“You wanna go, pal?” She was already shrugging out of her jacket. “We can go right now. Next I’ll roll up my shirt sleeves so you’ll know I’m taking this seriously.”
“Yeah, and then you’ll notice I’m not rolling up mine,” he scoffed. “I know you haven’t been in your room yet. Or you would have noticed the plate.”
“I haven’t!” she cried, delighted, instantly putting her jacket back on—it was getting chilly out. “I ran into Archer and Leah in the kitchen and then I came to find you, I haven’t been near my room!” She couldn’t sit still, so she clapped her hands like a goof applauding herself. “I haven’t had one of your swans in over a year. I can’t wait to devour it!”
“You earned it.”
“And all I had to do was devote a decade of my life to solving a murder that never happened.”
He leaned in and said in a low voice, “That’s why I made you two swans. Because for ten years, you’ve basically been our mom and our dad.”
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. She did the fake-cough thing instead. “I can get behind your two-swan reward system.” Jack got to his feet and held out a hand, then pulled her up. “You know the best part?”
“Archer’s gonna be pissed.”
“Archer’s gonna be pissed,” she agreed, and practically skipped into the house.
Photo courtesy of the author
MaryJanice Davidson is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, most recently Deja Who, Undead and Done, Undead and Unforgiven, and Undead and Unwary. With her husband, Anthony Alongi, she also writes a series featuring a teen weredragon named Jennifer Scales. MaryJanice lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children and is currently working on her next book.
* In fairness to the Horde, on the following Mondays Mitchell and Paul beat the crap out of the boys who blew her off. Or maybe it was Jack and Jordan.
* “She took me out for drinks a few times but would only ever give me an empty glass. Said even air would make me look fat. But her hair was glorious.” Excerpt from My Year with Nazir by Amy Ackman.
* “Little known, and even less forgiven, here lies Democritus Junior, who gave his life and death to Melancholy. Died 9th January, 1639.” Epitaph from the monument to Robert Burton.
* Full title (and it’s a mouthful!): The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It, in Three Main Partitions with Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up.
* And it’s not even the weirdest thing Gorey wrote!
* Not Guilty by reason of Insanity
* Seriously. The bra thing? Required by the State of Illinois. Which makes me wonder about enforcement.
* I love Degree antiperspirant! I make no apologies for that.
* These exist! I am not making this up! Google it, or check Amazon.
* Ooooh! Note the play on the book title. See that? See what I did there? #subtle
* This exists! Oh, Amazon, is there anything you can’t do?
* Not his real middle name.
* National Association of Legal Assistants
* Fun fact: Lewis Keseberg was the only survivor at Donner Lake. He had eaten Tamsen Donner to stay alive. But Mrs. Donner had seemed as healthy as anyone could be in those circumstances, and it was a puzzle that she had mysteriously died just in time to sustain Keseberg. He was accused of murdering her for food; and to the end of his days, he told people that human liver was “the sweetest morsel.”
* Reindyne is a hypnotic drug accidentally discovered in 1987; they were trying to develop a combination diet aid/heart medication. (Reindyne isn’t real. I don’t know if diet pill/heart meds are real.)
* Seriously! He fell out of bed and never recovered. And if he had recovered, the liver cancer he didn’t know he had would have finished the job.
* Fun fact: Not only did Andersen’s schoolmaster regularly abuse him, he and his colleagues made it their business to discourage him from writing. Yeah. They told Hans friggin’ Andersen to just stop with the stories already.
* You can get this on the Web. The CPD’s website is very helpful!
* See the Author’s Note. I’m too lazy to cut and paste it here. Ugh, writing is hard.
* SSRIs are serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac or Zoloft.
* It’s true! Thirty miles a day x 42 days = 1,260 miles.
* Luke, I am your father. Eat your vegetables.
* About five thousand, per the Chicago Tribune.
* Keep It Simple, Stupid.
* This actually happened in New Jersey! Two men were caught in “a lewd act” on a display bed in a Bed Bath & Beyond. They were arrested and exposed the arresting officers to scabies. They had to completely fumigate the booking area! I don’t know what happened to the display bed, though.
* The Alyutors pretty much set the standard for a “scorched earth campaign.”
* Uh, that’s not a euphemism for penis. Many who suffer from depression/dysthymia refer to their illness as a big black dog, taking a page out of the poet Samuel Johnson’s book, and/or Winston Churchill’s.
* The views expressed by Leah Nazir are her own and do not necessarily represent the views of the author, who worships JohnLock.
* Gotta side with Leah on this one.
* James McNair and Andrew Moore are wonderful cookbook authors. Simple-to-understand recipes, gorgeous pictures, it’s all terrific. Seriously, track them down and buy one of their books.
* Walter suffered from a stress-induced peptic ulcer. Among other things.
* That probably sounds weird, right? It’s not weird. It works. Get some.
* These exist! (Shudder.)
* The Next Generation
* Yeah, that’s right. I said it. And I’m not taking it back because you know I’m right.
* It’s true! Watch any Star Trek: TNG episode. They never give Picard a heads-up, they never warn him. They just lure him planet-side and hit him with the shock of the day. It’s weird.
* This is true! That’s how creepy the thing is, it inspires legends about seeing your own death. Yeesh.
* “What about my residuals?”
* There’s a clever, funny piece on this: “5 Ways the Grieving Process Turns Us Selfish” by Dennis Hong, on Cracked.com. Worth a look!
* Leah is quoting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It’s going over Archer’s head because he’s an idiot.
* In 1919, near Boston, Massachusetts, a molasses storage tank burst, which unleashed a twenty-five-foot wave that traveled thirty-five miles per hour. Since people can only run at about eight miles per hour, twenty-one people were killed and 150 were injured. Like I needed another reason to hate molasses.
* Earle Nelson, aka The Gorilla Man, born 1897, died (the first time) 1928.
* In Deja Who, we found out Nellie Nazir was once the Countess of Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who was thought to have tortured and killed more than six hundred girls and women. She was eventually tried, found guilty, and kept in solitary confinement, bricked into a room with walled-up windows, and died five years later.
* Allan Pinkerton (of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency) tripped on a sidewalk and bit his tongue so hard, he developed gangrene and died in 1884.
* Boat neckline with dropped shoulders.
* True.
* False.
* Join the club, pal.
* The founder of Williams-Sonoma!
* Take down
* It is. I would literally rather be slapped.
* Three slices of bacon. I had to look it up, so I saved you the trouble. You’re welcome!
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* One of the darkest and most delightful comedies in the history of TV. And Philadelphia.
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