Page 50 of Crossroads Magic
“Of course. There’s plenty. But it’s the same price each, all around.”
Wim nodded as he hurried past me, heading for the front door.
“I would be honored to eat at your table,” Benedict told me, and also moved past me, heading for the dining room.
I had half-expected him to say he would find Harper and have her join us, too.
Hirom waved me forward, so I turned and headed into the dining room. I wasn’t going to ask anyone to wait on anyone else. Instead, I told Hirom, Benedict and Ghaliya: “Bring four of the square tables together, to make one long table, up here by the door.” I left them to it, went into the kitchen and brought out the pots of rice, curry, and soup, and put them on the hotplates lined up on the buffet by the kitchen door.
The bread I threw into the basket at the end of the buffet.
Hirom didn’t have to bend to open the cupboard doors on the buffet. He pulled out a stack of soup bowls, and similar stacks of dinner plates and bread plates.
I opened the drawers and found cutlery. I pulled out the divided container they were sitting in and put it on the top of the buffet.
Benedict, who would naturally know his way around the room, too, pulled salt and pepper shakers out of the other end of the buffet and put them on the table.
By the time we were done, Wim and Olivia arrived. Behind them was Harper, still in all black. Harper crossed her arms. “I figure if you’re charging by the head, you won’t object to one more.”
Word passed quickly. “Will Juda, Trevelyan…” I paused, trying to think of who was missing. I already knew Broch wouldn’t eat with us. “Will everyone else be coming?”
Harper scowled. “I didn’t take a head count.”
I nodded. “Please, join us.”
Silently, everyone lined up to serve themselves a bowl of soup, and found a seat at the long table. There were too many chairs for the seven of us, and we all bunched up at one end of the table, but nobody seemed to mind.
By the time the soup was done, everyone was chatting around the table in low voices. Most of it was irrelevant social chat. The weather, the chances that the Rangers or the Devils would get into the play offs, which Ghaliya argued against with surprising insight. She was a Kings fan. It was the first time I knew she liked hockey.
As everyone settled back at the table with their curry and breadsticks, Olivia turned to me. “I saw Thamina being taken away earlier. I’m so sorry for your loss, Anna.”
It took me a minute to collect myself. “I rather think it is your loss that should be commiserated. I’m learning that I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought, while everyone in Haigton knew her very well indeed.”
“We will miss her greatly,” Hirom said, his face full of sadness.
But one of you killed her. The words whispered in my mind.
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning, I met Frida, the housekeeper.
We very nearly ran into each other, for she was moving along the upstairs passage just as I stepped off the last of the narrow flight of stairs up to the apartment.
Frida carried a giant plastic bucket full of cleaning implements, rags and solutions, and a surprisingly modern stick vacuum in her other hand. Apparently the inn did not have a trolley loaded with clean linen and cleaning equipment for her to push around.
She was a small, frail-looking woman of around forty years, I guessed. Her hair was a dull brown, with lots of grey in it, cut short around her chin in an unflattering bob. I wondered if she cut it herself, for the ends were not even.
Two great scars ran up one side of her face, barely missing her eye. They ran down inside the simple uniform she wore. They were pink and ridged and…well, they were ugly.
I made myself look at her eyes, not the scars. “You must be Frida. I keep missing you. You keep much earlier hours than I’ve managed while I’ve been here.”
She put the bucket down and smiled at me. The smile was crooked, for the side of her mouth closest to the scars did not move as freely as the other. Her now free hand moved up to linger near her cheek. She didn’t quite cover up the scars but the impulse was there.
“I’m Anna,” I told her. “Thamina was my mother.”
Frida’s spare hand moved in front of her mouth. She touched her lips with the tips of her fingers, then her throat. She shook her head.
“You’re mute…” I gave a soft sigh and wondered if the scars were related to her inability to speak. “Are you deaf, too?” I asked gently.
