Witchcraft

CHAPTER ONE.
    The rose with the needle thrust into its heart arrived on Kimberly Sawyer's doorstep that morning. Darius Cavenaugh , the man with the emerald eyes, arrived that evening. Both events shook her to the core. There was nothing unusual at first about the rose, other than the fact it had been left without a note. Kimberly discovered it as she opened the door to walk down to the beach. Startled and then mildly intrigued, as any woman would have been, she picked up the blood-red flower and cheerily stuck it into an old wine bottle. It would look nice sitting on the window sill in front of her typewriter. Not until midmorning, when the petals began to open, did Kimberly look up from her work and see the vicious shaft of the steel needle spearing the center of the rose. It had been carefully insinuated between the folded petals so that it would be revealed only when they gradually opened. Kimberly froze at the subtle, deliberate violence. She sat very still, staring at the wicked needle, and tried to chase away the frisson of fear that flashed down her spine. Then she remembered Darius Cavenaugh . The image of his savagely hewn features and the gleaming emerald depths of his strangely compelling eyes appeared with shattering intensity in her mind. Her gaze never leaving the needle in the rose, Kimberly reached out a trembling hand and picked up the receiver of her chromium-yellow telephone. She found herself searching blindly for the little card Darius Cavenaugh had given her two months ago, her fingers shuffling awkwardly through the file on her desk. And then she was dialing the number without even pausing to think. Halfway through the process, Kimberly suddenly realized how foolishly she was behaving. This was ridiculous. Someone was playing a joke on her, nothing more. But the phone had already started to ring. Before she could slam down the receiver a woman's voice answered. "Hello?" Frantically Kimberly tried to retreat. "..... I'm sorry, I have the wrong number."
    "This phone is unlisted," the woman said coolly. "May I ask who's calling and where you got the number?"
    "I'm sorry, I misdialed." Kimberly hastily replaced the receiver. Stupid. What on earth was she thinking of to call Cavenaugh's residence just because she'd had a small, but rather jolting experience? She was back under control now. Kimberly frowned at the offending rose and tried to imagine which of her few neighbors might have played such a bizarre trick on her. There was gruff and dour Mr. Wilcox who lived farther down the beach. Then there was Elvira Eden, the aging flower child who had never quite evolved mentally beyond the era of the 1960's. She had a huge garden, Kimberly reminded herself.
    But it was hard to picture the perpetually serene and smiling Elvira doing something like this. And old Wilcox, while admittedly not possessed of a charming personality wasn't really the type, either.
    Restlessly, Kimberly got to her feet, shoving her hands into the rear pockets of her snug, faded jeans and went to stand in front of the huge window that faced the ocean. This was a particularly desolate and rugged stretch of California's northern coast. Few people lived here year-round, although the tourists would be pouring in from San Francisco and the Bay area when summer arrived. But it was early spring right now and there was only a handful of residents strung along the craggy coastline this far north of Fort Bragg. None of the ones whom she'd met seemed the type to pull this little stunt with the rose. "You're going soft in the brain, Kim," she lectured herself as she filled a teakettle and set it on the stove. "It's got to be someone's crazy idea of a joke." Once again Cavenaugh's image flashed through her mind. She couldn't help wondering about the woman Who had answered his phone. It could have been any one of his relatives or someone who worked on the estate. The Cavenaugh winery undoubtedly employed several people. As far as relatives went, there was his sister, Julia, Julia's son Scott, an aunt whom Kimberly vaguely remembered being named Millicent and who knew how many others? Kimberly shuddered at the notion of so many people intimately involved in one's daily world. Extended families were not high on her list of life's pleasures. In fact, families of any size tended to make her wary. That thought made Kimberly remember the buff-colored envelope that had arrived in her mailbox yesterday. It was still lying, unopened, on the kitchen