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Daisy Yellow Yancy loved to sit and watch the witch’s house. She sat under a canopy of trees across the street and studied every line and curve of the old home. The heavy timbers, the brick walls, and the vines climbing up to the top of a rough stone chimney. There was a gable at each end and best of all, a turret with a room at the top jutting off the side of the gable on the left. That made it look like a witch’s house to the neighborhood children. Something out of a picture book.
Daisy giggled about that. Her job was to uncover the identity of the woman who lived here and report to the coven. She knew what the occupant looked like, but she didn’t know her.
The thing is, people didn’t know Rainbeaux Le Blanc. So talking to neighbors only resulted in a physical description which she knew well. A tall blonde woman with weird colored almond shaped eyes who wore “hippie” clothes. Daisy wouldn’t have said hippie it was more urban chic. Rainbeaux worked about thirty hours a week at a small bookstore. How this woman who lived on her own could afford a house in an older upscale neighborhood on a part time retail paycheck was beyond anyone’s guess.
Daisy knew one thing; Rainbeaux was an artist, a painter. Daisy hadn’t been inside the house but she had slipped into the barn shaped workshop out back. Here she discovered Rainbeaux’s studio. She walked through a few times. She took time to examine all the pictures Rainbeaux had rendered. Daisy would have kept creeping in there but Rainbeaux took to leaving her notes. The notes said she knew that Daisy was poking around and it was okay. Rainbeaux wanted to meet her. Daisy wanted to meet Rainbeaux too but she knew the one she worked for wouldn’t like it. She was just supposed to snoop around and find out what she could then report to the coven and then to him.
Ordinarily one couldn’t hope to keep anything from him. But Daisy had. She kept what she knew of Rainbeaux locked in those places she cultivated in her heart that even he couldn’t break into. And then he and the rest wouldn’t know anymore about her than they already knew. Which wasn’t much.
She hoped they didn’t know.
Now in the darkening gloom at the end of the day, a light came on in the turret off to the left of the front door. Soon the electric light was replaced by the flickering light of candles. Then even those were put out and another light shone from that closely watched upper room. A light that penetrated Daisy’s heart in the places he couldn’t go. So she sat there in the dark and loved watching the house. And the Light. |
