Go on, my friend. Go on.
Yours always,
Phineas Grove.
Rhoda finished. She folded the letter once, carefully, and laid it on the rug beside her knee.
"He hoped it would be a good one," she said quietly to the grey tabby in her lap.
Quill lifted his small grey head. "Thank you, Rhoda," he said softly. "Phineas was a good warlock. And he was always right."
He laid his chin back across the back of her wrist, and Rhoda sat on the rug beside the wing chair with her free hand at her face and her other hand gentle on the small grey body in her lap.
Epilogue
Afew weeks passed and the Hadwin parlor was almost a parlor again, if you allowed for the fact that the rug had a permanent population now of blackmarket unbonded strays slowly finding their way. Mose lay long across the back of the settee like a folded coat. Lou and Bess had claimed the wood basket together and refused to be parted. Iris was on the windowsill watching the lane. Of the thirty-eight strays Edgar had brought in from the lawn that night, fourteen had already gone home with witches and warlocks who needed and wanted them. The papers Lazlo had been keeping in his coat had opened a great many doors. Rhoda had been writing letters since the morning the vault had given up its records. Some of the bonds had taken at once. Some were still being mended. The rest of the strays were here on the rug, in no hurry to be anywhere, and welcome to stay.
Rhoda Hadwin sat in her wing chair by the fire with Quill across her lap and a clipboard balanced on the arm. Honey perched on the worn red ottoman at her feet with the registration book open across her knees and the good inkuncapped on the small side table. In Rhoda's lap, looking up at her with two careful yellow eyes, was a thin grey queen.
"Slow, sweetheart," Rhoda said. "There's no rush."
The grey queen drew in a breath. "Smoke."
Honey wrote it down. From the porch railing outside the open front window came an indignant squawk.
"Sugar," Dean Martin announced. "Incoming."
"Oh my, I wonder." Honey set the book on the ottoman and stood up.
Roam O'Reilly came up the front porch steps two at a time. He came through the front door with the brass bells barely rocking on their cord, crossed the front hall, and came into the parlor. The cataloguing flick of the panther's blue eyes swept the room but didn't, this morning, stop.
"Mornin', where's Edgar?" Roam furrowed his brow.
"Out back." Honey squinted. "Morning to you, too. What is going on?"
"Nothin'," He looked at Honey for a half a second and his eyes were already going past her toward the back of the house. "I'll be back."
"...Roam?" She huffed but he was already gone.
He was through the dining room. The back door clicked shut.
Honey stood with one hand on the back of the settee.
"Well, that was weird, right?" Honey asked her mother.
Rhoda didn't look up from Smoke. Her thumb moved gently across the grey queen's small head. The smile coming up at the corner of her mouth was a smile she'd been holding in her pocket since breakfast.
"Oh, he's probably just got some new thing to talk to your dad about. Don't fret. We have work."
Honey lowered herself onto the ottoman and got back to their task.
Out back, Edgar was on his knees in the dirt with his hands at the base of a tomato plant. A roll of twine lay on the ground beside him. A wooden stake stood pushed in next to the plant, and Edgar was tying off the main stem to the stake. He heard the back door close and Roam's boots cross the porch boards.
"Edgar." Roam breathed out.
Edgar finished his knot. He cut the twine with his pocket knife, pushed off his knee, brushed the dirt off his hands on the front of his work pants, and turned around in the row. "Mornin', Roam. What can I do you for?"
Roam stood at the head of the row with his shoulders square and his hands at his sides. "Edgar. I have to ask you a question."
