Eight
EIGHT
I jolted awake, turned my head, found no Lorne, checked the clock, saw it was eight, called out for him, and got no answer.
“No,” I moaned, upset with myself I’d missed him. He had gotten up and left, and I’d slept through the whole thing. It was nice of him to let me sleep, but I felt terrible. And worried. More than anything, I was that.
Rolling sideways, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand. For perhaps the hundredth time since she’d gotten it for me, I thanked Amanda in my head as I hit the button to call the man I loved.
“Xan,” he answered on the second ring. “I’m in the middle of something, but I will be back as soon as I can. I promise.”
“But you left home without your?—”
“No,” he said quickly. “You got out of bed and cast your protection spell, even though I don’t think you were actually awake.”
“I did?”
“You did,” he rumbled. “I promise. Now go back to sleep, and I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay,” I mumbled. “I love you.”
“Me too,” he whispered, then hung up.
So very pleased, I rolled over with the phone in my hand and went back to sleep. Somehow, in the middle of everything, I had forgotten it was Saturday.
First there was a bump, then a yawn, then the smell of banana, which wasn’t that odd since I made a lot of banana bread…though none that week. Rolling over, I opened my eyes to slits and saw JJ, Amanda’s youngest, now five, smiling at me.
“Why’re you in my bed?”
“’Cause it’s almost eleven and we were supposed to go to the farmers’ market this morning and then come here and make tarts.”
“That was today?”
They giggled. “Yes, Uncle Xan.”
“I totally spaced that.”
They shrugged. JJ, born Julia, preferred their gender-neutral name and pronouns, and liked to wear boys’ clothes. But JJ also liked to carry a mini Birken that matched their mother’s regular-sized one. At the moment, JJ had on pink gingham socks, denim overalls, and a short-sleeved shirt with sharks.
“Nice shirt.”
“Boys’ shirts have predators on them, like sharks, did you know that?”
Predators. Did most five-year-olds use that word? “I did not.”
“Girls’ shirts have bunnies or kittens or ducks.”
“Okay.”
I was certain JJ and Toby both had such amazing vocabularies, even at such young ages, because Amanda and Eddie had talked to them since they were born like they spoke to all the adults in their lives. She had been twenty-six when Toby was born, and didn’t have her own mother to turn to, and didn’t trust her mother-in-law enough to ask for advice, seeing how all her other children, Eddie excepted, had turned out.
So Amanda went with her gut, as she did with all things. She communicated with her children like they were adults. She talked to them constantly, about everything. If she had been away from them during the day for some reason—she had her own business, so most of the time, when they were infants, then toddlers, she worked from home—when she returned, she explained in excruciating detail what she had done. Once they went to nursery school, when they got home, she read to them and played with them, and there were endless adventures they went on together. And when she did have to leave them to fly away on business, she took comfort in knowing that I would step up and take care of them during the day and would hand them off to Eddie after school.
Because I had known even less than Amanda about children when she first brought Toby home, I followed her lead. I had been talking to them just like her and Eddie since they were crawling around on the floors of my cottage. And now, here I was, having a groggy conversation with her youngest at close to eleven in the morning.
“Boys’ shirts have dinosaurs on them too,” JJ continued, “and Toby says a T-Rex makes sense but not triceratops or stegosaurus or ankylosaurus because none of those ate meat. They were not predators. They ate veggies.”
“Got it.”
They studied my face for a moment.
“You have a question?”
“I asked Mom why there’s no lock on your front door, but sometimes, no matter how hard I pull, I can’t get out.”
“When has that ever happened?”
“Like when you say it’s raining too hard and you don’t want me to go outside.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then that time I brought my friend Ezra here to play, and he got to the door first, and when he tried to open it, it wouldn’t, but when I tried, it did.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I dunno, but Mom said that the door opens for us because it knows us and we belong in your house too.”
“That’s true.”
“When it keeps me in, it doesn’t want me to get sick or hurt.”
“That sounds right.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s magic,” I said because I never lied to my godchildren.
Amanda came in then, her perfume, the classic Chanel N°5, reaching me before she did. A second later she was hovering over me.
“You look nice,” I complimented her. The blue-and-white striped collared shirt paired well with the same baby-blue, long, pleated skirt.
“I also have on white backless pumps, short heel, because maybe we were supposed to be walking around the farmers’ market this morning.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
She grunted. “Did you go to the carnival last night?”
“Only briefly. I walked Father Dennis there.”
“Mom doesn’t like the carnival,” JJ chimed in. “She says it’s for children younger than us, drunks, and women of ill repute.”
“That’s so bad,” I assured her, but she only shrugged.
“What is ill repute?” JJ asked me. “I know what drunk is. Uncle Cam threw up at Easter and got it all over Aunt Denise’s shoes. Mom said he was piss drunk.”
I shot her a look.
“What? That’s Eddie’s family.”
“They’re your family too,” JJ and I said at the same time.
She shook her head in disgust.
Amanda did not believe in sugarcoating things for her children. Her parents had not been honest with her, which was why they had no relationship now. She wouldn’t let that happen with her kids. She would throw herself on a grenade for them, so she certainly was never going to hide anything, let alone her honest opinions on everything from poor management practices in the workplace, to boring white walls, to women who wore dark lipstick first thing in the morning.
“Ill repute means girls I would never let sit for you,” she told JJ.
They nodded. “I see. They have questionable morals.”
“That’s correct.”
How many five-year-olds even knew what the word questionable meant?
“I just woke up, and I’m already tired,” I told my best friend.
“That is not my fault. It’s probably yours because you were up late, running around Osprey with your intended.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“And now I need you to rise, get going so that we”—she indicated me and her—“can chat about what happened to the lovely Cordelia Wormwood.”
I groaned.
“In case you’re wondering, the town-hall meeting has been moved to one,” she explained.
“How did you manage that?”
“I told the mayor when she informed me of her proposed time that at noon I was eating and not convening for anything. I also pointed out that if we waited, Lorne would have more information to give the community than merely the facts of the crime, and the more answers he had, the better everyone would feel. Knowing if we do or do not have a murderer in our midst is eating away at all of us.”
“That was good thinking.”
“Well, let’s face it. I put her in office, I can take her out.”
“That’s not why she moved the meeting.”
She tipped her head, brow arched, daring me to contradict her.
“You’re a bully.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
The reality was, Amanda owned more land in Osprey, both commercial and residential, than anyone else. Even if somehow Allard Pace bought every commercial piece available, he would maybe own a third of what was not privately owned. Amanda, who had been abandoned by her family, taken in by me and my grandfather, and then became a self-made multimillionaire, had returned to her hometown with a vengeance after college. She was a wonderful, caring, kind person—but you didn’t want to cross her. She also sat on every board that had any kind of pull in the community, and had been the one to insist on hiring a city manager. It was time to drag Osprey into the twenty-first century.
I put my hands over JJ’s ears. “Are Diana and Ken going to give Troy any trouble because his bees are alive and theirs are dead?”
“No,” she assured me. “And I’m having new hives flown in for both of them, which they both lavishly thanked me for first thing this morning.”
I moved my hands from JJ’s ears.
“I heard all that,” I was told. “You were worried I’d cry about the bees, huh?”
“I was.”
“I cried this morning.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We made a donation to the global bee fund.”
“I had no idea there was such a thing, but that’s good.”
“Even though Ms. Flint and Mr. Slater thanked Mom for the new bees, Mom still called them bad names when we walked away from them at the farmers’ market.”
“Oh yeah? What’d Mom call ’em?”
“Dad said it was naughty to repeat them.”
“Did it start with a b ?”
They shook their head, big blue eyes on me. “No. The letter c for Ms. Flint and a d for Mr. Slater.”
I looked up at my best friend, who crossed her arms and glared.
“Really? That was early in the morning for the c word.”
Quick grunt from her.
“And the d ?” I inquired.
“Dickhead.”
“ Mom ,” JJ said, shaking their head. “So naughty.”
“I’m not going to get any better,” she informed her second born. “You should get used to it, all right?”
JJ squinted at their mother.
“Go tell your brother to pour Uncle Xan a glass of orange juice.”
They nodded and scrambled off the bed.
“Wait,” I called, and JJ stopped at the door to look at me. “Please make it apple, not orange. Orange gives me heartburn.”
JJ nodded. “Orange makes my stomach hurt.”
“Basically the same,” I replied.
They nodded and darted out.
“Since when?” Amanda asked me.
“What?”
“ Since when ,” she repeated, “does orange juice give you heartburn?”
“I’m getting older,” I told her.
“Bite your tongue,” she snapped, then motioned for me to move over so she could sit down next to me. “I stopped by Lorne’s office on the way here. He wasn’t there. He was at Kathy’s house with the arson inspector. Pete told me the ME started her autopsy at eight, and that she gave all her preliminary findings to Lorne but no one else.”
“And you’re chomping at the bit to know.”
“Some of these expressions of yours,” she said, squinting at me.
“Raised by my grandparents,” I reminded her.
She chuckled. “I am aware.”
I sighed deeply.
“Okay, Xan. Get up, wash your face, brush your teeth, and come out and have one of the bagels I brought.”
I was going to remind her I was not one of her children and so did not need instruction, but she’d already left the room.
After doing exactly what she’d said, making sure to slather on sunscreen I hoped Lorne had remembered before he left, I staggered out to my kitchen.
When I joined them, the first thing Toby asked me was why I slept in and missed the farmers’ market. I noted that his arms were crossed as he surveyed me.
“I’m sorry. I was tired and I forgot. I promise to make it up to?—”
“I hugged you when I got in bed,” JJ interrupted, “but you didn’t hug me back ’cause you weren’t awake.”
Walking over to JJ, I bent and squeezed them tight, which made them giggle. “I’m sorry, JJ, you know I love your hugs. I never want to miss one.”
“I know,” they told me.
“Uncle Xan,” Toby said, sounding annoyed, “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
He huffed out a breath. “I want to know what you were doing that made you forget about the farmers’ market.”
“It’s a long story.”
He nodded. “Okay. Make your tea and tell me all about it.”
The hot coffee Amanda was drinking went down the wrong pipe, but even that didn’t stop her from laughing. “Man, does he have your number.”
I went to get the kettle, but it was gone.
“I filled it,” Toby told me, and I saw it was already on the stove.
“Thank you, buddy.”
He sat down at the table and patted the chair beside him. Clearly, I was not getting out of explaining myself to a child whose diapers I used to change.
After the inquisition, Toby was mollified by my explanation about his uncle Lorne, the chief of police, being called to a crime scene, and me needing to stay up late to help him. I overslept, and that was the extent of my transgression, and he forgave me because he loved me. And the farmers’ market hadn’t been that great anyway. There were no cherries at all, which were his favorite. As he watched, I made quick work of my egg bagel with strawberry cream cheese that JJ had lovingly smeared for me.
“Did you let Lorne leave without his protection spell this morning?” Amanda asked me.
“No. Apparently, I got out of bed like a zombie and performed my little ritual.”
“Good,” she said softly.
Every day, I walked with him to the front door, carrying my salt cellar and my jar of cinnamon. Once there, I sprinkled salt on the floor, made him stand on it, walked around him and
asked for protection for the protector, ending with blowing a bit of cinnamon over him that I’d pinched out and placed in my open palm.
“People always say I smell so good—clean with a trace of cinnamon,” Lorne had mentioned the day before.
“Maybe people shouldn’t get so close that they’re smelling you,” I’d replied sharply, glaring at him.
His grin in return, as always, nearly made my knees buckle. I had it very bad for the chief of police.
“I remember that spell,” Amanda noted, smiling at me. “Your grandfather used to cast a similar one on both of us before we left each morning.”
“Yes, he did.”
“I miss those things,” she murmured.
So did I.
Amanda and I sat and talked as Toby walked around in the sunroom, looking through drawers, unscrewing the lids of jars, smelling the contents, and sometimes removing something for closer inspection. He was curious, and I liked that. JJ was on the couch with Argos, reading him a book the cat seemed to be enjoying.
When it was time for the town-hall meeting, I told Amanda to go without me and I would keep the kids. She seemed relieved with that arrangement, as her husband was playing golf with clients, and if I went to the meeting, Toby and JJ would have had to attend as well. I was certain Eddie’s parents would have loved to spend time with their grandchildren, and Eddie was gently pushing Amanda to let them, but she wasn’t there yet. It stemmed from their insistence on calling JJ Julia , and wanting to dress them in gender-affirming clothes. The concern with Toby was that he never stopped talking and that every word out of his mouth was a question. Eddie’s parents were not, Amanda insisted, a good fit for her children without either she or Eddie in attendance. Me, she could simply leave, as she did at a quarter to one.
Once she was gone, the three of us went outside and stood in the wind, arms open, letting the breeze blow any stagnant energy off us. I always felt better afterward.
“I like listening to the windchimes,” Toby told me, and after a moment, I noticed him staring at me.
“What?”
“Mom said that lady you didn’t like died last night.”
“She did. Your mother’s right.”
“Are you sad?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that yet.”
Toby nodded. “I understand. Sometimes you have to sit with your feelings. That’s what Mom always tells me to do.”
Amanda had been very smart. She’d gone to counseling and worked hard to heal herself before she became a parent so she wouldn’t put any of her past trauma onto her kids. “Your mother’s a very wise woman.”
Toby nodded, and I looked over at JJ, who was picking things for me in the yard—dandelions, St. John’s wort, sprigs of lemon balm, mint, and a few petals from a rose.
“I don’t like Brick in my class,” Toby said, “but if he died, I might be sad. I’m not sure.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“He always says I’m the teacher’s pet, but I can’t help it if Mr. Ingraham calls on me and I know the answers. You’re supposed to know them because you have to read stuff the night before. It’s all written down on the board.”
Toby was both a curious and logical child. It made perfect sense to him to be prepared for the next day’s lesson. “And lemme guess, when your teacher picks Brick, he never knows the answer.”
His eyes got big as he stared at me. “How did you know?”
I was going to say been there , but instead I said, “Lucky guess.”
“At recess, he’s always mad and tries to hit me in the head when we play dodgeball.”
“For starters, dodgeball shouldn’t be a thing anymore, but maybe Brick is having trouble learning or reading. Maybe he needs a tutor.”
“I don’t know, but he’s mad all the time .”
“Have you offered to help him study?”
“No,” he answered like I was insane. “Why would I do that?”
“Well, since you’re smart, and it sounds like he’s having trouble, you could see if he’d accept some help, and maybe you two could become friends.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling at him.
“I have a question,” he said after several minutes of us listening to the wind, which was something we did.
“You know you can always simply ask whatever it is,” I told him as JJ started dropping daisies off for me and I started weaving them into a chain.
“Missy Campbell said magic is evil.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think magic is evil?”
He shook his head.
“You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.”
JJ sat down beside me in the grass, having carried many daisies with them in their shirt. They rained down on me as Toby seemed to ponder what to say.
“Tell me,” I prodded the seven-year-old before turning quickly to JJ. “Are you wanting a crown, or a lei like you had when you went to Hawai'i?”
“Crown, please.”
“Okay.” I smiled at them before returning my attention to Toby. “Sorry. I’m listening.”
“You’re magic, and you’re not bad. You help people.”
“Thank you, Toby. I try.”
It was so nice outside with the sun and the warm breeze, I could almost forget about anything at all troubling. When JJ leaned their head against my side, I gave them a gentle hug.
“Who’s Missy Campbell?” I asked Toby.
“She’s a new girl in my class. She just moved here with her family last month.”
“I see.”
“She goes to Bible study and her youth pastor is Tanner Murphy.”
“I’ve seen him driving the church van,” I threw out.
“Me too. I didn’t know who he was until Missy introduced him to me when he came to the youth center.”
“Gotcha. Was he nice?”
He shrugged.
“You don’t know if he was nice?”
“I mean, he was okay, but then yesterday at recess she told me what he told her about magic being bad, and I didn’t understand why she said that.”
“Are you worried she’s right about magic?”
“No. I’m worried we can’t be friends, and she has a drone.”
Ah, priorities. “Is the drone amazing?”
He nodded.
“And if she says magic is evil and you say it’s not, then you might get in a fight and then you can’t play with her or the drone.”
He was quiet then, which was his way. He was a very thoughtful child, had been since he was a toddler. He never ran around and screamed, never threw things, bit people, or jumped up and down on their bed. His penchant for self-reflection had spoiled Amanda, as she was certain JJ would be similar.
JJ was not.
Her youngest was a thunderstorm contained only by their present size.
There were benefits to both.
Toby sighed deeply. “This is dumb. I’ll just save up my allowance for a drone. Dad said I could get one as long as I don’t buzz the squirrel.”
“The squirrel?”
“He’s eating all the birdseed. But I can get him his own squirrel feeder now since…” And then he stopped talking.
“Since what?” I prodded him.
Toby glanced at JJ, then back at me. “I can’t tell you right now.”
But one look at JJ told me they were dozing. “Tell me super quiet.”
Toby moved in close and dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “There used to be cats that would come into our yard, so Dad didn’t want to build a squirrel house in case the squirrel got too busy eating and one of the cats got him.”
“Makes sense.”
“But the cats are gone now.”
“What cats are gone?”
“Ghost, who lived behind us, and Dragon, who lived on the other side. Mrs. James and Mr. Diaz have been looking for them, but they can’t find them. And Mom said they should have kept them in the house, like we keep Doug, who gets to watch the squirrels from the kitchen window, but I still feel bad that they can’t find them.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“There are lots of cat posters at the vet. I saw them when we had to take Doug to get his shots. A lot of people can’t find their cats.”
Which was another tidbit of information. Dead bees. Missing cats. An eviscerated nymph and a murdered witch. A pattern was emerging, but I didn’t know what it meant.
When I looked back at Toby, his expression told me something had occurred to him even before he opened his mouth. “How come you never have to take Argos to the vet?”
What to say. “Argos would be mad if I tried to put him in a cat carrier.” Which was absolutely true.
“Sometimes Argos visits me at night, Uncle Xan. I think you should keep him home until everyone finds their cats.”
“I think that’s a really good idea,” I agreed, glancing over at the black cat sunning himself near us in the grass.
Once the shape of the crown was finished, I had Toby decorate it as JJ moved into my lap and went from dozing to sleeping.
“What’s up with this person? Why is JJ tired?”
“JJ was at a sleepover last night but had super bad nightmares. Mom had to go get ’em and bring ’em home at, like, two o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s not like JJ to have nightmares.”
“It was super dumb. They told me when they got home.”
“Tell me.”
Toby rolled his eyes. “JJ was at Timmy Reed’s house last night, and the house is by that part of the graveyard in the back, you know, the old part.”
“The old part,” I repeated because yes, I knew it well. I used to walk through it all the time on my rambling strolls all over Osprey when I was younger. “I do.”
“Well, JJ kept having a nightmare about being chased by animals like lions and wolves, and the last time they woke up, they said they looked out the window and there were two big toads out by where all the…what do you call them?”
“Crypts.”
“Yeah. JJ said there were humongous toads out there, and they thought they were gonna come by the window, and JJ didn’t want them looking in.”
“That actually sounds really scary,” I told Toby.
“Toads?” he asked, making a face. “Uncle Xan, toads aren’t scary.”
“They would be if they were huge.”
He shook his head like I was nuts. “JJ said they thought there were people in the graveyard, though, because they could see lights moving all around.”
“You know the cemetery tours have been going for a while now.”
“Yeah. They go until Halloween. I told JJ that when they got home, that they shouldn’t have been scared, but they didn’t care. They were just super happy to be back in their bed.”
“Well, JJ is only five.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “That’s really small.”
After a moment, I said, “Sorry you won’t get to play with the drone.”
“That’s okay.” He shrugged. “Like I said, I’m saving up my allowance. I bet I’ll have one before Christmas.”
“I bet you do too.”
“And besides, I don’t want Mom to be mad.”
Oh no. “What did your mother say about what Tanner Murphy said about magic?”
“She said Tanner Murphy wouldn’t know magic if it swam up next to him in a pool and bit him on the?—”
“I got it,” I assured him.
He nodded. “I knew you would.”