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his cell phone. I hoped he was hiring a band of mercenaries to hunt down the criminals. I hoped his people found the loot first and made the sheriff and his deputies look like fools. And I hoped really hard that he did it all before the twenty-fourth of October.
    Chapter 3
     
     
    The next afternoon, I stood by the ATM machine with a receipt in my hand that told me I had insufficient funds to make a withdrawal. I’d forgotten that I’d made the mortgage payment early before I’d lost my job.
    I couldn’t ask Georgia Sue for money. She’d already maxed out her credit card to buy a new jukebox for the bar. And because I wasn’t taking charity from Zach, I’d given him the money to get the mechanic to fix my car. I regretted that now. I would need that money to buy spellbooks to help me get the locket back. Though I don’t have strong witch powers like the other women in my family, I do have a little psychic energy like most people—maybe more since I can see Edie and sometimes I can sense Bryn Lyons’s magic. It was only when I tried to cast the spells that Momma taught me that nothing happened. Still, it had been a long time since I’d tried, and I can follow directions pretty well. I didn’t think I’d be half bad at potions since, as a pastry maker, I’ve got measuring and mixing down cold.
    Plus, there are spells that anyone can do, although they’re a lot riskier for the average person to try than for a witch, because a real witch can control the energy that goes in and comes out. So I wasn’t happy about having to try to do magic. There was a chance that things could go wrong, and I’d blow myself up or maybe create a really bad smell in the house. But with Edie’s soul at stake, what choice did I have?
    The trouble was that when Momma left she took half the library of family spellbooks, and when Aunt Mel left, she took the other half. At the time, I didn’t object because I didn’t have any powers and wasn’t a witch wannabe. But now I needed them. Real spellbooks had some power in them, and that would help me. I wouldn’t get any boost from a Barnes & Noble dictionary of spells that had been handled mostly by teenagers working part-time to get discounts on CDs and mochas. Besides, most of the spells in those kinds of books were written by nonpractitioners and were just plain wrong.
    I needed to take a road trip to Austin to the Witch’s Brew—a pagan gift and coffee shop where real witches went to get discounts on CDs and mochas—and to go into the back room to buy from the inventory of proven old spellbooks and charms. Unfortunately, those books would all cost upward of three hundred dollars. On my current budget, they might as well have been three million.
    And I couldn’t wait until I could get the money together to buy one. I needed to do something now. I thought about Bryn Lyons. I just bet he’d have some fancy books, but they’d probably be full of mojo as black as his hair.
    Bryn and his father were the only other magical family in town besides us. Too bad I couldn’t ask him for advice.
    “Well, well, well.”
    I spun around to find Jenna Reitgarten staring at me.
    Great. Just who I wanted to see in my darkest hour.
    “No money in your account?” she asked with a saccharine smile.
    Hiccups for life. Hiccups for life. Hiccups for life. I tried to hex her, but, of course, nothing happened.
    “Well, maybe you just ought to use better judgment the next time you have a job. How long until you move?” She looked at her manicured nails while I glared at her. “I never did like y’all living here anyway. You and your aunt, divorced women, and your momma, who never even bothered to get married before she had a child? That’s not the kind of family values we want to promote in this town. But yours is a cute little house. Maybe I’ll buy it when you go and rent it out to some nice couple that’s planning a family and a normal life.”
    “That’s a wonderful idea,” I said in my