“There’s a whole garden full of them. Would you like me to take everything outside, to the back yard?”
“No,” she answered, sharply and quickly. “Eating in bed sounds luxurious.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“These waffles smell heavenly,” she said. “Everything is perfect. You must have done this without Corvin helping. Whatever did you use to distract the boy and keep him out of the kitchen?” She used the dessert fork to stab pieces of fruit in the bowl.
“No distractions,” he said. “He’s with the dog walker for the whole day.”
She looked up from fruit stabbing and raised an eyebrow. “You certainly are a clever one, Mr. Linklater.” She put extra stress on the fake name Chet had been using to make arrangements for Corvin. “Am I to presume that I will be spending an entire romantic day alone with you?”
“Like it or not, I am yours for the whole day. No work. Just the two of us, doing whatever we want on a lazy Saturday.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t say that. You’ll tempt fate.”
“Oh, Chessa.”
“I know I shouldn’t be superstitious, but every time you say you-know-what, the office calls.”
“What? You’re imagining things.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. “I swear they must have a magical alert on you saying the phrase ‘lazy Saturday.’ All you have to do is say ‘lazy Saturday’ three times, and you immediately get called in for some crazy emergency.”
He frowned at her.
Just then, both of their phones rang with the tone that indicated exactly such an emergency.
“This is your fault,” she said in mock anger. “Your fault, Mr. Linklater.”
He gave her a guilty look as he answered his phone. “Chet Moore,” he said. “What’s up, Knox?”
* * *
The news from the Department of Water and Magic had not been what Chet Moore would have deemed an emergency, if he were the person in charge of such things. But he wasn’t in charge. The mayor was. And when Mayor Paladini declared an emergency, people reported to the office, whether it was their “lazy Saturday” off or not.
Chessa, who would be on sick leave for a week due to her surgery on Wednesday, had gotten a courtesy update rather than a call to come in. She’d expressed relief that she could stay in bed “for a few more hours.” Chet knew she would probably still be there whenever he managed to get home again.
His platinum-haired fiancée had been camped out in the master bedroom since coming out of surgery on Wednesday. Her reluctance to get out of bed had nothing to do with the actual procedure, which she had recovered from—physically, at least—almost instantaneously. In fact, her body was so strong, the surgeon had to use magic spells and ancient instruments to remove Chessa’s damaged ovaries. Dr. Lund had been beside himself with excitement, though he tried to mask it. Chessa had been awake and conscious for the entire procedure. Chet couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. But it had been her idea to stay conscious. She insisted on destroying the biological material herself, and never having any part of her leave her possession. Not again.
It was such a horrible procedure, and for such awful reasons, yet she had calmly prepared for the surgery as though she were a regular person getting a cavity filled at the dentist.
After the procedure, however, had been a different story. All the sadness she’d been holding back was able to burst through the dam. She’d lain in bed, listless.
Her sisters came to visit on Thursday, which was when they’d been given the news. Chessa hadn’t prepared the girls during their last get-together, because she feared one or both might talk her out of taking such drastic measures.
After receiving the news, Charlize and Chloe bickered in the bedroom for hours. Chessa didn’t put a stop to their arguing.
It was Chet’s father, Don, who finally stopped the racket. He barged into the room and told the three sisters he’d rather have his brain eaten by brainweevils all over again than have to listen to their fighting for one more minute. Charlize and Chloe left in a huff.
Chet had been anything but sad to see the two go. They meant well, he supposed, but they were also the worst, always drawing Chessa into their petty rivalries.
Charlize wasn’t so bad on her own—Chet considered her one of his best friends, along with Knox and Rob—but when those three got together, it brought out the worst in them. He suspected Chloe was the problem, that she was the one with the toxic personality that infected the others, but he’d never had any reason to spend time with her on his own, and he wasn’t curious enough to try.
Chet accepted that he would never understand their complicated family dynamics. He was an only child, and had always been glad of it, except it did leave him completely clueless about sibling rivalry.
That Saturday afternoon, as he arrived at the underground headquarters and reported in for debriefing, Chet kept thinking about Chessa, and how her depression showed no sign of lifting. Things had been bad before the surgery, and now her heartbreak had only gotten worse.
* * *
As the suited man from the mayor’s office talked about the new Magical Calamity of the Week, Chet struggled to sit upright in his chair and keep his mind focused.
The whole hullabaloo was about a valuable book that had been stolen from the archives. The book had since been recovered at a civilian’s house, so tracking it down was not the issue. The problem was that the theft had been an inside job.
Chet rubbed his temples. All this fuss, for a book they had back on site? There hadn’t been this much fuss over the last couple of agent-on-agent homicides.
Another person in a suit interrupted the presentation with an update on something unrelated but important.
There were some technical issues regarding Codex. That was the new AI software that had been forced upon them without enough testing. Charlize had warned that it wasn’t ready, but Charlize wasn’t in charge of implementation. Just programming. And the AI’s irritating personality. That was all Charlize.
Chet rubbed his forehead and pretended to be listening.
The IT department technician turned the microphone back over to the young man who worked under the mayor. What was the fellow’s name? Alistair Something? The kid tried his best. He’d even brought visual aids: images projected onto the viewing screen in the gallery. It was always nice to have visuals at a debriefing, but photographs of a boring old leather-bound book couldn’t hold Chet’s attention.
Chet felt like shifting into a wolf and howling for the meeting to end. He couldn’t pay attention to any more of this crap.
And it was such crap. All of it. Or, in his father Don’s wise words, What the wing-dang-doodle was all this bullcrap?
If the DWM didn’t keep such valuable archives in the first place, agents like Chet and his friends wouldn’t be sitting ducks on top of a tempting bunker full of valuable books, and prophetic scrolls, and various objects with powers beyond comprehension. There were millions of dollars in gemstones alone. These were exactly the sort of things that evil forces—the bad guys—were constantly trying to steal.
The Department must have been spending close to three-quarters of their resources on internal security alone. It was wasteful, and stupid. It was like keeping your sugar bowl inside an ant colony and constantly holding emergency briefings about how the ants were trying to get the sugar again.
Whatever happened to the good ol’ days, when magical objects were scattered hither and thither? Sure, some encursed gemstone or magicked-up dune buggy or evil, indestructible lamp popped up every now and then, causing trouble, but that was what made magic fun.
Keeping everything in one storehouse was asking to have security breaches. Of course someone stole a book of ancient deity resurrection spells from the archives. The temptation was too much for most people to withstand.
What was that other expression his father used to say? A wise man knows better than to flash his Rolex in a dive bar. Don
’s expressions were becoming more and more likely to pop up in Chet’s head as he grew older. He was becoming his old man. Who knew? Soon he’d be cutting deals for extra slices of bacon. Now that was a funny/sad idea.
And he liked it.
He liked being a little bit sad all the time. It helped with his guilt over not having been able to protect his fiancée.
The weight of guilt felt better when it mingled with sadness.
The man sitting next to Chet Moore in the gallery leaned over and elbowed him.
It was Agent Rob, who said in a low voice, “If it’s a dusty old book that’s gone missing, what are the odds your witch neighbor has something to do with it?”
Chet’s thoughts returned to the present. He sat up straight in his chair. Rob had a point. This weekend’s so-called emergency did have the hallmarks of Riddle shenanigans.
“I’ll talk to Zara,” Chet said gruffly.
Rob grinned. “That’s not what I’m asking, Moore. I mean, what are the actual odds? Do you think it’s three to one? A few of us have a betting pool on the go.”
“Good one,” Chet said.
It was a good one. A betting pool that Zara Riddle was somehow involved in the new Magical Calamity of the Week? Now, that was a game that could pay out in both cash and entertainment value.
Chet Moore wanted to laugh, but the anxiety-related stiffness had returned to his back, plus he’d forgotten to breathe again.
Chapter 11
ZARA RIDDLE
By the time Bentley steered the car into the museum parking lot, Zoey had apparently already dealt with the flat tire.
I saw my daughter sitting on the bumper, watching for us to come in the entrance. She waved as we pulled up alongside the 1986 Nissan 300ZX known as Foxy Pumpkin.
“Don’t you look fresh as a daisy,” I said through the open window.
“Why, thank you,” she said, grabbing the rim of her wide-brimmed sun hat and tipping it toward us. “You didn’t need to come. I told you I already dealt with the flat tire.”
Bentley turned off the engine and stepped out. He went straight to my daughter, knelt in front of her, and began examining the palms of her hands. “These hands didn’t change a tire,” he reported back to me over his shoulder.
Zoey pulled her hands away, laughing. “I dealt with the flat tire a different way,” she said. “Griffin changed it for me.”
Bentley stood and put his hands on his hips. “Don’t you know how to change a tire? You should know. Someone should have taught you. Here, I’ll show you now.” He waved for her to open the trunk.
“I know how to change a tire,” she said, not moving from her seat on the bumper. “I only sent Mom that text message because I was confused about the spare being one of those skinny ones, but Griffin and I figured it out together. I would have been able to change it myself, but Griffin insisted on doing it for me so I didn’t get my hands dirty.”
Bentley looked over at me. “What do we know about this Griffin person?”
I opened the passenger door, stepped out, and counted off the main points on my fingers. “Griffin Yates. Age seventeen. Works here, at the museum. No felonies on his record.”
“What about misdemeanors?”
“I don’t know about misdemeanors.”
“Didn’t they tell you when you checked him for felonies?”
I looked down and kicked a pebble across the asphalt of the parking lot. The sun was causing heat waves to radiate up around us. “To be honest, I didn’t check for felonies. But I did see him dressed in a cave man costume, and he didn’t have any visible tattoos that would cause a mother any concern.”
Zoey jumped in. “He’s just a kid, you guys. A regular kid. I know him from high school.”
“Just a kid,” Bentley mused, then asked, “Are you two serious?”
She let out a nervous laugh. “We’re serious about just being friends.” She looked at me. “Is he always like this?”
“The new and improved Bentley is full of surprises,” I said. “Apparently, your grandmother programmed him to be some sort of guardian for us.” I squinted at the tall detective, cocking my head to the side. “It was for both of us, right? Package deal? Two Riddles for one big, strong guardian?”
“I told you that in confidence.” He shook his head. “You two don’t keep anything from each other, do you?”
Zoey said, “She tells me way more stuff than any daughter should ever know.”
“I believe it,” he said.
More heat waves rose up around us from the dark asphalt. A road-paving crew was working a block over, and I could smell the even hotter asphalt they were laying down.
Bentley walked around the side of Foxy Pumpkin and kicked the skinny spare tire. He continued around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and folded his tall body into the seat. Once seated, with the top of his head touching the top of the car’s interior, he started turning knobs and adjusting mirrors.
Zoey asked me, stage whispering, “What’s he doing?”
“My best guess is a safety inspection. Remember, he was programmed to be our butler.” I shook my head. “I mean guardian. No, wait, that’s not it.” I struck one finger in the air. “Bodyguard.”
“Gigi made him promise to protect us?”
“Using her special zombie magic,” I said. My mother didn’t like being referred to as a zombie, but she preferred it to “the evil undead.”
“That was nice of her,” Zoey said.
“Nice. Sure.” I glanced around the parking lot. “Nice in the way that it makes me wonder what other ‘nice’ surprises she left behind for us.”
“Mo-o-om,” she moaned. “Why can’t you accept that Gigi is back in our lives and wants to do nice things for us?”
“Because her nice things always come with strings.” I pointed down to the car’s tail lights, which were flashing on and off as Bentley tested the hazard lights. “For example, now we’re going to have to put up with Bentley safety testing all our vehicles.”
“We only have the one car.”
“What about all the brooms? And when he’s done with the car and the brooms, then what? He’s going to find the stuff we have at the back of the fridge and declare our whole house unfit for habitation.”
“You may be overreacting.” She took off her sun hat and used it to fan me. She’d noticed I was starting to perspire in an unladylike fashion. She was such a sweet kid.
Zoey asked, “What happened with your nuisance call, anyway?”
I gave her a quick recap of our fun Saturday morning at Temperance Krinkle’s house.
When I was done, she said, “Dollhouses always gave me the creeps. Thank you for not getting me one when I was little. All those tiny plates, and bowls, and coffee mugs with their too-thick rims.” She shuddered. “They’re even more disturbing than those child-sized tea sets, also with their too-thick, not-to-scale rims.”
“You were such a weird kid,” I said. “You didn’t go through the usual development stages other kids do.” I clapped my hands together. “Speaking of which, say ‘hang-a-burger’ for me. Please. Just once.”
She refused, as usual. Weird kid. Sweet, but weird.
Bentley stepped out of the car and declared it to be “safe enough,” given its age. Then he asked Zoey if she wanted us to follow behind her while she drove to a garage to get the flat tire fixed.
“There’s a garage about two blocks away,” she said. “I think I’ll be fine.” She turned and glanced at the museum. “Actually, I’m not leaving yet. Griffin says I should apply for a summer job here. He says I’ll have more fun hanging out with him and his friends who work here if I’m in on all their jokes.”
My heart swelled. I gave her a look of motherly pride. “You’re applying for a job so you can learn more in-jokes? I’ve never been more proud of you.”
Bentley frowned in the direction of the museum. “Why would you want to work here? The building’s modern enough, but all museums do is glamorize cult
leaders and pagan worship.”
I let out a bark of laughter. Bentley turned his frown from the museum to me.
“Oh,” I said. “You’re serious. What did museums ever do to you?”
He relaxed his expression as he turned back to Zoey. “Don’t mind me,” he said gently. “If you want to work here, then by all means, work here. You can use me as a personal reference.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You won’t tell them about my felonies?”
He mimed zipping his lips.
Zoey stopped fanning me with her sun hat and returned it to her head. “I’d better get in there soon, before I get too sweaty from standing out here in the parking lot.”
I hugged her goodbye, then stood where I was.
I watched my sixteen-year-old daughter walk toward her first job application. She would get the job, of course. I’d encountered a number of local teenagers through the library, and there wasn’t a single one of them who came anywhere near as perfect as my daughter was for this or, well, any job. But it was possible love had clouded my vision.
Bentley patted me on the shoulder. “She’s growing up fast, but she still needs you. Just wait and see. When this Griffin boy breaks her heart, she’ll come running to you.”
“I know,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse. My throat was so tight.
“Let’s get that lunch I promised you,” he said. “How does Dreamland sound?”
I wiped some stray parking lot sand from the corner of one eye and then the other. That darn parking lot sand.
“Sounds good,” I said. “They do make a decent lunch.”
“Plus, we can ask your friend Maisy Nix what she knows about dollhouses.”
I agreed that it was a good idea on both counts.
Chapter 12
DREAMLAND COFFEE, TOWN CENTER LOCATION
Maisy Nix wasn’t in the coffee shop, but the store manager assured us she would be returning shortly.
I looked over the lunch menu, and asked Bentley what he thought looked good.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You always say that, but then you put away food like you’ve just come home from the health spa.”
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