then it was just getting started, the dump. Lute and Mercy, they was just a young couple. Old Miss Elvery Dimsdale, she up an’ died the second year they was working for her. Then it came about that there wasa big tangle—legal that was—over who was to inherit, though there sure weren’t much left.
    â€œThe big house, it burned down right before Miss Elvery died. She got touched in the head an’ used to go wandering about at night. Never had no ’lectricity put in, so she’d take a lamp or a candle to see by. Well, she had a fall, an’ Lute, he got her out. But the lamp she was carrying spilled out and the whole place—it was more’n two hundred years old—just went up in smoke! Folks started talking about the Dimsdale curse again, what with Miss Elvery getting so bad hurt that she died ’bout four months later an’ the house going that way. She was the last of the Dimsdales, as far as the lawyers could make out, ’cept for a cousin off in California or some such place.
    â€œThen they couldn’t sell ’cause there was a flaw in the title, and the town didn’t have no use for the land, ’cept as a dump. That’s how the junkyard started—”
    â€œWhat curse?” Crockett broke in, as Mrs. Pigot paused for breath.
    â€œThe witch curse, sonny, as was laid on all Dimsdales for almost as many years back as that old house stood. Story’s so old now nobody can tell you the right of it, ’less Miss Sarah over at the library. She makes a hobby of looking up old town history an’ might have found out something. There used to be witches hereabouts. Though they didn’t have the hangings like they had over to Salem. But anyway there was a witch that the Dimsdales got across somehow, an’ she laid a curse on them. Seems like they were a family mighty prone to ill luck in every direction. But some families are like that.Anyway they’re all gone now, just like that house of theirs. An’ Lute, he’s a good man—an’ Mercy, she’s a good woman. They ain’t been troubled none by something which was ended long ’fore any of us roundabouts was even born.”
    â€œA witch—with a gingerbread house?” Judy looked down at the small piece she still held in her hand as if it might have been broken off that dread dwelling, a picture of which was in her favorite fairy-tale book.
    â€œJust a story,” Holly said quickly, to show that she knew very well that witches and magic were only that. “People believed like that a long time ago, they don’t