“What’s it for? Is she suing you?” Fidelia asked.
“Competency hearing.” He shrugged and folded the document up, slipping it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I expected it. Just not this soon.”
Fidelia smirked. “We rattled her cage yesterday.”
Roger took the coffee carafe around, filling cups as he went.
Shackleford shook his head, frowning. “Maybe, but I doubt that even my redoubtable niece can wrangle a motion in probate court in less than a week. This was foolish on her part.”
“How so?” Fidelia asked.
“She needs to have a doctor’s statement signed within thirty days of filing. I’ve only seen two doctors recently and neither of them found anything wrong with me.”
“You expected this?” Barbara asked.
“Oh, yes.” He nodded at Roger. “She hired Mulligan to be my caretaker.” He looked up at Roger. “You’ll probably be called as a witness.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I’ll call Rexwood and have her look into it. I suspect we can get it quashed,” Shackleford said. “In the meantime, what have you two cooked up?”
Roger worked around the table, clearing away the detritus of breakfast as they talked.
“Nothing new. The major assets are the classrooms, the dorm rooms, and the teachers’ suites,” Fidelia said. “That says ‘school’ to me, but I’m not sure how we manage that. The state’s pretty rigid when it comes to who they let practice education.”
“Something to look into,” Shackleford said. “I have no idea what the regulations or liabilities are.”
Barbara nodded. “Bed and breakfast is probably the next choice. We’d need to renovate, I think.”
Shackleford took a sip of coffee and nodded. “Talk to me about this.”
“We went back through the upstairs wings after dinner last night. They’re clearly set up as some kind of boarding school. The classrooms, the dorm. Do you have any documentation on that?” she asked.
Shackleford pursed his lips. “It was before my time.”
“Somebody must have kept records,” Fidelia said.
“Like old ledgers, ma’am?” Roger asked.
All eyes turned to Roger. “Yes, Mulligan.”
“I have some in my desk, ma’am. I never looked to see how far back they go.”
“It’s a start,” she said, looking at Shackleford. “Can we look at them?”
“Of course,” the old man said. “There might be some records in one of the warehouses, but finding them would take a miracle.”
“Or allies,” Fidelia said.
Shackleford raised an eyebrow. “Who’d you have in mind?”
“First things first,” she said. “Let’s see what we have in terms of ledgers. With any luck, that will give us a clue about what time frame.”
Barbara shook her head, frowning into her cup.
“Something?” Fidelia asked.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Assume we’re right. It was a boarding school. They had to be rich kids who weren’t so rich that they got shipped off to some hoity-toity finishing school in Europe or one of the elite schools here.”
“Or so rich they wouldn’t hobnob with the merely wealthy,” Fidelia said. “Also, remember—European travel was by steamship until recently.”
Barbara nodded. “Yeah, even with that. Does it matter? Could we even consider it as worth doing?”
Fidelia’s eyes widened and she put her cup into the saucer with an audible click.
Shackleford glanced at Fidelia before settling back in his chair, a bemused smile on his face and his fingers steepled over his chest. “Worth doing? Say more about that.”
“Well, look,” she said, looking up. “I’m pretty sure with enough money and the right people, we could probably figure out a way to teach a dozen kids. Teach them what?”
Shackleford shrugged. “Reading, writing, arithmetic?”
“Why?” Barbara asked.
“Why what?” Fidelia asked.
“Why reading, writing, and arithmetic?” she asked. “It’s twelve people. Assume kids. Or maybe move them up to at-risk teens. What will we accomplish?”
Shackleford narrowed his eyes and tilted his head to one side. “Keep going. What do you want to accomplish?”
“I want to help people,” she said, looking back into her cup.
A smile blossomed on Fidelia’s face. “What do you want to help them with?”
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. Maybe help kids with talent? I grew up completely lost. My teens were hell. I kept reading people and finding out how much they hated me or thought I was stupid or liked somebody else.” She shook her head. “Flashes. I still have only the slightest idea of what I might be able to do.” She glanced up at them. “You two do things that I’m in awe of. Pixies? Fairies?” She gazed around the room. “This house. It’s like the damn thing is alive.”
Shackleford blinked. “Alive?” He looked up at the ceiling, narrowing his eyes. “Can you read the house?”
Barbara shrugged and shook her head. “Not read. It’s just kind of a background noise, like a refrigerator in the next room. You don’t really hear it unless the house is quiet and it clicks on.” She looked at Shackleford, then Fidelia. “You don’t sense it?”
Fidelia shook her head. “I heard something yesterday.” She glanced at Shackleford. “I don’t know what it was, but I don’t sense either the fairies or the pixies.” She glanced up at the ceiling. “Nothing from the house, either.”
“I hear the pixies,” Shackleford said. “When they want me to. I can sense the fairies in the yard and atrium, but mostly I just let them be.” He shrugged. “In my experience, we all have different talents and different levels of skill at those talents. I knew another mind reader once, but she was an old woman who lived in a cabin in the woods. She passed away a long time ago.”
“How many wizards are there?” Barbara asked.
Shackleford shrugged and looked at Fidelia.
“I don’t know, either,” Fidelia said. “I have a list of a few hundred who attend the annual gala, but neither you nor your mother are on the list. Obviously.”
“A few hundred?” Barbara asked, eyes wide.
Fidelia nodded. “Oh, yes. And more that I’ve heard of but aren’t on the list.”
“You know them when you see them, right? People with talent?” Barbara asked.
“Generally,” Fidelia said. “A few have latent talent that’s not visible. Every once in a while I’ve shaken hands with somebody and found a spark.”
“So where are you going with this?” Shackleford asked. “Some kind of school for wizards?”
Barbara frowned and shook her head. “No. At least not here and I’m not sure it would help. If there are so many variations on talent, then trying to put together a curriculum to address them en masse would be doomed to fail before it even started.”
Shackleford nodded. “So what then?”
“You’re rich,” she said, looking at Shackleford.
“I think we’ve established that,” the old man said with a grin. “You’re suggesting a charity?”
“No,” Barbara said. “Well, maybe no. Maybe yes. I don’t know.” She scowled into her cup as if the answer might be floating in the coffee.
“Spit it out, girl,” Fidelia said, a warm smile on her face. “I like the way you’re thinking.”
“With the house, we can help a dozen kids. How can we help a million?”
Shackleford’s eyebrows shot up. “A big number, but only a fraction of the kids who need help on the planet.”
“Help them with what?” Fidelia asked. “Wizards riding to the rescue to give them what we think is best for them?”
Barbara snorted. “That’s worked out so well.” She shook her head. “No. I don’t know, but I’d rather give money to a school that can use that money to help a hundred kids than use the same amount to help a dozen who probably ca
n already afford to get the help they need.”
Shackleford pursed his lips for a moment before speaking. “Go back to growing up with talent. How did you navigate that by yourself?”
“I always had a high level of empathy, even as a kid. It just sort of went from that to getting deeper into their heads. Luckily, I have to actively look. It’s not like some party in my head all the time.”
“How many talented people have you seen?” Shackleford asked.
“Just a few. Less than a dozen before I met you. Nobody I knew to talk to. In the beginning, I’d see people walking by the house. They had a kind of glow.” She smiled. “I asked my mother why some people glowed and others didn’t. She didn’t know what I was talking about. I remember being about ten or eleven and pointing to a lady walking by with a dog. She had this really cool aura thing around her. White and yellow and blue and red. It was pretty. When I pointed her out to my mother, she didn’t see it. She just said, ‘She’s very pretty and quite talented, isn’t she?’ She said that. Talented. I asked what her talent was. Mom shrugged. ‘Dressing well,’ she said, as if that explained the glow.”
“What if we asked the wizards?” Fidelia asked.
Barbara looked up at her. “Asked them what?”
“What they need. There’ll be maybe a couple of hundred at the Fête. Most of them well off.” She shrugged. “Most of us are.”
“Really?” Barbara asked. “I wasn’t until you found me. I’m still not. I’m comfortable. Run my little psychic business and it keeps me in incense and food.”
Fidelia’s shoulders dropped a fraction and she tilted her head a few degrees to the left.
“What if you’re assuming that, because the ones you know are rich, most of them are?” Barbara asked. “How could we check that?”
“Go to a ball game,” Roger said.
All eyes turned to him and he shrugged. “Sorry to interject, but if you can see it just by looking, go where there are a lot of people. Any large sporting event.”
“How does that help us, Mulligan?” Shackleford asked.
“It answers the question of whether or not most wizards are rich. It’ll give you an idea of how many there are. If the only ones at the event have expensive seats? I still don’t know if that helps.”
“What would you do with the place, Mulligan?” Shackleford asked. “You’ve been silent on the subject until now.”
“Bed and breakfast,” he said. “Exclusive. Expensive. Remodel the upstairs wings to make them luxury suites. We can extend the Wi-Fi network to cover the house with a few plug-ins. Put a real kitchen off the ballroom. Hire a chef to cook. Dress it up like an English manor house. Get some housekeepers and maids. A real butler. Some footmen.” He shrugged. “Rich people will rent expensive suites in hotels with hot and cold running everything, but I suspect there might be people who’d get a kick out of being out of the limelight and having the chance to spend a few days with a butler and cook.”
Shackleford and Fidelia both grinned, but Barbara frowned. “How does that help people?” she asked.
“It doesn’t, miss. It answers the question of what to do with the house. With that out of the way, there’s nothing preventing you from doing something else—something more altruistic, more philanthropic.”
“You could even make that part of the sales pitch,” Fidelia said. “Part of the proceeds go to help ... whomever.”
Barbara fell back into her chair, gazing into the middle distance. “Could that work?”
Shackleford shrugged. “Do a preliminary plan on it. Bed and breakfasts were all the rage but now it’s apparently whatever that silly Airbnb is.”
Fidelia looked at him. “Where’d you hear that? I didn’t think you ventured out of your library.”
The old man sniffed. “I’ve seen the internet. That’s how I found her.” He nodded at Barbara.
Fidelia toasted him with her coffee cup. “Well done, sir.”
He grinned. “Thank you, my dear.”
“How would you even figure out the market for that?” Barbara asked.
“Hire a marketing research firm,” Shackleford said. “You’re working with deep pockets. I’ve always found that I can hire the expertise in areas in which I lack the background for much less than it would cost me to do it wrong.”
“You’ve also had an advantage,” Fidelia said, glancing at his chest.
He nodded. “True.”
Barbara looked back and forth between Fidelia and Shackleford a couple of times. “Are you two hiding something from me?”
“We’re not a couple, if that’s where you’re going,” Fidelia said.
“It isn’t.” Barbara sat forward. “What’s this about a competency hearing?”
“We’ve talked about this, haven’t we?” Shackleford asked. “My niece wants me declared incompetent so she can become my guardian, tuck me into a home somewhere out of the way, and take over the estate and my finances. Her end goal is to get my money and assets and turn this place into the newest condos on the block.”
“You seem a long way from incompetent, sir. How does she think this is going to play out in the court?”
Shackleford grimaced. “It will depend on the day, I suspect.”
“The day?” Barbara looked around. “Why? Are you bad on Thursdays or something?”
Shackleford looked at Fidelia who shrugged and retreated behind her coffee. The look she gave him was clearly “you’re on your own here, pal.”
“First, I do not have dementia. Second, what I do have is a cursed artifact. I’m sure we talked about this before.”
“Please keep going,” Barbara said. “I’m not seeing where this dementia thing is coming from with your niece. Surely she’s not seen you acting oddly.”
Shackleford grimaced. “Actually, she has. When she’s here, I’m in a wheelchair. I pretend.”
Fidelia cleared her throat. Loudly.
“Sometimes I pretend,” Shackleford said, glancing at Fidelia.
“And she’s seen the real episodes enough to think that you’re like that all the time?” Barbara asked.
“Basically,” Shackleford said. “I haven’t gone out of my way to disabuse her of the idea.”
“So, if you go to court with a doctor’s certificate that says you’re not suffering dementia, and you can show the judge that you’re lucid, what’s the problem?”
“The episodes have become more frequent over the last few months. They’re lasting longer. They’re harder to bear.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s getting harder to come back from them.”
“Recover afterwards, you mean?” Barbara asked.
Shackleford shook his head. “No, I mean get my mind back to the present.”
“So you’re afraid you’ll have one of these episodes and think you’re twenty years old again?”
He shrugged. “Basically.”
“What’s the day have to do with it?”
“They’re worse and more common during the full moon.” He shrugged. “Cliché, I know.”
“Let me guess, the moon is full now?” Barbara asked.
Shackleford shook his head. “Nearly new. In spite of that, I had a serious episode yesterday while you were out.”
“And if you take the artifact off, you die,” Barbara said.
Shackleford nodded.
“If the judge finds in your niece’s favor, even the fact that you’ve found me is likely to be discounted, isn’t it?”
Shackleford nodded again.
“I’ll be sure to cash the check quickly,” she said.
Shackleford laughed. “Good idea.”
“So we have two weeks to get the thing off you, right?” Barbara asked.
“That would be the idea, yes,” Shackleford said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that for the last twenty years.”
“Or we try to delay the hearing,” Fidelia said. “If we can get it delayed to the next new moon, we’d have a better chance.”
Barbar
a shook her head. “I don’t know. If you had a really bad episode just yesterday, what’re the odds you won’t have one today? Can you stack the deck so you don’t have one in court?”
Shackleford sighed. “Not entirely. No.”
“How do you reverse a curse?” Barbara asked. “You two are wizards, right?”
Fidelia shrugged. “They’re not common. This one is ancient, from what I understand.”
Shackleford nodded. “Old as humans on this continent, I think. I don’t know what the power is behind it. I think of it as evil, but it might just be a function of the balance being maintained.”
“Balance?” Barbara asked.
“Yes,” the old man said. “I got a lot of good out of this curse. I’m paying the price now.”
“What’s the benefit if you die?” she asked.
“Somebody else will pick up the necklace,” Shackleford said. “Like I did. They’ll put it on and then they’ll have the advantage and the cost.”
“So it’s a ‘pay it forward’ deal when you die?”
“In a manner of speaking, I suppose so,” Shackleford said.
Barbara sat back in her chair, tilting her head to one side, some kind of processing going on behind her eyes.
“What are you thinking?” Fidelia asked.
“How dead is dead? And how do we pick it up without touching it?”
“Death is usually final,” Fidelia said.
“Keyword. Usually.” She looked at Roger. “You’ve brought people back from the dead.”
Roger felt the blood drain from his face. “No.”
“Yes,” Barbara said. “You have. Flatlined, adrenaline push, zap ’em.”
Roger swallowed hard. “Not. Happening.”
“What are you thinking, my dear?” Fidelia asked, placing her cup in its saucer with a clink.
“He’s an EMT. Emergency Medical Technician. He’s trained in restarting hearts. He’s done it at least twice here in the States.”
Fidelia frowned. “Where else would he have done it?”
“Afghanistan,” Roger said and blew out a deep breath.
“You’re talking about killing me?” Shackleford asked in the same tone he might have asked “What’s for dinner?”
“You don’t sound surprised,” Fidelia said.
He shook his head. “It’s not the first thing that crossed my mind this morning, no, but I’d be lying if I hadn’t thought about it.”
The Wizard's Butler Page 33
