Page 39 of The Fantastic Fluke

So Beez and I stared at Mal, confused, until they clarified. They held up the book in their hands. “All Debts Are Paid, by Jonathon McKinley. Some great-great-whatever-grand of yours, Sage? It looks really old.”

I shrugged but tried to keep it from being too defensive. Failed, no doubt, but at least I tried. Any family member of mine being connected to this was not reassuring. The fact that my father had created this... whatever it was, was bad enough. Add McKinleys to the mix and the result wasn’t going to be good.

“I think we need to keep this stuff,” Beez said when she found her voice again. She took the book from Mal, set it on the pile of others, and toted them out into the bedroom where she had a box set up for things I wanted to save. “Mal, see if there’s anything else that needs to come out of there.”

They scrounged around the closet, the floorboards, and the shelving unit where my father had kept his shoe collection, shaking their head and muttering “so many black loafers,” but didn’t find anything. “I think that’s it,” they called to Beez before looking back at me. “You still doing okay?”

I shook my head but didn’t elaborate. I needed to talk to Gideon. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Beez and Mal—I did, and they were my closest friends. But if I told them about Gideon, about Meredith, and about the fact that I was starting to suspect foul play in the deaths of the missing arcane mages, that dragged them into a situation where at least one person I knew had been murdered.

Gideon was already involved, and frankly, already dead. I couldn’t get him killed. Beez and Mal were much more vulnerable.

Maybe my mother’s murder wasn’t related to this. Or maybe it was. The fact that my father had known who Meredith Johnson was, had a photo of a woman I assumed was her sitting next to my mother, was terrifying. The related magic books? The other person. Adler.

What the hell did it all add up to?

For the time being, we packed it all into a box that went into Mal’s truck, and went back to readying the rest of Dad’s stuff for the estate sales people.

Chapter Fourteen

Iwas about to drop of exhaustion by the time I got home that evening, having spent the afternoon helping the estate people pack Dad’s furniture onto their huge truck. In the end, all I’d kept was a box of the stuff from Dad’s secret shrine.

I stopped at the front door to wave to Mal and Beez as they drove off. They were still saying they weren’t dating anymore. I wondered if it would stick this time. The two of them were obviously coming to a point where they were more friends than lovers, and dating was the wrong word for what they were doing.

Fluke slipped into the house the second I opened the door, running through the living room barking like that would summon Gideon, leaving me to close up behind us. At least, I assumed that was what he was doing. It was what I wanted, and Fluke was my familiar, after all.

I grinned at him as I set the box of books on my own dark wood coffee table. “Paging Gideon,” I called out. “I believe Fluke requires your presence.”

“Damn fox is as bad as a dance hall performer, always demanding attention,” Gideon said in his deep drawl, leaning on the arch that led to the kitchen. “Whatcha got there?”

I frowned and stared at the box, but decided not to go with that first. Instead, I pulled the photos out of my pocket. He wouldn’t recognize my mother, since even if she’d been directly around him last time he was teaching, she’d have been a little kid.

Instead, I pulled out the picture of Meredith Johnson and held it where he could see it.

He narrowed his eyes and immediately looked to me. “That’s her. You found her? I thought you were going to be busy all day.”

“I was,” I admitted, taking a deep breath and going back to sit on the couch. Fluke hopped up next to me, leaning his chin on my slumped shoulder. “I found this in my father’s closet. Along with one of my mother and one of a couple labeled Adler.”

Gideon didn’t interrupt me, just crossed the room in two enormous strides and sat down on the coffee table in front of me, eyes intense.

“This one and my mom’s—they had dates attached. I don’t know about Meredith’s yet, but the date on Mom’s was the day she was murdered.” I pulled out my phone and cued up the pictures I’d taken, holding it out and scanning slowly through them so Gideon could have a look, only moving on to the next each time he nodded to indicate he was finished with it.

Since I was thinking about it, when he was done, I opened my phone’s browser and searched Meredith Johnson, and the date my father had put on her photo. It only took a second to turn up an ancient article from the local newspaper, from their early days on the internet, about Meredith Johnson’s gruesome murder.

A knife, just like Mom.

But it couldn’t have been the same killer, could it? Mom and Alan were married by ninety-eight. She would have known if he’d murdered her friend. Wouldn’t she? And wouldn’t she have done something about it if she had?

I showed Gideon the article, and we were quiet for a long time. She’d lived another twenty years after he had worked with her, but Gideon had known this woman. Trained her. Liked her, I imagined.

He had known she was lost, but this was different.

After a while, he nodded and looked down at his shoes. His expression was at least as much murder as sadness, so I figured he was more interested in hunting down the culprit than talking about his feelings.

“Also,” I told him, “There were the books.”

At that, his head snapped up, and he turned to look at the box.

As much as I didn’t want to look at them, or even think about them, I opened it up and started pulling them out to lay each one face up on the coffee table. “I don’t know anything about half of them. Half the ones I know are out of print and rare. The others are old versions, so who knows what initial printings had in them that later ones don’t?”

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