Despite how excited she seems to be about having a new apprentice, we don’t jump into the witchy stuff right away. Instead, she serves us a tea too potent and too fresh to have come from a grocery store tea bag. It’s a green tea with ginger and it’s good, even though the ginger stings my tongue.
While we’re sipping, I ask her how she became friends with Leo.
“I met him at The Apocrypha.”
I chuckle. I should’ve guessed. The Apocrypha is a small cave of a used bookstore in the cellar of a downtown row house. And like the coffee shop, it’s a haven for literary and alternative types.
“We were both looking at the occult books and, I dunno—” Avery shrugs. “We just started talking to one another.”
“That’s it?” Her story is so ordinary, I laugh. I was expecting something much more mysterious or serendipitous. Something like what happened to me. I ask, “You want to know how I met him?”
She urges, “Do tell.”
So I do. She grins and shakes her head when I describe how he lurked in the O-Chi kitchen two weeks in a row, all alone and sober. Then I tell her about Jason—not only that I felt him, but that LeoknewI’d felt him. And that he’d confronted me about it. “He spooked the hell out of me,” I say.
Avery snorts. “Yeah, that’s Leo.”
She shares Aaron’s story, too. How he was at the Bobcat having a muffin when Leo came up to him and started asking all sorts of questions about the concert playing on Aaron’s laptop. “And Aaron, poor guy, was just happy to find someone interested in what he was doing.”
“Is it just me, or does it seem like Leo’s collecting us?”
Avery throws back her head and laughs. “All the time.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Well, think about it. He’s obsessed with historical mysteries…”
“You mean like Roanoke?”
“Yep. And he’s all into folklore and legends, too.”
“Then why isn’t he out West looking for Bigfoot?”
Avery grins. “Who knows? Maybe that’ll be his next obsession.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he’s collecting psychics.”
“Sure it does.” She takes a long sip of tea. “We’re three more oddities on his shelf. Mysteries normal people can’t explain.”
Oddities, huh? There’s something sort of liberating about that label.
I ask Avery, “So what’s your clair?”
“Myclair? Oh!” She smiles when she realizes what I’m talking about. “Clairtangency.”
“What’s that?”
“Have you ever heard of psychometry?”
“No.” Unless it’s a topic likely to come up at a frat party, I’ve definitely never heard of psychometry. “What is it?”
“Well, let me tell you what I did just last week.” She adjusts the throw pillow behind her back and settles against it. “My curatorial studies class was at the Alderford Historical Society, helping them date some artifacts. New stuff they just got in.”
Alderford has a historical society? It’s sad how little I know about the town I’ve lived in for the past year and a half.
Avery tells me she and her class partner were given a baby quilt to study.
“Not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” she admits. “Very utilitarian. You could tell the woman who sewed it was skilled, but she had to work with what she had, scraps of old clothes and sheets and rags and all that.”
