Time of the Witch by Mary Downing Hahn

his looks, can he?"
    Wanda drew back a little, as if she sensed I was getting mad, and shrugged her shoulders. "I'm just telling you what people say. I don't know about your father." She looked at the picture again. "Your mother's real pretty. They look like they're on their honeymoon or something, only I can see Jason behind them. How come they're getting a divorce?"
    "I don't know. It seems awfully complicated to me,
but I think some of it was Jason's fault in a way, 'cause he never acted the way Daddy wanted him to. You know what a baby he is, how he cries about everything and gets scared, and he can't play any sports. Daddy used to get mad at him and then Mom would get mad at Daddy and before long they'd be in a fight. Then she wanted to go back to college and finish her degree and he didn't want her to and they fought a lot about that. Finally Daddy just couldn't take it anymore and he left. I think Mom could've stopped him, but she didn't, so I kind of blame her for a lot of it."
    "What makes you think they don't want a divorce?" Wanda looked at me, her face pale in the dim light from the flashlight.
    "I just know. Neither one of them is the type who should live alone, especially Mom. She needs Daddy to take care of her, but she's too proud to admit it. She wants to be like Aunt Grace, independent and self-sufficient and all that stuff, but she's really like Annabelle. She needs a man." I frowned at Mom's smiling face. If she were here right now, I'd tell her myself, I'd force her to see the truth about herself.
    "It must be nice to know so much," Wanda said in a huffy little voice. "Not many kids know more about life than their own parents do."
    I glared at her and snapped the flashlight off. "It's almost eleven-thirty," I said coldly. "We should leave in about fifteen minutes."
    For the next quarter of an hour, neither one of us said a word. We just lay on the bed, watching the numbers flip on my clock radio. At eleven-forty-five, we both got up and tiptoed to the door. The hall was dark, but as we crept past Jason's door, I saw him in the glow of
his night-light, sleeping peacefully with his arms around his old teddy bear. There wasn't a sound downstairs except the
tick tock tick
of the grandfather's clock. I led the way down the steps, pausing each time a tread creaked under my feet. We passed Aunt Grace's door, shut tight with no crack of light shining under it.
    At the back door, I turned the knob slowly and stepped out onto the porch. Sitting down on the top step, we put on our shoes and ran across the lawn, taking the shortcut across the field.
    "Everything looks different in the moonlight," I whispered. "Even the shapes of things."
    "Wait till we get in the woods," Wanda said, looking ahead at the dark mass of trees.
    "That's why I brought the flashlight." I took it out of the pocket in my sweatshirt and clicked it on. Its beam made a small circle of light on one of the trees.
    "Don't do much, do it?" Wanda said.
    At the edge of the woods, we paused and shone the flashlight down the path ahead of us. Something rustled in the bushes and we clung to each other for a moment.
    "It was just a coon or a possum or something," Wanda said nervously.
    "Yeah," I said, looking behind me. "Well, come on."
    Following the tunnel of light cast by the flashlight, we crept into the woods like thieves entering a house, scarcely daring to make a sound. Without saying a word to each other, we climbed the path as it twisted uphill, curving around trees and boulders. By the time we reached the top, we were both out of breath.
    "That must be her house." Wanda pointed at a ramshackle cabin rising from an outcropping of boulders.
From where we stood, it looked as if it had been put together room by room without any plan. Parts of it were log, parts of it were shingled and parts of it were bare planks. Spooky as it looked, it wasn't surrounded by a bone fence and there wasn't a crumb of gingerbread in sight.
    While we stood there