The cat jumped up beside her. “That’s too bad because—and I realize I risk sounding clichéd in saying it—I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Claire managed to crack both eyelids open about a millimeter. No one had ever been able to determine if cats were actually clairvoyant or merely obnoxious little know-it-alls. “A bad feeling about what?”
“You know: this.” He paused to rub a damp paw over his whiskers. “Aren’t you getting anything at all?”
She let her eyes close again. “I seem to be getting MTV on one of my fillings. It’s part of the Stomp tour.” Flinching at a particularly robust bit of metaphor, she sighed. “I’m so thrilled.”
A furry, ten-pound weight sat down on her chest. “I’m serious, Claire.”
“The summons isn’t any more urgent than it was this morning, if that’s what you’re asking.” One-handed, she unbuttoned her jeans, pushing the cat back onto the bed with the other. “Nothing else is getting through this headache except a low-grade buzz.”
“You should check it out.”
“Check what out?” When Austin refused to answer, Claire decided she’d won, tossed off her clothes, and got into a pair of cream-colored silk pajamas—standard operating procedure suggested night clothes suitable for the six o’clock news, just in case.
Tucked under the covers, the cat curled up on the other pillow, she realized why the old man had looked so familiar. He looked like a gnome. And not one of those friendly garden gnomes either.
Rumpelstiltskin, she thought, and went to sleep smiling.
“This is weird, my shoes are still wet.”
Austin glared at her from the litter box. “If you don’t mind!”
“Sorry.” Claire poured liquid out of the toe of one canvas sneaker, hung them back over the shower curtain rod by their tied laces, then made a hasty retreat from the bathroom. “It’s not that I expected them to be dry,” she continued, dropping onto the edge of the bed, “but I was hoping they’d be wearably damp.”
It was starting out to be a six of one, half a dozen of the other kind of a day. On the one hand, it was still raining and her shoes were still too wet to wear. On the other hand, her sleep had been undisturbed by signs or portents, her headache was gone, and the low-grade buzz had completely disappeared. Even Austin had woken up in a good mood, or as good a mood as he could manage before noon.
Flopping back against a pile of bedclothes, she listened past the sound of feline excavation to the hotel’s ambient noise, and frowned. “It’s quiet.”
“Too quiet?” Austin asked, coming out of the bathroom.
“The summons has stopped.”
Sitting back on his haunches, the cat stared up at her. “What do you mean, stopped?”
“I mean it’s absent, not present, missing, not there.” Surging to her feet, she began to pace. “Gone.”
“But it was there when you went to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“So between ten-thirteen last night and eight-oh-one this morning, you stopped being needed?”
“Yes.”
Austin shrugged. “The site probably closed on its own.”
Claire stopped pacing and folded her arms. “That never happens.”
“Got a better explanation?” the cat asked smugly.
“Well, no. But even if it has closed, I’d be summoned somewhere else.” For the first time in ten years, she wasn’t either dealing with a site or traveling to one where she was needed. “I feel as though I’ve been cast aside like an old shoe, drifting aimlessly…”
“Mixing metaphors,” the cat interrupted, jumping up on the bed. “That’s better; while there’s nothing wrong with your knees, they’re not exactly expressive conversational participants. Maybe,” he continued, “you’re not needed because good has dominated and evil is no longer considered a possibility.”
They locked eyes for a moment, then simultaneously snickered.
“But seriously, Austin, what am I supposed to do?”
“We’re only a few hours from home. Why don’t you visit your parents?”
“My parents?”
“You remember; male, female, conception, birth…”
Actually, she did remember, she just tried not to think about it much. “Are you suggesting we need to take a vacation?”
“Right at the moment, I’m suggesting we need to eat breakfast.”
The carpet on the stairs had seen better days; the edges still had a faint memory of the pattern but the center had been worn to a uniform, threadbare gray. Claire hadn’t been exactly impressed the night before, and in daylight the guest house had a distinctly shabby look.
Not a place to make an extended stay, she thought as she twisted the pommel back onto the end of the banister.
“I think we should spend the day looking around,” she said, following the cat downstairs. “Even if the site’s closed up, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the area.”
“Whatever. After we eat.”
Searching for a cup of coffee, if not the promised breakfast, Claire followed her nose down the hall to the back of the first floor. With any luck, that obnoxious little gnome doesn’t also do the cooking.
The dining room stretched across the end of the building and held a number of small tables surrounded by stainless steel and Naugahyde chairs—it had obviously been renovated at about the same time as her room. Outside curtainless windows, devoid of even a memory of moldings, a steady rain slanted down from a slate-gray sky, puddling beneath an ancient and immaculate white truck parked against the back fence.
Fortunately, before she could get really depressed about either the weather or the decor, the unmistakable scent of Colombian double roast drew her around a corner to a small open kitchen. The stainless steel, restaurant-style appliances were separated from the actual eating area by a Formica counter, its surface scrubbed and rescrubbed to a pale gray.
Standing at the refrigerator was a dark-haired young man in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a chefs apron over faded jeans and a T-shirt. Although he wore a pair of wire frame glasses, a certain breadth of shoulder and narrowness of hip suggested to Claire that he wasn’t the bookish type. The muscles of his back made interesting ripples in the
