Library Cat Magical Mysteries Box Set (Books 1-3), page 6
“It’s not toothpaste,” she said. “Look.” She popped open the lid and squirted a little bit into her hand. It had the consistency of toothpaste, except it was brown and smelled like cloves.
“He’ll know it’s in his food immediately,” I said.
She sniffed her hand. “Smells like a pumpkin spice latte,” she admitted.
“He hates those,” I said. Wren furrowed her brows as if to comment, but then thought better of it. “But he does like pumpkin pie. He would never admit it. He says desserts are pedestrian.”
“Aunt Francie?” Sophie said. “I think I know a way to make him eat it.”
“Isn’t there a spell we can use instead?” I asked. “Like, do a summoning spell on the hairball?”
“I’ve tried,” Wren said. “Doesn’t work. The cat will tense up and use their own energy to block your spell.”
“What’s your idea, Sophie?”
She explained it while she held a stuffed mouse and the three kittens stepped on each other and fought for the right to sink their tiny little needle teeth into it.
And I had to admit, she had a pretty good plan.
I paid Wren for the hairball tonic and she assured me that it came with a money-back guarantee. Sophie said goodbye to the kittens. “I wish my mom would let me have one,” she said.
“You can’t have any pets,” I reminded her. “Not until your familiar chooses you.”
“I know,” she complained. “But that could take years.”
“Probably not,” I said. “Your skills are quite advanced. I bet you’ll have a familiar sooner than you think.”
We strolled down Canal Street and I was eager to get home. It was already dark and I didn’t feel safe knowing that the killer was on the loose.
“How do you know when it’s your familiar?” Sophie asked. “What if a bird lands on my table when I’m outside doing homework? How do I know if it’s a familiar or just wants a French fry?”
“You eat French fries while you do your homework?”
“You have to have something to dull the pain of algebra,” she said.
“I never could figure out how to graph a parabola,” I admitted. “Maybe all I needed was some French fries.”
“I can show you,” she said. “It’s easy. First you rearrange the equation—”
“My parabola-graphing days are, thankfully, over,” I said. “But thank you for the offer. To answer your question, when it’s your familiar, you’ll know. It will talk to you.”
“Kong talks to me,” she said. “He’s not my familiar.”
“It will be different,” I assured her. “It will be like two halves of the same soul. Hard to explain, but when you experience it, there will be no doubt.”
“How did you first meet Kong?” she asked. I smiled as I thought to that fateful day. How one small mix-up led to my finding my feline familiar.
“That is a story for another day,” I said.
“Get out of my way!” I looked up and saw a woman striding towards us.
Before I could say excuse me, she pushed me. I stumbled into Sophie. We both managed to keep our footing, but the impact squished the tube of hairball tonic and it got all over our robes.
“What in the name of hardcover first editions was that all about?” I shouted.
“I can’t believe you have the nerve to show your face,” she spat. Now that we were closer, I could see her face. It was the angry, almost snarling face of Mrs. Florian, the historian’s wife. Or, in this case, widow.
“Excuse me,” I said. As much as I wanted to defend myself and shout that I was innocent, I knew that there was no point. At best she was a widow with wild emotions and misdirected grief. At worst, she was unstable and prone to violence. She’d already pushed me, which was wildly uncharacteristic.
I only knew her by sight, but everyone knew her as the meek and mild housewife. She didn’t work, didn’t seem to have any friends. She never sported a black eye or anything, but it was clear who wore the pants in that marriage. I got the idea that he saw her as his unpaid domestic servant rather than his loving partner. Which was to be expected, considering how he treated everyone else in town—he was a man who thought everyone was there to serve him. It was like it never occurred to him that everyone else walking around had their own lives, their own trials and tribulations, their own hopes and aspirations.
“Better enjoy your freedom while it lasts,” she said. She took a few steps towards me, and I stepped protectively in front of Sophie.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, realizing only as the words left my mouth that it was a stupid thing to say.
“I bet you are,” she said. “Just wait. You’ll get yours.”
She turned on her heel and stormed off.
“What was that?” Sophie asked. “She thinks you killed that historian guy?”
“Seems like it,” I said. “That was his wife.”
“Oh,” Sophie said. “I guess I’d be angry too.”
“She was angry alright,” I said.
“Almost too angry,” Sophie said. “Like she was a movie version of an angry person.”
That got me thinking. Could Mrs. Florian have killed her husband and now she was trying to frame me? That could have been her intent all along. Maybe when she heard of our dispute, she decided it was a perfect time to finally be rid of her jerk of a husband and at the same time have someone else take the blame.
“Oh no, my robe,” Sophie said, just now noticing the stain from the hairball tonic. “It’s oil too—that never comes out.”
She was right; there was a big dark splotch front and center. “It’s okay,” I said.
“No it’s not,” she said. “I only have this one robe. What am I going to wear to the Spelling Bee?”
“Did I miss the action?” Kong came bounding up the sidewalk.
“No action,” I assured him.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Can’t I have a night on the town?” he said. His nose twitched. “What’s that? Did you eat pumpkin pie?”
I didn’t dare risk a smile at Sophie. Her plan to get him to eat the hairball tonic was going to work perfectly.
“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell him that she spilled hairball tonic on her robe, though. “She spilled a pumpkin spice latte on her robe. We’re going to get her a new one.”
“A new latte?” Kong asked. “Save your money and just eat a handful of potpourri.”
“A new robe,” I said. “Come on. They’re probably going to close soon. It’s just a few shops down. Maybe they can remove the stain. If not, we’ll buy you a new one.”
“But what if—” she started to say, but couldn’t bring herself to finish.
“What if you lose the Spelling Bee and don’t get the scholarship to the Academy?” I said, voicing her fear. “Not going to happen. You’ll win, trust me.”
She smiled, but it was full of trademark teenage lack of self-confidence.
I led her to A Stitch in Time and we caught them right before closing.
“Please,” I said before anything else. “She needs a robe for the Spelling Bee.”
“Hold on there,” said Ansel Pelagatti, the shop owner. He’s an elderly gentleman, thin with a perpetually bent spine from a lifetime hunched over the sewing machine.
“She got some oily stuff on her robe. Is there a spell to get it out? Or does she need a new one?”
“Well,” he said, examining her robe. “First of all, this robe is the wrong fit. Plus it’s got the old crest. And it’s the summer robe made with the light linen fabric. Someone’s hemmed the sleeves, haven’t they?”
“It was my mom’s when she was a student,” Sophie explained.
“I can probably get the stain out—not with magic, but with a solvent,” he said. “But if it’s for the Spelling Bee…”
“Now that’s a good salesman,” I said. “Yes, get her a brand-new winter robe. Will it be ready in time for the competition?”
“Sure, for a small surcharge,” he said.
“It’s okay, Aunt Francie,” she said.
“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re every bit as good as the other girls competing, so you should look every bit as good too.”
“Aren’t you not supposed to judge a book by its cover?” Sophie asked.
I couldn’t help laughing. “I’ve worked in a library for over twenty years. Trust me. Everyone judges a book by its cover. Everyone.”
Ansel quickly took her measurements and then asked me all sorts of questions about what stitch, cuff style, button orientation, hood drape and a million other things.
Sophie amused herself by playing with Kong. There was a huge accessory section of the shop, and Kong must have really liked her because he sat still while she put different hats, wigs and scarves on him.
“All done,” Ansel said. “Give me a day or two. I’ll let you know when it’s ready for pickup.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “All in a day’s work.”
“Why is a man the town seamstress?” Sophie asked.
I could not have been any more embarrassed. “When it’s a man, you call him a tailor, not a seamstress,” I said.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” he said. “She’s right, the family business should have passed to my sister. But I didn’t have a sister, so there you go.”
“Thanks again,” I said. Kong shook off the top hat and bolted for the door.
“The indignity,” Kong said.
“You were so cute,” Sophie said.
“I am many things, but cute is not one of them,” he said.
“You know what else you are?” I asked. “You’re wrong. Because that top hat was adorable.”
Chapter 10
At the Archives the next morning, I started the day trying out a spell to repair holes in several books. The books in question had been shelved together (in the seventeenth-century travelogue section). Each book had a hole bored straight through, cover to cover, about an inch and a half in diameter.
The cause?
“I sighted the devilfish, hand to God!” Ahab had shouted the moment my key was in the lock. I hadn’t had my coffee yet and this was a rather unwelcome revelation.
“You saw a whale in a library?” I asked him. “On land?”
“It be sly, dearheart,” he said. “Not a true whale at all, nay, but a demon in disguise.”
“Was he swimming?” I hazarded.
“Ye daft wench, of course not!” he said.
I couldn’t pursue this line of questioning any further if I wanted to keep what little remained of my sanity. Instead, I scooped the books off the shelf and brought them to the circulation desk. They were priceless, irreplaceable tomes… if, perhaps, a bit useless. I wasn’t sure if any of these had been checked out in decades. However, they represented the quest for knowledge, the embodiment of curiosity—and for that reason alone, the books deserved to be repaired.
The spell worked marvelously. I watched with smug satisfaction as the hole shrank and patched itself right before my eyes.
It wasn’t until I’d almost repaired the whole stack that I realized that in doing so, I’d accidentally reversed the pagination. Now the last pages were page one and they read backwards like Japanese books.
I had tried to employ a spell known as redeo (which Kong would delight in explaining was Latin for ‘return’). The spell returned something to a previous state. But I must have done something wrong. When I focused my intent, I was concentrating too much on turning the books ‘back’ and it flubbed the execution.
I now faced the dilemma of quietly shelving them and hoping that no one would ever check the books out… or trying to undo the spell and fix my mistake, potentially making things worse.
As I was weighing the moral quandary, the door opened up and the SPS delivery man came in. “Got an overnight from Hell’s Junction,” he said. He set down a small box and I signed for it.
This was an interlibrary loan, a book on primitive robotic constructs in Victorian England. The patrons who had requested the book were Jeyne and Jula Jibbleson, brilliant twin sisters. Though their brilliance fails to be harnessed by parents and teachers and other well-meaning adults. The girls are talented artificers and build strange devices according to whimsy. I couldn’t imagine what new invention this book was going to help spawn—and I was slightly afraid to find out.
I looked up their information so I could call them. Since I was already looking up patron information, I took a peek at Magnus Lightfoot’s records. I had told Rend to investigate that mysterious red stain on the student’s shoe, but Rend needed to wade through a lot of red tape to do it—and wasn’t entirely confident that he’d get the warrant needed to seize the shoe as evidence.
Me on the other hand…
I could take a quick peek. If it was ketchup or paint, then I could cross him off the list. Easy as could be. It would be beneficial to Magnus, really, if he was innocent. He would want me to do it.
And he lived in the same neighborhood as the Jibbleson sisters. I could deliver the girls the book, and since I’d be in the neighborhood anyway…
- - -
I knocked on the door to the Jibbleson sisters’ workshop, but the sound of metal crashing and sirens blaring blotted it out. I bashed my fist against the door, but the sounds of chaos inside the workshop only intensified.
“Kong?” I called out. “Are you around here?”
“This better be good,” he said and appeared from around the corner.
“Isn’t it always good?” I asked. He gave me a look like maybe I didn’t want to know the answer. “Anyway, can you go in there and get the girls’ attention?”
“Is it safe?” he asked. “By the sounds, I fear they’re committing at least three felonies.”
“They’re just working on their latest project,” I said.
“If I go inside, they’ll use me as a test subject,” Kong said.
“Then get their attention and leave,” I said. “It will be fine.”
“Famous last words,” he muttered. But he trotted off, hopefully to find a way inside. After a few minutes I was going to give up hope, when the sound of screeching machinery suddenly halted. The door flew open and before I knew what hit me, I had four arms wrapped around my shoulders.
“Francie!”
“What a surprise!”
“Do you have the book?”
“You have to see our new invention!”
When the girls unlatched me, I took stock of their current appearance. One of them had bright pink hair and the other one had blue hair, but they were both clad in grease-smeared blue coveralls, and I’m not sure their own mother could have told them apart.
“Jula?” I said.
“I’ve got the blue hair today,” Jula said.
“But not for long,” Jeyne said with a smirk.
They like to change their hair color without telling anyone.
“I do have the book.” I held it out, but neither girl grabbed it.
“First,” Jeyne said. “You have the honor—”
“The privilege!”
“The pleasure!”
“The once in a lifetime opportunity!”
“To witness the unveiling of the Proteator Denaturizer 5000.”
When I didn’t squeal in delight, Jula continued. “It has many applications in the sciences.”
“Nothwithstanding biochemical engineering, astrophysics and interior design.”
“Interior design?” I asked.
“It will revolutionize the horticulture industry as we know it!”
“Gone are the days of infestations—”
“Infiltrations!”
“Infections!”
“Infractions!”
“Infarctions!”
It’s exhausting to deal with them sometimes.
“Inflictions!”
“Influences!”
“Infringements!”
Okay, all the time.
“Girls?”
“Please, hold your questions until after the unveiling!”
Jula grabbed one arm and Jeyne grabbed the other and they dragged me into their vast workshop. The numerous workbenches were littered with tools, scrap metal, nuts, bolts, blow torches, coils of wire, fuel canisters and all manner of dangerous chemicals.
The girls’ obsession with artificing is viewed with skepticism and scorn by many residents in town. A lot of people think they should practice magic like decent young witches. And while they do sometimes use magic to get their devices to work, usually they rely on traditional engineering.
“Watch and be amazed!” Jula said. She swept a shop rag away from the workbench, revealing a small cage. Inside was a giant cockroach.
“You mean watch and be disgusted,” I said. I could barely look at the vile insect.
“Has this ever happened to you?” Jeyne said. She pulled the pin from the door of the cage and the bug skittered across the workbench.
“No!” I said. “I would never trap one of those things in a cage, and if I did, I would never set it free on the countertop.”
“Eek!” Jula said in a high-pitched, sarcastic voice. I couldn’t help feeling as if I was being mocked. “Oh no, what am I going to do! I’ve been psychologically undone by a creature without a circulatory system!”
I was definitely being mocked.
Jula then produced what looked like a long brass pipe. One end was fitted with a decorative finial, and several thin wires protruded from the other. She pointed it at the escaping insect, and light flashed from the wire end, like a tiny lightning bolt. The bug stopped dead in its tracks.
“What did you call that thing?” I asked. “Your Super-Duper Bug Zapper 2000?”
“The Proteator Denaturizer 5000,” Jeyne said.
“How does it work?”
“By denaturing proteins,” Jula explained. “It detects certain key organic proteins and zaps them.”
“Is zap the technical term?”
“It’s equipped with a small rechargeable lacrima,” Jula continued. “The magical energy will bind the proteins. Then this chamber right here will inject protease molecules to systematically obliterate the bonds on a molecular level.”
