Read Online Making Magic by Donna June Cooper - Free Book Online Page B

fluff was the same dog.
    As she took a breath to begin the next song, he cleared his throat.
    Thea gasped and spun around. Her face, flushed and wet with tears, went dead pale.
    “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” His voice sounded rough to his ears. “And I don’t mean to intrude.”
    She shoved the flute behind her in a way that reminded him of a much younger Thea. “Well you did,” she said, her voice sharp and a little shaky. She shoved out her chin, another familiar gesture. “What’re you doing up here?” As if she had only just noticed that her face was wet, she wiped the back of her hand across her cheeks.
    “Listening. You’ve gotten even more amazing, Thea,” he said. “What was that piece after ‘Ashokan Farewell’?”
    She chewed on her bottom lip. “Part of something I wrote,” she said at last. “‘For The Woodsman’.”
    He paused for a moment, looking over at her Pops’s headstone then back at her. “You finally did it, didn’t you? You composed it. The mountain’s song.” It wasn’t a question.
    They had discussed it long ago, the song that the mountain sang to all of them. It was hard to capture because it changed from season to season and year to year—the trills of birdsong woven through the counterpoint of wind in the trees, the slide of water over mossy rock beneath the vibrato of the frogs, and the silent fall of snow that muffled the crunching percussion of leaves underfoot. If that was only a part of it, he wanted to hear the whole.
    A soft smile curved her lips even as she took another swipe at her wet face.
    “Your Pops would’ve loved it,” he said, wishing that he carried a hanky. “Are there parts for other instruments?”
    A spark had kindled in those wet gray eyes when she looked up. “What do you think?”
    “I think no one instrument can capture this place.”
    The fuzzy white dog came over to inspect him. He crouched to let her smell the back of his hand and noticed a pile of what looked like lace on top of Thea’s flute case. He looked closer and saw that it was a huge stack of lacy, white flower heads. “If you’re gathering flowers, I think you forgot the stems.”
    The sound she made was a bit too watery to be a snort. “It’s called deadheading. Sort of like beheading—” she paused for effect, “—except for flowers.”
    He straightened. “What’d the poor flowers do to you?”
    She gestured around them. “It’s Queen Anne’s Lace. Not native and really invasive, according to Grace. Makes Daniel’s honey smell and taste horrible if the bees get at it. So…” She put her thumb and index finger together and snapped them sideways. “Off with their heads.”
    Jake’s hand went to his throat and Bailey’s ears went up.
    For a moment, Jake couldn’t get his brain to work. Thea’s hair was that thick, glossy auburn he remembered, even though it was far too short. And dressed in a skimpy green T-shirt and denim cutoffs that showed a lot of very pale leg, she looked fantastic.
    Thea’s smile faltered. “I was really sorry to hear about your dad. That had to be rough.”
    He cleared his throat. “It’s the risk you take when you put on a badge.” But she would read his true feelings. She’d always been able to.
    “I hear that your job got pretty risky a couple of months ago. Grace told me you got shot.”
    “Yeah, well, like I said.”
    “Some idiot tried to shoot the mayor and got you instead?”
    “Lots of idiots out there, you’ll have to be more specific.”
    She crouched down to scoop up the flower heads and dump them into her tote. She tucked the Irish whistle into a cloth sack.
    “Isn’t that the one—”
    “You made for me. Yes.” A wedge of auburn hair slid forward as she put the sack into a pocket in her flute bag, hiding her face.
    “Still sounds good,” he said.
    “Of course it does.” She started disassembling and cleaning her Burkart. “Are you still making them?”
    “When I get an order. These days I’m