A few minutes later, the sisters had reconvened in the living room. Piper sat on the long couch, still distraught but less tearful. Phoebe watched her anxiously from a nearby chair. Paige came into the room with a large mug in her hands.
"Here you go," she said, handing the mug to Piper. "Chamomile tea. Should calm your tummy if nothing else."
"Thanks, Paige." Piper smiled gratefully.
Paige settled onto the couch beside her sister. "It might be a little stale," she warned. "We haven't really had a chance to clean out the pantry yet."
"I'm sure it's fine. Thank you."
She took a sip, and nodded appreciatively.
"So, why do you do think mom and Prue were killed by a demon?" Phoebe asked. Her voice seemed tight and choked.
Piper took another sip from the mug and set it on the coffee table before answering. "Ever since Paige and I found that book, I don't know, it kind of stirred up some old memories," she confessed. "A lot of things I thought I'd forgotten. Weird stuff I couldn't explain as a kid, but makes perfect sense now. In fact, it could only make sense if mom and Grams really were witches."
She sighed heavily. "Paige, the lake trips were before your time, but Phoebe probably still remembers them."
Phoebe nodded somberly.
"Every summer, we would spend at least two weeks in these beautiful cabins upstate. They were only a few yards from the lake. The first couple of trips we took were with mom and dad. After they divorced, mom still took us, by herself."
Phoebe shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Although removed from the event by almost two decades, she still had ugly memories of that horrible day. Piper noted her sister's discomfiture sympathetically.
"Mom loved that place. But I have no memory of her ever actually getting in a boat of any kind. Sure, she would get her feet wet at the shoreline, playing with us. But that's about all. And now that I think about it, I can't ever even remember her swimming past the dock."
Piper leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She no longer saw the table in front of her; her eyes lost focus and it was clear that she was re-living a traumatic memory.
"I remember waking up that morning, and mom and Prue were just… gone. There was no hint of any problem the night before. At least, nothing my eight year old self remembers. We had toasted marshmallows at the campfire, then we went to bed. But when I woke the next morning…"
Piper hesitated a long moment before continuing. Finally, she let out a ragged sigh. "Any time before this, and I would have thought my subconscious was playing tricks on me. I felt… a presence. Something totally evil. Malevolent. Like it was sitting on my chest and crushing me under its weight. And I could sense it laughing. I don't mean that I heard it. It wasn't a sound. But somehow I sensed this laughter… it was delighted that it had managed to do something to hurt me and my family. Not happy. Triumphant. It was taunting me. I was too young to understand that. I was just scared. And… I don't know how I know this either, but… whatever this thing was - it lived - maybe still lives - in the water. Every sense I had of it was rippled, distorted, kind of like what you would see, if you look up towards the sky when you're underwater."
"Oh, my God, Piper," Paige swallowed hard.
"I felt like I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and I think Phoebe felt it too."
Phoebe's eyes were filling with tears. Like her sister had done earlier, she had clamped a hand over her mouth to keep herself from crying out.
"But you didn't actually see or hear anything," Paige sought to clarify.
Piper shook her head. "No. For years, I just thought, this was my brain trying to process the event. I was eight years old. My mother and sister had died. One night, they were there, we were laughing and happy, and the next morning - they were just… gone."
Piper picked up her mug again and sipped it slowly, trying desperately to keep her emotions under control.
"I didn't want to believe it," she said, almost talking to herself now, instead of her sisters. "And then we found the book, and I was confronted with this inescapable evidence that this whole world of witchcraft and demons might actually be real. And I couldn't deal with it. Because it meant that what I felt that day wasn't my imagination. It wasn't my brain sorting out a traumatic event. It means that what I remember from that day actually happened. It's a real memory. Something totally evil killed our mom and our sister. I can only guess now, it has to be some sort of demon."
"But why? That's what I don't get. Why would it want mom and Prue?"
"I have no idea," Piper shook her head sadly. "I never told you guys this, but I went and looked at the police reports from the events about three years ago. Usually, even with an accidental drowning, there's a fair amount of details in the records. But not in this case. The witness statements, the coroner's report - everything was as bare-bones as possible."
Paige frowned. "You don't think someone's covering up what really happened, do you?"
"I think if anyone knows what really happened, they weren't willing to say."
Paige glanced over at Phoebe, who had been gradually shrinking herself down into an ever tighter ball of misery. She was staring away from them, towards the atrium.
"Phoebe, you okay?"
When Phoebe didn't immediately answer, Paige got up off the couch and sat on the arm of the chair. She reached over and gently began to rub Phoebe's shoulders. Phoebe let a choked sob escape, then buried her head in her arms.
"Oh, honey," Paige murmured sadly. She leaned over and hugged Phoebe from behind.
"She remembers," Piper said somberly. "In some ways, I think it was probably worse for Phoebe. She was only six when it happened."
The conversation halted for a few moments, as Paige continued to hug Phoebe, who was sobbing quietly.
"Sorry," Phoebe croaked, finally lifting her head. "I just kind of hit a double whammy there."
"Double?" Paige frowned, not understanding. She resumed rubbing her sister's shoulders.
"I - never mind. It's not important."
Piper took a sip from her mug, a thoughtful expression on her face. "Why did you come back, Phoebe?" She asked quietly. "When I talked to you a few days ago, you were adamant that you were staying in New York. What made you change your mind?"
Phoebe uncurled herself slightly in the chair. She reached up her hand towards her shoulder, and clasped her baby sister's hand tightly. Piper had asked her a similar question the night before, and she had deflected it intentionally - but not today.
"Right after you'd called me that night, I went straight to bed," Phoebe recalled, her voice almost toneless. "And - I just woke up the next morning, and knew that something was horribly wrong. It wasn't that I'd lost my job, or that dad didn't want to see me. Those things hurt, but - this was different. This was…" she paused, searching for the right words. "I felt like I had been asleep for a very long time, and all of a sudden, I had woken up for real. Like I had been living a dream. Like I was under a sp…" she faltered on the word. "Under a spell," she finished at last. "It scared me. Really scared me. And I just knew, I had to come home. To find you guys. I had no idea why I even got on the plane - at the time. Now, I think I know why - and I'm even more scared."
"Oh, trust me, you're not the only one who's scared," Piper assured her. "Right now, my creep-o-meter is all the way up to eleven, and the dial only goes to ten."
"So, what do we do, Piper?" Paige asked. "You don't think this thing in the lake is still around… do you?"
"I think there's a larger issue here that we need to address first."
"Which is?"
"Let's assume for sake of argument that everything in that letter is actually true. That we're all witches, and Grams bound our powers when we were little to protect us from demons. The spell she wants us to cast will restore those powers to us. We'd be able to conjure magic. The question is - what else happens, if we flip that switch back to the 'on' position?"
Phoebe and Paige exchanged a worried glance.
"You think we shouldn't cast the spell?" Paige asked.
"I think, before we do anything else, we should read the fine print on this inheritance of ours," Piper answered solemnly.
"You think mom and Prue were killed because of it?"
"But why?" Phoebe asked. "Even if we can cast spells, so what? What would demons want with us? We're not that special - are we?"
"Let's see if we can find out," Piper said. "Paige, would you please bring the Book of Shadows down from the attic?"
"Sure." Paige got up from her seat.
"Grams says, read the book. So let's read it. And find out what we're really dealing with here."
"What if it's all true?" Phoebe asked quietly.
"Then we have some very important decisions to make," Piper replied grimly. "Far more important than property taxes or replacing broken water heaters."
Paige hurried from the room to retrieve the book.
"I'm having a hard time believing we're even having this conversation," she confessed to Phoebe. "I kinda always knew our family was crazy, but this…" she shook her head, still not accepting if no longer disbelieving. "Magic. Witches and demons. Curses and spells. What the hell are we supposed to do with all that?"
Phoebe had grabbed a facial tissue and wiped her face. She smiled sadly at her sister. "What else can we do?" she shrugged helplessly. "When crazy runs in the family, we run with crazy."