If only, I said to myself. I hooked my arm in my aunt’s and told her to follow my lead with Duggan.
He was standing where I’d left him. “All right, Detective, now that we’re here, what can we do for you?” I can do sociable as well as anyone.
“As you’re both aware, I have a murder case to investigate. The folks in this town are scared; they want the killer behind bars. I don’t have the time or patience for nonsense like this...this animal thing.” His upper lip started to curl, but he quickly shut it down. I wondered if there had been complaints about his attitude and if Police Chief Gimble had taken him to task about it.
“I understand,” I said. Tilly echoed me.
“Good. Let’s try to make this quick then. Do either of you know how all those animals came to be congregated on your street?” Although his tone was polite, it had a peculiar undercurrent, as if he’d actually said, “I dare you to explain away this one.”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” I replied. I’d decided our best defense would be to answer his questions with some of our own. I was waiting for the right moment.
He looked from me to Tilly and back again. “You mean to tell me that neither of you did anything that might have lured those animals here?”
I gave him a beats-me shrug. “I’m sorry it’s not what you want to hear, but that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
He was studying us like he was trying to detect the lie in our eyes. Time to turn the tables. “Seriously, Detective,” I said with a smile, “are you saying my aunt and I have magickal powers? That we’re some kind of animal whisperers?”
Duggan opened his mouth to answer me, but his brain didn’t seem to have come up with a response, so he let it fall closed again.
“Maybe what happened here should be chalked up to a mystery of nature,” I continued. “For all we know, it will happen again this time next year. We may be witnesses to a new pattern of animal migration.” I stopped myself short before I became too fanciful and overplayed my hand.
Duggan’s eyes narrowed. I imagined the debate raging in his head. How hard could he come down on me without being chewed out again by his boss?
“I’m going to let it go this time,” he grumbled, turning his failure into a magnanimous gesture, “but remember, I’ve got my eyes on you—on both of you.”
“Good to know,” I said, holding the screen door open for him. He hadn’t asked about Merlin, and I certainly wasn’t going to remind him. But it might not have been an oversight on his part. When he first met the wizard, he made a snap judgment about him. I’d seen it written plain as day on his face. He believed Merlin was the addled and eccentric black sheep in my family. And I had no plans to disabuse him of that notion anytime soon.
The last of the wild animals were heading away, probably wondering why they’d come here in the first place. After closing and locking the front door, Tilly fell back against it, looking weak with relief. After a few seconds, she straightened up. “Let’s go see if that pie is cool enough to slice!”
I glanced at my watch. It seemed like I’d been away from my shop for the entire day, but in reality it had been less than two hours. I made an executive decision. There was time for a quick piece of pie before I headed back to work. Tilly deemed the pie ready to eat, even though it was still venting steam and didn’t hold together properly when she put the knife into it. None of us cared about the aesthetics. I think we would have sucked it up through a straw if we had to.
The day’s events had made two things crystal clear to me: life was unpredictable enough without the added stress and craziness Merlin brought to it, and it was up to me to figure out a way to send him home, whether or not he wanted to go.
* * * *
I wasn’t back at work for long when Paul Curtis stopped in. I almost didn’t recognize him out of uniform. He looked younger, like the boy next door, in jeans, a polo, and sneakers.
“Hey, I just wanted to see how well you weathered Duggan. He can be tough when he’s stressed, and right now there’s a lot of pressure on him to catch Amanda’s killer, not that I’m trying to defend the guy, you know, though it probably sounds that way.” He was rambling like an awkward teenager.
“Thanks for checking on me,” I said, “but as you can see, I’m none the worse for my talk with Duggan. He did try to bite my head off, but I guess it was just too hard.”
Curtis laughed. “Listen, I was wondering if you’d like to go to lunch sometime. With me, I mean.”
I wasn’t surprised by his invitation. It had been a long time coming. But I hadn’t worked out how to respond. I couldn’t cite my relationship with Travis as a means of letting him down gently because I didn’t know if Travis and I still had a relationship. Then there was the more central issue—sure Curtis was nice enough, but I wasn’t particularly attracted to him. I hadn’t even worked out what I should call him. Until then I’d thought of him as Officer Curtis, but in his civvies, talking about a potential date, it had to be Paul.
“Here’s the thing, Paul,” I said, trying out his name, “I’m just coming out of a relationship, and I’d hate to ruin our chances by starting over when my head and heart aren’t in the right place. May I have a rain check?”
He looked disappointed but not crushed. “Yeah, sure, whenever you’re ready, just give me a call.” He took one of my business cards from the counter, asked for a pen, and wrote his number on the back for me. He asked if my aunt had recovered from the shock of finding Amanda. I asked how he liked working with Duggan, and we shared a couple of laughs at the detective’s expense. I felt like we’d left things between us at a good place.
A steady parade of customers kept me from dwelling too long on my love life or my lack of one. Toward the end of the day, Nancy Clemens walked in. She and Clifford, her husband of sixty years, were the “mom and pop” owners of The Soda Jerk. The diminutive couple had moved to New Camel and opened the café/soda fountain more than thirty years ago. As a kid, I remember always seeing Nancy behind the counter, making her extravagant ice cream concoctions. Clifford preferred socializing with the customers but was quick to roll up his sleeves if they were short-handed. It had become a rite of passage for teenagers in New Camel to wait tables there. The summer I did my stint, I walked my feet off and still managed to gain seven pounds.
“Hi, Mrs. Clemens,” I said, coming around the counter to give her a hug. I didn’t see her or her husband much anymore. Their son and daughter-in-law had taken over the day-to-day operation of the café around the time they’d turned eighty.
“How many times have I told you to call me Nancy?” she scolded me, her blue eyes twinkling with good humor. “Mrs. Clemens was fine when you were a kid, but you’re an adult yourself now.”
“Okay, Nancy,” I said, “but my grandmother would have had a meltdown if I’d done that when she was alive.” For all I knew, she was having one at that very moment.
“Bronwen was a fine woman but a little behind the times. Informality is the order of the day. I firmly believe that if you don’t adjust, you go the way of the dinosaurs.”
“What brings you in today?” I asked.
“Goodness,” she said with a chuckle, “I almost forgot. Clifford has a cold and all the cough medicines he’s tried upset his stomach. So I said to myself, Nancy, you need to take yourself over to Abracadabra, and Kailyn will know what to give him.”
“Colt’s Foot should do it,” I said. “Have a seat here while I grab it for you.”
“You’ve put in a chair. What a grand idea.”
It took me a full five minutes to locate the right jar. Whenever Merlin