The Witches of Bellinas: A Novel

by J. Nicole Jones

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

A dreamy California Gothic about a woman who moves to the mysterious town of Bellinas to save her marriage, only to be swept up in a hedonistic cult that isn’t what it seems

Tansy and her husband Guy are the newest arrivals in Bellinas, a lush oasis tucked into the coast of northern California where a reclusive, creative community is beginning to take shape. Helmed by Guy’s cousin Mia, a famous model -turned -wellness -luminary, and her tech mogul husband, the group renounces the outside world in pursuit of purity, fashioning their own rules about what to eat and how to live.

Everything seems perfect in Bellinas: food is abundant, flowers are always in bloom, and nearby wildfires leave the town remarkably unscathed. While Guy is happy in their new lives, Tansy becomes more and more suspicious of the community and increasingly desperate to save her already-fragile marriage. And as lonely women have throughout the ages, she wants to believe in what may only be a beautiful lie.

The Witches of Bellinas unfolds as a confession from Tansy, filled with anguish over the life, and sense of self, she’s surrendered in her desperation to belong. In J. Nicole Jones’s clever reimagining of cult power and groupthink, the question isn’t why join, but rather, what happens when you understand the danger, but can’t conceive of a way out?

 

Release date: May 14, 2024

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 240

Sample

CHAPTER 1

THEY SAY THE WINDS OF BELLINAS HAVE DRIVEN SOME to madness. The closest thing to being lost at sea, they say. The way this little lip of land juts into the ocean tempts gusts and gales from all directions. The cold north winds that lash and bite. A gentle zephyr from the west. Dry hot blasts that blow in helter-skelter from southern deserts. The old east wind that brings the devil with a hint of bay laurel. I have not yet found their howls and whips a threat to my sanity, despite what the villagers may say. I know their secrets, you see, but they also know mine.

I hear a number of souls have found the ocean depths more hospitable than our seaside town, and not just the abalone divers. I don’t blame them, frankly—the divers or the dead. Don’t believe those who say that the fog is just fog, that the latest breeze is nothing but air in motion, that the thunderheads worn by nearby mountain peaks are merely weather. That those aren’t messages left in the sand when the tide goes out. If I have learned anything from my time in Bellinas, it is to follow the signs, even—no, especially—when you’re unsure of having seen any at all.

Abalone is not the only black market in Bellinas. I’d tell you to ask around, but it’s safer not to. I myself have been locked in the old schoolhouse since finding out a few things. I must spend my last hours recording the real and true history of this pretty little town—technically an unincorporated village. As I write this, the eucalyptus leaves outside the window sway in a fragrant, deceptive breeze. Every now and then, a bobcat bounds after a gray fox through the emerald brush that carpets the hill behind the school. It’s all poison oak, but it sure looks nice, which you may take as a metaphor if you are into that sort of thing.

The unincorporated villagers of Bellinas will accuse me of sinister acts, most of which I confess forthwith in cursive as neat as the letters modeled here on posters for the primary school students. Except one. I am not like them. I am not a witch. If I were, I would have long since conjured something better to eat. Last term’s forgotten graham crackers and fermenting juice boxes have been my only sustenance these last three days as I step onto the path walked first by Herodotus of Halicarnassus in the Histories. The Father of History, he is called, when he is not known as the Father of Lies. Lies are what this history will be labeled by my enemies, but I’ll try not to dwell on that now.

I think we can all agree that it is only fair to allow the condemned a last confession. How will I go? Will they dunk me in our charming lagoon to see if I float? A sensible and inexpensive option. There is always burning at the stake, which may depend on the county fire restrictions when they come for me. On top of everything else, it is fire season here. It would be a shame to see my only remaining friends ablaze. The trees, I mean. They have been steadfast and loyal companions this summer in Bellinas, alongside my books, which are themselves highly flammable. For months, wildfires have burned, besieged, and blackened the land that surrounds Bellinas, and yet, the winds here bring barely the faintest rumors of smoke. Fire is usually the only thing that spreads faster than gossip. At least, in the dry season. Like everything else in Bellinas, fire awaits its direction from the wind. But who directs the wind?

Perhaps I am due the same fate as my husband. Not the typical sentence for those accused of witchcraft, but one easier to cover up by the townspeople of Bellinas. For such a sect to survive in secrecy, they cannot afford to be splashy. Justice is rarely dramatic. If I have learned anything, it is that to seek out the truth is a choice between deaths; either body or spirit must succumb. They will say I am responsible for what happened to my husband, the good townspeople. I know that I failed him as a wife, but is that a crime? Oh, Guy. I am sorry. Given the option to start again here in Bellinas, I’m fairly certain that I would make the same choices. I was at the mercy of a number of elements, and, well, nobody’s perfect. A life with no self, or a death with what minor dignity I can salvage in the face of annihilating darkness. This, in a nutshell, is my current dilemma.

Here is one truth as old as history and as dull as any lesson taught in schoolrooms like this one: women are responsible for most ills in this world and witches all the rest. A fact as ordinary as a game of schoolyard jacks—called “knucklebones” by the Romans, for what they played with. How commendably straightforward, their logic. What do the Romans have to do with anything, you may ask. Everything and nothing. I am a student of history. Or I was. I could have been a scholar, in fact, had I not met my husband. I could have taught in great marble lecture halls in foreign universities. Instead, I write this, my final history, in the humble one-room schoolhouse in Bellinas. I hope it apparent, however, that my education has not entirely gone to waste.

But where are my manners? If I am to be accused of witchcraft, I shall not be accused of rudeness. My name is Tansy Black, though I used to be Tansy Green. In truth, I never liked being called Tansy. Constance is my full name, a family name. My grandmother’s name. My parents thought it was too austere for a child, and confusing besides, having two Constance Greens in the family at once. But I always felt like a Constance. Serious, faithful, and, yes, constant. I was not a flower until Guy came along.

Perhaps now that I am a widow, I will retake my maiden name, though the forms required for such a change the first time around were nothing less than a hassle. I have wondered from my exile in the schoolhouse what my acquired name says about me. From light to darkness. From Green to Black, like the hills after 

a fire. I have little time to ponder psychology, much less philosophy. I must narrow my gaze exclusively to history, if I am to accomplish my Herodotean task.

The good townspeople of Bellinas follow an October-through-May school year. Like much else, their alternative pedagogy felt revelatory when we first arrived. Its benefits were evangelized by an eighteenth-century Austrian clairvoyant who claimed to be the reincarnation of a saint from the Middle Ages. In keeping with his doctrines, the children of Bellinas are grouped not by age or subject proficiency, but by the color of their auras. Being the offspring of the beautiful and rich, they will also be beautiful and rich and feel little the consequences of following a charlatan into mystical ignorance, even one long dead. I suppose he may have reincarnated again by now. Who is to say?

In any case, the length of the summer vacation serves my purpose to write in safety, even if that was not their leader’s purpose in setting it so. Or maybe it was . . . somehow? According to Manny—excuse me, Father M—the good townspeople’s leader, everything is connected, the smallest of events has purpose, Spirit has a plan, trust the Universe, etc., etc. Especially if those predestined events from the cosmos benefit him.

I question whether the approved curriculum includes material enough to cover even such an abridged school term. Most of what the rest of the world recognizes as science and literature and basic geography is absent from any learning materials I have come across in search of writing implements. Not to mention the absence of the Classics! Not a word about Homer or Ovid. No volumes of Herodotus or Thucydides in their classroom. Once, when I politely inquired of a resident child the name of the islands that appear on the horizon when the fog clears, he replied, “The Falklands,” and his mother corrected him with “Lemuria.”

I could not tell you where the graham crackers and juice boxes I have been living on come from, as it was assuredly not from the loving hands of any self-respecting Bellinian mother. The children of Bellinas have known only macrobiotic or probiotic or bioorganic raw creations at the sun-warmed and splinterless picnic tables that line the walkway to the school, but are now stacked inside against the front doors. A decent barricade is never a bad idea. Had I any salt, I would have ringed the building with it, as recommended in The Book of Magic, a volume I discovered improbably in Bellinas, from an enlightening series by Anna Nováková. The women here cling to their charms of abalone, but my preferred talisman has always been a book. It will be in Nováková’s The Book of Weather, my personal favorite, that I hide the pages of my story. There is more than one way to survive. I would kill for a real cup of coffee. Forget about cake altogether. What tragedies might have been avoided had there been a bar of chocolate or a flaky croissant in arm’s reach. I suspect everyone in town is always hungry . . .

The schoolhouse itself is finished in spotless white stucco and capped with a bell tower to ring the town’s few children to and from its wide double doors. The schoolyard and its paths are lined in springtime bulbs, pretty pink tulips and sunshine yellow daffodils that bloom year-round. It is very nearly the first of October, but the steps leading to the schoolhouse will not catch a single leaf of autumnal orange. The ocean glitters from the end of the street, and mere yards beyond the entryway, the lagoon sparkles. Hats off to the so-called founding families of Bellinas, who knew how to pick a spot. Of course, they did little founding in the first place.

Yes, there is nothing to mar the charms of their schoolhouse except for its history. Before our move out west, I myself—a history scholar—knew woefully little of the state's

 Mission Trail, the scar that runs the length of California. The Bellinas schoolhouse is the last and most modest of the twenty-two missions built to the standards of murderous friars by the hands of enslaved Indigenous peoples. As with all the structures in town, its unassuming perfection will read as a threat to those who know better than to look for peace in the pastoral.

The green-and-white road signs directing traffic to Bellinas disappear with such regularity that whatever state or local governing body is in charge of replacing them no longer bothers. Drivers pass their intended route again and again before abandoning the search for more welcoming villages due north. Point Ray and Olyma. Albion Bay or Tolemas. Psychics and cynics have an even harder time finding the town than your average day-tripper. Bellinas is protected by more than the remoteness of its landscape. What whispers have been planted in the wind, like mustard seed scattered by Spanish colonizers, to ward off scrying eyes? I doubt the devil himself could find Bellinas, but this is not a tale of the devil come to the countryside. If anything, it’s the other way around.

The residents will claim this secrecy is to protect outsiders. From themselves, among other things. Bellinas was best known for its cliffs favored by suicides and shipwrecks. A remote and distressed magnet for disasters, when thought of at all. Until the town’s refurbishment. The Roses spared no expense, it must be said—money is almost as good as magic for changing one’s image. Bellinas has been transformed into a picturesque playground for the elite seeking privacy. A better view than any offered by our cliffs could not be chosen for one’s last, it is true.

It is of the utmost importance to be able to distinguish between the natural forces of the landscape and the unnatural winds raised to taunt and tease. Take, for example, this unlikely instance of weather: A slab of fog has lifted, as it does every morning at exactly nine o’clock. The church bells lull the good town into another perfect day with the requisite number of clangs, and by the last toll, the feather-gray morning mist is dispersed entirely. There remains no evidence that anything dour or heavy might have passed through Bellinas in all its history, only diamonds of moisture left on the tips of leaves and at the ends of the cheatgrass. For the ensuing hour each morning, the countryside glitters like a jewelry box open under the lights of a vanity, but nobody asks why, so ingrained is their acceptance of perfection. The good townspeople of Bellinas, that is. The unincorporated villagers, as they really are. Entitled to utopian splendor, no matter the cost.

At first glance, there truly was so much to love about the good town of Bellinas. About the idea of such a place. A kind of Bohemian Eden. There is even a nearby road called the Bohemian Highway. For the longest time, I thought, or made myself think, What a stroke of fortune it was being invited into this paradise populated by young, artistic couples, by families who had been farming the land for centuries, by the enlightened few who had escaped the grime and grind of city life. What luck. What an opportunity. How magical. Be grateful, Tansy, you must. All of these beautiful people, and then us too, somehow, there to live as in that original garden, but with expensive dresses and avocados instead of apples. Avocados grown in their backyards, no less. To worship the mysteries and splendors of the natural world, that was the higher calling of their utopian colony. This was to be accomplished simply through living their best, most creative lives. Even now, given everything that has happened, I recall that first visit with warmth: a testament either to the postcard-perfect charm of the town or to the fact that no matter the scenario, when faced with a repetition of circumstances, I, as women since Eve, defer always to that mantra we are born knowing by heart—maybe this time will be different. But maybe this time, after writing this history, it will be different.

 

CHAPTER 2

 

GUY AND I WERE NEWLYWEDS THE AFTERNOON WE FIRST arrived in Bellinas, only a few short months ago, on the summer solstice. After a week spent in the lush forests of Northern California, Bellinas was the last stop on a delayed honeymoon. My husband’s only living relative, his cousin Mia, emailed us an invitation to her midsummer birthday celebration. She directed us to print a map along with her detailed, bulleted directions. There was no phone signal, she warned, writing, “You may not want to ever leave.” That is what had happened to her. She had fallen in love with the place.

The party was to meet at Psalm Valley Farm, the town’s oldest, which grew wheat for a century and had been converted into a flower farm with rows of blue dahlias, zinnias in an array of pinks, yellow-orange sunflowers, bloodred snapdragons, and many more whose names I do not know. You could hardly sneeze in Bellinas without coming across some kind of rainbow. Where Guy couldn’t wait to see his cousin, I found myself dragging my feet, reluctant to give up our solitude, to go back to the way things had been before. For the past week, Guy held my hand on muddy paths lined with bristly Douglas firs and Sitka spruces swollen with burls. I marveled at the height of coastal redwoods as he kissed my neck. Against a felled sequoia, its heartwood the warmest pink and its growth rings annotated in world events, my husband bowed to whisper reminders of the night before. “Remember when . . . ?” he asked, as my cheek pressed into the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake: 1431. “And when we . . . ?” he continued, my lashes obscuring the discovery of electricity: 1752. I let the happiness I felt in that moment of renewed closeness grow taller than the forest of disappointments we had collected in the course of years together.

A winding two-lane highway led us to Bellinas. Holding hands over the armrest in the car, we emerged in mottled sunlight from a canopied temple into full blue sky over hills of alternating emerald green and canary yellow, not unlike the flower-shaped cluster of tiny stones singing their own brightness on the ring that had once belonged to Guy’s mother and was now mine. Roadside blooms swayed with such cheer I would not have been surprised to see smiling faces turn and wave their petals in friendly greeting.

“What’s that one?” I asked over and over. I knew Guy enjoyed having the answers, and I exaggerated only slightly for the fun of drawing out his amusement.

“The purple are lupine.”

“And the tall yellow ones?”

“Mustard. It’s an invasive species. Like you,” he said, winking at me in the rearview mirror.

He had moments of wittiness. Tansy, my namesake herb, was considered both a pernicious weed and a powerful medicine.

“The orange ones?”

“California poppy. It’s the state flower.”

“That figures.”

“What?”

“That the official state symbol is a hallucinogen.”

Guy laughed, and I thought I would die from happiness. “It’s not that kind of poppy.”

“I knew it was all too beautiful to be real. Am I hallucinating this whole place? This entire trip?”

My husband kept his eyes on the road, but I could tell by the pleats of skin fanning the edges of his sunglasses that he was as happy as I was then.

The highway carrying us away from our forested retreat reached a T in the road. Waiting for traffic to clear so that we could turn south onto the famous coastal highway, I marveled at how this kind of nature could belong to the same country I had grown up in. I’d lived in Charleston until college, and the coast of South Carolina was one of soft marshlands and warm seawater stirred occasionally by a hurricane. I was bewitched by the drama of the moody, indecisive landscape.

“Roll down the window,” Guy said. In no hurry, and without anyone behind us, he remained stopped at the intersection. “Do you hear it?”

I caught the distant ups and downs of sirens. After a decade in New York, I must have tuned it out. “Do you think there was an accident?” Guy made a face and rolled down my window. It was the cawing of seagulls. Were these hills so close to the water? The air no longer carried the earthy warmth of the redwoods, but filled the car with the cool sharpness of seaweed and eucalyptus.

“And?” he prompted.

I went from worried to spellbound, and in such a dazed state, I felt as if I could imagine any number of whispered conversations. The chatting blades of grass and the gossip of pert blue daylilies growing ditchside. The humming of pebbles in the shallow riverbed the road followed toward its release. The lazy yawns of pillowy clouds. Finally some dissonance broke through. The crash of water. The hairs on my neck stood, and my skin prickled as I listened to expanses both internal and outside. My eyes had been closed long enough to break the flirtatiousness we’d cultivated. I turned to find Guy giving me a curious look. He knew me well enough to see when something

percolated beneath my stillness. He described my expressions as “unreadable” in equal instances of fascination and frustration as it suited him.

“Are we that close to the ocean already?” I smiled, both in confusion and to please him with a question he could answer.

Across the highway, a waxy patch of ivy and small, sturdy flowers stood out against a thick gray cloud obscuring the horizon, as if the green and pink were painted stage props. The Pacific lay in front of me, but I could not see it for the curtain of fog. I suddenly felt very high up, which made the water I heard, but couldn’t yet see, feel more dangerous than familiar. One. Two. Three. Four, I counted, as I was taught to do by a psychiatrist in moments like this, when the spiraling and falling of vertigo pounced. I noticed a line of seagulls gliding toward the car window—a wind that carries dizziness and four white birds precedes an ambush, says Anna Nováková’s Book of Weather. When I look back, her work makes everything clear. She has become my most trusted advisor.

Guy leaned over for a kiss, ...