The Magic Library Mysteries Collection: The Complete Series, Books 1-3

by Hillary Avis

  “He’s my family now, too,” Emily said hotly.

  “You’re not married yet.” The words were out before Allison could stop them and filled her with instant regret. She was poisoning the well by reacting this way—she needed Emily to listen to her. To believe her. To trust her. If not, she might as well just turn the pen over to Zack, because Emily would run straight into his arms. “I’m sorry. I know you love him. This is all just a lot for me. Elaine knocked me out and locked me in the basement, remember? I thought I was going to die there. Forgive me if I’m not jumping for joy about her being your mother-in-law.”

  A moment of silence and then Emily’s voice came over the line, low and thick with emotion. “I just see how hard it is on Zack, too. That’s what I was trying to tell you. He said this whole situation is so messed up. His mom hurting my mom. He cried when he came back from putting her stuff in the storage unit. Like a baby in my arms. He said it felt so final, packing up her stuff. Like he was giving up on her ever getting out.”

  The hairs on the back of Allison’s neck prickled at the mention of the storage unit. “Do you know where Elaine’s storage unit is? Like what town?”

  “I tell you my fiancé had a breakdown, and that’s your question? Where’s your compassion, Mom?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. I’m very familiar with the feeling of putting someone’s whole life in storage. That’s where all your dad’s ‘crap’ is, remember?” Allison bit her tongue. As much as it stung when Emily lashed out at her, she had to get better at taking it—at least until Emily saw the whole picture. When she understood who Zack really was, she’d realize why Allison harbored so little sympathy for him. “Just...have a little heart for our family, too, Em.”

  “I do. But we have each other. We have Dad. Zack has nobody now that Elaine’s in jail. So I have to be his somebody.” Emily cleared her throat. “My break is over. I should go.”

  “See you Saturday?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Allison took that as a yes. Or at least, that’s what she told Michelle when she walked over to the yellow house next door to give her the news.

  “Good,” Michelle gave a nod and started to shut the front door, then paused. “Did you ask her about the storage unit?”

  “It didn’t go over well. I thought I’d try again on Saturday, when she knows more.”

  “We may not have that much time. When Taylor and I were at the grocery store, I overheard Leroy Gauss say he was moving a prisoner from Remembrance jail to county in the next week or so. He has to mean Elaine.”

  Allison sucked in her breath. “I guess that moves up our timeline a bit. How do you feel about a little judicious editing now? I could at least delay the transfer until after Emily comes down.”

  Michelle scowled at her. “I hope you’re joking. If you can’t find it in Elaine’s memories, then you better start calling all the storage places in the yellow pages.”

  “Nobody uses the yell—” Allison started to say, but the door shut in her face. A second later, it popped back open, but it was Taylor’s beaming face that emerged.

  “Are you going to work tomorrow?”

  Allison nodded, and he thrust a piece of paper into her hands. It was folded into thirds and had a pencil drawing of a dog on the first panel with its tongue sticking out. Printed at the top in all capitals was his name, TAYLOR ROBINSON, and at the bottom was another crooked line of letters: DOG WIZARD. She grinned at him and opened the flyer. Inside, he’d listed his services—walking, petting, feeding, and training—and his fee, a reasonable two dollars per visit.

  “That’s per dog,” he said. When she raised an eyebrow, he amended, “It’s half price for puppies, though.”

  “Are you sure? Puppies are more work. They need a lot more training,” she said bemusedly.

  He nodded. “I know. I looked it up on YouTube.”

  The puppies would probably be fine by themselves for her four-hour shift, but the spark in Taylor’s eye reminded her of herself at that age. She was always a sucker for animals, and they’d gotten her through some hard times, including the aftermath of Paul’s memory loss. It might be healing for Taylor to help Jenny’s puppies grow up and find loving homes. “Then I think I’d like to hire you—if Grandma Michelle says it’s OK, and you don’t have anything else to do.”

  “She said she’ll approve anything that keeps me close to home and out of the trees.” He rolled his eyes. “She said no broken bones this summer. No bikes and no trees. She said those are the rules, and you know she’s real serious about rules.”

  “Yes, I do.” Allison chuckled ruefully. “We don’t want to break her rules. Brush up on your puppy videos and brainstorm some names, and I’ll see you in the morning, Dog Wizard.”

  Chapter 8

  That night, as Allison cuddled a warm puppy, heavy with sleep, to her chest, flipping through the stack of books she’d gathered as probable locations for Elaine’s storage unit, she thought of the long nights she’d spent much like this when Emily was a baby. They had seemed endless, those sleepless nights. She didn’t need the memory magic to recall vividly the feeling of despair at two a.m. when, after an hour of bouncing, Emily had awakened the moment Allison slid her back into the crib mattress, no matter how gently she made the transfer.

  “Just have Paul take the baby,” her mother had said when Allison complained to her over the phone. “Get some rest while he spells you.” But she was reluctant to rouse Paul when she knew his alarm would ring at four, anyway. He had a full day ahead of him, seven days a week; she couldn’t ask him to work the midnight shift. Instead, she’d encouraged him to find some temporary bakery help so she could sleep in.

  He’d hired a college girl, home for summer break.

  “Like me,” she teased him.

  “Not like you.” He blushed to the tips of his ears. His hair was only dusted with white then, as though his temples had been sprinkled with powdered sugar. “You were always on time.”

  “Just don’t fall in love with her.” It was a joke, but also a prediction. You couldn’t expect to repeat the same actions and get a different result. Hire cute young twenty-something, work long, odd hours with her...it was a recipe for love.

  Of course, Allison had no idea what happened between Paul and that girl. She was too busy sleeping upright on the sofa, an infant cradled in her arms. But she could guess. The summer had ended, the girl went back to college, and Allison didn’t want to know, anyway. Emily started sleeping through the night, so Allison went back to work. A season had come to an end.

  But now she couldn’t help but wonder if the pages missing from Falling in Love, the ones that didn’t quite match up with the torn-out page about Paul falling in love with her, were about that girl. Or maybe even about Michelle, his first love.

  Or maybe even someone she didn’t know about.

  It was likely that, when she recovered the box of Paul’s memories, she’d learn a lot of things she didn’t want to know. His doubts about their relationship. Situations where he resented her. Times he was unfaithful in his thoughts or actions.

  She pushed away the ugly jealousy that rose up in her chest. It didn’t matter what had happened in the past. She loved Paul because she loved him, not because he was perfect.

  She kissed the puppy she held and settled it back in the pen. The puppy yawned, and she couldn’t help mimicking it, her jaw hinging so wide that it popped. Enough of these dull books about where Christmas ornaments and graduation certificates were stored. She pushed them to the side and then scooted the other books, the ones that might be origins of Paul’s memory page, toward her. Her lids were heavy, but she forced them open.

  Ten more minutes. Then she’d go to bed.

  The next book in the stack, Crushes, was an obvious choice. She found the spot where Paul’s memories would be, right after someone named Chuck Ryan, and counted three missing pages—a good sign. She held her breath and, hand trembling, compared the edges.

  A match
.

  She wanted to cry with relief. With hope. Now, how to reattach the page? It had no easy torn edge to overlap and glue. She dug deep into her old memories of college; though she’d dropped out to marry Paul and run the bakery, she’d almost finished her two-year library science program. There, they’d learned how to repair damaged books, the kind that might regularly cross the desk in a public library.

  There were two options, she recalled. One was to glue the page edge directly into the gutter. That would be the easiest, but she feared the book wouldn’t recognize the page as long as the shorn part of it was still connected in the binding.

  The other option for repair meant using tape or tissue paper to reattach the torn page to the stub. Tape was out of the question—she didn’t have proper library repair tape, and she knew that regular tape would degrade the page over time. She couldn’t bring herself to do that to Paul’s memory. But she had acid-free tissue paper in the desk upstairs and paper glue, too.

  She collected the supplies, gingerly made the repair, and then, with waxed paper protecting the adjacent pages, clamped the book shut to dry overnight. After waking the puppies to make one more visit to the potty spot in the back yard, she collapsed in bed for a dreamless sleep.

  Wednesday

  SHE JERKED AWAKE TO a pounding at the front door. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she stumbled downstairs. The puppies whined and yelped in the dining room, sending her blood pressure skyrocketing as she opened the door and squinted into the bright day.

  Taylor bounced on his toes on the porch. “Morning!”

  “What time is it?” Allison asked groggily, as she held the door open wider so he could come in.

  “Eight.” Taylor headed past her toward the dining room. “Ooh, their pen is a mess.”

  “Eight?!” She checked the clock and was dismayed to see he was right. She barely had time to get ready for work, let alone clean up the puppies and show Taylor everything he needed to do. “Ugh. I stayed up too late looking for the storage unit.”

  “You should take them out every two hours, even at night,” Taylor said reprovingly.

  “I must have shut off my alarm,” Allison mumbled, still trying to shake off the shackles of sleep. She really needed coffee before she could deal with guilt trips from eleven-year-olds. “Why don’t you take them out to the yard while I get ready for work?”

  Taylor nodded and began officiously ferrying the puppies to the back patio. She retreated to the kitchen and put on the kettle, starting a puppy-care list for Taylor while she waited for the water to boil. Then, noticing the time slipping away, she texted Myra.

  “Might be a little late today, so sorry. It won’t become a habit.”

  Myra’s reply came a minute later. “Baby girl, I’m not even going in today, so I don’t care.”

  Right. Myra was on family leave. “How’s the baby? How’s Crystal? How’s everyone?”

  Myra sent back a laughing face. “We’re all fine. Crystal and baby Isaac are coming home in a few hours, if everything goes well. I’m holding down the fort, although I think the kids are winning. The house is a disaster.”

  “Good luck.” Allison switched screens and texted Julio her original message, but he didn’t reply. Too busy working, probably. She set down her phone to doctor her coffee, adding more milk than usual to cool it down enough that she could chug it the way Kara tossed back her Bloody Marys at brunch.

  After she took her caffeine like medicine, she swiftly cleaned out the puppy pen—that was too much for a young Dog Wizard’s first day on the job, and it was her fault, anyway. When the wall clock chimed the time she was supposed to be starting her shift at Golden Gardens, she raced outside to thrust the list into Taylor’s hands.

  “Good luck with these little guys,” she said, grinning at the fuzzy potatoes bumbling around the grass. “Tell me their names when I get back, OK?”

  The Dog Wizard nodded, all his attention on the puppies. “You can go now.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  Chapter 9

  “Oops, that’s enough. If we stir too long, we’ll make rubber muffins instead of blueberry ones.” Allison caught Mr. Simon’s elbow and shot a smile at Paul across the table. Blueberry muffins were the first recipe he’d perfected when he was learning to bake as a child—he’d told her that story many times. But rather than returning her smile, his brow furrowed, and he quickly looked down at his own bowl of batter like it had personally offended him.

  She skirted the table where a handful of residents were adding their pre-measured ingredients so she could stand beside him. “What’s wrong?”

  He darted a glance at her and gave his muffin mix a halfhearted stir. “If everyone makes a full batch of muffins, we’ll be eating them for weeks.”

  She laughed even though his tone was serious. “Don’t worry. We’ll send some home with staff, and the rest we’ll freeze.”

  As if to prove the point, Willow, Julio’s Great Pyrenees and Allison’s former foster dog, squeezed between them and nosed Paul’s mixing bowl. The bearlike white dog was a favorite with the residents and came to work with Julio almost every day. Gentle, lazy, and tall enough to pet without bending over, she was the perfect therapy dog—if she’d ever learn to listen.

  “Shoo,” Allison said, nudging her away from the table. Across the room, Julio gave a short whistle, and Willow’s head swiveled toward him. She seemed to be considering whether or not to abandon her quest for muffin batter, but it only took a few seconds for her to decide where her loyalties lay. She huffed and then trotted over to him, grinning as he rewarded her with a good head-scratching before returning to his med rounds.

  “Frozen muffins,” Paul muttered darkly.

  “Don’t be a snob, Paul Jasper James Rye,” Allison teased.

  He dropped his spoon. It hit the side of his mixing bowl with a dull sound, ricocheting off the rim and sending a splash of blueberry batter across the tabletop. He quickly grabbed the spoon, his face pained as he watched her wipe up the spill with the roll of paper towels she’d put out for just this kind of accident. A few messes were expected. “S-sorry,” he stuttered. “I was just surprised that you knew my middle names. Not many people do.”

  She smiled crookedly at him. “Your grandfather’s names. But he always went by JJ.”

  Paul backed away from her, unconsciously clutching the messy spoon to his chest. She put out a hand to stop him; he was smudging the batter on his baby blue polo shirt now.

  “I—I guess you read that in my file?” he stuttered, as she gently pried the spoon from his hands and dabbed at his shirt with a clean paper towel.

  “No. You told me.”

  Confusion spread across his face. “Why would I—I don’t—” He broke off and sighed deeply. “My memory isn’t so good these days,” he finished, his tone resigned.

  Her heart sank. With a quick glance at the table to make sure the other residents were still busy stirring their bowls—rubber muffins be damned—she took his elbow and led him a few feet away from the table. “You don’t remember yesterday? We took a walk over to the gazebo.”

  “We saw Michelle,” he said slowly. “She said Emily’s in danger. An old family grudge.”

  “Yes. And after that—”

  “We came back.” His jaw tensed and he scanned the room, lingering on the exits as though he planned to bolt.

  “No.” Her voice came out a faint breath, barely audible. “No. You read a page from the memory books. It was about me, remember? About us.”

  “Tell me now—is Emily OK?” He gripped her shoulders, his fingers digging painfully into her upper arms as he stared into her eyes. His irises were crystal blue, the same light color as his shirt, and they matched his icy cold expression. He shook her slightly, and she stiffened. He didn’t remember what she’d told him. That they were married. That she was Emily’s mother.

  Julio was there in an instant, a soothing hand on Paul’s back. “Let her go, Mr. Paul. Come on now. I ju
st put on a movie and I saved you a seat on the sofa.”

  Paul ignored him, his eyes boring into Allison’s as his fingers tightened.

  “She’s fine. She started her new job,” she finally gasped. He released her, and she rubbed the spot that still throbbed. “She’s coming to visit you on the weekend.”

  “See? Everything’s fine.” Julio said, his voice calm and reassuring as he led Paul away, even as he shot Allison a look over his shoulder that said wow, this is nuts.

  She made the OK sign, even though she wasn’t. Her arm still hurt, and her heart hurt worse. Because Paul hadn’t just forgotten their conversation yesterday. He also didn’t remember that day in the bakery, the day he watched her reach for the top shelf and was compelled to help her because he was falling in love.

  Michelle was right. Reattaching the page in Crushes hadn’t restored his memory. The magic of the library didn’t work that way. Allison had meant to check this morning, to read it and see if the memory bloomed up from the page now that it was reattached, but in the rush to get to work on time, she’d forgotten. She could only assume that once the Founders tree fibers in the paper were broken, they couldn’t be reconnected. There was always a miniscule gap between the severed ends, a thin barrier of glue. That meant even if she found Elaine’s storage unit and stole the box of Paul’s memory pages, they were useless. No matter how many times he read them or how many of them she glued back in the books, they’d never stick.

  He would never know they were married. He’d never feel it. She might capture an hour with him, or even a whole day with the right reminders, but it’d never stick. The cruelty of what Elaine had done settled deeper into her bones, strengthening them.

  Elaine wouldn’t get away with this. Allison wouldn’t let her.

  “Miss?” At the table, Mr. Simon stood, his spoon dripping back into his bowl. “What now?”

  “Now we bake,” she said grimly.