Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Honey sent me home after I’d promised I would drink my weight in peppermint tea and try not to get stressed about anything. We had discovered the root cause of what was sending my magic haywire, but we still had no clue how to stop it, so for the time being our only recourse was to keep my anxiety at a minimum.
My guest author had been murdered, and Dierdre Miller was trying to convince me to sell my properties to a big developer that wanted to turn our town into some sort of tourist hellscape.
No chance of me getting stressed at all.
I got home and ordered myself an early dinner from our local Thai restaurant, because when anxiety comes knocking, the best thing to do is drown it in crab Rangoon and pad see ew. It also meant I wouldn’t need to go into the kitchen, where there were sharp pointy things and far too many items I could light on fire.
Strawberries had been cute, but the flying coffee and accidentally flaming candles were causes for concern.
It was too early to feed Bob—not that he would have argued—and I had to wait an hour before my own food would show up, so I grabbed my laptop and settled onto the couch in the living room. It was a squishy old-fashioned number that had deep, sinking cushions, so once you sat down, you were never getting back up again.
The old house didn’t have air conditioning, something that didn’t seem like a big deal most of the time, but as the July temperature outside inched closer to ninety, I was missing it a bit. I turned on the overhead fan and a little oscillating one I moved from room to room and thanked Aunt Eudora’s genius brain for having so many remote-controlled items in her home.
With the air circulating and time to kill, I set about doing pretty much exactly what Detective Martin had asked me not to and went searching for trouble by looking up Sebastian Marlow. I knew plenty about his public persona thanks to the videos I’d seen online as well as an in-depth info dump from Daphne, who seemed to have memorized his entire career.
Sebastian might have been known for his love and knowledge of birds, but as I started to dig into his credentials, I found website upon website dedicated to what they called “The Backyard Con Man.” Apparently Sebastian had no formal study in ornithology and had no actual credentials whatsoever in terms of being an expert.
I was surprised I hadn’t seen any of these criticisms before booking him. I had only briefly looked into him online when Daphne had made the suggestion, and everything I’d read before agreeing to the event had implied that Sebastian was the next big thing in terms of getting a new generation excited about animals and the outdoors.
Indeed, it seemed like he had raised a considerable amount of money for various wildlife conservation efforts. There was a lot of backlash from birding professionals about him not having a degree and not making it more apparent that he was just an enthusiastic amateur, but aside from that I couldn’t see any real skeletons in his closet.
I did some basic searches on Melody and Deacon, but there was barely anything about Melody online, and everything about Deacon was connected to Sebastian, barring a few bylines in his college newspaper.
If there was something in Sebastian’s past that had made him a target for murder, I wasn’t seeing it. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there, but it wasn’t obvious.
Staring at the photo of Deacon and Sebastian from their youth, I was taken aback by the warmth and obvious affection the two shared for each other. They were standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, twin megawatt grins, their faces splattered with mud from a charity race they had just completed.
How had they gone from that to what I had seen in the store on Saturday?
I set my laptop down as a knock sounded at the door. The legitimate struggle of getting up from the couch took an extra minute, and Bob was whipped up into a frenzy, pacing back and forth in front of the door like he was worried I might have missed the sound of the knock.
“Mreowwwww,” he declared.
“Buddy, I’m coming, it’s not an emergency.”
He did not agree with me. “Brr, brrrr, mrow.” He butted his head aggressively into my shin, then trotted up to the door, where he began actively pawing at the wood. Not scratching, thankfully, but some very enthusiastic pawing.
“I got it, chill.” I opened the door, expecting to be greeted with a bag of Thai food on my doorstep, but instead of crab rangoon, there was Deacon Hume.
Bob hissed, his striped orange tail lowering and his entire back end becoming denser as his fur stood on end. His tail looked like a bottle brush as he backed away.
It was very unusual for Bob to have such a negative reaction toward people, and it immediately set all my personal alarms jangling. Outwardly, however, I maintained a poised, even expression.
“Deacon, this is a surprise. What are you doing here? How did you know where I lived?” This latter question felt especially important, because I never gave my home address for event details or shipments, just the store’s.
“Oh, I just asked at the grocery store, and someone pointed me down the road.”
If I could have knocked my head repeatedly against the doorframe in that moment, I would have. I loved living in a small town, but there were some drawbacks. Like eager-to-help cashiers directing potential murderers to my front door.
“What are you doing here?” I asked again. I didn’t want to come across as rude, but it was more than a little strange for him to be here, and I was not loving the way Bob was still growling behind me. Animal intuition was a real thing, and I trusted my cat more than I did this relative stranger in front of me.
“I just heard about Sebastian.” My bristly exterior shield lowered slightly when he said this, because there was no mistaking how completely crushed he was. His whole face had paled, his shoulders slumped, and even in those few words his voice cracked with emotion.
Either this guy needed to get into acting, or he was genuinely distressed about the death of his former friend.
I also wasn’t going to let a big heart be the thing that got me killed, so I gestured toward the two big armchairs I had set out on the porch. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get us some tea. We can talk about it.”
He glanced over my shoulder into the house, as if perhaps he’d been expecting me to invite him inside, but while I might be too nosy for my own good, I also know at least one or two things about general self-preservation. When I waved my hand at the chairs a second time, redirecting his attention there, he took the hint and settled in. I closed the door behind him and locked it, then true to my word set about pouring two glasses of iced tea.
While doing this, I sent a quick text to Detective Martin to let her know what was happening. I would normally have sent this to Rich, but since he had no context about the murder or who Deacon was, he would probably be more curious than concerned when I told him some random man was at my house.
At least outside, with Detective Martin clued in and my Thai delivery en route, I was probably mostly safe.
When I headed back to the door, Bob followed after me, biting my sock.
“Buddy, what the heck?” My hands were full, so I pushed him away gently with my foot. He bit my big toe. “Ow.”
“ Mow ,” he declared.
“Look, I promise you I’ll be okay. I’m just right outside. Nothing is going to happen.” Still, he stood in front of the door and angrily swatted at me when I tried to open it. I considered letting him win this round, but then there would be a random man just sitting out on my porch for heaven knew how long. If I went out, I could get rid of him more effectively than hiding would.
I pushed Bob back once again and snuck through the door while juggling the two glasses of iced tea. Deacon was sitting right where I’d left him, but he had shrunk in on himself even more in my absence. His chunky black boots had come untied at some point, making him remind me of a little kid. He was slouched over, his face pressed into his cupped palms, and it looked for all the world like he was crying.
I set the tea down quietly so he would know I was there, and when I sat in my own chair, he finally looked up, his face red and his eyes glassy.
“I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know who to talk to.”
“What’s going on?”
“I think Sebastian is dead because of me.”