Chapter Nineteen
The phone rangand clicked over to a computerized voice that told me the mailbox was full. I wondered who could be calling Than so much his voice mail had filled up.
If we weren’t short-handed, if we weren’t in the middle of a show about to go on, if we didn’t have a ghoul and a monster hunter and stolen god weapons messing with our groove, I wouldn’t have followed through.
But all those things were happening and we were a small department. Even though Than technically had today off, I needed him on the job.
So I drove to his house, a pretty blue cottage with a white picket fence and a lot of windows that looked over the ocean.
He wasn’t there. I knocked, rang the bell, and even peeked in the windows. I tried his phone again, got shuffled to the full mailbox.
Time to try his kite shop.
The good weather drew in the tourists, and traffic was picking up. Bertie would be happy because more people would see the Show Off was going to happen tomorrow and might decide to stay in town for it.
If Than had any kind of business sense, he’d be at the Tailwinds selling the heck out of all those brightly colored wings.
I pulled up next to the shop with the sign painted in a blood red font that looked like a particularly murderous clown had gone to town on it.
Theopensign in the door was visible, and the door itself was propped open with a very small stone owl with golden eyes that twinkled in the light.
The owl was new. I stepped past it and into the shop.
The little building was pleasantly cluttered with layers of kites on the ceiling. All of them, if you looked from just the right angle, told a story of hunt and hide, of the wind moving through the natural universe around it.
Which is to say it looked like a craft bazaar had rolled around in neon paint, and exploded into kites of every shape, size, animal, and object you could imagine.
A man and two kids were browsing, the kids looking up at the ceiling with something like awe on their faces. A pre-teen girl was crouched in the corner, digging through a box of what looked like spools of string wound around wooden bobbins.
Behind the counter with its old-fashioned, manual cash register and much more modern card reader, was Death himself.
He had, of course, watched me walk in, his eyes just as twinkly as the little owl at the door.
Those twinkly eyes took me in, from my windbreaker and uniform shirt to my jeans and sneakers. Then he raised an eyebrow.
I grinned. I was happy to see him. I was also still buzzing from the high of finally picking a wedding date.
I didn’t know if he could see that on me, that happiness, that joy, but his eyebrows went back to where they belonged and he brought a very delicate tea cup, which Myra had probably given him, to his lips and sipped.
I strolled over to the counter. “Hey, there. Done with your walk early?”
“I finished at exactly the expected time.”
“I need you to come into work today.”
His gaze lifted past me to take in his shop. “I have done so, as you can see.”
“I mean the department. We’re short-handed.”
“Oh?”
“Things are busier than normal.”
He sipped tea.
“Muchbusier.”
“In what way?”
