Читать книгу Magick Run Amok - Sharon Pape - Страница 17

Chapter 9

The next morning I was up before the sun and the rest of my household. Curiosity about the contents of Ryan’s disk had pulled me from a disjointed dream in which Merlin and Ryan were beta testing a time travel machine. If Travis was right, the disk could tell us what his brother had been working on and it might even point us in the direction of his killer. Given that Ryan had been living in Watkins Glen for the past month, it seemed likely that the subject of his investigation was somewhere in the greater Glen area. Not even Travis had been privy to more details than that. He said his brother observed a strict code of silence about his investigations, until they appeared in print or on the air. Ryan claimed it wasn’t a matter of trust. It was simply human nature that people with the best intentions often let information slip.

As I emerged from my warm cocoon under the quilt, the air pricked my skin like the spray of a cold shower. My grandmother Bronwen had had the heating system updated decades ago, followed by new windows guaranteed to stop the continuing loss of heat. They didn’t. Morgana had tried caulking and having extra insulation blown in. And when that still didn’t fix the problem, we had a parade of experts troop through, all of whom concluded that old houses were leaky as sieves. One went so far as to cavalierly suggest tearing the place down and rebuilding it the right way. He was shown the door with the help of a magickal push that made him stumble over his own feet. Morgana took the matter into her own hands and spent most of her free time trying to create a spell that would resolve the problem. Five years ago we thought she’d finally succeeded, but it turned out the spell made the house so airtight that we all nearly suffocated in our sleep. If not for Sashkatu sounding the alarm, the Wilde family and its magickal bloodline would no longer exist. At the time of Morgana’s death, the problem had yet to be solved. I continued to make do with thick quilts, warm robes, and lots of Tilly’s hot teas. There was never any question that the house would remain inviolate for future generations of Wildes.

When I’d crawled under the covers the previous night, I’d made the tactical error of leaving my robe at the bottom of the bed. Now there were two cats curled up on it. If I woke them, they’d start thinking about breakfast and I wanted to spend the quiet time before dawn on the computer. I exchanged my nightgown for an ensemble of ratty old sweats on the floor of my closet. I’d been meaning to throw them out, but they were handy and warm. If I fussed about for something more stylish, I’d probably wake all the cats.

I pulled on thick socks and padded into the smallest of the four bedrooms that had been used as a home office as far back as I could remember. I’d kept everything pretty much the way Morgana and Bronwen had left it, with the exception of installing a computer there. I plugged in Ryan’s thumb drive. There was only one file on it. He probably used a new drive for each investigation. I clicked on the file and found a meaningless list of dates, locations, and names. Although Ryan would have understood his notes, to me it was like staring at a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the cover to show me what the puzzle should look like in the end. My phone beeped with a text from Travis, asking if I was up yet. Perfect timing, maybe he could help me make sense of it. I called him back.

“I’m not only awake,” I said,” I’m stumped.”

“Tell me about it,” Travis said. “I just looked at his disk.”

“Do you happen to speak Ryanese?”

“Not a word, but it’s a starting point. We have to find out what these people have in common.”

“Did you notice that the dates are months, even years apart?” I asked.

“Yeah, whatever Ryan was hunting happened over a relatively long period of time.”

“Maybe he saw a pattern involving these people,” I said, thinking out loud. I was so thoroughly engrossed in our conversation that I was startled to find myself staring into Sashkatu’s face. He parked himself on the keyboard and eyed me balefully. He must have climbed up the bookshelf and walked across the window sill to reach me. The others wouldn’t be far behind. Dawn was breaking and stomachs would soon be grumbling for breakfast.

“Let’s start with the names and see what that nets us,” Travis said.

“Okay, I’ll try to find out if the list refers to people who are alive or dead.” Google and Facebook should be good places to start.

“Let me know what you find. I’m going to be chasing down a story about political corruption in Albany.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.

“Depends on how you look at it. I have a lot of fun receiving the paychecks. Especially when a stack of bills comes in.” Sashkatu started to chatter at me and batted at the phone in my hand. His gang of five chimed in. “What on earth is going on over there?” Travis asked.

“A feline uprising,” I said as another cat scrambled onto my lap.

“I’ll let you deal with the mutiny. We’ll talk later.”

I powered through my morning routine, intrigued by the clues and where they might lead. But it was hard not to dwell on the sobering fact that Ryan’s death lay at its core.

* * * *

“Kailyn,” Tilly called as she came through the connecting door. “Oh dear, oh my, Kailyn.” The timbre of her voice was the perfect soundtrack for hand-wringing. I was restocking products in the second aisle. I set down the jar I was holding and intercepted her on her way to the counter. She was wearing the turban she used for dramatic effect when giving a reading. Paired with her bright sneakers and bedazzled muumuu, she looked like the one who flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

I gave her rouged cheek a kiss. “What’s up, Aunt Tilly?”

“Mayor Tompkins is threatening to have Merlin arrested.”

“For what?” Maybe this was a good time for hand-wringing.

“Election fraud, forgery—”

“Wait, is this about his bid to run for the town board?”

“Yes, that’s how I understood it.”

“Where is Merlin now?”

“In my shop watching TV, but Tompkins told me to come back to discuss the matter at three o’clock.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said, which immediately calmed her. Too bad it didn’t ease my mind. If Merlin was arrested, the whole issue of his status in New Camel and the country would come under scrutiny. He might even be deported, if they could figure out where he belonged. The truth was he didn’t belong anywhere in the present. When the news outlets picked up the scent of this problem, things would go from bad to worse. Merlin would become national news. From there it was a short hop, skip, and jump to international notoriety, courtesy of social media. The man who came from nowhere. Whenever things went haywire with modern technology, Bronwen would bemoan the loss of the “olden days.” I used to tease her about being old-fashioned, but I was starting to realize there was something to be said for a simpler, Little-House-on-the-Prairie life.

At ten to three, we all piled into my car for the short journey to New Camel’s town hall. The building occupied an old white clapboard house with forest green shutters and a weather vane that straddled the sharply pitched roof. The second floor was off limits, deemed unsafe as far back as I could remember. In any case, the main floor was adequate for the town’s purposes. The mayor’s office was in a small room off the public area. There was no mayoral residence. Tompkins lived in the house where he’d grown up, although now with his wife and children instead of his parents.

We walked into his office at precisely three o’clock. He had three chairs waiting for us. Either he’d guessed that I would accompany my aunt and Merlin, or three was the room’s normal complement. Tilly had talked Merlin into wearing his best jeans and a sweater. She’d lassoed his unruly hair with a rubber band. He could have passed for an eccentric artist, a mad scientist, or a hippy leftover from the seventies.

Once we were all seated, Tompkins reached across his desk to hand me a form that was several pages long. The heading at the top of the first page read “Petition to Run for the New Camel Town Board.” Signatures filled all the lines below it. I flipped to the next page and the next. There were a lot of signatures. I looked more closely at the names that were both printed and signed. I recognized most of them as belonging to local residents. So far so good. My first clue that all was not as it should be, came with the signature of Jim Harkens who’d been dead for the last few months. Another problem popped up a moment later when I found Tompkins’s signature. Oh Merlin, weren’t there any laws back in your time? Or were you exempt from them because of your status and close relationship with the king?

Tompkins was glaring at me when I looked up from the papers. “Do you understand why I asked your aunt to come back to discuss this matter more fully?” His expression dared me to shrug it off.

“I apologize, Mayor Tompkins. What can I say? As you’re aware, Merlin is a bit different and often doesn’t understand the right and wrong of such things. My aunt and I promise to be more vigilant about keeping him out of trouble. We’d be so very grateful if you could find it in your heart not to turn this over to the police.” Boy, did I hate begging him. I wanted to go home and wash my mouth out with soap.

“There is a remarkable aspect to your cousin’s disregard for the law,” Tompkins said, breezing over my plea. “He forged my signature so perfectly not even I can tell the difference. I checked a lot of the other signatures against documents in our files that were signed by those individuals. Merlin forged them all with uncanny accuracy. How do you explain this ability?”

I went with the first thing that came to me, though it was far from a perfect analogy. “Rain Man.”

Tompkins frowned. “Excuse me?”

“The Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman movie from the late eighties?”

“Are you trying to tell me your cousin is an autistic savant?”

“How else could he do such a thing?” I said, hoping it didn’t occur to the mayor that Merlin couldn’t have memorized all the signatures, because he’d never seen most of them before.

“In-ter-est-ing.” He drew the word out as though dissecting the possibility. “That would explain a lot,” he concluded.

“You know what?” Tilly piped up. “I would love to bake a pie or cake for you. Name your favorite. Why don’t we make it a different one every week for a month? Six months? You deserve it for your trouble.”

Tompkins sighed. “You don’t want to be bribing me, Matilda.” He looked at me, shaking his head. “Kailyn, please take your family home before they break every law we have in New Camel.”

“Are you going to bring this to the attention of the police?” I had to know if there was a knife hanging over our heads.

“Not this time. Just go—with my sympathies.”

* * * *

“How did you forge all those signatures?” I demanded of the wizard once we were in my car and headed back to our shops.

“With magick of course, silly girl.” He was in the front passenger seat, having called shotgun as we emerged from town hall. It was anyone’s guess where he’d learned that expression. I was having a hard time keeping my anger in check. Any minute steam might pour from my ears and eyeballs. “You promised not to use magick unless one of us okayed it.”

“I was merely following the instructions on the form,” he replied blithely. “If they are incorrect, the person who wrote them should be reprimanded.” He turned his head to address my aunt. “Tilly, dear lady, might you still have one of the blank forms?”

I heard my aunt rummaging in the depths of the oversized tote she called a purse. “Aha,” she exclaimed, “there it is.” She held up a small plastic bag containing a partially flattened jelly donut with the jelly oozing out. “I couldn’t find this for the life of me yesterday.”

“I’ll take half,” Merlin said, although she hadn’t asked for volunteers.

I parked in front of my shop. “Aunt Tilly, do you have a copy of the form?” I hadn’t paid particular attention to the instructions on the one Tompkins showed me.

“Yes, yes,” she said, dividing the donut in half. She handed Merlin the larger piece. Then she dove back into her purse and came up with a folded sheet of paper that she handed to me:

Petition to Run For the New Camel Town Board.

Interested parties must present the signatures of at least one hundred legal residents of the town and file said petition with the town clerk before the first of December, 2018.

“You can see for yourself that there is no mention of how one should obtain the signatures,” Merlin said. “Was I expected to ring every doorbell in this town and ask if the people living therein were legal residents? What do you think the result of such an effort was likely to have been?”

He had me there. The instructions were not specific about how to obtain the signatures. Merlin knew only a handful of people, primarily the shopkeepers. More likely than not, everyone else would have slammed their doors in his face, if they even bothered to open them in the first place. But there were important points he’d chosen to ignore.

“First of all,” I said, “it is assumed that anyone applying for the position is aware that forgery is illegal. Secondly, it is also assumed that applicants know they have to be legal residents of this town.”

The wizard was absorbed in plucking bits of jelly out of his beard and licking it off his fingers. “Mayhap they are too quick to assume such things.”

“Trust me, Merlin, you do not want to give any branch of the government cause to look into your background or ask for your ID. It would mean a quick trip to a prison cell or, in your case, a hospital for the insane.”

“Then I will find another way to restore the town’s original and proper name,” he said clearly undaunted. We’d reached a temporary impasse and I had a business to reopen. Tilly and he climbed out of the car and headed into Tea and Empathy. I unlocked Abracadabra, Merlin’s avowed mission weighing heavily on my mind.