SEVEN

An hour later we got a call on the official line, which came over the speakers in the conference room. It was Rick. And he was growling.

“Rick?” T. Laine said, startled.

“Grindy with . . . In trouble.” His next words were garbled and Tandy appeared in the doorway, his eyes wide and skin too dull, as if all the blood had left his flesh and coagulated in his core.

“. . . driving. Close now . . . Null . . . ,” he growled, the sound less human. “Open . . . doors . . .”

“LaFleur,” Lainie demanded.

“Rick’s near here. He’s in trouble,” Tandy whispered.

“‘Open doors,’” I repeated. “He wants us to open the outer doors. The grindy is with him so he’s a danger to humans. His cat’s trying to shift.”

“Null room. Move!” T. Laine said.

Tandy and I raced down the hallway. Tandy grabbed up a chair and I took my service weapon in one hand and a potted plant in the other. T. Laine shoved the null room door open behind us, activating the strongest antimagic we could access. She locked it in place, groaning in pain as the null magic that stopped magical workings washed over her. She stumbled back to the conference room. Rick’s antishift music blasted over the speakers.

I blocked open the stairwell door at the top with the pot. Tandy raced downstairs and into the night, blocking the outer door open with the chair. He was going to wait on Rick outside. Dangerous. Very dangerous.

I placed myself in front of Mud’s room and drew my weapon. If I had to shoot my boss to protect my sister I would. The enormity of having her here while I worked fell on me like an avalanche. Saving her from my family had put her in danger. Mud couldn’t stay here.

I heard the sound of a car stopping, tires screeching. A door opening but not closing.

Rick hissed. I heard him stumble at the entrance and I looked down the stairs. My boss’s body was silhouetted in the entrance, his shoulders hunched, only his hands visible where they gripped the metal doorjamb. They were covered in black hair, fingertips clawed and gouging into the paint. He was caught in a partial shift, fighting it. This wasn’t a full moon shift, but Rick wasn’t shifting by choice. This had to be the result of being called to a witch circle.

“Hurry,” Rick growled. “Hurry. Null . . . room. Now.” But his feet didn’t move. He was caught in a stasis of misery in the outer doorway, panting in pain, fighting what was happening.

Tandy said something, his voice soft. Soothing. I could help him to pacify Rick. I slipped off my shoe and touched a toe to the potted plant I had brought to hold open the door. Tentatively, I reached for Soulwood, drawing its calm to me. I had claimed Rick for my land to save his life, and I sought that part of him. Pressed Soulwood’s peace into him. He gasped. Looked up the stairs at me. His eyes were glowing green. His shoulders writhed and the hunched shape resolved into a neon green grindylow. Her claws were out too and they were pressed against Rick’s throat. Because Tandy was right there. In danger.

Grabbing my shoe, I backed away as Rick started up the stairs, his movements unexpectedly lithe and supple, graceful as a cat in the night. He moved up, step by step, his silver hair glistening in the overheads. He reached the top of the stairs and started toward the null room just ahead.

From the stairway entrance a woman emerged. Margot. She was following Rick.

As if he was stepping into hell, my boss stepped inside the null door. T. Laine tossed me something on a chain and said, “Inside with him.” I caught the thing—dark stone, hanging on a leather thong—and tossed it inside the null room to the floor. It skittered across the room and when it stopped spinning, I saw it was a carved stone black cat. The amulet sent by the local witches. We hadn’t tested it. We didn’t know what it did. Rick whirled to me, claws at his fingertips. I shoved the door shut. Through the layers of steel, I heard Rick scream. I slid on my shoe and turned to the woman who had followed him.

Margot was dressed in jeans and a tank, her dark skin glistening with a faint sheen. Her eyes were heavily made up with black liner and mascara; she looked fabulous and . . . sexy. As if she was on a date, or wanted to be. Had she been with Rick when he was spell-called? She wore earrings and a necklace with an unpolished moonstone on it. The stone was carved in the rough likeness of a sleeping cat and . . . it was glowing. A moonstone. A magical amulet. And she was still following Rick. I put my body in front of the null room door to stop her.

T. Laine said, “What the hell.” She practically flew down the hall, throwing out her hand. A wallop of magic slapped Margot into a corner and Lainie was on her. Our witch lifted the necklace from the feeb’s neck. “What are you doing wearing a magical cat amulet?”

“It’s not magical. And get your hands off it. And off me.”

“It is magical. I feel the working in it.” T. Laine dropped the cat and backed away. “Forgive me if I say so, Special Agent Racer, but your appearance here when LaFleur is caught in a calling/curse working by a black-magic witch, while wearing a magical amulet in the shape of a cat, is disturbing and too coincidental to be ignored.”

“It. Isn’t. Magic,” she pronounced, her voice a snarl. “You can grill me later. For now, I can help LaFleur.”

“No.”

“I was helping him all the way here,” she said. “I can help now.”

“Is she a witch?” T. Laine asked. “She isn’t in my database.”

I hadn’t included Margot’s family line in my official report, only the report to Rick. I sighed out the words, “No. Not exactly.”

Margot’s head came up and her dark eyes bored into me. “You said you hadn’t included it in your report, but I got a jolt of untruth from you. I assumed you were prevaricating.”

“No. I told Rick verbally. We kept it out of the reports for your privacy, because I didn’t know how it fit in your personnel records.”

“Damn,” she huffed. For an FBI agent, Margot had very expressive eyes, and I could see things passing through their depths. “Cat’s out of the bag now, pardon the pun.” She met T. Laine’s accusing gaze. “The only witch in the family was my grandmother. My mother has some minor talent.”

“And you?” T. Laine asked.

“I can tell when people are lying.”

Tandy said gently, “She believes what she’s saying.”

“The child of a witch family didn’t know she was wearing a renewable amulet?”

“Not—” Margot stopped, one hand sliding around the charm, her face going through an even faster series of thoughts and emotions. “My grandmother was a lapidary. She gave me this in her will. She gave me dozens. I didn’t know.”

“True,” Tandy said. “But you still haven’t addressed the rest of it.”

She took off the necklace and gripped it in a fist. “I called Rick to ask about the circles.” She leaned in and glared at us all. “He answered from Bistro at the Bijou, where he was replacing the band’s sax player. Last-minute gig. It sounded like fun, so my date and I decided to eat there and take in the show.”

Rick played saxophone? Had I known that? “Date?” I said.

“I ditched him when Rick took off like a cat with his tail on fire. I followed and talked Rick down from driving away and from shifting. I put his music on despite the fact that it was awful to listen to.” She swallowed and forced back what looked like fury and helplessness. “I helped him stay human, per his request, but he was in a lot of pain. Pain caused by illegal and immoral use of magic.” She stopped and took a deep breath, running a hand over her nearly bald head. It was a strangely masculine gesture and it looked exasperated and confused. She was giving a lot away. Or she was becoming an empath, which I had once thought about her. Or she was a really good actor. “He was being spelled.” Her glare deepened. “Not. On. My. Watch. No one suffers from black magic on my watch. You understand?” she demanded. “I drove him here. In pain. And now I’m responsible for helping him through the rest of it.”

“What happened to the date?” I asked, because while it made sense, it was also too coincidental to be real.

“Gah!” she screamed in frustration, throwing back her head. “You people! My date came after me and found me sitting in the car with LaFleur, holding his hand, talking him down. Stupid man got pissed and took off without me. I have a feeling that relationship is over before it ever got started.”

T. Laine frowned but backed down the hallway with Margot following, as if the feeb was about to attack her. Margot glanced at the door behind me as she passed, seeing the words Null Room on it. “Damn,” she cussed again. “That’s why he wanted to come here.”

In the conference room T. Laine opened a mic into the null room. “Rick. Talk to me. You still human?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice gravelly. “But, God. It’s bad.”

Her hand hovered over the camera controls, but she left them off. “There’s an amulet in there, sent by the local coven. Hold it. Better?”

“Maybe . . . a little. Yeah. Turn up the music.”

T. Laine turned off the antishift music in the rest of HQ but increased the volume in the null room. “How can a summoning spell reach him through the null room?”

No one replied.

“Put your hand on the speaker,” she directed Rick. “The music magic should work on you even there.”

We heard stumbling through the system, perhaps the sound of a chair turning over. Then Rick groaned out a note of relief.

Margot cocked her head and muttered, “That’s why he was playing that awful music.” She leaned over the table and said into the mic, “Hey, LaFleur. Stop being such a pussy.”

I stepped back in surprise at the crudity. Rick laughed, the sound shocked but less pained and more human.

“Don’t ask me to feel sorry for you,” she said into the mic, as she took a seat. “Injuries are part of the job.”

“True dat,” Rick said, a New Orleans cadence strong in his pain.

“But since I have you as a captive—pardon the pun—audience, I’ll finish the update and debrief your unit. I’ve been going over NCIC files looking for spell/animal-sacrifice sites and crimes and tracking them back for twenty-four months. You were right. Some found in Louisiana eighteen to twenty-four months ago.”

“Year and a half?” T. Laine said. “Two years? Rick was in NOLA then.”

“Yes. And the circles look odd,” Margot said. “I sent photos of the Louisiana ones to the coven leader of NOLA, Lachish Dutillet. She says that some of the early ones look like summoning workings, the kind lonely women do to call a man to their side, except more. More intricate and more vicious, a summoning combined with a curse. It’s peculiar.”

“You know Lachish?” T. Laine asked.

“Not personally,” Margot said. “But her grandmother knew my grandmother. She’s been helpful. So I know stuff. Like despite the fact that Lachish is scared spitless of this circle, not that she said so. You still with us, LaFleur?”

“Yeah. Tell me more,” Rick said, his voice breathy and harsh. “Cuss a lot. Be callous. I’ll try not to be such a wimp.”

“Good. Nothing worse than a whiny-ass man. Survive childbirth and then tell me about pain.”

“You had a baby?” Rick asked.

“Yeah. I was sixteen. Baby didn’t make it.”

“That’s terrible.” Rick stopped. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. So, if someone will get my laptop out of Rick’s car, I can sync my system with yours and we can update data.” Which would give Margot Racer complete access to all our files. Not what we had planned.

Rick, sounding more like himself, asked, “Why did the FBI want a liaison on this case? A case with no crime and no victim except me? And that might be accidental.”

“I don’t think it’s accidental,” Margot said. “The bureau wanted what I wanted—to get me on the inside of PsyLED. Except they want info on the paras you keep track of. I want access to your people to keep paras safe.” Like her witchy family.

No one spoke or moved, and finally Tandy said, “I’ll get the laptop.” Which meant the empath had just approved of Margot Racer and her motivations for liaising with PsyLED.

And just that fast, Special Agent Racer’s transition to a provisional part of the team was complete. We wouldn’t trust her with everything, but we wouldn’t treat her like a potential enemy either.

“What about demon summoning as the motivation for the circles?” Rick asked. “I’ve seen two demons, one that was willingly working with a black-witch and eating her friends, and one that had been summoned in concentric hedge of thorns workings, trapped in a reversed hedge, and was eating the sacrifices.”

“That had to suck. None of the circles I’ve seen have centered, reversed hedge of thorns,” Margot said, “and no halfway competent witch would summon a demon into a circle with her. The demon would eat her, use her blood and body to disrupt the circle and get free. Waste of time and good protein.”

Rick made a chuffing cat sound of laughter, probably at the waste-of-protein comment.

T. Laine said, “I’m going to try and scry for a witch circle or a magical working. See if I can spot the calling. I’ll be outside.”

“Take your weapon,” Tandy said. “Keep comms open.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving the words at us. “Roger that.”

I had heard only bits and pieces about the cases Rick described and went back to my cubicle to research it all, still not satisfied. But Tandy was the motivational and emotional gatekeeper of the unit and he approved of the special agent, so my misgivings weren’t significant.

I pulled up the reports Margot had compiled and studied the witch circles in Louisiana as well as here. Some of the early circles overlapped with Rick’s travel itinerary. Margot hypothesized that the caster had been tracking and calling Rick specifically. Rick had been the PsyLED special agent in charge of the Southeast region—five states—for less than a year, with Knoxville as his home base. Before that he was working as a detective with NOPD, and even before that, he’d been undercover with NOPD. His itinerary up on my laptop, I compared the circles with Rick’s whereabouts. Some matched. Some didn’t. But something had happened to Rick tonight. It was the waning moon. If someone was trying to call Rick—specifically call Rick, not a coincidence—to use him in a sacrifice or to harm him, that made this a crime against a federal agent. That made this an investigation, not just an inquiry.

I added Margot’s research to mine and, using her search parameters and language, broadened my own search pattern much further back. I found a witch circle in New York State, near a small town called Aurora, on the bank of Cayuga Lake. This one was from over five years ago, and though it had no runes, it had an odd, six-sectioned wheel-spoke form, no dead animal in the center. In a report from six months later, I found another circle documented on the same lake but farther south, close to Ithaca, centered with a single rune. Nauthiz. In Arizona, where Margot had found one witch circle in the desert, I discovered another one on the bank of the Salt River, near Apache Lake Marina and Resort. It was the oldest one yet, the circle smaller, no runes at all, and only a cross pattern instead of the twelve spaced spokes. But there was a dead rattlesnake coiled in the center.

Rick had been nowhere near New York or Arizona on the dates the circles were found. He had never worked or lived in either state.

I thought it unlikely that Nauthiz and the odd circles would be coincidental with the circles found here, though I couldn’t prove it, and the distance between all the places suggested it was different witches or witch factions. Maybe several witches, all members of different covens. Or isolated witches with no covens nearby. Or outcasts, banned from their covens for doing evil, who met on the Internet. That sounded possible. Likely even. Did covens have Internet gossip boards or pages? Would word of outcasts have made it out of the covens and into witch gossip? What if a cadre of black-magic witches, keeping in touch over the Internet, were trying to refine a spell of some kind? That made even better sense. There was nothing to tie the early circles to Rick. He wasn’t summoned then. Everything about this summoning seemed coincidental. But I kept working on the case/inquiry, just in case. I sent a note to T. Laine asking all my spell-type, coven-type questions and turned my attention to more mundane possibilities.

Over the years, Rick had arrested or been involved with the arrests of seventy-four people. Of that number, some were witches, one was a vampire down in New Orleans. Then there were the werewolves who had died or who were in permanent custody in silver cages because of him. Large numbers of gwyllgi—devil dogs—had died here in Knoxville, and the rest had been shipped out. Maybe we had missed some? All the recent cases involving paranormals had been high profile, and Rick was quickly becoming a high-profile para in Knoxville law enforcement. He had enemies who might pay a witch for revenge. Maybe a witch had honed a curse spell and was selling it?

I expanded my criteria. On the personal side, Unit Eighteen needed to talk to old girlfriends, like Jane Yellowrock and Paka, and recent enemies, like members of the Party of African Weres and the president of the International Association of Weres, Raymond Micheika. Rick and Jane Yellowrock had made a lot of people mad while I was busy being a tree, and Jane had instigated legal action to keep Raymond out of the United States. The Dark Queen had taken possession of some African were-lion cubs when the pride alphas died. She hadn’t given them back to Micheika.

Rick was, in effect, the second-ranking were-creature in the country, both as Jane’s beta and by being a part of Clan Yellowrock. He had come to that position in the Party of African Weres through some arcane machinations by Jane. What any of us knew about that situation was limited, and there was nothing in the databases detailing how his promotion came about. Rick was also chief cat over a leap of black wereleopards somewhere in Africa. Rick was, or could be, politically powerful. His cat was cat-dominance-powerful.

But . . .

I stopped. My thoughts were treading off in a dangerous direction. I had an in with Jane’s business partners. Admittedly, I hadn’t talked to them in a long time, seeing as how trees were seldom verbal. Instead of a phone call, I sent a text to Yellowrock Securities. That seemed easier, though it may have been social reluctance, aka cowardice.

I hauled my thoughts back to things I could delve into tonight—all those situations and cases. They made Rick a target to bad guys and government spooks alike. In one criminal investigation recently, there had been indications that someone in the CIA had been passing along classified info to a para-hating homegrown terrorist group. He or she had to be high up, maybe an overseer, as no busywork agent would have had access to all the info. The responsible person or people at the CIA had never been identified, and so they were still out there, and they might still be unhappy with Rick and other paras guarding Secret City. But since hunting federal agents would require a higher security clearance than a probie had, I passed the overseer concept up to JoJo, who could use her hacking skills to find out more than I could. I’d have to concentrate on criminals.

A short time later I had lists for all the people Rick had arrested, human and otherwise: either out on bail, on parole, still incarcerated, or having served their full sentences and released from incarceration. Most were easy to locate and I started a search to verify the location of each one. I made a call to find that the witches were still being held in witch jail—null rooms run by witches. They were accounted for. I made a note for JoJo to check out the vampire. A significant number of the case notes on the Mithran were redacted, showing that even this was over my pay grade.

I needed to also consider any NOLA and local vampires Rick might have irritated.

There were hints that Rick was related to a very important vampire Blood Master, perhaps Katie Fonteneau, the Master of the City of Atlanta. Katie’s enemies might be Rick’s enemies, and if the circles were indeed targeting Rick, that would go a long way to explaining the maggoty feeling at the circles. But all I had so far were questions and not very good questions either. I kept coming back to Tandy’s suggestion that I talk to Rick.

I tracked the waning arc of the moon on a lunar calendar on the Internet. It wouldn’t set until afternoon but Rick was no longer in pain, and back in his office. Margot was in the break room. It was as if the episode in the dark of the night had never happened. But I still remembered the pained moans of my boss as a spell reached him. In the null room. Where no spell should reach. Ever.

I was finished at five, before sunrise, and I could have left, but I didn’t, pecking out my summation report, blaming my dawdling on not wanting to wake Mud. But I knew that I was waiting for the day shift to arrive. Occam in particular, since I was determined to be honest with myself. I didn’t have anything to tell him, but I just wanted to . . . see him. It was an attitude I’d noted in the church while growing up, women or men loitering in a place they had no real reason to be, until someone else showed up. It was courting behavior. I wasn’t sure I liked seeing that emotionally needy part of myself, but there it was. I was waiting on Occam.

Minutes ticked by, the sky graying. I watched as Margot and Rick left. Together. Of course, Margot didn’t have a car here, having arrived with Rick, so maybe that made sense. A grindy sat on Rick’s shoulder, the neon green cute-as-a-button killer nuzzling his shoulder. The boss looked tired, dark circles under his eyes, sweat stains on his shirt, and his hair hanging lank. Fighting turning had been hard on him. Being in the null room was hard too, the antimagic in the walls twisting all other magic into knots and making it unworkable—except for the summoning that had been trying to force him into his cat. If not for the music spell, Rick would have gone catty and fled.

T. Laine leaned out and watched as they left, coming to my cubicle as they disappeared and the door to the stairway closed. “What do you think, Nell?” she asked. “Can Rick restrain himself with a woman? I’d hate to be called to a scene to find my boss naked and dead at the claws of a grindylow and Margot bitten.”

“He never bit Jane and they dated for a while even after he was turned.”

Occam walked up the stairs and closed the door. “Somebody want to tell me what’s going on? I just passed Rick and he stank of moon magic. And Margot is all over him.” He was holding two paper cups of gourmet coffee from Coffee’s On, the scent strong, and he placed one on my desk. It had my name on it. “Your usual,” he muttered, his eyes on Rick and Margot on the parking lot camera screen. T. Laine looked at me with a You go, girl expression and I ducked my head.

Occam’s cell dinged and he glanced at the screen. His face blanched and he walked away, fast. T. Laine said, “That was rude. And weird.”

Yes. It was. It almost looked like guilt. “See you later,” I said and slipped past our witch and down the hallway to the sleeping room. I woke my sister and drove us home. Mud never truly woke, and I was tired down to my bones. But as we bumped over the entrance of the drive, I spotted a stack of very large boxes on the front porch. Boxes that hadn’t been there when we left. “Stay here,” I said to Mud. She woke up fast, reaching for the door handle. “No. Stay here. Keep down.”

I slid from the truck cab and drew my weapon. Moved around the house to check the back door, which was secure, and the small locked shed, also secure. Carefully I eased back around front and climbed the steps, halfway to the porch. The front door was still secure, no indication of breaking and entering. The windows were all intact. The boxes appeared to have packing slips on them and were securely taped shut. But I had felt no one walk onto my land.

I moved down and back to the truck, holstered my weapon, and grabbed my one-day gobag from the truck cab. Searched through it.

“What is it?” Mud asked. “Is it a body in a box? Is there blood all over it?” Curiosity and desire to take part in whatever was happening practically vibrated the air around her.

“No body. No blood, Mud. Stay put a bit longer, though.”

“But—”

“Stay put.” I climbed the steps. Removed the pocket-sized psy-meter 1.0 from my gobag. I hadn’t looked at it in forever, but it still had a charge. I crouched, so I could inspect the boxes.

Now that I was close enough, I saw that two of the large boxes were clearly marked as solar panels. A smaller one was marked as a battery, one designed to make the best use of captured but unused solar energy. The markings on the other boxes were less obvious, except for the one marked as an 18,000 BTU window-unit air conditioner and heater, suitable for a thousand square feet of space. Strangely, they were all brands I used and was familiar with, but I hadn’t ordered them.

I eased closer and saw my name and address on the boxes. The packaging slips looked real. This was neither a bomb nor a mistaken delivery. I holstered my weapon, feeling a little foolish, but I wasn’t used to getting packages. Then it hit me.

Someone who knew me well—Sam? Daddy? Occam?—had ordered all this stuff for me. That someone had taken over my decision-making power and done what Occam might call an end run around me.

I heard the truck door open and shut softly.

Mud said, “Oh. Ummm. It came early.”

I swiveled on the balls of my feet to see Mud on the steps. She was wearing her new jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, her hair down in a long tail and her tablet clutched in her hand. Her face wore an expression that was defiance with a little bit of guilt. “Came early?” I asked.

The defiance grew stronger. “Daddy told me he’d give me a dowry as good as yours when I got married or the cash now. He said I could use it for school or my wedding or however I wanted. I ain’t planning on a wedding and I can get financial aid at school, so I took the cash now.”

“I didn’t get—” I stopped. John had never told me there had been a dowry. But then, I had never asked. Seems that my daddy and my husband had handled things without the input of the daughter and wife, just like the churchmen always had, which should make me mad now that I knew it. But Daddy had let Mud make her own decision like a woman grown, so maybe Daddy had changed.

“I done all this behind your’n back, before we had that negotiation about working together.” She hunched her shoulders and hugged the tablet to her chest. “I seen where—I saw where you kept the papers on the brands and the models. Sam helped me order ’em online and I talked to your friend Brother Thad at Rankin Replacements and Repairs about the cost to put them in. It was supposed to be a surprise. But if’n I’m honest, it was also to get my way. Since we talked I been scared to tell you.”

I stood and studied the stack of boxes, remembering Thad’s hesitation when he talked about my solar array. “Well. Did Brother Thad give you a ballpark figure for installation?”

“He said he’d talk to you about it, but it’d be in range with the last upgrade. You ain’t mad?”

“If you had to do it over again would you talk to me about it first?”

“Yep.”

I shifted my eyes to my younger sister. “This must have cost several thousand dollars. Where did Daddy get that much money? He doesn’t even own his own land.”

“Six thousand, seven hundred dollars and forty-six cents after taxes and shipping and handling. And Daddy’s got money. The church sets up commercial greenhouses and windmill pumps for cattle and horses. Your’n windmill is a church product. They used to make a fortune growing and harvesting trees for the paper mill industry. That income stream started dying ’bout twenty years ago, but wood still brings in some cash. Daddy’s got investments. Mosta the churchmen got investments. And useta be, there was all the money the mamas brung in.”

“What did you say?” I asked, startled. “The money the mamas bring in?”

“The mamas,” she said, as if I was stupid. I just looked at her, confused. “The state put an end to their moneymaking after the raid. The one where them vampire hunters done come across your land.”

“What money?” I stood, feeling the sweat trickling down my spine.

“They’s poor and unmarried and they useta get medical care from the state and money each month for each young’un. It ain’t that much per young’un, but they gots lots of them. Daddy useta put some a that money aside each month in an account for college and for dowry.”

“Daddy and the mamas—” I stopped cold. That was why none of them had been legally married to Daddy until recently. They spent decades complaining about the government interfering in their lifestyle and they had been taking money from the state? I was pretty sure that was welfare fraud. “Used to take money?”

“The social services people put a stop to it after they raided the church,” Mud said, matter-of-factly.

That meant I had been indirectly responsible for the church’s loss of income when I let the raid start from across my land. Another reason for the church to hate me. Like a hammer of doom, all the personal implications hit me. I hadn’t been legally married to John until I was fifteen. Had John and Leah earned money off of me while I lived with them? I’d had Medicaid? Welfare? Medical attention I never used or never thought about? All behind my back. Or had Daddy kept getting the money when I went to John?

A tiny barb of anger lodged itself in my chest, prickly and painful. I had a bad feeling that poisonous spine was gonna grow until I had this out with Daddy. It was hypocrisy of the highest order and I wanted to throw things. Maybe break things. “Why do you say they used to make money?”

“They had to settle with the state. Pay ’em some back and not take money the way they useta. Social services people make sure it’s done right now.”

Instead of screaming, I took another breath and said, “This AC will eat power. Are you willing to go back to using lanterns an hour or two earlier in the summer? Because we’ll be out of light that much sooner.”

“But we’ll be cooler. I done decided I’m gonna be a townie girl real soon. Townies don’t sweat all summer and freeze all winter.” She paused, as if reconsidering. “Well. I’m gonna be a townie girl with a greenhouse and plants and a business selling my veggies and suchlike.”

“Hmmm.” I walked to the wide grouping of potted flowers and herbs on the far end of the porch and tilted one over to retrieve the key I had left there. There was a note beside the key, which I opened and read. It was from Brother Thad. I said to Mud, “Brother Thad says he’s adjusting his bid for the upgrades we talked about.” I looked at my sister, who still seemed a little on the defensive side. I keyed open the door and led the way inside. It was still cool enough, the night air chilled by the small air conditioning unit. It wouldn’t last long. A new AC unit would be nice. “A townie, huh?”

Mud followed me in. “Pretty much.”

I walked through the house and opened the back door, letting the cats inside. “According to my note”—I waggled it at her—“Brother Thad will be sending me an e-mail this morning. The second-story walk-in closet is more than a closet. At some point before I came to live here, maybe before John’s second and third wives divorced him because he couldn’t give them children, that space was roughed in for bathroom plumbing. I never knew. Putting in a small bath for you may not be as expensive as we’d feared.”

Delight flashed across my sister’s face. “I’m gonna have my own bathroom?”

“Maybe. We’re going to get prices for a new bathroom and all the remodel, including installing your solar upgrades. But don’t think it’s a done deal. The money for the custody court costs is not something I’m willing to touch. If we can’t afford all the construction, we’ll have to pick and choose. It might come down to a bathroom upstairs or a greenhouse.”

Mud let out a whoop that echoed in the rafters and the bedrooms upstairs.