I sighed and admonished my protective dog in silence. “He’s going to find out anyway. Angus was pursued out of the store and down Main Street by a furious wind. People will remember that.”
“I’d like to hear about this clash,” Drew said. “But perhaps we could move out of the aisle. We’ve cleared the building of everyone except the librarian. Most had left of their own accord.”
Or by decree of a certain spectral sheepdog.
“That sounds good,” I said. Being in such close confines with Angus’s remains bothered me more than I expected. There was no telling what took him down or whether it was contagious. I’d encountered viral spells before but they generally passed among the living.
Mr. Bixby cleared his throat. “Plus you want to avoid—”
I hiccupped. It was inevitable. I couldn’t see sunflowers from the floor but I sensed they were there.
Ren leaned around Drew and saw them first. I knew from her expression and then the urgency in her voice. “Drew, I mean Chief Gillock, could you help Sinda move to the reading nook? I can manage with Janelle.”
He nodded and assisted our friend to her feet. Sinda made a show of being feeble to command his full attention as they squeezed past Ren and left the aisle. Meanwhile, Ren grabbed blooms from three different shelves and shoved them into her coat pockets.
“Take note of where they were,” I said. “At this point anything’s a clue.”
“Got it.” She pulled out her phone and snapped some photos. “Easy to see the holes in the metal. How do they do that?”
“Ask Liberty. It’s all her fault.” I clambered to my feet and looked around. The border collie ghost was nowhere to be seen now. Just Angus, the book that exploded my mind, and a few police officers blocking the other end of the aisle. Drew must have told them to give us privacy, because their backs were turned. That wasn’t something Jimmy Barrow would do willingly. He was both suspicious and terrified of us.
“A dangerous combination,” Mr. Bixby said. “Makes people unpredictable.” I turned to leave and he added, “Wait. Do a quick check on these books before you go. There’s no telling when we might get back in here.”
“I’m not touching them. Not after what happened.”
“Oh, it was probably just a simple smoke bomb. No damage done. I would know.”
I stared down at the book spread open on Angus’s chest. The title in gold lettering against navy blue looked deceptively harmless: Magic Through the Ages.
“Maybe it seemed like a simple smoke bomb to you but it knocked me right out. I was lucky I didn’t hit my head harder. So, I’m not touching anything else.”
“Then try what you learned with the buffet at Liberty’s house.”
It took me a moment to remember. “Right. I’ll go fishing.”
I had watched Liberty trail her fingers along the Brighton family’s old oak buffet to locate something and discovered I could do the same.
“See? I told you that you got more than hiccups in your energy exchange.” He prodded my hand. “Try it.”
Holding my breath, I ran my fingers above the spines of the books, not quite touching. The first shelf revealed nothing, but the one below yielded a hit. A book sent a pulse of golden energy into my fingers and up my arm, along with a message. “Ren, I think it’s for you. Try touching it.”
“Really? I don’t want to, after what happened to you. What do you think, Bijou?”
The poodle took a long careful sniff that made Bixby pound his paws impatiently. “Smells good. Full of tasty delights. Yum yum yum.”
Ren laughed quietly. “It’s not a cookbook, Beej.”
“Kind of is,” I said. “You’ll cook up all kinds of trouble if this is your book.”
She gently touched the spine with her index finger. “Oooh. It sparkles.”
It didn’t sparkle, at least to my eye, but my spell book always made me tingle. “We can’t just steal it, though.”
“It’s a library. Check it out fair and square,” Mr. Bixby said. “I would imagine the librarian is suggestible.”
“But what if it holds a clue to Angus’s death?”
I shook my head. “Nothing I could pick up.”
Bixby prodded Ren now. “Pop it in your bag before Big Red gets back.”
She did as she was told and the gleam of her white teeth suggested she’d met her match. When I found my book it felt like the missing piece of a puzzle snapped into place. Mr. Bixby had been the next. And Whimsy the third. There were likely more pieces to come.
“Exactly right,” the dog said. “But none of them include that fool.”
The fool in question was the handsome, auburn-haired man who made me tingle in a different way. “Miss Brighton, a word?”
His expression as he beckoned from the end of the aisle told me there would be no romantic subtext today, however. Nor should there be, when a man was dead behind me.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Bixby said, silently. “Flirting is a vast waste of your time and talents. That said, Angus MacDuff doesn’t deserve much pity.”
“Bad man, bad man, bad man,” Bijou said, also on the inside line. Our conversations would need to be scrupulously silent now, not our usual hit and miss. Chief Dredger and James Barrow had joined Sinda to wait for us in the circle of comfortable leather chairs.
“He was a bad man and I know it,” I told them. “And yet there was no imprint of his misdeeds on his watch. It’s strange, because when I touch anything belonging to Oscar Knight, snakes writhe inside me. Could Angus’s mind have been selectively purged in prison?”
“Possibly,” Mr. Bixby said, strutting ahead of me. He wasn’t going to play lapdog today. “But save the musing for later.”
Chief Dredger took the lead in the questioning, as it was his home turf. “Miss Brighton, I’d like to know why you followed Mr. MacDuff in here and confronted him in the Parapsychology and Occultism aisle.”
