Out of consideration for his exhaustion, I decided to deflect the subject. “That looks a lot like Mom’s china,” I said, wandering over to the dinner table as if to admire it.
“Yeah, it’s the same pattern,” she said. “I loved it so much when she had that wedding tea for me that I decided to get some for myself. Wasn’t I lucky that Murphy’s still had it in stock, all these years later?”
“It’s a classic pattern,” I said, in the most neutral response I could manage. I couldn’t help but wonder how recently she’d acquired the china from the burgled jewelry store—or if maybe there were a few place settings missing from Mom’s china cabinet. Then because I couldn’t help myself, I asked, “Oh, is that a new necklace? I don’t think I’ve seen it before.”
She stuck her chest out to display it better, and I heard Owen choke on his tea. “Do you like it? It goes with my new bracelet. And see, matching earrings, too.”
Now I was even more suspicious. Either Dean was selling drugs, she was selling her body, or something very, very fishy was going on.
Dean came back inside with a plate piled with steaks. “Steaks are ready,” he said. “How about the rest of dinner?”
Sherri fluttered her hands. “Ooh! I just have to get it on the table.” She ran to the kitchen and brought out take-out containers of slaw and baked beans. She dumped the beans into a bowl and put it in the microwave, then stuck a serving spoon in the slaw and put it on the table. I felt a little embarrassed that my family was being so very redneck in front of Owen, but then I glanced at him and saw that he didn’t seem to be particularly upset. Of course not. He embarrassed easily, but he wasn’t really a snob. Come to think of it, this was kind of the way he lived, eating out of take-out containers, though he did so in a multimillion-dollar Manhattan town house.
Oops, that meant I was the snob. I had to ask myself if I suspected Sherri because she really might be our greedy rogue wizard, or if it was because I was looking for an excuse to see her as my enemy. It was a tough call.
She got the beans out of the microwave and said, “Now, everybody take a seat. Sit wherever you want. We usually sit on the sofa and eat in front of the TV, so it’s not like we have usual seats at the table.”
Owen took a seat, and I sat across from him. Dean hovered with his platter of steaks. “Do you want yours more rare or well-done?” he asked Owen.
“Do you have anything somewhere in between?”
Dean laughed. “Right answer. I think that’s the way all of them are.” He sounded friendly enough now, so perhaps his earlier coolness had been about something else. More than likely, he and Sherri had had a spat soon before we got there. He served steaks to the rest of us, then took his seat. Sherri passed the side dishes around, then Dean said, “Dig in!”
Owen had managed to avoid the worst of the family interrogation so far. My parents must have been so happy to learn that I had a man, any man, that they weren’t going to look the gift horse in the mouth. My brother, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Dean barely waited until we’d started eating before he went on the offensive.
“So, Owen,” he said, “you’re from New York, right?”
Owen didn’t even flinch. He’d gone into his business mode. “Yes. I live in the city now, but I grew up in a small town not far outside the city.”
I held my breath, hoping Dean wouldn’t ask where Owen was born. That was a touchy subject, since he didn’t actually know for sure, and I didn’t want to have to get into that. Fortunately, Dean didn’t go there. Instead, he asked, “Where did you go to school?”
Owen gave him an even gaze and said, “Yale, for my undergraduate through my doctorate.” He didn’t blush, but I felt my own face growing warm with pride on his behalf. Yep, my guy—or ex-guy, or whatever he was—was hot stuff.
Even Sherri seemed to be impressed. “Whoa, so you’re like a doctor?”
“I’m not a medical doctor. It’s a PhD, and it mostly means I spent a lot of time in school writing a lot of papers.”
Dean didn’t see the need to back down. If anything, he was more intent on finding and exposing whatever was wrong with Owen. I wasn’t sure if he was really being the protective big brother on my behalf, or if he was looking for weaknesses so he could assure himself that he was still the hottest guy in town. “And what is it you do?” I was actually rather surprised that nobody had yet asked the question. The fact that Owen had worked with me had seemed like answer enough so far.
Owen very deliberately finished chewing the bite he’d just taken, then took a drink of tea before answering. “I work in research and development for a company supplying specialized technology resources.” I tried to remember that description for future use. Saying “the Microsoft of magic” only worked when I was talking to people who were in on the secret.
Owen held Dean’s gaze, like he was waiting for a reaction. Dean was no dummy, but he’d never applied himself, so I knew he was well out of his league, and it looked like he knew it, too. I felt it was time to jump in. “So, big brother dearest,” I said, trying to sound fond instead of defensive, “does he pass muster? Or should I have held out for a medical doctor who went to Harvard?”
“That wouldn’t necessarily have been an upgrade,” Owen said with a raised eyebrow in my direction.
“Not Harvard.”
“I think he’s swell, Katie,” Sherri said. “Dean, you should lighten up. Does anyone want seconds?”
Before Dean could say anything else, I piped up again. “I was just admiring Sherri’s china. Did y’all get this recently?”
For perhaps the first time in my life, I saw Dean utterly speechless. His mouth hung open, and no sound came out of it. Sherri didn’t seem to notice. “It’s brand-new,” she said proudly. “Y’all are the first ever to eat off it.”
“Well, someone’s trying to score Brownie points,” I continued. “I noticed all that pretty new jewelry Sherri’s wearing. I guess one of your businesses hit the jackpot for you, huh?” Dean couldn’t resist a get-rich-quick scheme. He was the guy all those Internet spam “make money fast” ads were targeted to. And then, almost holding my breath in anticipation, I went in for the kill that was sure to get me a reaction. “It’s lucky you got all that stuff before someone knocked over the jewelry store. It would have been a shame if you’d gotten together the money to buy all these nice things, and someone had swiped them out from under you.”
Their reactions weren’t at all what I’d anticipated. Sherri couldn’t keep a secret to save her life, so I’d expected her to lean forward and whisper to us about buying everything cheap from a guy who’d offered a great deal. Or, if she was our wizard, she’d have started preening, gloating, and acting mysterious. Instead, she nodded sincerely and said, “Yeah, I know.”
Dean’s reaction was even more surprising. He went totally still, only his eyes moving as he looked between Owen and me, then he said in an ice-cold voice, “And I think it’s interesting how the biggest crime wave ever to hit this town just happened to strike the day after your boyfriend showed up.”
I wasn’t sure how to react in order to convey the maximum degree of innocence. Of course, Owen wasn’t the thief, but the mysterious crime wave was related to his visit. I tried for affronted girlfriend and embarrassed sister, which wasn’t much of a stretch.
Meanwhile, Owen went even colder than Dean had been, with the eerie kind of stillness that he got when he was absolutely furious. The last time I’d seen him that angry, he’d almost accidentally sent Grand Central Station plummeting three stories underground after generating a shock wave that could have undermined the foundation. “Are you implying anything in particular?” he asked, his voice even and conversational.
“Dean, don’t be rude!” Sherri said. “Like he’d need to come here to rob the town. If he was a robber, he could have robbed all kinds of places in New York. Now, you apologize right this instant.”
Dean and Owen remained in a staredown, blue eyes locked with green. Under norm
al circumstances, Owen might have been at a disadvantage because he wore contact lenses and would have to blink, but Owen was anything but normal. I had a feeling that if I’d worn Owen’s magic-detecting necklace, it would have been buzzing up a storm, just from the waves of anger that were coming off him. Dean’s high school portrait that hung on the dining room wall fell to the floor with a crash. There was a strong chance it was pure coincidence and caused by a slipshod job of picture hanging, but I wouldn’t have bet on it.
“Dean, I said stop it and apologize,” Sherri said again, her voice shrill. That broke the standoff, and for the first time since I met her, I actually liked Sherri. “You know he’s not the robber, and besides, your mom was talking about weird stuff happening days before he got here.”
Dean kept his eyes fixed on Owen. “Weird stuff isn’t the same as robbery.”
“Yeah, but still, weird things were happening around town, so it’s not like everything suddenly changed when he got here—except maybe for Katie. I’m sure a lot changed for her.” She looked embarrassed as she said, “I doubt y’all will want to stay for dessert after my husband was so rude. It was just a store-bought cake that I got on special, anyway, and you can bet Lois’ll have something even better when you get back home.” Sherri stood up. “I’m sorry about all this.”
This was one of those times when it was best not to get into an argument, so I got my purse while Owen got his suit coat, and then Sherri walked us to the door. As soon as we were both in the car, I said, “I’m sorry about that. He was a total jerk. I don’t know what his deal was.”
Owen didn’t say anything while he started the car, put it in gear, and then backed out of the driveway.
He didn’t talk until we were halfway home. Then he sighed and seemed to relax a little. “I know he’s your brother,” he began, “and I realize I know absolutely nothing about what it’s like to be part of a family—”
“That most definitely is not it,” I cut in.
“But I think we have to consider him a suspect. It was a classic move—you were getting too close with your questions about all the new things he seems to have acquired lately, so he tried to deflect suspicion onto me. I’m sure if he talks to enough people in town about this, it will be easy for him to make the outsider look like the culprit.”
“Well, considering that he’s got a house full of stuff stolen from the stores in question, and you have nothing on you—and I suspect you’ve arranged it so nothing could be easily planted—that won’t go far. This town may be small and old-fashioned, but we haven’t tarred and feathered a stranger before riding him out of town on a rail since I can remember. And how can he be our suspect? He’s not magical. Remember, my family tends to be immune to magic.”
“I’m not saying he’s our wizard, but I think he may know who the wizard is and may be in league with him. He might not know that magic is involved. He may just be serving as the fence.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t see it. He can be a jerk, and I could totally see him as a con artist, but I can’t imagine him going that far.”
“So you still think Sherri is our key suspect?”
I sighed. “No, not really, unless her niceness today was all an act and they were doing a good cop/bad cop routine to get us off the trail. But why would they even think we might be on their trail? There’s no reason for them to know that either of us might be investigating magical activity.”
“Not unless they’ve been warned. Idris may have figured out I left New York and must be here.”
“You’re being paranoid. Dean just felt threatened by you. He’s always been the town golden boy, the best-looking guy who could have any girl he wanted. And now he’s having second thoughts about the girl he’s stuck with, people in town have grown immune to the charm and looks so they expect him to actually do something, and then you come along and show him up. You’re better looking than he is—
and don’t go blushing on me because that only makes you cuter. Yeah, believe it or not, you’re hot stuff. Then you go talking about having a doctorate from Yale and a high-powered-sounding job in New York. Sherri was practically drooling all over the table at what a catch you were, and then I went and questioned the goodies he’d gotten her to make her sweet for a little while and ruined that much.”
I sighed. “He had to tear you down to make himself look better.” When he didn’t respond, I added,
“You don’t know him like I do, and like you said, you don’t have any experience with brothers.”
He glanced over at me, looking a little sheepish. “I have Rod.”
“Yeah, and Dean and Rod are practically two peas in a pod, except Rod isn’t allergic to work and never tied himself to any of the bimbos he used to date.”
“Because I wouldn’t let him.”
“Rod feels threatened enough to hide behind an illusion. What do you think he might do if he felt really threatened, if he thought he might lose his standing with someone whose opinion mattered to him?”
“I’m not sure he’d go so far as to be that rude to a guest in his home, but I see your point. I’m sorry.”
“He does sound suspicious, I’ll admit, but I can’t imagine him going that far. If he’s involved at all, he’s just buying stuff cheap from the guy who did steal it, or from someone that guy sold it to. If worse comes to worst, we could try interrogating him about his sources, but I doubt he’d be too cooperative. I guess we’ll find out who it is soon enough, though. Another late night?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“This should be our last one. Our wizard won’t be able to resist hitting the bank. He’ll run into the wards, and then bang, we’ve got our guy. What could possibly go wrong?”
Of course, saying that nothing can go wrong is almost as good as putting a curse on yourself to guarantee that everything will go wrong.
It started when we got back home. Mom was waiting for us in the kitchen. “Kathleen Elizabeth, how dare you be so rude to your own brother when you were a guest in his house!”
As I counted to ten before saying anything I might regret to my mother, I realized that Dean must have called ahead in a preemptive tattletale strike. “I? I was rude to him?” I sputtered.
Owen was far calmer, which meant he was still very, very angry. “He was the one who was rude, I’m afraid,” he said softly. “He accused me of being the thief who robbed all the stores in the town square the night I arrived here.”
That brought Mom up cold. Being rude to family was one thing, but you were never supposed to be rude to guests, particularly not the potentially-marriage-material-good-catch boyfriend of your still-single sister. She frowned at Owen, then turned back to me. “Of course Owen wasn’t the robber. He was here all night. But Dean said you’d accused him of being the robber.”
Okay, maybe I had, sort of, but in a very indirect way. “Mom, I didn’t accuse him of anything. I simply remarked on all the nice new things he and Sherri got recently. They’ve got a whole set of china like yours, and Sherri had a necklace and earrings that match her new bracelet, the one she was wearing last night. And then I said they were lucky they got them before the stores were robbed and all the good stuff was taken.” I took a breath and continued. “Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was his guilty conscience talking. If he didn’t have anything to feel guilty about, he wouldn’t have assumed I was accusing him, and then he wouldn’t have tried to shift the blame to Owen.”
It took her a while to process that information. In most families, the middle child is more or less forgotten, but Dean had always been Mom’s favorite, the one who could do no wrong. I wondered if it had something to do with how handsome he was. “Well, you’re making accusations against him now,” she said at last.
“No, I’m simply evaluating his behavior, and I did say that I knew he couldn’t really be the thief. I’d just prefer that he not invite me over and then attack my friend. If he had doubts about Owen, he could have talked to me privately.”
I never passed up chocolate, and Owen was well aware of that, so we sat at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad and had chocolate cake with coffee. The atmosphere was still a little tense, but after a couple of slices of cake, Owen seemed to have settled down and I was no longer afraid of household objects blowing up. Now he just looked tired.
As Mom took the dishes away, she said, “I don’t know if Katie told you, but Sunday afternoons are usually pretty quiet around here. It’s a day of rest, and we all try to read and relax or nap. You’re free to do what you like, of course, but we prefer to keep things quiet for the afternoon.”
“I could use a nap,” Owen said. “I know it’s not a big time difference, but I think I’m a little jet-lagged, and I had to work a lot of extra hours to be able to take off to come down here.”
She smiled and patted him on the arm, as if trying to make up for the way Dean had treated him.
“Then you have a good nap, and we’ll see you at dinner tonight. Sunday night is casual, so there’s no set timetable.”
At the top of the stairs, Owen pulled me into his room. “Let’s get ready for tonight first,” he said, shutting the door.
“You know what my parents are going to think about us being in here with the door closed.” I certainly knew what I was thinking about.
“You won’t be in here too long, and your hair won’t be at all messed up when you leave, so relax.
She’s more likely to think we’re talking about how awful your brother is.” He pulled off his tie and sat on one of the beds. I sat next to him. “We need to come up with disguises for tonight.”
“Disguises?”
“You’re the one who lives here. You have family here. Do you really want to let anyone in town know that you or someone associated with you is involved with magic?”
Don't Hex with Texas Page 14
