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

by Hillary Avis

  “Well, she’s special needs. A tripod dog.”

  Allison laughed and dropped her keys on the porch. She stooped to pick them up. “Yeah, I think they’re going to notice if Jenny’s missing a leg.”

  “I had to try,” Rachael said good-naturedly. “The vet mentioned her when I called to schedule the puppies. Said a cop brought her in after she was hit on the highway. She’s apparently a real sweetheart.”

  Allison froze, her key in the lock. “Wait, did they say when?”

  “No. But it was at least a couple weeks ago if her surgery site is healed enough that they’re talking to rescues. I’m probably going to take her if I can come up with the cash to cover her vet bills. And if you’re looking for a new foster after the puppies are gone...” Rachael wheedled.

  Allison drew in a sharp breath. “Two weeks ago is when Jenny was killed. Or when she was hit, anyway. What if—” She left the idea hanging. It was a slim hope that Leroy had taken Jenny to the vet after he hit her. There were a lot of cops and a lot of highways and a lot of dogs that got hit every day.

  “Could it be Jenny?” Rachael asked. “I figured Jenny was chipped.”

  “I don’t know. Probably wishful thinking.” Allison pushed open the front door and was met by a chorus of eager puppy yips emanating from the dining room. Down the hall, she could see Taylor crouched beside their pen, filling up their dish with puppy chow.

  “Should I ask Myra?” Rachael asked.

  Allison paused, thinking. If she was right, Myra would be thrilled to have Jenny back, in any condition. But if she was wrong, it’d be an emotional rollercoaster during an already fraught time. “I don’t want to bother her if it’s a different dog. Let me ask Leroy about it first. See if he’s the one who took the dog in. I need to have a chat with him, anyway.” She hung up as Taylor rose from the floor. As he turned toward her, she saw his eyes were swollen and puffy. He rubbed his reddened nose on his T-shirt sleeve.

  “Hey,” he sniffed. “Six dollars. I didn’t stay very long today.”

  “I’ll add it to your jar,” she said, nodding.

  “Actually, can I have it all? Right now?”

  She raised her eyebrows as she went to the kitchen window and lifted the lid on the cookie jar to withdraw the wad of bills. She handed it to him, and he immediately began counting it out on the countertop, his lips moving as he silently kept track of the total. When he reached the end, he looked up at her expectantly.

  “Plus six,” he reminded her.

  “Oh, right.” She got a five and a one from her purse, smoothing them before she handed them over. “What’s your total?”

  “Ninety-six,” he said, sounding discouraged.

  “Not bad. If you hand out a few more of your flyers to the neighbors, you’ll have a real little business going.”

  He pursed his lips. “Right. Grandma’s going to let me ride my bike here from Elkhorn to walk people’s dogs. She won’t even let me ride around the block.”

  “In your new neighborhood, then.”

  “Why does everyone always want things to be new? Like that’s a good thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “New house. New guardian. New dogs.” He glared pointedly at her. “I’m tired of new. I just want things to stay the same—for once.”

  “You sound like you could use a cookie,” Allison said sympathetically. She grabbed a few from the freezer bags they’d filled the week before and popped them in the microwave. A few seconds later, armed with glasses of milk and the now-warm, gooey cookies, they cozied up in the living room.

  “So what are you going to use the money for?” she asked, nodding to the wad of cash that made a lump in his T-shirt pocket. “Got a bike picked out?”

  He shook his head and mumbled around his cookie. “You’ll just tell Grandma.”

  She leaned forward. “I won’t. I swear.”

  He swallowed and then sucked in his cheeks as he stared at her from his spot on the sofa. “You think you’re not a regular grownup, but you are. You’ll tell. You just will.”

  She giggled and then choked as a stray cookie crumb lodged in her throat. She held up a finger while she coughed, her eyes watering. When she finally dislodged it with a few gulps of milk, her eyes were streaming. “How about this? You tell me. We’ll make sure my memory goes into a particular book, and then you can tear it out if I decide to tell Michelle. Fair?”

  He dusted the crumbs off his hands and took a long swig from his own glass, wiping away his milk mustache with the same T-shirt sleeve that he’d used for his tears earlier. “I guess so.”

  Allison scanned the volumes on the bookshelves nearest her chair. “How about Plans and Schemes?”

  Taylor shook his head. He went to the shelf and ran his hands over the spines of the books, scanning their titles. When he reached the third shelf, he slid out a purple volume. “This one.” He held it up so she could read the title.

  “Secrets and Lies. So which one are you going to tell me?” she teased, but he didn’t crack a smile.

  He sat down again with the book spread across his lap, open to the table of contents. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said slowly and deliberately, his eyes trained on the page. A smile of satisfaction crept across his face. He looked up at her. “My name just appeared.”

  “Find the page,” she urged. He flipped into the center of the book and found it, marking the spot with his finger. He took a deep breath and let it out.

  “I’m running away,” he said bluntly.

  She sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “I guess I have to tear your pages out, then.” He moved to do it and she sat forward in her seat, alarmed.

  “Wait! Let’s talk about it for a minute.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I know what you’re going to say. Don’t do it, you won’t be safe, ninety-six dollars isn’t enough, you have to tell my grandma, blah blah blah. I know. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you to begin with.”

  “That’s not it.” She paused. “You don’t need to tear the page out. I won’t tell. You’re going to think about running away whether I remember or not.”

  “I’m going to do it, not just think about it,” he said sullenly.

  “Why?” Her question hung in the still air of the living room.

  “Because I want to stay here.”

  “So let me get this straight. You want to stay here, so you’re going to leave?”

  He shifted on the sofa, drawing up his knees and hugging his arms around them so the book was sandwiched against his chest. “Just until she changes her mind.”

  “Listen. I’m a regular grownup, right? So I know how grownup minds work. She’s not going to change her mind unless something else changes. If you run away, she’ll just see that as more evidence that you’re in danger, that she needs to get you out of here. If you don’t mind, I’ll make a suggestion. I think I can help you. I think you and I want the same thing.”

  He barked a disbelieving laugh. “Grandma says you want to take over the library for yourself.”

  Allison shook her head. “No, I don’t. I want time. Time to help my husband recover his memories. And time is what you want, too. You want a little time to grow up in your grandma’s house and then you’ll be ready to take on the world. It’s like that for me, too.”

  “I don’t want to live with her at all,” Taylor muttered, seeming to shrink back further into the sofa cushions. “She just gets meaner and meaner.”

  He was going to disappear if she let him continue down this path. Allison stood. “Can you help me with something?” He shrugged and she motioned for him to follow her. She led him back down the hall to the dining room where the puppies were sleeping. “I need good pictures of all four for the adoption website.”

  “I’m not helping with that.” Taylor crossed his arms. “I want to help with the other thing.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What other thing?”

  “You know wh
at.”

  She did know what. “I promised your grandma I wouldn’t get you involved.”

  “You promised her you wouldn’t mess with the books, too. And I know you did. I saw when I was looking for my mom and dad.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “We both want the same thing, right? So I want to help.”

  Outwitted by an eleven-year-old. All she could do was laugh. “OK. Fine.”

  He dropped his arms by his sides. “And you can’t give the puppies away.”

  “That I can’t promise. They’re not mine, for one. And two, four dogs is a lot of dogs, and these guys aren’t going to stay puppies forever. They’re going to be big.”

  “Big is good.”

  “Big eats a lot of food,” she countered. “Food costs money.”

  Taylor chewed his thumbnail for a minute and then slid the ninety-six dollars out of his pocket and offered it to her. “Just keep one, then. So I can visit.”

  She blinked back the prickle of tears that rushed to her eyes and pushed his hand back toward him. “I won’t take your money,” she said thickly. “Listen. If we can figure out how to steal the boxes back from the sheriff, I will do my best to convince Michelle that you should keep one of the puppies. And if I can’t do that, then I’ll adopt one. You can train it and play with it and everything. It’ll be yours even if it lives at my house.”

  Taylor’s chin quivered. “Do you promise? Really promise, not a grownup promise?”

  She nodded gravely.

  “OK. Then I have an idea.” Taylor led her to the pantry and showed her a tiny book hidden under a loose floorboard. It was brown leather, the size of a deck of cards, titled Locks and Keys. “You can write a memory in there that the sheriff’s mom should leave the key out for him. Then we can just take it. We don’t even have to break in.”

  “How’d you find this?” Allison asked wonderingly as she peered past him into the hole in the floor.

  “Everest found it,” Taylor said proudly. “He was digging in here one day and I saw the board wiggle.”

  She fanned the pages out. Of course—she could follow Elaine’s burglary blueprint and just use a key. She just needed to fashion a new pen, since she’d given the real one to Emily already. Last time she’d made one, when Elaine locked her in the basement, she’d rolled up some pages from one of the books to form a makeshift pen. It’d been a clumsy tool, but it’d worked.

  Taylor was already one step ahead of her. “This one has a lot of blank paper in the back,” he said, shoving a book from higher up on the pantry shelf into her hands.

  Soufflés. Paul’s mom must have authored this book back in the Fifties thinking a lot more people would be attempting such culinary endeavors than actually had.

  “Now we just need a nib to roll the pages around. I used dog hair last time, but the puppies’ hair is too short. Maybe we should use yours.” Allison ruffled Taylor’s hair.

  He blew out his breath in a raspberry of disbelief as he jerked his head away to stare at her. “Or you could just roll it around a regular pen.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Grownups.”

  Chapter 32

  Tuesday

  “I’ll bring you some chicken noodle on my lunch break. We have a lot left over,” Myra fussed over the phone.

  “No, don’t. I’m too queasy to eat anything, anyway.” Guilt crept up Allison’s spine as she lied in front of Taylor. He’d lied to Michelle that he was coming over to watch the puppies, but that was different. A child’s fib. She hated that she wasn’t a better role model to him. She ended the call with Myra and then gave him a nod. “Done. Let’s go.”

  They made the short drive out to Mrs. Gauss’s place in silence, Taylor staring out the passenger window at the houses and fields flicking by. When they pulled into the driveway, the bottom fell out of her stomach. Leroy’s SUV was already parked in front of the house.

  She slammed the car into reverse and started to pull out, craning her neck to watch for oncoming highway traffic.

  “What’re you doing?!” Taylor looked up toward the house. “Oh. Stop. Stop now. He already saw us.”

  She hit the brakes and glanced out the windshield. Leroy was coming down the steps like a tree being felled, casting a long shadow of disapproval toward them. She swallowed. “Stay in the car,” she said to Taylor out of the corner of her mouth. Then she pasted on a smile and unclipped her seatbelt. When she stepped out, Leroy stopped in his tracks.

  “Well, I’ll be. It’s the bungling burglar.” He didn’t know how close to the mark he was. Here she was, bungling a second attempt.

  “I was going to say it’s the highway hitman,” she replied sweetly, shading her eyes so she could see him better in the glare of the morning sun.

  “I told you, I didn’t kill that dog,” he growled.

  “No, but you hit it.” She motioned to the SUV. The blood might be gone, but the dent in the fender was still readily apparent. “But I also know you took her to the animal hospital in Elkhorn. That’s why I came to talk to you.” Another lie. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at Taylor in the car; he couldn’t hear her.

  “I’m not going to pay the vet bill, if that’s what you came for. You let your animals run loose, they get hit. Anyway, I don’t have the money.” He switched his toothpick to the other side of his mouth and fixed her with a steady stare. “I would have it, but I got conned in a real estate deal.”

  “Sorry about that,” Allison said, wincing.

  “So you admit it was a con!”

  “So you admit you hit Myra Mitchell’s dog?” she countered. He gave a single slow nod, which she then returned. “Then we can reverse the deal on the hayfield if you refund my check.”

  “Minus closing costs.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  “Deal.” He stuck out a hand and she shook it grudgingly.

  “Invite her in, Leroy.” Mrs. Gauss’s reedy voice came faintly from behind the screen door. “Don’t be rude.”

  Leroy clenched his teeth. “Would you like—”

  “No thanks!” Allison turned back to her car and froze. The passenger seat was empty. Taylor was gone. Her eyes darted toward the fence, where the gate to the back yard was almost imperceptibly ajar. Taylor must have taken it upon himself to steal the boxes from the shed himself. She cursed herself for letting him come along, then composed her face and turned back to Leroy, moving quickly toward him to distract him from Taylor’s absence. “On second thought—I could use a cup of tea.”

  He glowered at her. “Mother will be thrilled,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Inside, Mrs. Gauss beamed and plucked her glasses from her chest where they rested at the ends of a jeweled chain and held them up to her face like a pair of opera glasses to see Allison across the room. “Oh, wonderful, it’s Myra’s pretty friend. I forget your name, dear.”

  “Allison Rye.” Carefully avoiding eye contact with Leroy, Allison took the seat adjacent to Mrs. Gauss.

  “That’s right, the muffin girl. Leroy, don’t just stand there being rude. Fetch us a tray. Do you take your tea sweet?”

  Allison nodded. “I do.”

  “Well, my Leroy will get you some sugar.” Mrs. Gauss winked at her.

  Leroy’s face reddened as he stared back and forth between the two women. Then he tossed up his hands in exasperation and stormed off to the kitchen.

  “He’s a good boy,” Mrs. Gauss said. “Very handy. He built me my dahlia shed, you know. All by himself.” She drew aside the curtain beside her chair, revealing a perfect view of the shed in the back yard. Allison watched, horrified, as Taylor exited the shed door, precariously balancing the paisley storage boxes in his arms. How in the world had he gotten in there by himself? She stood up and noisily cleared her throat to distract Mrs. Gauss from the view.

  “On second thought, maybe I don’t have time for a visit this morning. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

&nb
sp; Mrs. Gauss pouted. “Not even one little cup?”

  Allison shook her head. “Sorry. I’ll come again another time, I promise.” It was a grownup promise, one she didn’t know if she could keep or not. She scurried out the front door and ran to the car, where Taylor was waiting, breathless, his cheeks flushed and his eyes sparkling, in the passenger seat. The three red paisley boxes were at his feet.

  “Put on your seatbelt,” she commanded at the same time that she slammed the car into reverse and craned her neck to see out the back window. He obediently buckled his belt and then bounced in his seat, his knees pulled up to make room for the boxes on the floorboards while she pulled out into the road.

  “They were heavier than I thought,” he said as she cranked the wheel and shifted the car into drive. In her peripheral vision, Allison only caught a glimpse of Leroy standing on the porch, dumbfounded, before she pressed the accelerator to the floor and buzzed down the highway toward town. Taylor poked her arm, sending a flood of adrenaline through her. “Aren’t you happy I got the boxes?”

  “Happy isn’t the word.” Her chest tightened as her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, expecting to see red and blue lights flashing there. Any minute, Leroy would realize that the boxes were gone. The center line clicked away behind her car like Morse code, but Leroy’s SUV wasn’t looming over the rise. Yet. “I’ll be happier once we get them somewhere safe.”

  “I thought you’d be glad,” Taylor grumbled.

  “I told you to stay in the car. I should have left you at home.” She regretted it the instant the words came out of her mouth. Taylor leaned away from her, curling against the door and pressing his cheek to the window, his breath sending a plume of fog up the glass. She peeled her eyes from the road in front of them to steal a glance at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s my fault Leroy has those boxes, and I should be the one to take responsibility for getting them back. Not you.”