“What? You invited him over?” Rachel said.
“Unfortunately. But he was sort of cute that day, and besides, I had to. How else was I going to break the spell? The only problem was, I couldn’t break it without the spell book, and now he won’t leave me alone. I have to do a spell that drives him away before he makes me completely bonkers,” she said, and looked down at the book, tapped on a page. “Do you think we could get Mr. Valicielo’s cat to pee into a cup?”
“Oh please no, God,” Rachel groaned, and dropped her forehead to the coffee table again. Only this time, she banged it against the table. Three times.
That night, when Dagne finally gathered her spell things to go home (having been astoundingly unsuccessful in finding the right ingredients, or substitutes, for her spell), Rachel walked with her to the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said as Dagne walked down the steps of the porch. She watched Dagne lope to her car, then glanced at her watch—a little past one in the morning. She glanced up again to make sure Dagne was in her car, and from the corner of her eye, she saw the blue car turn onto the next street. Odd, she thought, but it looked like the one she had seen earlier. Where had she seen that car before?
With a shrug, she waved to Dagne, closed the door, and headed to bed.
Flynn was awakened the next afternoon by the ring of the telephone, and stumbled out of bed to retrieve it. “Hello,” he mumbled into the phone through a yawn.
“Flynn, darling?”
“Hi, Mum,” he said, sleepily scratching his bare chest.
“Have you been sleeping?” his mother asked, sounding terribly offended.
“I’ve had quite a lot of work—all day yesterday and well into the night.”
“Oh Flynn, I don’t think this particular assignment is very good for you. You sound absolutely ill.”
“Thanks, Mum, but I’m fine. Really,” he said, standing and stifling another yawn. “How’s Dad?” he asked as he stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water.
“Oh, he’s quite all right. He hung tartan curtains in the guest rooms all morning, and this afternoon, he nearly took off a finger hanging that sign that says a hundred thousand welcomes in Gaelic. You know, whatever it is the Scots say.”
Flynn lowered his glass, stared straight ahead for a moment before asking, “Why?”
“Why? Because the Americans and Japanese love that sort of thing,” Mum explained matter-of-factly, as if it was perfectly natural to own a bed and breakfast in Butler Cropwell, smack-in-the-bloody-middle-of-jolly-old-England, and dress the place up as if it were a bed and breakfast in the Scottish Highlands.
“I didn’t tell you, but we had some rather important people come through last week,” Mum said.
“Did you?”
“The Winston party. From America,” she said, as if it were a palace instead of a country. “They are part of the Winston tobacco family, fourth cousins once removed. That’s rather exciting, isn’t it?”
Actually, Flynn thought his socks were a bit more exciting, but his mother reveled in such things. “That’s brilliant, Mum.”
“We’ve really got a reputation, what with our ties and all,” she sniffed.
Mum meant, of course, their aristocratic ties—the ties he’d been hearing about all his bloody life, owing chiefly to a very distant relation to the Duke of Alnwick on his mother’s side, the cousin of a cousin of a second cousin, something like that. Which meant, therefore, that they, the lowly Olivers, were in line for the throne . . . should there be a nuclear war that left absolutely no one else in England.
“Flynn, love,” his mother said, then paused to sigh wearily.
Flynn braced himself for what he knew was coming.
“I know you are quite cross with Iris, but the poor dear has been pining since you left. Don’t you think you could just ring her up and speak to her?”
Iris had not pined for him in two years, but his mother was far too na?ve to understand a woman of Iris’s nerve. “If I’ve time.”
“You can make the time, can’t you?”
“I’ll try. But I’m really astoundingly busy at present.”
“Iris is frightfully upset about your misunderstanding,” his mother purred.
What a lovely way to put an unpleasant turn of events— a man comes home early from a business trip and discovers his fiancée in bed with another man. Both wearing dressing gowns, mind you, and both having a bit of a post-coital smoke. What part, exactly, had he misunderstood? “It was hardly a misunderstanding, Mother,” Flynn said. “Delicately put, she was shagging another man in my absence.”
“She didn’t mean to. You were away so long and she rather forgot herself!” Mum insisted. “It won’t happen again.”
Flynn removed the phone from his ear and stared at it for a moment, wondered which puffy little cloud his mother had descended from, and put the thing back to his ear. “How can you be so sure?”