Page 42 of The Fantastic Fluke

“She sounds like a smart girl. I’d like to meet her sometime, if—that is, if we get that far.” The longing in her voice made my stomach twist. How was it possible that this woman, who I’d only just met, cared so much about getting to know me?

“I think Beez would be thrilled to meet a member of my family who wants to talk to her.” I had the strange urge to keep talking, like a teenager who wanted to spend all night chatting with their friends, but from the look Gideon was giving me, it was time to get to work. Ugh. “Tomorrow will be fine. Do you want me to come over?”

“Oh no, that’s not necessary. There’s a lovely Italian restaurant just down the street from your shop. Wayne and I will come pick you up—” She stopped abruptly, as though the wind had been let out of her sails. “If that’s okay, that is.”

“That sounds great, Iris. I’m looking forward to it.”

Well hell. Now I felt bad for manipulating a sweet old lady who maybe just wanted to get to know me. I would do right by her, I decided. Even if the meeting was to find out about my mother, I owed Iris McKinley a genuine chance. Besides, she wasn’t the only one who loved the idea of having family she enjoyed spending time with.

“Ready to get to work?” Gideon asked as I hung up.

I turned to him with a sigh. “We can’t just call it a good night’s work and go read a book?” I flinched when I realized that if he agreed to reading, it would probably be one of the books in the collection from my father’s closet.

I needn’t have worried, though. He shook his head. “No. We’ve been putting it off long enough. You need to start learning how to touch the convergence.”

For once, I didn’t feel like laughing at the double entendre. I just sighed, nodded, and headed for the couch. If I was going to work, at least I could be comfortable while I did it.

Chapter Fifteen

Tuesday was sunny.

There weren’t a lot of new releases, so I only showed up an hour before the store opened to set them out on the new release rack, then move the older books down, and finally, the oldest few to a space on the regular shelves. It was boring work, but there was a certain mindlessness in it that was calming.

And calming, if I were being honest, was what I needed.

I wasn’t too worried about lunch with Iris—if anything, I was looking forward to that. No, I was worried about Dad.

I’d foolishly believed when he’d died that he would stop causing me stress. Then I’d opened the shop two days later only to find him there, waiting to berate me for “taking a day off,” during which time I’d arranged his funeral.

“Sentimental twaddle,” he’d called it.

Maybe it had been a waste, but it hadn’t been for him, after all. Funerals aren’t, at their most basic level. It had been for me.

Sure enough, he was back. I was just finishing moving things on the new-release rack when a throat cleared behind me, and there he was, arms folded over his chest and a face that could have been set in stone. “I presume that our argument is over?”

It was how he always reacted when we had a disagreement. It was always my job to acknowledge that yes, everything was fine, and my complaints were not important. Except my complaints on Saturday had been well-founded, and since then, they had only multiplied.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”

His eyes narrowed fractionally, but he retained the calm facade. “Have you finally gotten rid of that mutt?”

“He’s a fox, not a dog,” I pointed out, and took the no-longer-new-releases off the counter, heading for the closest section where one belonged. “And no. He and Gideon went to the coffee shop to buy some treats. Gideon thought he should start getting used to acting like a familiar.”

“It’s not a familiar.” Normally, his flat tone would have grated on me. It would have been yet another sign that he had no emotions related to me.

That wasn’t true, though. There was a tension in his voice that I wouldn’t have picked up, once. Maybe even recently. “He is, Dad.” I slid the book into its new place and turned to look at him. If he wasn’t going to give me any information, he might as well not do it now. Hell, he’d probably been not giving me information for years, so I might as well know that for sure. No reason to keep what I knew from him. “We cleaned out your apartment yesterday. Found the stuff in your closet.”

Like a man still living, his twitches gave him away—the way he swallowed, his fingers curling toward his palms, and how his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “I don’t know what—”

“You can cut the bullshit. You know Gideon is here to teach me about the kind of magic Mom did. What she was murdered for. What Meredith Johnson was murdered for.”

I refrained from mentioning that I didn’t actually know any of that for sure. If I asked, he’d never tell me. If I acted like I knew and got things wrong, he might correct me just to feel smarter.

He didn’t correct me, and I shivered.

Oh gods.

Had I been right?

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