Chapter 4

SIBLING SORORITY

Any misgivings I might have had about installing Chloe as my replacement at the store were quickly erased the next morning. She was quick and eager to learn, and already knew a great deal about the various Tarot and oracle decks, telling me she was far more than a mere dabbler.

“Oh, I own about fifteen decks,” she said after she’d helped a pair of tourists from Phoenix choose a Moonology deck and some moonstone and amethyst pocket crystals to go with it. “I started using them in middle school.”

“And your parents didn’t mind?” I inquired. No reason why they should, but people could harbor odd prejudices.

At once, Chloe shook her head. “They’re pretty easygoing. Their only real rules were to get good grades, stay off drugs, and not get pregnant.”

I couldn’t help smiling, since my mother had guided my teenage years with just about the same set of rules. But then, I supposed they were pretty universal.

“Did you go to the Tarot because of your dreams?” I asked next.

Her expression brightened, letting me know she was glad I’d figured it out so quickly.

“Yep, that’s exactly what happened,” she replied. “I started having them when I was around eleven, so I tried to do some research online about psychics and that kind of stuff. I found people on YouTube doing Tarot readings, and I got hooked. It wasn’t until high school that I started working with oracle cards, too, but Tarot’s always been my main thing.”

We had to break off the conversation there, because Josie entered the shop right then, today wearing a turquoise blue blazer and matching skirt that went much better with her fiery hair than the hot pink she’d had on the day before.

Immediately, her gaze moved to Chloe, frankly questioning, and I knew the moment had arrived.

Thanks to the way Josie was able to spread news all over town in what felt like the blink of an eye, I knew most of Globe would know within the hour that my long-lost half-sister had shown up out of the blue just in time to keep me from shutting down the store for an indefinite period.

“Hi, Josie,” I said. “This is Chloe Fairfield. She’s my little sister from L.A.”

I deliberately introduced her that way because even though we didn’t share the same mother, we still had Jordan Fairfield’s blood running through our veins. There didn’t seem to be much point in continuing to make the distinction that we were only half-sisters.

For just a second, Josie’s light blue eyes flared with surprise, but then she smiled and came forward with her usual bustling energy.

“So nice to meet you, Chloe,” she said. “I’m Josie Woodrow.”

“She’s the mayor,” I put in. “But before that, she was the person who sold me this store.”

“And I’m still in real estate,” Josie added. “So you just let me know if you’re in the market for a house around here.”

That sort of offer was pretty much par for the course for Josie, but Chloe’s startled expression told me she definitely hadn’t expected the conversation to take that kind of left turn quite so quickly.

“She’s staying at Hazel’s Airbnb for now,” I said, keeping my tone light…and also hoping Josie would get the hint that it wasn’t really the time to be talking about buying real estate when my sister had only shown up in town the day before. “But we’ll let you know. The important thing is that Chloe came here just in time to help me out with the store. She’ll be running things while I’m out on leave.”

If Josie was at all surprised by the arrangement, she didn’t show it. No, she only nodded and asked, “Does that mean the fifty percent off sale is canceled?”

Trust her to worry about something like that. Lips quirking with amusement, I said, “No, I’ll keep it going through the end of the week, just as I advertised. It’ll help to clear out some old stock that’s been sitting around for longer than I would have liked. And then Chloe can order new inventory…kind of like a spring cleaning for Once in a Blue Moon.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” Josie said. “And it’s wonderful that you came at just the right time, Chloe. But I have a meeting I need to get to — very nice to meet you.”

And with that she headed out, leaving a drift of Chanel No. 5 in her wake.

Chloe blinked. “She’s kind of a force of nature, huh?”

I couldn’t help grinning. “You have no idea.”

As I’d expected, word spread fast, saving me the effort of having to reach out to everyone and let them know what was going on at the shop. Hazel dropped in to meet my sister, gave me an approving nod, and then headed out again. Victoria also came down from her studio so she could make her introductions with the person who would soon be running the store, and even Archie deigned to come by a little after one o’clock, since he didn’t have another dance class to teach until three.

His was the opinion I worried about the most. Although he would never come right out and admit it, I knew he looked on me as the sister he’d never had, just as I considered him a sort of found brother, and he was fiercely protective of me. After what had happened with Melanie Knowles, there was every chance he’d tell me I was out of my mind for inviting Chloe into my life so quickly when I knew so little about her.

Well, I wasn’t being quite as careless as it might have looked on the surface. That morning when Calvin went to work, he did a quick background check on Chloe, just to make sure I wasn’t the victim of a particularly clever con artist. He messaged me soon after, telling me that everything seemed to be on the up and up — she’d been born in Northridge Medical Center, had attended school in the local district, and graduated from Cal State Northridge…the same university I’d dropped out of more than ten years earlier after realizing a college diploma wasn’t what I needed in life…and that her parents had owned the same house since 1998 and were employed in exactly the professions she’d described.

While I really hadn’t had any reason to doubt her — the aura I’d seen hovering over her head the day before had told me everything I needed to know — it was still reassuring to have some solid proof that she truly was Jordan Fairfield’s daughter and not someone trying to worm their way into my life so they could get their hands on my money.

Again, I made the necessary introductions, and although Archie seemed surprised by Chloe’s sudden appearance, he only said it was nice to meet her. At the same time, I could tell my sister was impressed by Archie, who wasn’t exactly the sort of person you’d expect to find in tiny Globe, not with his impeccable clothing and the sort of handsome blond looks that seemed as though they would have been put to better use in some kind of classic film.

“So, what brings you to Globe?” Archie asked, and even though I could tell he was being on his best behavior, it was also somewhat obvious to me that he wasn’t going to head back to his dance studio until he had some answers that satisfied him.

“Finding Selena,” Chloe said frankly. “I mean, I knew she existed, but my father never talked much about her. I graduated from college a semester early, and it just seemed like the right time to look her up.”

Archie’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded, as if pleased to hear that my unexpected little sister was no slouch in the academics department. Back in the day, before he was turned into a cat, he’d been a history teacher, and although he’d left that profession behind, I knew he still had very little use for ignorance.

Instead, his gaze shifted back toward me. “And you, Selena — why didn’t you ever go in search of your little sister?”

A valid enough question, but one I wished he’d asked in private. I honestly didn’t know how much Chloe’s father had said about the way he’d made it clear he wanted to live his own life, one that didn’t involve my mother…or the child he’d fathered after a single drunken night of passion.

“Oh, my bio-father didn’t want to have much to do with us,” I said lightly. “He paid child support, and that was it. Which is fine. It’s never a good idea to force people to have a life together just because of a single mistake they made.”

A golden-brown eyebrow lifted. “You see yourself as a mistake?”

“Of course not,” I returned at once, even as Chloe began to frown, as though annoyed on my behalf. “I just mean the hook-up that started the whole thing. It was my mother’s choice to keep me, and Jordan did the right thing by sending money. There wasn’t any need to make him do more than that.”

Although Archie had been living in the twenty-first century as a man for more than a year, he still had a hard time with our much more casual attitudes toward sex. In this particular case, though, it seemed he’d realized it wouldn’t be a very good idea to push me further on the topic.

“I understand,” he said, and even managed to smile. “Then I suppose it’s a very good thing that the two of you were able to meet as adults — and that Chloe is in a position to help with the shop.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “And I’m super glad that I got here at just the right time. The universe definitely guided me where I needed to be.”

Since that was exactly the sort of woo-woo statement I would have made in a similar situation, Archie’s expression turned sour. However, his tone was pleasant enough as he said, “Yes, it does seem as though you were a godsend. And if you ever need anything while Selena is out on leave, I’m just next door — and my wife Victoria is upstairs.”

“Oh, Victoria’s your wife?” Chloe asked, looking a little confused. True, they had different last names, and Victoria hadn’t mentioned anything about Archie, probably because she’d come down to say hi to Chloe in between client meetings and hadn’t had any real time to go into details.

“Yes,” he said, obviously proud to be able to claim such an accomplished woman as his partner in life. “She sometimes helps out with the studio when she has the time.” He paused there and gave Chloe a searching look. “I don’t suppose you dance.”

“What, like ballet?” she said, even more befuddled.

“Ballroom,” he explained patiently. “Waltz…tango…foxtrot. That sort of thing.”

Chloe let out a chuckle, then paused, as if she realized laughing in response to his comment might not have been the most polite thing to do. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve got two left feet.”

“That can be fixed,” he said, something in his tone telling me that my little sister was going to end up in one of his beginning ballroom classes whether she liked it or not. But then he glanced over at me and added, “At any rate, I’ll let you two get back to it. I’m sure you have a good deal to show Chloe before the big day arrives.”

“Oh, lots,” I said. “But we’ve still got some time.”

“Hopefully,” he said, his tone now ominous. His gaze moved to Chloe and he added, “It was very nice to meet you. Remember, I’m just next door if you need anything.”

And then he went out, moving past a couple of people who looked as though they’d taken a break during a hiking trip to come downtown and do some browsing, judging by their cargo shorts and sturdy boots.

Since they headed immediately for the book section, Chloe seemed to think it was safe to continue our conversation. “Are all your friends so…dramatic?”

I couldn’t help chuckling. “Well, Archie and Josie are definitely their own people. But you also met Hazel and Victoria. They’re pretty normal, right?”

Chloe shook her head. “They’re more low-key. But since Victoria looks like a movie star and Hazel is some kind of world-class artist, I’m not sure I’d use ‘normal’ to describe them.”

Fair enough. Still smiling, I said, “I guess Globe just isn’t a ‘normal’ kind of place.”

The rest of the day went smoothly, though, with Joyce Lewis also stopping by to meet Chloe — and to drop off a new batch of candles. I showed my sister how to log everything into the inventory system and where to store things in the stock room, and ended up thinking that this was all going to work out just perfectly. In fact, although I’d first thought I’d stay through the end of the week just to make sure she was on top of everything, I was now beginning to wonder whether I should take only another day to get her up to speed and then go home and spend the rest of the ten days or so until I was due with my feet up on the couch, the way an eight-months-plus pregnant woman should.

Chloe was good with the customers and quick to learn how I did inventory — probably not the most efficient system in the world, but it worked — and yet it seemed that whenever I tried to ask her about her life back in Southern California, she somehow managed to give a brief answer before turning the conversation to something more innocuous, like a question about how to place an order with my two biggest vendors, Llewellyn Press and Hay House.

I supposed it was possible that she didn’t want to talk about her life very much because her parents had admonished her not to divulge too much information about their family dynamics. Again, since I knew very little about Jordan Fairfield as a person, I had no idea whether he would have even laid down that sort of commandment, or whether he and his wife would have simply told Chloe to stay safe and left it at that. After all, even though she was still living at home, she was also an adult of twenty-one and paying rent to stay there. When you got right down to it, I didn’t think there was much her parents could have done to prevent their daughter from doing as she liked.

One question she asked did surprise me a little, though.

“Do you ever do readings here?” she inquired after the hikers left, books on cryptozoology stowed in their bags.

“Tarot readings?” I responded, and she nodded.

“I mean, that’s what you did when you lived in L.A., right?”

“I did,” I said, which was only the truth. I’d made a decent living reading Tarot and sometimes using my pendulum to provide counsel to a variety of West Los Angeles types, a lot of whom worked in the film and TV industry, even if they weren’t the forward-facing kind of people that anyone would have heard of. “But when I came here, I thought I’d make a fresh start, and that meant focusing on running the shop rather than being an actual psychic. I still do readings for myself and occasionally for friends if it’s something they feel is important enough, but trying to read cards as part of the business would have been too much. Until I got pregnant, this was pretty much a one-person operation.”

Chloe seemed to absorb all this information, her expression thoughtful. “I suppose I can see that,” she said after a pause. “But maybe once you come back from leave….”

She left the sentence hanging, and yet I thought I could guess what she was trying to say. While she was minding the store during my absence, she’d have to focus on being a shopkeeper. In the long run, though…if it turned out that she wanted to stay on…then maybe we could expand the business to having her conduct readings while I was out front working with customers, or vice versa.

“You like reading Tarot for people?” I asked, and she nodded.

“I started doing it in high school for my friends,” she said. “And then in college, I worked at a couple of psychic fairs and did readings there.”

An impressive resume for someone her age, since the fairs I’d attended before deciding I had a hard time focusing in crowds had been very careful about who they invited to be guest readers. Once again, I pondered whether I should ask if her parents had a problem with her attending those sorts of events — I loved my psychic community back in L.A., but even I’d known that the fairs could attract some fairly fringe people — and then I decided it wasn’t any of my business. From what I’d been able to tell, Chloe had genuine talent, and it seemed clear enough to me that her parents hadn’t wanted to stand in her way.

“Well, it’s something we can talk about when the time comes,” I said, and she seemed to get the hint that I wasn’t about to start making promises, not with a baby due any day now.

Olivia came in around three-thirty and I introduced the two girls. They seemed to hit it off right away, which was a relief, especially since I’d wondered if Olivia would worry that I planned to let her go now that I had Chloe here to help out. However, I had no intention of doing such a thing, figuring that it would be easier for both of them to have someone else here for at least part of the day. Besides, I knew Olivia had been counting on the money she was saving from her part-time job to help her get situated in her new apartment, and it wouldn’t have been fair to cut her off with no warning.

With everything that had been going on, I was kind of blindsided when my phone rang at four — a call from my mother, who’d been expected in town that afternoon, even though she hadn’t known for sure exactly when she and Tom would arrive at their home at the east end of Globe.

As soon as I saw her number, an uneasy sensation went through my stomach that had nothing to do with the baby I was carrying. How in the world was she going to react to finding out that my sister was not only here, but had already been welcomed into my life?

It’s fine, I reassured myself. It’s not as if she’s been harboring some kind of undying love for Jordan Fairfield all these years. And she never said you couldn’t look up your half-siblings, only that she didn’t know whether it would be a very good idea.

Even though my inner voice sounded particularly no-nonsense, I wasn’t sure whether I could believe it. After all, I’d never dealt with a situation like this before.

“Hi, Mom,” I said as I touched the screen to answer the phone. Luckily, Chloe and Olivia were over by the bookcases, maybe talking about the shelving system I used. But whatever they were doing, they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me, thank the Goddess. “How are you?”

“I should be asking you that question,” she said with a laugh.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I told her. “Are you here in town?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We got to the house about fifteen minutes ago. I thought I’d open up some windows and air out the place a little bit before I gave you a call.”

My mother always had been a fresh-air fiend. If it was truly hot, then of course she’d close up everything and turn on the A/C, but she always preferred to have breezes blowing through open windows, and I couldn’t really blame her for that since I was the same way.

“That’s good,” I said, then paused. There wasn’t any way to tell her what was going on without just blurting it out, so that’s what I did. “Mom, Chloe Fairfield showed up in Globe yesterday. She’s a great girl, and I’m having her help me here at the store.”

A pause. Then my mother said, almost blankly, “ Jordan’s Chloe?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I know it’s kind of a shock, but — ”

“It’s fine,” my mother cut in. “I’m actually glad to hear that she reached out to you. How old is she now?”

“Twenty-one, I think,” I said, feeling somewhat surreal. I supposed if I’d stopped to think about it, I should have known my mother would take the situation in stride. There wasn’t a whole lot that fazed her…except maybe a demon infestation that had turned out to be fake in the end. Then again, at the time none of us had guessed that the terrible manifestations in the historic house she and Tom had bought were a huge lie and not actual imps from Hell. “She’s staying at Hazel’s Airbnb for now.”

“Well, she’s certainly welcome at the house if Hazel needs her rental back,” my mother said. “We’ve got tons of space.”

True enough, since the massive Victorian was more than four thousand square feet in size and had six bedrooms. All the same, I was touched that my mother had made the offer. A lot of people would have found it just a little awkward to stay under the same roof as the child of their long-ago one-night stand.

“I’ll let her know,” I responded, and figured I’d better leave it at that for now. “Anyway, I know we all planned to meet for dinner tonight — is it okay if I bring Chloe along? She’s started to meet a few people in town, but she’s definitely not at the point where she’d be getting together with friends for meals yet.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” my mother said at once. “It’ll give us a chance to all get acquainted. Tom already made reservations at the Gold Dust, but we’ll just call and let them know we’ll be a party of five instead of four.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, knowing I was thanking her for a whole lot more than merely changing the dinner reservations to accommodate our new guest.

“Not a problem.” She paused there, then added, her tone changing subtly, “I think it’s wonderful that your baby’s aunt will be here when he or she comes into the world. I know Calvin has plenty of family who’re awaiting the big day, but….”

“But it’ll be nice to have someone else from my side of the family,” I finished softly.

“Exactly. Well, we’ll see you at the Gold Dust at six-thirty.”

I told her it was a date, and we ended the call. As I set down the phone, my gaze moved across the room to the spot where Chloe was still standing and laughing with Olivia. We didn’t have any customers in the store right then, so it wasn’t as if I needed to take them to task for wasting time…not that I would have even if the situation had been different.

No, right then I was thinking about something else entirely.

I was thinking about family…and how good it was to know that mine had expanded unexpectedly but beautifully over the past two days.