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To my relief, though, it seemed that Archie was more interested in discussing Danny’s demise than piling more guilt on me. “Do you think one of those women Danny Ortega dated is guilty?”
“Two of them, probably not,” I said. “I don’t know about the third one. I guess she was a friend of Chuck Langdon’s back in high school, so I’ll pick his brain tomorrow night and see what he has to say on the subject.”
“‘Tomorrow night’?” Archie repeated, now sounding somewhat alarmed. “You’re not planning to leave me alone on Halloween, are you?”
“What, are you afraid the ghoulies and ghosties are going to get you?” I teased him, and his tail flicked from side to side in annoyance.
“No,” he said severely. “But you know it’s not safe to leave a black cat alone on Halloween.”
I sipped some of my water, then replied, “You’re not black.”
“I’m dark gray,” he shot back. “Close enough.”
“And yet you somehow managed to survive all those other Halloweens without having me around to protect you,” I responded without missing a beat.
His golden eyes slitted. “And it was touch and go some years, I can tell you.”
Maybe that was the case, although I somehow doubted any of Globe’s denizens were the sort to be practicing dark rituals involving cat sacrifice on Halloween. Since I could tell Archie was upset, however, I only said, “I’m just going to spend a few hours over at Hazel’s house, handing out candy and eating pizza. I’ll be back here by ten.”
Not that we’d actually discussed an end point for our little get-together, but I had a feeling that Hazel wouldn’t be getting trick-or-treaters quite so late. Even when I was a child back in the Valley — in a time that felt far safer and more innocent than now — my friends and I were back home and sorting through our candy by nine o’clock. I somehow doubted it would be much different in this sleepy little town.
Also, I would need to perform my Samhain ritual before midnight, and so I needed to be home in plenty of time in order to avoid feeling rushed. I’d set up my altar before I left, of course, but that still meant I wouldn’t be lingering at Hazel’s house until the witching hour.
Archie’s tail went back and forth one more time and stilled. I didn’t know if that meant I’d mollified him, or he could tell I was set on my plans and nothing he could say would change them.
When he spoke, however, he did sound fractionally less annoyed. “Before ten?”
“Yes,” I said. “And Calvin will be going home after he drops me off. You have nothing to worry about.”
“I wasn’tworried,” Archie responded at once. “I was merely concerned.”
Some people might have said those were pretty much the same thing. Because I was dealing with Archie, I knew he’d be more than happy to argue the infinitesimal difference between the two adjectives for the next half hour.
“Well, there’s no need to be,” I told him. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Except that you were once again present for a murder.”
True, there was that. I shrugged, drank some more water, and said, “Actually, I was nowhere around when Lucien and Lilith and Brant were murdered. Their deaths all happened to take place in Globe, but I wasn’t anywhere near them when they passed. It was just a coincidence.”
Judging by the way Archie’s nose wrinkled at that comment, I could tell he wasn’t convinced. To my relief, though, he didn’t seem inclined to debate the point, but only said, “I suppose it’s not so surprising that Danny Ortega met a bad end. The man was always taking risks — and indulging in behavior unbecoming of a high school principal.”
That comment was accompanied by an audible sniff.
Did Archie know about Danny’s affair with Taylor Harrison? I would have said there was absolutely no way he could have been privy to that sort of information, but again, Archie had a way of slinking around town and watching its various goings-on without anyone seeming to notice. It was entirely possible he’d witnessed a moment that Danny had thought was entirely private.
“He did indulge in a few indiscretions,” I said cautiously.
Archie’s pink nose wrinkled again. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it. No one was terribly surprised when his wife left him.”
“Because he was cheating on her?” I asked. Danny hadn’t confessed anything like that to me, but I supposed it was fairly likely that was exactly what had happened. Although I was beginning to get used to Globe’s rhythms, to become more familiar with its inhabitants and the way they were all connected, sometimes it still felt as though I’d walked into a movie that was more than half over and I was now expending all my energy trying to puzzle out the events in the first two acts from context and nothing else.
“That’s the rumor,” Archie said. “She didn’t talk about it, though, and so no one knows for sure exactly what happened. She left Globe and never came back.”
Which was pretty much what Danny had told me, although he’d conveniently left out any mention of the reason for his breakup with Alison.
Before I could respond, Archie added, “He should never have been made principal of the high school. We had higher standards back in my day. But that’s what happens when you have connections.”
“‘Connections’?” I echoed. Had someone pulled strings to get Danny that job?
