“Agreed,” Hector said. “Let’s reconvene tomorrow evening. I’d like to have that closer look at Clarence’s magic that we discussed.”

  Clarence met Hector’s cool hazel gaze without flinching. “It’s a date, demon.”

  4

  I knocked on Sylvie’s door at five after nine the next morning.

  After I received Sylvie’s text message relaying her and Lilac’s readiness to depart, it had only taken me three minutes to “persuade” Clarence he was better off at home than coming with us.

  To say his protests had been nominal would be an understatement.

  That alone told me we were on the right track, because we were headed to the land of beer and brats.

  On the short walk home last night, Lilac had posited a theory that anyone with an obsession for beer and brats that was as strong as Clarence’s would have familiarized himself with the sausage offerings in his surrounding area—especially when that area was in and around Fredericksburg.

  We might not know what Clarence had looked like when he was human or his last name, but we all agreed that Clarence was likely his real name. What nineteen-year-old would have chosen Clarence?

  We had every expectation of discovering more about our bobcat buddy’s human life today, because we planned to hit every place he might have when he was still walking around on two legs. And that was why I thought we were on the right track. The weight of his past, and possibly the compulsion placed on him, were greater than the allure of fatty sausages and craft beer.

  Lilac opened the door smiling brightly. “I am so ready for beer and brats.”

  Oh, to be twenty-four again, when hangovers and indigestion were someone else’s problem.

  I’d had half a glass of wine and a veggie burger last night, because any other choice would have had me at less than my best this morning.

  “I’m glad someone is,” I replied. Even with one of Sylvie’s smoothies for breakfast, I was feeling some trepidation regarding our looming culinary adventures. I loved brats as much as the next person, but an entire day of them was daunting.

  Sylvie arrived at Lilac’s shoulder and read me like a book. “Don’t worry, Geoff. We have a plan. It involves our feminine wiles and large tips. As the designated driver, you’ll mostly be driving.”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  Lilac chuckled as we headed for my car. “The look on your face, Geoff. What did you think? That we were going to get you all liquored up as we trawled bars? Besides, that would mean Sylvie or I would have to be the DD, and I know how much you hate it when other people drive your car.”

  True. No one seemed to understand that posted speed limits were the law, not guidelines or suggestions.

  Three bars masquerading as restaurants later, I’d learned to be unobtrusive and let the women do the heavy lifting. I’d made a half-hearted attempt at our first stop, and it hadn’t gone well.

  No one wanted to discuss local gossip with a middle-aged man when two gorgeous women were available to chat up. Or so Lilac had explained after I’d struck out, even after offering a large bill as enticement.

  She assured me that I had my own appeal, but it wasn’t likely to be effective among the male-dominated dive bar bartenders.

  I had a little luck with the beer garden we hit. There were a few women who were more than happy to talk to me about my “missing nephew Clarence,” but only two had been around more than a few months and the ones who’d been there longer didn’t remember him.

  We’d decided to save Grandpa Jo’s for last, since it turned out that it had been bought out about six months previous and likely had a full staff turnover. So we were in Jonesville, on our fifth and next-to-last dive bar, the last one with a decent online reputation for sausages, when we scored big.

  First, there were the brats. It was finally late enough in the day that I felt like I could partake, and they were amazing.

  Second, my shoes didn’t stick to the floor. The place was more of a diner with pool tables than an actual dive bar. Not as nice as the beer garden, but a step up from the bars we’d been scoping out.

  And finally, we got our first Clarence hit. Lilac struck up a conversation with the bartender, a young man around her age, and she hit the Clarence lottery.

  “Clarence—you mean Clarence Hart?” When Lilac nodded her encouragement, he continued, “Good kid. Not sure what happened to him. He used to come out pretty regular on Friday and Saturday nights.” The guy grinned.” He hustled the frat boys at pool. They deserve it and then some, if you ask me.”

  That sounded like Clarence.

  Which meant…we had a last name.

  I was listening from a distance away, sipping a beer and finishing my brat. But Lilac and Sylvie had taken a seat at the bar together. One or the other of them must have given the game away, because the guy’s smile disappeared.

  “Did something happen to him?”

  I kept him in my peripheral vision, watching for any helpful reactions. So far all I’d picked up was that he was sincere. He’d liked Clarence—and now he looked genuinely concerned.

  Instead of sticking with the missing nephew-cousin story, Lilac went off script. “Look, I think maybe yes. You’re the first person my aunt and I have run into who remembers him, and we’ve been looking for a while now.”

  The guy dropped the rag he was using to wipe the counter and leaned forward. “Like I said, I liked the guy. I hate to think something happened to him. What do you want to know?”

  So Lilac asked him a series of questions.

  When had he last seen Clarence?

  About ten months ago.

  Did he have any friends or acquaintances that he spent a lot of time with?

  He had to. He was a likeable guy, but Derek (our bartender) didn’t know who they might be. He vaguely remembered a redhead that Clarence brought with him a few times before he stopped coming, but he didn’t know her name or anything else about her, except—“she was hot” and a little older than him.

  With a wry shrug of his shoulders, he added, “She bought him beers, and we’re careful about carding here. She was legal. He wasn’t.”

  Since we weren’t the beer police, neither of them commented.

  Sylvie, who’d been quiet for most of the exchange, jumped in to ask, “Do you know any other places where Clarence might have spent time?”

  “The guy played a solid game of pool. You might try the pool hall on the other side of town.” A customer flagged him down. He nodded, indicating he’d be there shortly, then turned back to Lilac and Sylvie. “I hope you find him, and he’s okay. Do you have a number? In case I think of anything else?”

  The question was directed at Lilac, but he seemed sincere. Lilac must have thought so as well, because she turned to Sylvie expectantly. Sylvie produced a card for her bookkeeping business.

  Fifteen minutes later, after we’d all finished our respective meals and paid, we met in the parking lot.

  “Grandpa Jo’s then the pool hall?” Lilac said as she climbed into the back seat.

  We all agreed that later was better for the pool hall.

  Not three minutes on the road and Lilac gasped from the back seat. “I found him. I found Clarence Hart. He’s mentioned in his grandfather’s obituary about six years ago. Thank goodness for the death of the printed word. This little town’s weekly paper went online almost a decade ago.”

  She handed her phone to Sylvie, who read it aloud. It was only a few lines and merely mentioned Clarence Hart, August Rainer Hart’s fourteen-year-old grandson, as his sole surviving family member.

  Sylvie tapped and scrolled on Lilac’s phone until she eventually made a surprised sound. “I have a picture. I think?”

  She passed the phone back to Lilac.

  “Well, I’ll be. Clarence was a cutie. He doesn’t look nineteen in this picture.”

  Sylvie murmured her agreement, then added, “I think it’s his height.”

  I concentrated on the road and the directions my own phone was providing, but I also had a bit of a moment.

  Clarence Hart.

  Grandson of August “Auggie” Hart.

  A young man who was handsome, based on Sylvie and Lilac’s reactions.

  Who was likeable, based on our helpful bartender’s comments.

  And who was most certainly our Clarence, based on the timeline.

  We’d found Clarence’s past, or at least a part of it, and it was…disconcerting. Clarence had always been more than a pet—but he’d also been something less than a man in my eyes.

  Unfair, certainly, but simply a function of the circumstances we found ourselves in. He lived in a cat’s body. He acted like a juvenile delinquent. He needed a great deal of supervision. He’d been handed off to me by my former employers like a naughty child. I’d been told to supervise him and make sure he didn’t get into trouble.

  Considering all of those factors, was it any great surprise that I’d treated him as something other than a grown man?

  “Geoff.” Sylvie touched my shoulder. “You just missed the turn.”

  “Yeah, I sure did.”

  And that wasn’t all that I’d missed. When this was over, Clarence and I needed to have a talk. The kind where we both laid all of our cards on the table. Because something had to change. This power dynamic that existed between us was wrong.

  His threats of feline retribution, the negotiations for concessions, the general lack of personal accountability that he failed to assume, and my need to control his behavior until it conformed to some standard of my own making—all of that, it was wrong.

  By the time I’d turned the car around and found the correct path, I’d made a decision. Clarence and I couldn’t go on as we’d been. We needed to move forward. I wasn’t sure what that would look like, just that it needed to happen.

  He wasn’t a child, I wasn’t his parent, and he was no cat.

  “Everything okay, honey?”

  Sylvie was perceptive. She’d know if I lied, so I didn’t. “I’m not really sure, but we’ll figure it out.”

  She didn’t misunderstand, even though I hadn’t explained the direction my thoughts had taken. “Clarence is your friend. You’ll definitely figure it out.” She shifted in her seat to include Lilac. “Now how are we going to approach Grandpa Jo’s? We get the male bartenders and Geoff gets the female? And sticking to the lost nephew-cousin story?”

  5

  Grandpa Jo’s was a bust.

  The entire staff had turned over. Even the brats weren’t the same. I tried one, and there was no way that Clarence would give those sausages any sort of praise, let alone his highest rating.

  Then it went from bad to worse, because the pool hall, our only other local lead, was closed. Not according to the sign on the door that posted its hours of operation, but based on the fact that the door was locked and the building dark.

  A helpful elderly woman walking her dog happened to spot us peering into the dark windows. She stopped to inform us that the pool hall owner kept his own hours, not to be found on any door or website, and she laughed when Lilac asked whether the business was online.

  Once the dog walker’s giggles had died down, as well as the growling they’d sparked in her Chihuahua, she said, “But if you really want to play a game of pool, Hank rarely misses a weekend.” She grinned, revealing a set of straight white teeth. “That’s when he makes most of his money.”

  Today was Wednesday. We could gamble that weekends in Jonesville, Texas, started on a Thursday night, or we could come back Friday night.

  Once we’d thanked the woman for her help, we piled back into the car and headed home.

  “It wasn’t a complete bust.” Lilac leaned forward from the back seat to break the silence that had persisted for several miles. “We have a name and a lead to follow up on.”

  “And we’ve got two days to dig into the Hart family’s past and connections, before we hit the pool hall again.” Sylvie sighed. “It is a shame we can’t rely on our usual tech support.”

  That would be Clarence. He ran all of our background checks, the legal and illegal ones. He generally did all of our research. Only now, as I was staring at two days of thumb-twiddling, did I realize how very much we’d always relied on his special brand of skills to propel our investigations forward.

  “It sucks not having Clarence’s help.” Even though Lilac’s statement wasn’t helpful, it was exactly what each of was thinking.

  It was ridiculous that Clarence couldn’t use his special sort of investigative tools on the one case that was nearest and dearest to him. If only I’d bothered to pay attention, to ask more questions, I might have been able to—

  Ah. Now there was an idea.

  “How do you ladies feel about taking a class with me?”

  Tone wry, Lilac said, “I know you love those computer courses you’ve been taking at the library, Geoff, but I don’t think your local branch is going to have a course on digging up illegal dirt on magical subjects.”

  Sylvie chuckled. “No, but I know a certain bobcat who might be persuaded to offer that class.”

  I smiled as I thought about how smug Clarence was going to be when I proposed he teach us his dubious computer research methods.

  Two hours later, I wasn’t seeing a sign of that smugness. All I was seeing was a scowling bobcat who couldn’t seem to keep his feet off the kitchen table as he ate his late lunch.

  Clarence rarely scowled while eating, unless there was dry kibble involved, so things weren’t going well.

  I refrained from commenting on his feet, instead waiting for him to respond to my suggestion.

  “It’s as much about contacts as anything else. I can’t give you my little black book.”

  “We need to do research on a certain Clarence Hart.” Clarence flinched, but I kept talking. “And since that isn’t likely to be something you can help me with… Or am I mistaken?”

  I should have pitched this idea with Sylvie and Lilac as backup. But Sylvie had scarpered as soon as we’d arrived, something about a client meeting she needed to prep for, and Lila hadn’t even made it to the house. I’d dropped her at her front door. She’d been keen to get back to check on Marvin, except she’d then stated that she was fairly certain his name wasn’t Marvin and if she didn’t figure out what to call him soon, she was going to have a meltdown.

  It made no sense to me. Why did the house need a name at all?

  Whatever her reason, she wasn’t here now, and I needed to make some progress. Especially since Clarence had just finished his meal. I no longer had a captive audience.

  “If you don’t want to share your sources, then teach us to do the other parts of what you do.”

  Clarence removed his front feet from the table and sat in his preferred kitchen chair. The one with the pillow on the seat. He licked his lips. Then he licked a paw and groomed his face, slicking his whiskers back.

  Finally, he reluctantly said, “What about an alternative operative?”

  An alternative operative? What kind of nonsense was that? “You mean someone who can do the same kind of research that you do, but for hire?”

  His paw froze a half inch from his face, and he narrowed his eyes. “He’s not me, but basically.”

  “Is this alternative operative someone in the magic community?”

  “Not exactly, but he knows of its existence.”

  It wasn’t like we had much choice. I needed to know more about Clarence Hart than a simple sixty-five-dollar online credit report would give me, though I’d certainly start there.

  I caved, because I truly didn’t have much choice. Not if I wanted to help Clarence get some closure, maybe even justice—and I most certainly did want that. “Fine.”

  “He’s expensive.”

  “Of course he is,” I muttered in reply.

  “But I’ll negotiate a lesser fee for you.”

  Now I knew he was on board. Clarence seemed to have a general disregard for money, whereas I tended to be more aware of its finite existence. It was one of our usual areas of discord. Trading in on his connections for a discounted fee was a solid sign that he truly was trying to help.

  I had to get past the adversarial dynamic we’d established. We were on the same side, and not just because I was looking for his killer. In truth, we were always on the same side. It might not seem so, but we were—because we were friends.

  Before I could get maudlin and start waxing poetic over the friendship we’d somehow cobbled together under less-than-ideal circumstances, a knock at the door stopped me.

  “I’ll just get that.” I excused myself from the table, for once not obsessing over immediate sanitation in the wake of its exposure to Clarence’s feet and his specialized raw wildcat diet.

  I swung the door open to find Hector on my doorstep. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed the late afternoon sun.

  He frowned. “What did that witch tell you? That the sun turns me into a vicious beast that hunts the blood of ex-reapers?” His frown turned into a scowl. “I’m fine with the sun and light and daytime. No problems there.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Actually, it was more along the lines of daylight making you moody.”

  Not something I’d seen until today. His mood generally seemed positive, and I’d seen him out and about during the day. Not much, but some.

  Even when we showed up on short notice at his door asking for help, day or night, sunny or cloudy, Hector presented a similarly amiable demeanor.

  The only times he’d taken a turn for the somber was when his precious magical artifacts came into play, and I could hardly blame him. He was a master of the cursed object. It was more than a title. It was a job with responsibilities. He had to ensure the containment and safety of the cursed objects in his possession.

  Perhaps Hector was concerned for the well-being of one of his cursed objects. Or perhaps there was something else eating at him.

  “I’m not moody. I have moods. There’s a difference.”

  I stepped to the side, implicitly inviting him in. “Anything in particular affecting your mood at the moment?”

 

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