“I’m not only awake,” I said,” I’m stumped.”
“Tell me about it,” Travis said. “I just looked at his disk.”
“Do you happen to speak Ryanese?”
“Not a word, but it’s a starting point. We have to find out what these people have in common.”
“Did you notice that the dates are months, even years apart?” I asked.
“Yeah, whatever Ryan was hunting happened over a relatively long period of time.”
“Maybe he saw a pattern involving these people,” I said, thinking out loud. I was so thoroughly engrossed in our conversation that I was startled to find myself staring into Sashkatu’s face. He parked himself on the keyboard and eyed me balefully. He must have climbed up the bookshelf and walked across the window sill to reach me. The others wouldn’t be far behind. Dawn was breaking and stomachs would soon be grumbling for breakfast.
“Let’s start with the names and see what that nets us,” Travis said.
“Okay, I’ll try to find out if the list refers to people who are alive or dead.” Google and Facebook should be good places to start.
“Let me know what you find. I’m going to be chasing down a story about political corruption in Albany.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.
“Depends on how you look at it. I have a lot of fun receiving the paychecks. Especially when a stack of bills comes in.” Sashkatu started to chatter at me and batted at the phone in my hand. His gang of five chimed in. “What on earth is going on over there?” Travis asked.
“A feline uprising,” I said as another cat scrambled onto my lap.
“I’ll let you deal with the mutiny. We’ll talk later.”
I powered through my morning routine, intrigued by the clues and where they might lead. But it was hard not to dwell on the sobering fact that Ryan’s death lay at its core.
* * * *
“Kailyn,” Tilly called as she came through the connecting door. “Oh dear, oh my, Kailyn.” The timbre of her voice was the perfect soundtrack for hand-wringing. I was restocking products in the second aisle. I set down the jar I was holding and intercepted her on her way to the counter. She was wearing the turban she used for dramatic effect when giving a reading. Paired with her bright sneakers and bedazzled muumuu, she looked like the one who flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
I gave her rouged cheek a kiss. “What’s up, Aunt Tilly?”
“Mayor Tompkins is threatening to have Merlin arrested.”
“For what?” Maybe this was a good time for hand-wringing.
“Election fraud, forgery—”
“Wait, is this about his bid to run for the town board?”
“Yes, that’s how I understood it.”
“Where is Merlin now?”
“In my shop watching TV, but Tompkins told me to come back to discuss the matter at three o’clock.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said, which immediately calmed her. Too bad it didn’t ease my mind. If Merlin was arrested, the whole issue of his status in New Camel and the country would come under scrutiny. He might even be deported, if they could figure out where he belonged. The truth was he didn’t belong anywhere in the present. When the news outlets picked up the scent of this problem, things would go from bad to worse. Merlin would become national news. From there it was a short hop, skip, and jump to international notoriety, courtesy of social media. The man who came from nowhere. Whenever things went haywire with modern technology, Bronwen would bemoan the loss of the “olden days.” I used to tease her about being old-fashioned, but I was starting to realize there was something to be said for a simpler, Little-House-on-the-Prairie life.
At ten to three, we all piled into my car for the short journey to New Camel’s town hall. The building occupied an old white clapboard house with forest green shutters and a weather vane that straddled the sharply pitched roof. The second floor was off limits, deemed unsafe as far back as I could remember. In any case, the main floor was adequate for the town’s purposes. The mayor’s office was in a small room off the public area. There was no mayoral residence. Tompkins lived in the house where he’d grown up, although now with his wife and children instead of his parents.
We walked into his office at precisely three o’clock. He had three chairs waiting for us. Either he’d guessed that I would accompany my aunt and Merlin, or three was the room’s normal complement. Tilly had talked Merlin into wearing his best jeans and a sweater. She’d lassoed his unruly hair with a rubber band. He could have passed for an eccentric artist, a mad scientist, or a hippy leftover from the seventies.
Once we were all seated, Tompkins reached across his desk to hand me a form that was several pages long. The heading at the top of the first page read “Petition to Run for the New Camel Town Board.” Signatures filled all the lines below it. I flipped to the next page and the next. There were a lot of signatures. I looked more closely at the names that were both printed and signed. I recognized most of them as belonging to local residents. So far so good. My first clue that all was not as it should be, came with the signature of Jim Harkens who’d been dead for the last few months. Another problem popped up a moment later when I found Tompkins’s signature. Oh Merlin, weren’t there any laws back in your time? Or were you exempt from them because of your status and close relationship with the king?
Tompkins was glaring at me when I looked up from the papers. “Do you understand why I asked your aunt to come back to discuss this matter more fully?” His expression dared me to shrug it off.
“I apologize, Mayor Tompkins. What can I say? As you’re aware, Merlin is a bit different and often doesn’t understand the right and wrong of such things. My aunt and I promise to be more vigilant about keeping him out of trouble. We’d be so very grateful if you could find it in your heart not to turn this over to the police.” Boy, did I hate begging him. I wanted to go home and wash my mouth out with soap.
“There is a remarkable aspect to your cousin’s disregard for the law,” Tompkins said, breezing over my plea. “He forged my signature so perfectly not even I can tell the difference. I checked a lot of the other signatures against documents in our files that were signed by those individuals. Merlin forged them all with uncanny accuracy. How do you explain this ability?”
I went with the first thing that came to me, though it was far from a perfect analogy. “Rain Man.”
Tompkins frowned. “Excuse me?”
“The Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman movie from the late eighties?”
“Are you trying to tell me your cousin is an autistic savant?”
“How else could he do such a thing?” I said, hoping it didn’t occur to the mayor that Merlin couldn’t have memorized all the signatures, because he’d never seen most of them before.
“In-ter-est-ing.” He drew the word out as though dissecting the possibility. “That would explain a lot,” he concluded.
“You know what?” Tilly piped up. “I would love to bake a pie or cake for you. Name your favorite. Why don’t we make it a different one every week for a month? Six months? You deserve it for your trouble.”
Tompkins sighed. “You don’t want to be bribing me, Matilda.” He looked at me, shaking his head. “Kailyn, please take your family home before they break every law we have in New Camel.”
“Are you going to bring this to the attention of the police?” I had to know if there was a knife hanging over our heads.