Chapter Three
Hatterand I drove past the old fire hall, which was a box of a building barely big enough to hold two parked cars and a can opener. The parking lot of a restaurant with mural of a disappointed crab stretched out east of the little fire hall. Short brown grass cut a small swath on the west side by the firehydrant.
The building wore an indifferent coat of yellow paint, and the glass garage doors took up the whole face of it. There was a sign on the door saying the meeting had been moved to the community center. The sign was faded. I didn’t think this old place had been used inyears.
A perfect spot for headlessAbner.
“You gonna let me in on this?” Hatter asked like he was wondering if I wanted to split an order of fries. And if he’d actually asked that I would have told him no, because, hello: fries are not for sharing. But this was about gnomes and gnomes were an all-hands-on-deckproblem.
“I sometimes forget that you don’t know everything aboutOrdinary.”
“Doesanyone?”
I shrugged and decided to drive around the block one more time just to make sure I had covered the hall from all angles. Gnomes weretricky.
Hatter fiddled with the vent. “I’ve done a fair share of pitching in when your father asked, but it wasn’t all that often. He liked to play things pretty close to the vest about thistown.”
“He had a protective streak a mile wide. Delaney inheritedit.”
“Pretty sure all his daughters inheritedit.”
“Fair.”
“So,gnomes?”
I sighed. “I don’t know how it happened. Some people say it was a drunk witch. Others say it was a curse-happy harpy. I’ve even heard whispers that the local Jinn did it as a revenge-wish fulfillment. But whoever orwhateverdid it, we have to spend every day of October mopping up after thatmess.”
“Still don’t know what mess we should be mopping. Gonna stop talking in circles any time soon, or should I pay for an extraride?”
I gave him a short smile. “That wish, hex, spell, whatever, fell on all the gnomes in thetown.”
Hefrowned.
“The garden gnomes. The statues people put out in their yards and think are cute? Thosegnomes.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I thought we were talking living breathing sorts ofpeople.”
“We are. For the thirty-one days of October, the garden gnomes come alive. They are living, they are breathing, and they are pissed off littlebuggers.”
He laughed. It was a squeaky, hissy sound that I liked. Hatter was fun to be around. He had a way of making things seem like they weren’t as bad as one might think, and that there was room for a little fun shoved between all the responsibilities of thisjob.
“So we should be looking for something on themove?”
“Not untilsunset.”
“They only come alive at night? That’s notcreepy.”
“Some of them are okay, I guess, or at least not creepy, really. But angry? Oh,yeah.”
“What do they have to be angryabout?”
“Spending eleven months out of the year frozen as stone? Hating that they have to wear the same dumb hats every day of their lives? Or, oh, here’s a good one. That time they found out a gnome statue got the job for that travel commercial. A gnome statue that wasn’t fromOrdinary.”
“Didn’t go overwell?”
“Ca-frickin’-lamity. We had to round them up into one of the storage units, and then red hat our way in to calm themdown.”
“Redhat?”
