Amber hadn’t had a single nightmare. She’d slept through the night. She’d slept better than she had in a long while, honestly.
When she smiled, he did too.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I did.”
Chapter 20
Jack fed the cats, then made breakfast while Amber took a shower. Since he was taking the ten-to-one shift to keep an eye on the maps while she was at the float barn today, once they’d eaten and he placed a kiss on her forehead, he’d taken off to go home, shower, and grab a few things. She forbade him from watching Vamp World without her, both because she wanted to watch it with him and because she didn’t trust him not to pass out again.
While Amber was tidying up—suddenly very self-conscious about Jack being left alone in her apartment for several hours—Kim called her. “Hey, Kim.”
“Oh my God, Amber, hi!” The loud whine of an electric power tool came through the phone. “My car is at the shop. Dang thing wouldn’t start this morning.”
“Need me to pick you up?” Amber asked. “Jack should be back by 9:30.” Then she froze when she realized what she’d said.
A bell chimed on the other end of the phone, followed by a door clanking shut, and the hurried breaths of her friend. Amber pictured Kim slamming her way out of the mechanic shop and speed walking outside to the curb so she was out of earshot. “What do you mean ‘be back’?” Then she gasped. “Did Jack Terrence spend the night?”
Amber felt herself flush from head to toe. “Kind of?”
“Kind of?” Kim nearly shrieked. “I need all the details. Immediately.”
“We fell asleep on the couch together. That’s it! But I kind of woke up on top of him and I still can’t figure out how that happened,” Amber said.
“Oh my God,” Kim said. “Guess the cure for insomnia is some cuddle action. Do you think Edgar needs that?”
“Please never say ‘cuddle action’ ever again,” Amber said, laughing. “And I don’t know what Edgar needs. It’s very hard to think of him cuddling anything but a video game controller.”
“I could get into that,” Kim said. “Wait, so does that mean no one watched the maps all night?”
Amber wrinkled her nose. “Right. Hopefully they didn’t stage a raid on a storage unit in the middle of the night. But the last I checked, each dot was where it was supposed to be. Well, all except Molly who seems to be darting all over the place like a hummingbird. The cats had to be shooed off the table about ten times this morning to keep them from pouncing on the dot as if it were a bug,” she said.
“Ha!” Kim said. “Okay then. I’m at Kat’s Car Shop whenever you’re ready. Assuming you don’t lose track of the time when Jack shows up for cuddle action round two.” Then she cackled like she was the world’s funniest comedian.
Amber hung up on her.
She checked on the maps every twenty minutes or so. The Daniels dot eventually moved to the police station, and the mayor dot went from her house to the city center and stayed there. Tillman seemed to be a homebody most of the time and hadn’t left Magnolia Estates all morning. Molly was still moving all over town—what was curious was she seemed to be in Edgehill as much as she was in Marbleglen.
When Jack arrived a little before 9:30, Amber made sure he had everything he needed, planted a kiss on his cheek, flushed from head to foot again, and then hurried downstairs.
Ben and Lily were manning the store for the morning shift. With Ben busy behind the counter, Amber pulled Lily aside.
“Jack Terrence is up in the studio now,” Amber said. “My cousin Edgar will be by around one to relieve him.”
Lily cocked a brow.
Right. Amber forgot to include details—details she couldn’t actually give Lily. So she made them up. “Tom Cat is a little under the weather. The vet says he’ll be okay, but someone should be around to supervise him for the next couple days to make sure he doesn’t have any adverse effects to the medicine.”
“Oh no!” Lily said. “Well, if you ever need some extra help, just let me know. It wouldn’t be a problem, since we’re already here.”
“That’s very sweet of you to offer,” Amber said. “I think we’re covered for now—plus Tom is so shy with people he doesn’t know that well.”
Lily nodded. “My Butterscotch is the exact same way. Well, I’m glad you and Tom have help, and I’m here in a pinch if you need me.”
“You’re the best,” Amber said, feeling terrible about the lie, and then scurried for the door, waving goodbye to Ben as she went.
Kim was sitting in one of the white plastic chairs in front of the mechanic shop’s front window, eyes focused on her phone and large purse clutched in her lap, when Amber arrived. Kim looked up, beamed, and hurried to climb into the car. “Oh my God, thank you! They said it would take all day to figure out what’s wrong with it. My guess is it’s because it’s twenty years old.”
“Well, if it ends up being too expensive to fix, we should go car shopping together,” Amber said as she pulled out of the lot and headed for Marbleglen. “I can’t drive this rental forever.”
“Oh my God, we totally should,” said Kim. “You can use your magic to make sure all the salesmen are honest with us and aren’t trying to weasel us into getting extras we don’t need just because we’re women.”
Amber didn’t hate the idea.
For most of the drive, Kim had been talking about the trials and tribulations of the seemingly never-ending list of things she still had to do for the Here and Meow, but as Amber pulled up to the box outside Magnolia Estates, Kim grew quiet.
“That’s Tillman’s house,” Amber said as they cruised past 86 Cylindrica Lane. The garage doors were closed, and no cars sat in the driveway. Amber wondered if the Tillman dot was still fixed at the house.
“It’s so weird to be in on the details of an active murder investigation and I can’t tell anyone!” Kim said. “I don’t know how you do this.”
Amber laughed nervously. “I never meant for this to become a hobby of mine, honest.”
They arrived at the float barn a little after ten, and there were already dozens of cars lined up outside. Amber hadn’t seen the floats since last Sunday, when she’d left at four p.m. just before the second wave of volunteers had arrived. In Amber’s memory, the floats were merely massive structures made of twisted-wire bodies and plastic, only decorated in patches with flowers, seeds, and bark. The bodies of the floats themselves made it clear what they’d eventually be, at least: there was a park with a weeping willow in the center, which was populated by insects, a couple bunnies, a handful of birds, and, of course flowers; a meadow of the town’s famous marbled rhododendrons; and the Edgehill float featuring three giant cats.
Amber could only recall rows and rows and rows of black onion seeds. So many onion seeds. So many, in fact, that it felt impossible to see the forest for the trees. Or the float for the seeds, she supposed.
What made it even harder to imagine was the fact that they only had this weekend and the next to finish the floats in time for the opening ceremonies for both festivals. Only three weeks until the Here and Meow. Amber could hardly believe it. Every year it felt as if it took ages for the festival to take place again, and then once it did, it felt as if it had snuck up on her.
After a short trek from the car to the float barn, Amber and Kim came up short at the same time. Even from here, Amber could see how much work the second wave of volunteers had done to the floats. One of the cats was nearly done, its large, sweet face smiling at them from inside the barn. Mostly black “fur” was striped through with a few lines of white. A white triangle-shaped patch covered the cat’s nose and half its cheeks, the rest of its face black. From a distance, the black onion seeds were a solid wall of color—similar to a pointillist painting.
The massive trunk of the willow on the leftmost float was completely covered in pieces of brown bark. The top of the tree would need to be added once the float was wheeled out of the barn, she thought, as
it might be too tall to clear the roof. At the front of the float, like the figurehead on a ship, sat a giant white mushroom with large red circles decorating its cap. An all-black beetle about the size of a small dog was perched on top, a pair of curved horns sprouting from its head. As Amber got closer, she could see that green, blue, and purple were mixed in with the black—both on its back and the underside of the beetle’s belly—to mimic iridescence.
The middle float had several completed marbled rhododendrons on it and Amber could see now that the back half of the float was being covered in blue flower pieces of varying shades to represent the water of Lake Myrtle.
“Okay, this is all super cool,” Kim admitted under her breath.
Amber couldn’t argue.
Chloe Deidrick, several of her friends, and Ann Marie were already decked out in aprons, fast at work on the cat float. Amber and Kim quickly donned aprons of their own and joined them. Bianca, Nathan, and Jolene all arrived in the next ten minutes.
Harlo brought a small stereo with him this time and had music blasting through the barn for most of the morning, everyone in good spirits as they worked diligently while bouncing along to the steady stream of pop music echoing around them.
When noon rolled around and lunch was delivered, Amber was surprised that two hours had already gone by. She was, however, practically covered in glue, and her fingers were dotted with black again thanks to the onion seeds that were going to haunt her nightmares alongside Kieran. Maybe he’d just be covered in them now while he screamed at her about the Henbane grimoire.
While Amber and the Here and Meow group stood in line for sandwiches—mostly discussing Ann Marie’s upcoming date that night with Alan Peterson—someone in a group of chatting teenagers said, “What’s Chief Daniels doing here?”
Amber and Kim shared a wide-eyed look, then turned toward the makeshift parking lot. Sure enough, walking up the road were both Chief Daniels and Randy Tillman.
“Uh oh …” Amber muttered. Then she nudged Kim and said, “The other one is Tillman.”
“Shut the front door!” Kim hissed, then quickly looked away.
Amber decided the best thing to do would be to do nothing at all. Their presence very well could have nothing to do with her. Maybe they were both parade float nerds and had just come to check out the progress the group had been making.
The line inched forward. Amber was only two people away from the start of the buffet of sandwich fixings. Her stomach rumbled.
They aren’t here because of you. You have a turkey sandwich with your name on it. Just two more people. They aren’t here because of you.
“Hello, everyone,” Chief Daniels said, stopping a few feet away from the line. He held a black leather portfolio binder, about the size of a clipboard. He held it to his chest with one arm. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m looking for the owner of a four-door silver Nissan Sentra.”
Which was the make and model of Amber’s car. But there very well could be other Sentras in the parking lot.
“It appears to be a rental,” Daniels added.
Crap.
“And there’s what looks like box of plastic cats in the back seat.”
Double crap.
Sighing, Amber shrugged at a very concerned-looking Kim, and then stepped out of line. “I think that’s mine,” she said to Daniels.
Both men gave Amber an assessing head-to-toe scan.
“Can you come with me, Miss …” Daniels said.
“Blackwood,” Amber said, then headed for the pair. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her back as she walked away. “What’s this about, officer?” she asked once they had moved away from the float barn and were likely out of earshot of the others.
Daniels didn’t reply. Tillman had yet to say a word.
Daniels came to a stop behind Amber’s car before he said anything. “Can you read me your license plate number, Miss Blackwood?” He held his portfolio in one hand and unzipped it.
After a beat, Amber unnecessarily read off the plate number to him.
“How long have you been renting this vehicle?” he asked, peering into his portfolio and making a show of flipping through the papers inside.
Lie to me, the action said. I dare you.
“About a month,” she said.
“Has anyone other than yourself had access to your vehicle?” he asked, his attention still focused on whatever was in the portfolio. Tillman stood nearby, hands behind his back as he watched this exchange without expression on his handsome face.
“Not that I know of,” Amber said with a sigh, knowing her tone was growing more annoyed by the second with whatever this charade was, but unable to stop it.
Daniels looked up then, clutching the portfolio in front of his lap. “I’m sorry, Miss Blackwood, is this an inconvenient time for you?”
Amber blew a slow breath out of her nose. “Not at all. What would you like to know about the car?”
He stared at her, then started to rifle through his portfolio again. Amber resisted the urge to use a wind spell to knock his feet out from underneath him. He took out a stack of what Amber immediately knew were photographs. Handing them over, he said, “Do you know the woman in this photo?”
There were five of them—all of them Sienna Tate in Amber’s car. Her first thought was that the no-smudge spell was powerful indeed if even a camera captured her altered features. The quality of the pictures wasn’t crisp in many of them; Amber guessed several had been taken by cell phone cameras. While the license plate wasn’t always clear in the semi-grainy black-and-white photos, Sienna behind the wheel was. Cute button nose; freckles across her nose, cheeks, and forehead; and two long braids that hung over either shoulder. There was one of Sienna sleeping, her head back and mouth open. Two of her being occupied by something on her phone. One of her talking into the phone. And the fifth was of Sienna halfway to taking a very large bite of a sandwich.
Her face was practically on fire. While Amber had been keeping tabs on Tillman, someone had been keeping tabs on her. She supposed at least a few of these had been taken by Tillman himself, but who had taken the others?
Alan Peterson would be so disappointed.
“Can you read me the license plate clearly visible in the third photograph, Miss Blackwood?”
Doing her best to keep her annoyance in check, she said, “It’s the same as mine.”
“Indeed. So … who is she?”
“Sorry,” Amber said, handing the pictures back. “I don’t know.”
Daniels took them back and slipped them into his portfolio, which he zipped up, each tooth slotting into place at an infuriatingly slow pace. Then he held the closed case in front of him again. “How do you explain someone you don’t know being in the car you’ve been renting for a month? Has some mystery woman been stealing your car at all hours without you noticing?”
Amber didn’t know how to respond.
“I saw her outside my house one day,” Tillman finally said. “She was loitering in the neighborhood for hours. Then a few days later, I went to Lilac Garden to go on a run with my dog, and she followed me there.”
Amber hoped her expression didn’t betray her rapidly thumping heart and clammy hands.
“I’m here on very important business and it wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to interfere with my work,” Tillman said with the air of someone who kept state secrets.
“If you’re covering for someone who might want to do harm to Mr. Tillman, it’s best you speak up now, Miss Blackwood,” Daniels said. “If it turns out later that this woman is a relative or a friend and something happens to Mr. Tillman, you’ll be considered an accessory to the crime.”
Amber knew he was just trying to scare her. Perhaps if she hadn’t known what the man—what both men—were capable of, it would have worked. She turned her focus on Tillman. “You make it sound like she’s an assassin or something. What do you do, Mr. Tillman, that your life seems to be in such danger?”
Daniels spoke
up before Tillman could. “You’re not really in a position to ask questions, Miss Blackwood.” He unzipped his portfolio again and took out a business card. “If this mystery woman materializes, give me a call, okay?”
Amber took the card. “Will do.”
Daniels nodded at her, motioned at Tillman with an incline of his head, and then walked away. But Tillman didn’t immediately follow him. Instead, Tillman took another step toward Amber, taking his time letting his gaze rove her face. The fact that he looked like just he’d stepped off a Hollywood set made him even more unnerving.
“I don’t know what your tie is to this person,” he said in a low tone that sounded oddly sensual, given both the location and the circumstances, “but just know that I’m a very, very wealthy man. You tell me who she is and your bank account will suddenly have enough money in it that you can return that hunk of junk of a rental, buy your pretty little self something flashy, and have enough left over to keep you comfortable for a nice long while.” He took a step back, and Amber could almost feel his energy leave her orbit. He grinned a leading-man smile at her. “Think about it, okay?”
He walked away without waiting for a response.
Amber shuddered out a breath. Neither man had threatened her, not really. Yet their presence here alone completely freaked her out. They’d be watching her now. Or her car, at least.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there when Kim rushed up to her.
“Oh my God, Amber!” Kim said, startling Amber out of her thoughts. “What happened?”
“Alan Peterson was apparently very accurate when he said I was terrible at being inconspicuous,” Amber said.
Kim’s gaze shifted toward the retreating vehicle for a moment, and then something seemed to click for her, because her brows hiked toward her hairline and she said, “Time to buy a new car?”
Amber nodded. “Time to buy a new car.”
Chapter 21
At four, Amber and Kim wished Ann Marie good luck on her date, said goodbye to everyone, and then hightailed it to Salem. Amber called Edgar on the way.
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