“Janelle?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ireversed the invisibility spell just seconds before Drew appeared at the end of the row. Bixby materialized, too, and trotted up behind him.
“Hey, where did you come from?” he asked the dog.
“Cop on the beat,” Bixby said, out loud. He liked yelling at Drew, ever hopeful of baiting me into answering aloud, too. It worked often enough to reinforce the intermittent rewards loop.
“Hi, Drew.” Smiling, I smoothed my hair. I hadn’t looked in a mirror since I left Whimsy this morning, which felt like a lifetime ago. It probably wasn’t my best look.
“I concur with that, too,” Bixby said. “Whoa. I’m getting downright agreeable. My second life is making me soft.”
“How did you know I was here?” I asked.
Drew smiled back at me. “Smelled you the second you came in.”
“Smelled me! How? I’m not wearing perfume.”
“Sure, you are. You smell like sunflowers.”
“You could have picked a sweeter flower, Janelle,” Bixby said. “These are all show and no smell. It’s sort of a damp mossy scent. Hardly something to inspire romance.”
Tuning the dog out with mental humming, I forced another smile for Drew. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the sunflowers.”
“No need. It was startling at first, but now I like to see them pop up unannounced.”
My face took on a lot of heat, considering the library was far from warm. The back door was still open and inviting winter inside. “I don’t. It’s unintentional.”
“I figured. Especially when a bunch arrived here about an hour ago and you didn’t. Just figured you were thinking of me. The ones in my coat pocket came as a nice surprise.”
I laughed. “I hate being so obvious. In this case, I was pondering what happened here and wondering if I could get back inside to look around. But I was anxious, after what happened earlier. And when I get anxious, sometimes I— Well, I send sunflowers to strange places.”
“Ah. That explains the one I pulled out of an empty bookshelf in this row. It almost fought back. They’re scrappy little things.” He leaned to peer around me. “Sometimes not so little.”
I turned and saw one growing rapidly out of the carpet toward an empty shelf where the occult books had sat earlier. They’d all been taken away, presumably for investigation. I highly doubted anyone would find a clue. Magical villains knew how to cover their tracks.
“That’s embarrassing,” I said, as the tall flower rested its heavy head on the shelf in question. “And a giveaway. You know the reason I’m here.”
“Hoping to get a look at the book that seemingly knocked you out, I presume.”
I nodded. “Unless you’ve found another cause of death for Angus MacDuff.”
“Not yet. Preliminary results indicate a stroke.”
“Reasonable and very possibly true. I probably only got a small taste of what Angus was served. Much more and a stroke would have been welcome.”
He shifted uneasily. “I still find all of this”—he gestured to the bookshelf—“unnerving, to say the least. But it explains the stack of unsolved cases in Wyldwood Springs. I started poking around after what happened a few weeks ago.”
What happened was that I shared a recording of a murderer’s confession that included references to magic. It was the first time we’d taken a tentative step into discussing such matters. Both of us had avoided a deeper dive in the weeks since. Our dinner dates were refreshingly normal.
Since he seemed open to the discussion tonight, however, I got brave. “Drew, what happens when crimes have no logical explanation? Is there a protocol?”
“I’ve only been around a few months, as you know. What I’ve observed is that Chief Dredger closes the file rather quickly and hands it off to a special investigations unit. I’ve worked in many towns throughout this region and no one else has a special investigations unit.”
“The magical police, I presume.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. I’ve asked to meet them for the handoff but it never happens. You can imagine it’s frustrating to have no control over your own cases. But they usually do get resolved and the problem goes away.”
“Not always?”
“Well, Mr. MacDuff wasn’t supposed to come back. That was my understanding. Yet here he was, only weeks after his arrest.”
“So Chief Dredger did know about the episode in the mayor’s office,” I said.
“Not officially. It was off the books. We were toeing the party line.”
Bixby forced his way past my mental humming block. “See? We all told you Red had secrets. What else is he hiding?”
I threw the dog a mental glare. “Not as much as I’m hiding, I bet.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I shut the line down again and continued with Drew. “I was hoping to find out why Angus was free. When he came to threaten me at the store, he didn’t seem like himself.”
Running a hand through his auburn hair, he sighed. “Janelle, it goes against my training to say this, but some issues are probably better left unexamined. You took quite a hit. Maybe close the book on this one.”
“He doesn’t know us very well.” The words came from Mr. Bixby, of course. My humming block was failing miserably. It was tough to focus on two things at once. Especially when one of them was watching me with great concern in his deep brown eyes.
