Martin Greenberg: The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

Tea was like ritual, although without the fuss. The pot sat in the centre of the table; Connell toddled his way around the chair, and Shanna drew pictures while laying flat out against ceramic tile. Unfortunately, some of those pictures tended to bleed off the page, so the floor was a bit more colourful than it had been when the previous owner had laid down said ceramic tiles.

“So,” Gran said quietly. “You’ve started gardening.”

Maggie’s smile was calm and warm.

“And cat collecting. I’d advise you to take up a fondness for rabbits instead.”

“Why?”

“Less of ’em. They’re still work,” she added. But she shrugged. “The kids are growing.”

Maggie smiled fondly. She still looked like the same woman I’d first met-but not when she smiled. “I wanted to thank you both. But I also wanted to ask a question.”

Gran snorted. She had her pipe in her hand, but she didn’t light it. Mags would have thrown her out of the front door and watched to see how many times she bounced; she respected age and wisdom, but smoking around her children was a definite no-go. Gran seemed to expect this, and as she was in Mags’ house, she obeyed the unspoken rules.

“You’re the crone. I understand what you do.”

“What?”

“You preserve wisdom,” Maggie replied. “Collective wisdom. Maybe bitter wisdom.”

“It’s all bitter.”

“Maybe. But necessary.”

That got a ‘good girl’ out of the old lady.

“I’m the mother, and I understand-I think-what that means.”

“Better harvests,” Gran said.

Maggie raised a brow.

“It’s true.”

“Well,” she said, looking doubtfully out at her garden, “we’ll see.” She picked up her cup, staring at the cooling tea. “What does the maiden do? Preserve our innocence?”

Gran snorted. “You’ve been reading those trashy novels again.” It was a bit of a bone of contention between them.

Maggie chose to let the matter drop; she really was curious.

“Look,” Gran said, with open disgust, “just how innocent do you think you were when you were a maiden?”

“Well,” Maggie said, defensive in spite of her best intentions, “I wasn’t the maiden now, was I?”

Gran laughed. “Good answer! No, you weren’t. But I’m going to tell you that you’re confusing innocence with inexperience.”

“That’s her way of saying stupidity,” I added.

“Got that.” She looked over at her daughter, who had finished her odd drawing and had started in on another piece of paper. Shanna was humming a song I tried very hard not to recognize. Because Gran didn’t hold with television much, either.

“You think that the maiden is supposed to preserve stupidity?”

“ I didn’t use the word.”

Gran snorted again. “Innocence implies guilt.”

“Stupidity implies-”

“Not guilt,” Gran snapped, before Maggie could get started. Watching the two of them, I could almost see a familial connection between them, and you know what? I almost got up and slunk out of the room. “Innocence is a Unicorn word. It’s a defacement. It’s a linguistic injustice, an act of defilement.”

“Unicorns speak?”

Gran’s laugh was dark and ugly. And unsettling. “You wore that ring for how many years, and you have to ask?”

Maggie’s turn to get dark. “It didn’t exactly whisper into my ear.”

I really wanted to be anywhere else.

“It did . You just weren’t listening. You want it back? I’ll give it to you. You’ll probably hear a lot more now.”

Maggie’s brows rose. “You didn’t destroy it?”

Gran hesitated for just a second, and a shudder seemed to pass through her. “No.”

“Why?”

“I’m no warrior,” she replied.

“The maiden is a warrior?”

Gran was quiet for a long time. “At her best,” she said at last, “she can be.”

“And at her worst?”

“Lost.”

“Was there a maiden, back when there was a mother?”

Gran said nothing at all for a long time. Silent Gran? Always made me nervous.

“Look, what is the maiden about?”

“Sex,” Gran replied primly.

Maggie stared at her as if she’d started speaking in tongues.

One week later, round two.

“So, the maiden is about sex ?”

“That’s what I said.”

“If she’s about sex, she can hardly be a maiden.”

Gran shook her head. “That’s Unicorn talk,” she said firmly.

“Will you quit that?”

“I could call it something else, but you probably don’t want Shanna to repeat it at school.”

Maggie hadn’t asked for the ring back, and failed to mention it. Gran failed to offer. This was an armistice.

“The maiden has always been the most vulnerable of the three,” Gran continued. “The hardest to find. The hardest to keep.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“It’s the sex.”

“Something like that.”

Maggie turned to me. “Your grandmother is driving me crazy.” Unfair, trying to drag me into the discussion. “It’s because of the sex, right? There aren’t a lot of young women who don’t. Have sex.”

“It’s because of the sex, but not in the way you think. You’re thinking like a Unicorn,” she added. So much for armistice.

“Look, what are Unicorns? I’ve seen a lot of pretty pictures, and I’ve read a lot of pretty books. I’ve done more internet research on that than I have on almost anything, and my saccharine levels are never going to be the same. For something malign, they seem to occupy a lot of young girls’ minds.”

“Not the practical ones,” Gran snapped.

“Fine. Not the practical ones. Are we looking for a practical girl?”

Gran seemed to wither. “No,” she said at last. “We’re not. That’s why it’s so hard. To find her. To save her.”

“She dies?”

“Not the way you or I do. But her gift is the easiest to lose. It gets passed on, but sometimes it’s just the blink of an eye.”

“Unicorns are usually associated with purity.”

“What the hell is purity?” Gran snapped. “A bottled water slogan?”

Round three.

“Okay. If the maiden isn’t defined by not having sex, and she isn’t defined by purity-which,” Mags added, holding a squirming Connell while trying to get him to eat, “I’ll agree is pretty nebulous, I have two questions.”

“You’ve got a lot of questions. How, precisely, are you intending to pay for the answers?”

Maggie glared. It was a pretty glare. “By being the mother,” she snapped.

Gran nodded, as if this was the only answer she expected. “What are your questions?”

“One: there are three. Maiden. Mother. Crone.”

Gran nodded.

“You’ve been waiting for me.”

Nodded again, but more wary this time.

“But we’re only two. The third one must be important.”

“She’s important.”

“But you weren’t waiting for her.”

Snorting, the old woman said, “I wasn’t exactly waiting for you, either. I just knew you when I saw you.”

“Fine. And the maiden?”

“You’re not going to let go of this, are you?”

“No.”

“Fine. Be like that. What’s the other question.”

“You haven’t answered the first one yet.”

“Never promised answers.”