Keme snorted.
“But aren’t you excited,” Millie asked again, “to see your FRIEND?”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
“But you brought him a Christmas present,” Millie said, looking at the parcel wrapped in brown paper (and string—that was my mom for you) under my chair.
“It’s from my parents; my parents are friends with him. They sent it to my house because they didn’t know which hotel he was going to be staying at.” My parents were both writers as well—my dad (Jonny Dane, the Talon Maverick series) leaned toward military thrillers, not too different from Marshall’s, and my mom (Patricia Lockley, The Echoes in the Cellar, We All Live in the Basement, The Matriarch’s Tooth) wrote psychological thrillers. In addition to the parcel for Marshall, I’d gotten a package of my own from my parents—handwritten edits on my latest short story (“And Then They Were Done,” and let me tell you, my parents did not like the title). “He probably doesn’t even remember me.”
Although that, at least, definitely wasn’t true. Because when I’d turned twelve, Marshall had happened to be visiting my parents, and he’d been kind enough to give me a BB gun—and then been crushed to learn I didn’t want to go hunting with him and my dad. I hadn’t been all that surprised when, a couple of books later in the Chase Thunder series, Chase had been saddled with a pansy twelve-year-old who didn’t want to hunt, had zero self-confidence, oh, and ultimately got butchered in particularly disturbing detail. (To put your minds at rest, yes, Chase went on to exact about two hundred pages of bloody revenge.)
In other words, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to seeing Marshall again. Which was part of why I looked around one more time. If nothing else, Bobby could shoot Marshall if he got particularly annoying. Not that Bobby would, because he was too kind. But maybe he’d let me borrow his gun.
Unfortunately, though, as had become more and more often the case, there was no sign of Bobby. Things had certainly been different since he’d broken up with West and moved into Hemlock House. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected—okay, I had some very clear hopes and dreams, and yes, maybe one of them involved a bubble bath. But I also understood that Bobby was just a friend, and as far as I could tell, that’s all he wanted to be.
In fact, considering how things had gone lately, he might not even want that. He was hardly ever home. He went to the gym. He went surfing (yes, God, in the winter). He worked as many shifts as he could get at the sheriff’s office. And when he was home, he was busy, or the rest of the Last Picks were there, or he headed to his room. Slowly, over the last couple of months, I’d realized that I saw less of Bobby now that we were roommates than I ever had when he’d been engaged and living with his fiancé.
“I’m sure Marshall remembers you,” Fox said. Tonight, they’d gone with corpse bride meets James Fennimore Cooper as their fashion choice: a striped, ruffled dress over buckskin leggings and clonky boots. “Who wouldn’t remember you?”
“Uh, thank you?”
Keme and Fox both got a good laugh out of that.
I would have responded to that (probably), except raised voices drew my gaze.
At the back of the multipurpose room, my other self-appointed nemesis, Pippi Parker, was trying to clear people away from the coffee station. Pippi was yet another author—Hastings Rock was lousy with them, it turned out. She was a middle-aged white lady with platinum-colored hair in a pixie cut that looked like it had been blow-dried within an inch of catching fire. She wrote cozy mysteries. You know the type: everyone is friends, everyone gets along (well, except whoever got murdered, I suppose), calories don’t count, and nobody says bad words, not even when Keme was hiding in your bedroom and he jumped out and screamed, and then you screamed, and then you had a minor heart attack, and Keme and Fox laughed so hard that Fox fell over and you had to take them to the urgent care because, according to them, the fall had made their sciatica flare up (painful and believable) and they needed their laudanum refilled (less believable).
Right then, Pippi was directing her family as they began unpacking the bags they were carrying. Accompanying Pippi tonight were her beloved husband Stephen, balding, in a reindeer sweater vest, and her three sons (their names were Dylan, Christian, and Carter, although I couldn’t have told you which one was which; all three of them looked the same, with dishwater blond hair and obnoxiously friendly smiles, and they were all painfully polite and well-mannered). Under Mrs. Shufflebottom’s approving gaze, Pippi’s family was setting out what appeared to be an entire trade catalogue’s worth of promotional materials: Pippi Parker-branded pens, Pippi Parker-branded keychains, Pippi Parker bookmarks (Park Yourself with a Good Book!), even Pippi Parker-branded cups, napkins, and—
“Good Lord,” Fox said. “She has her own water bottles?”
Sure enough, a sticker with Pippi Parker’s face had been pasted over the water bottle labels. All I could do was watch as Stephen hustled to the stage and started setting out the branded water bottles for Marshall and whoever else might end up sitting there.
“It does seem like a bit much,” Indira said.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Millie said. “Dash, we should put your face on everything we drink.”
“I think I’ve got a little more class—” I began to say.
And at that exact moment, of course, the room fell into one of those conversational lulls that occasionally happen.
“—than to slap my face on every available surface.”
Every eye turned toward me as my words rang out through the multipurpose room.
Mrs. Shufflebottom recovered first, glaring at me, one hand pinching the cardigan shut at her throat. “Mr. Dane,” she stage-whispered, “this is a library. If you cannot keep your voice down, I will have to ask you to leave.”
Some bozo—I thought it sounded like one of the Archer clan—made a familiar high school noise, the one that suggested: a) I’d gotten in trouble, and b) this was going to be good.
“But,” I said, and I made a flailing gesture at the roomful of people who had chosen that particular instant to fall silent. I tried not to see Pippi’s death stare. “Everyone was—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—it was so loud in here—”
“Mr. Dane,” Mrs. Shufflebottom snapped. And then, yanking the cardigan up a few inches: “Control yourself.”
I sank down in my seat.
And then Millie waved. “HI, MRS. SHUFFLEBOTTOM.”
A few of the people closest to us were knocked backward by the gale-force winds.
“Well, hello, Millicent,” Mrs. Shufflebottom said, her voice changing to that syrupy sweetness I associated with librarians who spent too much of their lives doing story time. “Aren’t you looking lovely this evening?”
To be fair, Millie was looking lovely this evening—you could tell by the fact that Keme practically fainted every time Millie said something to him—but the injustice of it still made me whisper, “How is that fair? I barely said anything—”
“Mr. Dane!”
I sank down even further and clamped my mouth shut.
Slowly, nervous chatter began, and the volume began to build again.
“She really doesn’t like you,” Fox informed me.
I glared at him.
Keme was smirking, so I gave him a dose too.
“What did you do to her?” Millie asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” I whispered furiously. “I’ve been nothing but charming and polite and charming and—”
