Giving Atti a stern look, I shook my head to let him know now wasn’t the time to pick at Uncle Darling’s slang.
“In pretentious British speak, it means he’s gobsmacked, Atti. It’s a nice thing. Now hush with all that Brits-do-it-best snobbery.”
“Gagged,” Atticus scoffed. “What has happened to the English language? We’ve all but trampled it to death. Who’s happy to be gagged, I ask?”
I glared at Atti, reminding him yet again this wasn’t the time, and he was ruining the perfectly warm feelings he’d created by being kind enough to have tea prepared for us when we walked in the door.
Uncle Darling, unperturbed by Atti, grabbed my hand, his deep brown eyes searching mine. “Does that walking, talking, bearded fantasy know about you, Sweet Face?”
That was more like my uncle than he’d been all night. “Nope. We’ve only known each other a little while. I’m not ready to share yet. But he has witnessed a vision.”
He sniffled and dabbed at his eyes with the tissue. “Still calling your visions ‘migraines’?”
I gripped his hand and gazed into his swollen eyes. “I am, and that’s what Hobbs thinks they are, too. For the moment, that’s enough.”
“Tell me about him, Hal,” Uncle Darling demanded. “Take my mind off the sheer torture of waiting for the hospital to call.”
Grabbing my beer, I took a swig and tried to focus. “He’s my tenant. He rents the cottage in back. He was some kind of financial advisor in Boston, but he’s from Texas, an oddball Southern boy who loves the cold and the snow. After coming here on a daytrip with a friend, he decided to move here when he left his job.”
Uncle Darling gasped, injecting his brand of drama as he placed his hand over his heart. “He has no job, Sugarbuns? How does he pay his bills? You’re not letting him freeload, are you?”
I smiled. “I think he made a lot of money and retired really early. I’ve never had a check bounce, and he’s been here full time for a couple of months. No freeloading, though I might let him have the place if he’d let me have his dog, Stephen King.”
He patted my hand and nodded. “Well, he’s a dish, isn’t he? Or trade, as we’d call him in the drag business.”
Listen, I’ve watched a lot of RuPaul’s Drag Race in honor of my Uncle Darling so we could talk about it when we chatted on the phone, but I didn’t know what trade meant.
I squinted at him. “Er, trade? Do I want to know what that means?”
He gave me his coy-sly smile, one of his specialties, and said, “The meaning’s evolved some, but when I use it, it means I wouldn’t look the other way if he were interested in some hanky-panky. More or less, anyway.”
Giggling, I wagged a finger at him. “I don’t think I want to know what more or less means. Either way, he’s a nice guy and—”
“And he likes our Halliday. They’ve been together ever since they were chased down by a deranged killer with a gun last week.” Atti buzzed upward toward the top of the mini Christmas tree and seated himself on a branch.
“What?” Uncle Darling yelped, jumping up from the stool at the counter, a frown on his face. “If your mother were here, she’d positively hold my feet to the fire for allowing you to be in any danger!”
I put my hands on his shoulders and sat him back down. “I’m a grown woman, and I couldn’t help the danger. It’s a long story, Uncle Darling. Suffice it to say, we made a discovery together we didn’t want to make and that discovery had a big, bad gun.”
“And a vicious attack dog Halliday turned into a giraffe,” Atticus pointed out in his deep voice.
Now Darling sputtered. “Oh, Lamb Chop, no. A giraffe?” he squealed.
I frowned and hung my head, driving my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “Yeah. Unfortunately, Atti’s right. I used my magic to get us out of a sticky situation, but you know how fluky it can be when I’m anything but calm. Things got a little out of control.”
Glancing at his phone, Uncle Darling sighed. “You and your out-of-control magic. It was your mother’s biggest worry. Remind me to introduce you to some calming techniques when this is…over.” And then his eyes filled with more tears.
I wrapped an arm around his shoulder and rested my head on it, sniffing the scent of laundry detergent. “I love you, and it’s going to be all right, Uncle Darling. I feel it.”
I didn’t know if that was true—if I felt Uncle Monty was going to be all right—but I also didn’t know what else to say. The only thing I did know? I wish my mother were here. She’d know what to say. She always knew what to say.
Swiping at his eyes, he dropped an angry fist to the countertop. “I should have never let him talk me into stopping, Hal. He insisted on bringing you flowers—you know how much he loves you. But like everything with Monty, they had to be perfect. Except that blessed fool wouldn’t listen when I told him Feeney’s would have nothing but carnations, and absolutely nothing that lived up to his standards. He insisted I stop, and because I love him more than my own life, I did.” He inhaled then and let out a wail of distress. “Why didn’t I ignore him, Hal? Why? I was driving. I should have listened to my gut. I knew it was a bad idea. I knew it!”
The guilt I felt about those flowers was enough to make my chest tight and my heart throb erratically, and I’m guessing uncle Darling picked up on that because he instantly pulled me into a tight hug.
He wrapped his beefy arms around me and nuzzled my nose with his. “I’m sorry, Lovey,” he whispered against my hair, his body shuddering. “This has nothing to do with you. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
I knew that logically, but my heart ached anyway. “I know that rationally. I do, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was trying to do something nice for me. I love Uncle Monty. You know I do. He means the world to me,” I said, leaning back in his beefy arms.
Brushing my hair from my eyes, he gave me a watery smile. “I know that, Lamb. He loves you, too.”
Then I gathered myself. I had to know what my vision meant, and while I wasn’t ready to tell my uncle I’d had one involving Monty and the killer yet, I needed to try and understand what I’d seen.
In the meantime, knowing he likely hadn’t eaten, I snapped my fingers and produced a plate of apple strudel, Uncle Darling’s favorite, ignoring the frown from Atti’s direction.
As he reached for some, and Atti produced a fork and plate, I ventured into the shallow end of the pool. “Listen, Uncle Darling, can you tell me what you remember? I know it’s painful, but maybe I can help.”
Sitting back down, he grimaced. “How can you possibly help, Lamb?”
I shrugged, downplaying my interest. “I dunno. You’d be surprised, but the saying two heads are better than one is really true. So what happened?”
His breath shuddered from his chest as he shivered. I snapped my fingers again and a warm shawl appeared around his shoulders. He gave me a grateful smile and tucked it around his rotund body.
“I don’t know where to begin, Sugar, but I’ll try. Like I told those police officers and my sweet boy Stiles, we stopped to get flowers. I stayed in the car because I didn’t want to haul my big fanny through the snow. I had my earbuds in, and I was listening to some new music from a fellow drag sister, Helen Highwater, so I wasn’t really paying attention to anything. Monty was taking forever and a day, and if you know anything about my man, you’ll know he’s like molasses uphill in the winter. So I decided to check on him. I was gonna give him all sorts of what for, and then…then…”