The Witches of Willowmere

Chapter 2

It was close to five o'clock when Claire took the 12A bus home. As she stood in the shelter, she saw Mimi Taylor roar past in her lipstick red car, followed by Chelsea Two in her secondhand BMW. Other kids had cars, Claire reflected in discontent. She still hadn't even taken a driving lesson: there was no money for the fee right now, Dad said, so she had to ride her bike or take the bus. It was a long ride, as the bus's route wove in and out of the central Willowville suburbs before heading along Lakeside Boulevard to the downtown area.

Despite its name, Lakeside did not actually give a view of the shore of Lake Ontario: there were large, stately properties on both sides of the boulevard, expensive Georgian- or Victorian-style houses on spacious lots. Their lawns were well manicured, with the occasional ornamental flower bed, impatiens and petunias still flaunting their vivid summer colours in the September sun. Those on the side facing the lake, with a view of its vast blue expanse, were of course the most expensive; some were a century old or more, like the historic Glengarry estate, which had been turned into a public park and museum. The larger estates were surrounded by tall fences of iron railings or by stone walls, and they had grand gated entrances, some with concrete urns or lamps atop stone posts. There were two estates in particular that had enchanted Claire from her early childhood days, when she and her mother drove past them on the way to the farmer's market at the eastern end of town. One, surrounded by an iron fence, contained a beautiful old house with a small orchard whose apple trees flowered in pink and white every spring. Had flowered. They were all gone now—chopped down to make way for a small housing development—and the old house had also been razed.

"You can't blame the heirs for selling these places off," Dad had said. "Properties that size belong to another era: they cost a lot to maintain, and the taxes are extortionate."

Claire had conceded his point. But she still felt a little twinge of hostility whenever she passed the new development inside the iron fence. The houses that had replaced the orchard were big, ugly things of sand-coloured brick, all crowded cheek by jowl on tiny lots to make the greatest use of the land. Though expensive, they were cheaply and badly made: the brick was fake, and Claire had heard that their inner walls were thin and their roofs prone to leakage. The house that had been built on the site of the old one was even larger and more hideous. Claire had watched resentfully as, little by little, its massive walls rose: grey walls of what looked like cinder blocks, topped by pretentious turrets. It looked like a Victorian prison, she thought, or a small version of Dracula's Castle; she could not believe that anyone would actually choose to live in such a place. But apparently it had been designed and built to someone's specifications. There had never been a For Sale sign out front, and this morning, as the bus drove past, she had noticed a large moving van parked in the ostentatious circular driveway.

The estate shared a huge block, much larger than the blocks in her more ordinary neighbourhood, with another property. This second, separate estate was still as Claire remembered it from her childhood. The same developer who had ruined the property next door had tried hard to get his hands on this one, too, but in vain: the old man who had lived there would not sell. He had died this year, though, at the ripe old age of ninety-two, and she waited in dread for his heirs to sell and the inevitable development sign to appear.

The estate, called Willowmere, was her favourite and always had been. Its outer wall was of stone topped by iron railings, and there were lions on its gateposts—not little concrete ones like those you sometimes saw in front of suburban homes, but big, grey stone ones with regal crowns on their heads, obviously very old. Sometimes the gate was left open, so she could catch tantalizing glimpses of the grounds within as she rode by in a bus or car. There were cedar trees and yew hedges, some of the latter clipped into fanciful shapes, and green lawns and some statuary she could see fleetingly: there was a dark green shape that looked like a seated Buddha and, farther on, a small summer house with a pagoda roof. That was all she could ever see before the walls once more hid it all from view. A cedar hedge grew behind the railings, shielding the property from curious eyes. But Claire had once or twice come here on her bike and peeked through the curtain of close-growing cedars at enchanting vistas of the grounds beyond. There was a small stream meandering under a grove of gnarled old willows, with little arched Oriental bridges crossing it here and there, and a pair of bronze Japanese cranes wading in mid-current. Part of the stream had been diverted to make a wide, shallow pool, out of which rose a fountain—not a little, suburban-style fountain, but a large one such as you might see in a public park sending up a majestic three-metre jet of spray. She had stared at this in utter amazement when she first glimpsed it through the hedge. Imagine having a fountain like that in your backyard!