Water Witch Read Free Page A

the rest of their lives. Instead, having always been
frugal, Mom and Pop had only bought necessities, preferring to save
a good portion of their new income for ‘a rainy day,’ which, of
course, never came.
    With no mortgage on the house, and interest
checks coming in monthly, Angelle and I could have easily sat on
our butts and grown fat and bitchy over the last couple of years.
Fortunately, our grandparents had also left behind a work ethic
that kept that from happening. The money did, however, provide us
with the freedom to work at whatever we chose. For me, that meant
freelancing as a columnist for three large Texas newspapers, one as
far away as Dallas. The pay wasn’t all that great, but with money
not being an issue, I reveled in the opportunity to work
independently from home.For Angelle, it had meant earning a degree
in education. Now she worked as a second grade teacher in south
Louisiana, where she lived with her relatively new husband, Trevor.
Angelle loved working with kids as much as I loved working with
words.
    Standing in the pantry, thinking about my
sister, sent a wave of loneliness crashing over me, and I quickly
grabbed a can of beef stew and got the hell out of there. There was
a significant difference between living alone and being lonely. I’d
always managed the former without a problem and fought my entire
life to ignore the latter.
    To brush away the last of that forlorn web, I
shook the can of stew at Fritter. “You better damn sure appreciate
this. Ten o’clock at night, and I’m feeding a rag-tag dog.”
    Fritter jumped up, and at first I thought he
was excited about the upcoming snack, but then he let out a sharp
bark and stared at the telephone, ears peaking. In that instant,
the phone rang.
    I shot a look at the old beige box mounted on
the wall. It had no caller ID, no answering machine, and its ring
was shrill and always set my teeth on edge. Even worse, it summoned
all the bats back to roost in my chest. I set the can of stew on
the counter and took a step towards the phone, which sent the bats
colliding into each other. Fritter began to paw the linoleum and
howl, his snout raised to the ceiling. Between the scratching and
howling, jangling and fluttering, I felt a sudden urge to run out
of the house and never look back.
    I wish I had.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
    Gritting my teeth, I marched over to the
phone. “Quit being ridiculous,” I muttered to myself, then yelled
at Fritter to shut up. He howled louder. I grabbed the receiver
from the cradle and yelled into it, “Hold on!” then dropped the
phone, scooped Fritter into my arms, and carried him outside. The
mutt barked and wiggled, squirmed and howled, as if I was leading
him to a torture chamber. By the time I got back to the phone, I
was out of breath.
    “What the hell is all that noise?” My sister,
younger by two years and prettier by multiples of ten in my
opinion, never missed an opportunity to get right to the point. We
usually talked at least once a week, catching up on what was going
on in one another’s lives. But the last time we’d spoken had been a
couple of weeks ago, and even then the conversation had been short.
The school year was rolling to an end, which usually meant
Angelle's workload doubled, leaving her little time for leisurely
chats.
    “Just Fritter losing his shit. I had to put
him outside.”
    “Since when do you let him in the house?”
    “I didn’t. He just kind of let himself
in.”
    Fritter was still howling, and he began to
paddle the door with his paws. Right then, I had a sneaky suspicion
that whatever he’d been trying to warn me about involved this call.
The hair on my arms stood on end. If there was bad news coming,
there was no use dancing around it. Just as soon cut to the chase.
“What’s wrong?”
    . “How . . . how did you know something was
wrong?”
    Since I’d never told my sister about the
special connection between Fritter and me, I figured it best to
tell a