“I can’t come in,” he said tersely.
“Some sort of personal rules?”
He blinked twice. “I don’t have a warrant.”
“Detective Bentley, aren’t we past the warrant stage by now? We just had a charming interaction with a talking blue jay. We’re becoming friends.”
He raised one dark eyebrow. “If we’re friends, tell me my first name. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not Detective.”
“Ben,” I guessed. “Your name is Ben, as in Benjamin Bentley.”
“Nice try,” he said. “Not even close.”
I looked up into his eyes, which were medium-set, hooded, fringed with thick, dark lashes, and perfectly symmetrical. Most people have one eye that’s droopier or smaller, but Bentley’s were perfect. And they were colorless. Perfectly gray.
As I stared into those colorless eyes, the edges of his face began to blur and fade away. Without boundaries, his face stretched out until it was everything, and there was no sky or trees or quaint neighborhood. Just gray.
The effect was pierced by my daughter calling out, “Mom? Oh, there you are! I thought you left for work without your purse.”
Bentley’s face snapped back into focus. He took a step back, bowing formally.
With a thick, gravelly voice, he said, “I should let you be on your way.”
I reached out and put my hand on his forearm. The wool suit felt soft to the touch, but there was strength in the arm underneath. He wasn’t joking about one-armed pushups.
“Let me introduce you to my daughter,” I said.
Zoey skipped across the street toward us, the hard soles of her shoes scuffing on the pavement. She was wearing the ballerina flats that were a size too big and flopped around noisily whenever they weren’t falling off and tripping her. The girl had plenty of shoes, but she chose to wear those silly loose flats for reasons that I, a grown adult woman, was not able to comprehend.
Zoey reached us and handed me my purse. “Here you go, Mom. Don’t worry about walking me to school today. Pawpaw is going to give me a ride in his car.”
Bentley turned to my daughter and said, “You must be a Riddle. You truly are the spitting image of your mother and aunt.”
She stuck out her hand and introduced herself. “Zolanda Daizy Cazzaundra Riddle. Everyone calls me Zoey.”
“You can call me Bentley.”
My daughter sucked in air and let out a high, light laugh. “You’re the detective? The way Mom talks about you, I expected someone way different.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Your mother talks about me?”
I elbowed Zoey. “You’d better make sure the kitchen’s cleaned up before you leave for school.”
Zoey took the hint and started back toward our house, stopping once to pick up her loose shoe.
Up the street, a car door slammed and then another. People were leaving for their jobs, just like any other Thursday morning. Except it wasn’t that normal for me, because I wouldn’t be walking my daughter to school. That made it two days in a row. She caught a ride with a schoolmate on Wednesday. We’d reached a fork in the road of our lives. My sweet, bubbly girl was headed off in another direction without me.
Bentley’s deep voice startled me back to the present. “Do you always walk to work?”
“I don’t have a car, and I can’t fly.” Not yet, anyway.
“I’ll give you a lift. My car’s just up the street.”
“Thanks, but I prefer walking. Morning ambulation clears the head.”
“Morning ambulation,” he repeated. “Your vocabulary is as refreshing as your wardrobe.” He raised his chin and looked down his nose at me. “That is quite the colorful outfit. I suppose later today we’ll have a naked clown show up at the police station to report a mugging?”
“No way,” I said. “The clown I got this shirt from surrendered it willingly. And he’s not naked. I left him one of those wooden barrels with suspenders to wear around town.”
“How thoughtful.” Bentley started walking along my usual route. “Come on. I’m ambulating with you to the library,” he called back.
“A police escort? For little ol’ me?”
He gave me a steely look. “It’s a new crime-reduction program.”
“Can’t hurt to try.”
I hitched my purse strap up my shoulder and skipped to catch up with Detective Bentley.
Chapter 12
“There’s something strange going on in this town,” Bentley said.
“Oh?”
“It’s too perfect. Have you seen that movie, The Truman Show? Sometimes I think a big spotlight’s going to fall from the sky and reveal that I’ve been part of an immersive, semi-scripted TV show this whole time.”
We’d been walking for twenty minutes, making small talk about movies and the weather, and were now entering Wisteria’s downtown core of shops and services. The street we’d turned onto was aesthetically pleasing to the point of being unreal, like the two-dimensional painted backdrops for an upbeat stage play set in a quaint small town.
Up ahead, a middle-aged man in a green apron emerged from a flower shop and began sweeping the sidewalk, whistling as he did. He swept rhythmically, stopping only to call out greetings to passersby—many of whom he knew by name.
“Good morning, Detective,” the shopkeeper said to Bentley as we drew near. “And a good morning to you,” he said to me. “Why, look at that lovely red hair! You’re as luminous as these ranunculus blossoms. You must be Zinnia Riddle’s niece.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said.
Bentley paused, looking at the display of cut ranunculus flowers and then at me, as though he was thinking of buying me a bouquet. His eyes twitched back and forth. Was I reading him like an open book, or imagining things? They say people see what they want to see. But I didn’t want Bentley to buy me flowers. No. That would be weird.
After some small talk about the nice weather, he said goodbye to the shopkeeper and started walking again. I skipped to catch up, the hard soles of my boots making satisfying sounds on the cement.
“Every single one of those flowers back there was perfect,” he said.
“I’m sure they throw out the imperfect ones. I bet if we go into the alley, we’ll find a dumpster full of rumpled ranunculi. That’s the plural of ranunculus.”
He shot me a steely look. “I’ve seen their dumpster. It’s clean and graffiti-free, just like everything in this town.”
“I do understand what you mean,” I said. “When Zoey and I first got here a few months ago, we joked about people being robots. Like in that show, Westworld.”
He let out a sigh of relief. “So, it’s not just my imagination.”
We walked in silence. I should have dropped the subject, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Detective, if there is something going on in this town, what makes you think I’m not in on it? Maybe I’ll report your wild conspiracy theories to the head of the Department of Mind Erasing, and you’ll be getting a visit tonight.” I glanced over to give him a double eyebrow raise. “The sort of late-night visit nobody wants to get.”
I was only partly joking. There very well could have been a Department of Mind Erasing in Wisteria, for all I knew—a subsidiary of the Department of Water and Magic. Vincent Wick probably ran it from his underground offices near the composting piles.
Bentley grimaced. “Funny you should mention mind erasure. That’s a popular topic for the local eccentrics. They say that when the Pressman house burned down, it was actually a cover-up for some evil, mind-wiping mad scientist operation.”
“Maybe it was,” I said, flirting with the idea of a full confession. Why couldn’t Bentley be told about the town’s magical aspects? It would certainly make his job easier. In fact, it seemed cruel that he didn’t already know. Wasn’t the police department in on everything? One possible explanation was they were giving Bentley a trial run before letting him in on all the secrets.
Oh, but it would be so much
fun for me to grab him by the arm right now and tell him everything. Bentley, you’re right about this town! It’s full of magic! What a fun job that would be. The expression on his face would be priceless when I levitated the peanuts out of his jacket. I could witness, up close and personal, a man’s entire worldview shatter. His mind breaking. And then the crushing realization that everything he knew was a lie. He would be over on the other side of the revelation with me. Yet he wouldn’t truly be part of it because he had no powers of his own. And then he’d be as depressed as my daughter.
On second thought, it would be a terrible job to have to tell people about magic.
Bentley slowed his pace. He reached into his pocket for a handful of peanuts, which he tossed into a planter box as we walked past.
“That’s for the squirrel who lives around here,” he explained. “His name is Petey. He’s got a reputation for mugging people at the sidewalk seating for the cafes.”
“Really? And the official Wisteria Police Department response to a known mugger, a buck-toothed buccaneer, is to pay protection money in the form of peanuts?”
“It’s one of our many crime reduction programs.” He dusted off his hands. “Plus the little guy’s cute, like that blue jay by your house.”
“Detective Bentley.” I used both hands to mime framing a sign. “Friend of Woodland Creatures.”
“At least Petey the Squirrel doesn’t talk—not that I know of.”
“And now I understand why you carry peanuts in your pocket. See, if you look hard enough, there’s always a logical answer to everything. Wisteria is like that. It seems odd at first, on account of how happy people are, but maybe it’s the rest of the world that’s doing things wrong.”
Bentley turned his head and watched me for several paces. “You’re in on it,” he said. “You’re feeding me lines from a script.”
“No,” I answered, a little too quickly. Just like the blue jay.
“You’re in on it,” he repeated.
I rolled my eyes and answered with a sarcastic, “You got me, Detective.” I pointed to a display of fresh mangoes and pears as we walked past a fresh produce store. “Don’t eat those. They’re all plastic, from the props department.”
“All right,” he said. “What are you authorized to tell me about Wakeful?”
“Wakeful?” Wakeful. The word resonated inside my head. It sounded like something I should know about but didn’t yet. “Is that a coffee shop?”
He shook his head and looked straight ahead. He picked up his walking pace.
“Never mind,” he said. “It’s a shame you’re not interested in getting to the bottom of things. You would have made a good partner. I always thought librarians were great at ferreting out information.”
“We are,” I said. “And don’t give up on me that easily. What else do you know about Wakeful?”
He put his hands in his pockets. “Never mind,” he repeated.
I fought the urge to shake him by the shoulders. How dare he tempt a librarian with the prospect of a juicy research project and then take it away!
Bentley cleared his throat. “You probably don’t know this, but I only moved here a month before you did,” he said. “I can’t even remember why I applied for the position, or how, but I must have, because here I am.”
A few questions came to mind, but I kept quiet and let him talk. Some men are stingy with their inner thoughts, and you have to draw the story out of them with questions. Then there are the ones who won’t stop talking or explaining or bragging. I liked how Bentley fell right in the middle.
“It’s almost comical how overqualified I am for this job,” he said. “The majority of my calls could be handled by a rookie. I spent most of yesterday helping Old Man Wheelie negotiate with some neighborhood kids for the return of his prosthetic legs.”
“Was he up drinking on his roof again?” Bentley had told me about a similar story a few weeks back.
“He was on a church roof this time. He rang the big church bell to get help.” He glanced over at me. “Is it rang or rung?”
“I’m a librarian, not a grammarian.” The answer bubbled up anyway. “It’s rang. Rung is the past participle.” I gave him a sheepish smile. “I try not to correct people’s grammar, but I find language interesting, so I assume other people must feel the same way.”
Out of the blue, he asked, “Why aren’t you married?”
I felt the heat rise in me and the skin on my back prickle. No matter how many times people blurted the question at me, I always got a visceral, physical reaction.
I volleyed back, “Why aren’t you?”
“Because I’ve been married,” he answered evenly. “I didn’t pack up and move to Wisteria just for the cupcake bakeries and sunny weather.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “In answer to your question, I guess the number one reason I’m not married is because nobody’s asked.”
He stopped walking. “Why not?”
I stopped and faced him. “I guess it’s because I never gave anyone a chance to ask.”
“Why not?”
“Because... I’m afraid of being let down.”
“Why?”
“Because people always let you down. Always. Eventually.” And by people, I meant men.
“Why does a smart woman like yourself believe something that’s patently untrue?” He blinked in slow motion. “Look around you, Zara. Look at all the people hustling around with purpose. They’re all trying so hard. Trying not to let anyone down.”
I looked around. We had come to our standstill directly across the street from the library. People were walking toward the book-return drawer with bulging book bags. Kids with backpacks were hurrying toward school. All around us, everyone moved with purpose. Bentley, a striver himself, recognized the quality in others. They were all striving.
And was I one of the strivers? I worked hard at my job to serve the community and to support my family. I was letting my troublesome father stay at the house so my daughter could spend some time with a male role model. I even let ghosts hang out inside my head. Apart from a few pastries, most of my activities were in the service of others, so I didn’t let anyone down.
Bentley said, “Look at me.”
I did. I looked at the steely-eyed man in the gray suit who carried a pocketful of peanuts.
He asked, “Did I walk away from Wheelie before getting him his legs back? No. I didn’t.”
I continued looking at him. Really looking. Once again, I saw him for the striver I’d pegged him as when we’d met. Bentley was a driven man, and he valued it. He saw the quality in other people, the way I was able to spot a person’s thirst for knowledge.
But he was also making a point about the lack of a wedding ring on my finger, which was none of his business.
“Good for you,” I said, my tone ever-so-slightly patronizing. “I guess there’s an exception to every rule.”
He reached into his jacket’s inside pocket and withdrew his phone. It was buzzing insistently. He didn’t look at the screen.
“To be continued,” he said, maintaining eye contact with me. “Let’s pick up this interview again another time.” His gray eyes shone silver in the bright sunshine, almost platinum.
“Interview? Am I a suspect for something?”
“You’re always my number one.” His phone stopped buzzing. He still didn’t look at the screen. He looked over my shoulder at the library and then up the street. “I’m going to do my work on foot today, like the prototypical gumshoe detective. My gut tells me I’ll see a lot more this way.”
“You’ve got nice weather for it. Maybe you’ll find some lady to rescue by making her the next Mrs. Bentley. Or should I say Mrs. White Knight.”
He turned back to face me again. “And I plan to figure out this town’s secrets,” he said, ignoring my barb about him being a white knight.
“All of this town’s secrets in just one day?”
He shrugged. “I already figured out yours, didn
’t I? You don’t trust men, and it has everything to do with your father, who travels with the circus, trains wild birds to talk, and makes a mess in your kitchen.”
I snorted. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Detective Bentley made an old-fashioned gesture like he was tipping an invisible bowler hat, turned, and walked away.
Chapter 13
FRIDAY
Friday morning, I woke up in my small bedroom, in a bed that seemed smaller than the night before. My feet were hanging off the end. Either I’d grown, or my furniture had shrunk.
I sat up and listened to the sounds of my father cooking breakfast downstairs in the kitchen. The strange part was how this didn’t feel strange at all. They say you can get used to anything if given enough time, but really? Two days?
The night before had felt practically routine. The three of us had shared a dinner of leftover Thai food and then gone for a walk to get ice cream from a local shop, to compare it to the takeout from the Northern Stargazer Cafe.
After the ice cream, which was deemed to be nearly equal in taste and texture, we’d strolled along the shoreline, where Rhys and Zoey had played at skipping stones for hours. When we got back to the house again, the two of them continued their poker game while I read my Monster Manual. I’d nodded off with my face in the book yet again. There was something about the way the book had to be read, in its upside-down, magically encrypted text, that made me sleepy.
Before my eyes had closed, I’d returned to the section about the Iguammit, a chimera with the head of an iguana and the body of a lion. The DWM employed one as their in-house lawyer, Steve, whom I’d only seen for a moment in the hallway—long enough to make an unforgettable impression. According to the book, Iguammits are shy and reserved until you gain their trust. When it comes to convoluted legal matters, they are ten times as sharp as human lawyers. However, they get hyperfocused on their work. They forget to eat regularly and get so peckish they consume anything at hand, including but not limited to office furniture. Their first choice is candy, preferably red, but they will consume anything from staplers to laptops. If I ever required the services of Steve—and I hoped I wouldn’t—I’d be sure to have plenty of red licorice on hand.
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