“Cook,” Gunnar said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Sommelier. Busboy. Whatever they need.”
“This isn’t Boston,” I reminded Luke. “We don’t stand on formality here.”
Gunnar cast an eye to the wine bottle resting in the bucket adjacent to our table.
“Barolo.” He gave me a look. “Since when?”
“Since tonight,” I said. “Renate and Colm sent it over.”
“Chloe usually buys her wine by the box,” Gunnar told Luke with a small smile.
Luke said something about being a Guinness kind of guy, and Gunnar said something about single malt while I tried sending Gunnar “go away” signals with my eyes. He just smiled back at me in that maddeningly noncommittal way he had and kept on talking.
Finally Luke said, “Pull up a chair,” and to my horror, Gunnar did exactly that.
I wanted to kick his Fae butt from one side of the room to the other. What was he
thinking
? Hadn’t Gunnar heard about the virtues of keeping a low profile?
Luke stood up. “Back in a few,” he said. “I need to set up an appointment to speak with the waitstaff.”
“What’s going on?” Gunnar asked as soon as Luke was out of earshot.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“Renate told me you needed reinforcements.”
“What I need is for you to get out of here before the cop comes back to the table.”
If Gunnar had a flaw, it was the fact that he lacked the emotional armor most people needed to get through the day with their heart intact. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know I had hurt his feelings.
“He’s human,” Gunnar said. “There’s no future.”
“Future?” I almost laughed out loud. “The only future I’m interested in includes dessert.”
“I know you’re lonely, Chloe. Don’t let it blur the lines.”
“You’re way off base,” I said, wondering who else had been reading my mind these days. “This is a business dinner. He asked his questions about Suzanne Marsden, I answered them, and now we’re just talking.” Gunnar was my closest friend but right then I could have happily hit him over the head with Felix’s serving tray.
“No problems?”
“Why would there be any problems?” I countered. “I mean, it’s not like I have anything to hide.”
It took a second but he started to laugh, and just like that everything was back to normal between us.
“I called this afternoon,” he said, “but your cell phone’s off.”
“I forgot to charge the battery.” I had a rocky relationship with all things electronic.
His smile was sweetly familiar but he said nothing. Once again I found myself wishing with all my heart that I loved him the way he deserved to be loved.
“And since when do you call my cell phone anyway?” Sugar Maple villagers had far more interesting means of communication available to them.
“If we’re going to have a human in our midst, we have to do as the humans do.”
“You think I’m going to screw up, don’t you?” I said as the light dawned. “I didn’t plan to be caught off guard this morning. I fell asleep on the sofa with the door unlocked and there he was.”
“That’s the point,” Gunnar said. “We have to guard against the unexpected.”
I picked a piece of silver-blue glitter from his shoulder. “I’m not the one shedding sparklies, friend.”
“Hey,” he said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand in his, “we’re friends, aren’t we? Friends have each other’s back.”
“Did Isadora put you up to this?” I loved Gunnar dearly but he was his mother’s son and her power was absolute.
“You heard her last night,” he said as a chill ran up my spine. “She wants the Book of Spells.”
“But why now?” I asked. “She’s had all these years to make a run for the Book. Why pick now to get serious?”
He looked uncomfortable.
“Tell me,” I said. “I need to know.”
“According to Isadora, the same charm that’s protected the town all these years also keeps the Book of Spells safe.”
“So if the town is in danger, so is the Book.”
“Once you possess full powers, you’ll be able to lock in your claim on the Book of Spells and it will be too late. The time for her to strike is now.”
Each and every descendant of Aerynn had faced a challenge from outside for ownership and each time we had won the day. The magick contained within the Book was powerful and demanded an equally powerful woman who would use that power to protect the town and all who lived there.
And to make matters worse, if I died without powers and without a daughter of my own, the Book of Spells would be absorbed into the Universe and Sugar Maple would be on its own.
So how did a twenty-first-century woman with no magick prove herself worthy of a seventeenth-century Book of Spells anyway? Dragons were in short supply in Sugar Maple. Maybe I was supposed to thwart a demon or, better yet, sit around and wait for Prince Charming to lend a hand.
I hadn’t a clue.
I started to laugh. Unfortunately it was one of those near-hysterical laughs that made people turn around and shoot you a look. “Gunnar, this is me you’re talking to: the woman with no powers. The woman who is never going to have any powers.”
“She’s not usually wrong about these things.”
“The only way I stand a chance to get my powers is if I fell in love and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”
He met my eyes. “Unless it’s already happened.”
LUKE
The Weavers said they would be happy to give me a list of employees who were on duty the night Suzanne died.
“I distinctly remember her,” Renate said. “She was sitting alone right over there.” She pointed toward a cozy corner table near an elaborately embroidered screen. “I think she was drinking margaritas while she waited but I could be wrong.”
“Did you enter into a conversation with her?”
“Nothing but the usual welcome speech, the list of specials.” She paused, thinking. “Actually, that’s not entirely true. She dropped by earlier and wanted to sit at the bar and wait. I told her we opened at six sharp and not a second sooner. I don’t think she liked that very much.”
Renate was being kind. The Suzanne I had known would have hated it, and she wouldn’t have hesitated to let the world know just how much.
“Was she alone?”
“Yes.”
“Both times?”
“Yes.” She gave me a friendly but professional smile. “I need to get back to work now, Detective MacKenzie, but I’d be happy to talk to you tomorrow.”
So far tomorrow was shaping up to be one hell of a busy day.
“By the way,” she said, “you should ask Gunnar over there if he saw anything. He was helping out in the kitchen that night.”
I walked back to the table. Chloe looked a little edgy as she noted my approach. Her golden-boy friend seemed distracted. On him it looked like moody introspection. He probably spent a good three or four hours a day staring at his reflection in every mirror he passed.
Not that I was jealous or anything. In a town of great-looking people, he was just another pretty face, but there was something about the guy that got under my skin.
I reclaimed my seat. “You saved me some whiskey cake,” I said. “Thanks.”
Chloe smiled at me. “At great personal sacrifice, I’ll have you know.”
I took a bite and decided I probably wouldn’t have been that generous. The stuff was amazing. “I owe you one.”
I wasn’t ignoring the guy next to me but I wasn’t exactly pulling him into our circle either. She didn’t treat him like a boyfriend. There was no touching, no hand-holding, no lingering glances. If anything, she seemed pissed with him.
“So what’s that all about?” I asked, gesturing toward his right eye.
“Family disagreement,” he said, wincing. “Things got out of hand.”
“Speaking as your local law enforcement provider, anything I should know about?”
“My brother likes the Pats. I’m a Dolphins man. They play each other next Sunday.”
“Got it,” I said. I was a Patriots fan too. Hand-to-hand combat seemed to come with the territory.
I settled down to the whiskey cake.
CHLOE
By the time Gunnar said good-bye, I had fallen into a football coma. I suppose I should have been grateful to him for taking Luke’s mind off his investigation, but the sense that we had dodged another bullet was strong.
“I love him,” I said to Luke after Gunnar had left, “but I thought he would never leave.”
Luke’s eyebrows shot skyward. “You love him?”
“No, no!” I started to laugh. “I don’t love him that way. I love him like a brother.”
“Does he know that? Because I wasn’t picking up brotherly vibes heading your way.”
“We tried dating years ago,” I admitted, “but we’re better off friends.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“I see lots of men,” I said airily. “I just don’t see any of them a second time.”
Maybe you had to be there (or be brined in fancy wine), but we started laughing and we couldn’t stop. Felix refilled our coffee cups and we laughed harder. Renate strolled casually by to see if everything was okay, but we couldn’t answer her through the gales of laughter. Have you ever had one of those nights when absolutely everything was funny? Every sight, every sound, doubled us over with the kind of hilarity I’m not sure I had ever experienced before.
When the cute little snifter of Courvoisier I’d been nursing slipped from my hand and somehow flew across the table and upturned itself in Luke’s lap, I was almost relieved to be interrupted by magick.
Almost
being the operative word, of course. Right then I was praying he didn’t notice that the brandy snifter had a better jump shot than Michael Jordan in his prime.
“What the—?” He leaped to his feet, Courvoisier sluicing down his muscular (I wasn’t too drunk to notice) thighs.
“I’m sorry!” I grabbed for a clean napkin and leaped unsteadily to my feet too. “I don’t know how that happened. Let me—”
He took the napkin from my hand. “I’ll do it.”
Renate hurried over with ice water and more clean napkins, and except for the delicious smell of brandy, he was as good as new in record time.
“That was some trick,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“That glass hung in midair before it tipped over. How the hell did you do that?”
Funny how quickly a girl could sober up. “You must have had too much wine. It slipped out of my hand.”
Very funny, Gunnar.
I pictured him standing outside the window laughing his butt off. He knew the rules. When it came to practical jokes, outsiders were off-limits. We hadn’t managed to keep our true story hidden all these years by taking chances.
Renate and Felix hovered over us as if we were small children in need of supervision. I eyebrowed Renate to back off but she blithely ignored me and encouraged Felix to do the same. This was probably part of the “Let’s Keep Chloe from Screwing Everything Up” campaign under way in Sugar Maple.
“Would you like anything else?” Felix appeared at our table, all smiles and bristling with curiosity. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he had been eavesdropping on us and reporting back to Renate.
“Just the check,” Luke said.
I made an attempt to pay my half of the bill but he waved me off.
“Business expense,” he reminded me.
“Even the wine?”
“Renate comped it.”
I had no idea whether or not he was happy, but suddenly I realized that I was. Embarrassingly happy, to be precise. When the Barolo-and-brandy buzz wore off, I would remember that we had spent half the evening re-creating some of the last moments of a woman’s life, but at that moment on that particular night I was about as happy as I had ever been in my life.
For the first time in my thirty years on the planet, I wasn’t wishing I could step into someone else’s shoes, someone else’s life. I was happy just as I was. Too bad it couldn’t last.
We said good night to Renate and Colm then stepped out into another dazzling Vermont night. The snow-blanketed mountains glowed silver-white beneath the waxing moon. An owl hooted softly in the distance. The air was so crisp and sweet I wanted to take a bite out of it, and I pulled in a long, deep breath.
“Oww!” I clutched at my head.
I could hear a chuckle in his voice. “Oxygen will do it to you every time.”
“You drank as much as I did. Why aren’t you having trouble?”
“I’m driving,” he reminded me. “I only had half a glass.”
I babbled something about the great food and great wine and God knows what else. We must have walked to the parking lot because the next thing I knew I was strapped into the front seat of his truck, shivering while we waited for the engine to warm up.
“You don’t really have a pine tree hanging from your mirror, do you?” I tapped it with the tip of my index finger.
“You’ve got something against pine trees?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, happily tipsy. “They belong in the forest, not dangling over your dashboard.”
I launched myself into a goofy riff on pine tree air fresheners, furry car seat covers, and satellite radio that probably didn’t make any sense at all.
“So where do you live?” he asked as he drove out of the lot.
I had to think for a second. “You know where Osborne and Nurse intersect? I’m east of there, right near Proctor Park.” He punched some info into a GPS and it recited instructions in one of those creepy robotic voices that weirded me out even when I was stone cold sober.
“I could have walked home from the Inn,” I said. “You’re going out of your way.”
“No problem. I need to learn my way around town.”
Was I too buzzed to walk home? I didn’t think so. Our town was safe, we had no traffic, and I had a homing pigeon’s sense of direction. But I was very glad he thought I was because it meant we had more time together.