"I should go. It seems like you've got a lot to do..."

She looked down at him with full-blown paranoia in her eyes. "Don't you remember them, Martin? The old ladies with their knitting needles and disapproving glares? Their clucking tongues. Weren't they old when we were kids? Don't you think that's strange?"

"Betty White and Sean Connery have looked the same for forty years," he said, putting on his shoes.

This seemed to derail her. She blinked at him several times. Then she let out a dry laugh. "You don't know. You haven't lived here. Under their shadow. The way people act around them. The way they talk."

He flashed on the night of the fire, the smiling old woman Aunt Norma had chased into the dark, their shadows thrown long and wavering from the blaze.

Was that who she meant?

He opened his mouth to ask. Shut it again and tugged his shirt over his head, refusing to fall into her paranoid trap. Evil old ladies? The entire concept was preposterous.

"Do you know where the word glamour comes from, Marty?" She crossed to the door. "It's a Scottish term for a magical enchantment. Making things appear different than they are. Like the emperor's new clothes. A trick played on the eyes of the beholder. Synonyms for glamour include enchantment, charm, bewitch."

He followed her, anxious now, holding his shoes in a clenched fist. She was starting to sound a lot like James Barclay. He'd already gotten a lifetime's supply of that brand of crazy in the past few days.

"Look around you, Marty. Doesn't this town seem strange to you? Doesn't it feel not right?"

She pulled back the door shade enough to peer out, eyes narrowed.

"Nadine, what are you saying to me? You're scared of a bunch of little old ladies?"

"You have no idea, Marty. She's blinded you to it. She used a glamour on you so you can't see her as she really is. She's blinded this whole town."

"She? She who?"

When Nadine turned back from the windows, all the menace and fear had left her eyes. They held only pity.

"The wickedest witch of them all, Marty. Your mommie dearest: Miss Ruby Savage."

9

Suspicious Minds

"I'M LEAVING THIS shithole town on the last ferry out," Nadine said, rushing Martin out the door with his belt unbuckled and one shoe still in his hand. "If you're smart, you'll do the same."

Then she pushed the door closed and pulled the shade back down.

He stepped into his shoe and walked back to the house with one damp sock. The after-sex high and slight buzz from the weed did nothing to stop the paranoid thoughts of what she'd said to him from circling his brain like vultures over a corpse.

She was clearly deeply disturbed. How likely was it that everyone in town was out to get her at the behest of his mother and her friends? It was madness.

Witches. Glamours.