"The house understands some things. I don't know if it's sentient in the way you and I are, but it's definitely a living thing, Sean."
Caldenia walked through the door. She was carrying a tomato vine with four ripe, red tomatoes on it. Caldenia saw the stalker's body. Her carefully shaped eyebrows rose.
Now what? "Yes, Your Grace?"
"I'm glad that after months of a perfectly boring existence, the inn is now a hotbed of interesting activity. I do have to tell you that the reek is abominable. What are you doing?"
"We're trying to determine if this corpse has a tracking device somewhere inside it."
"Ah. Have fun, but before you dig into it, look at this."
She showed me the tomatoes.
"I just had a perfectly lovely conversation with the woman who lives down the street. Her name is Emily, I believe."
"Mrs. Ward?"
Caldenia waved her fingers. "Yes, something or other. Apparently she grows tomatoes in her backyard."
"Did you go off the inn grounds?"
"Of course not, dear, I'm not an imbecile. We spoke over the hedge. I would like to grow tomatoes."
Whatever kept her occupied. "Very well. I'll purchase some plants and gardening tools."
"Also a hat," Caldenia said. "One of those hideous straw affairs with little flowers on them."
"Of course."
"I'm going to grow green tomatoes, and then we'll fry them in butter."
"Your Grace, you've never tried fried green tomatoes."
"Life is about new experiences." Caldenia gave me a toothy smile.
"I'd eat it," Sean said.
I stared at him.
He shrugged. "They're good."
"You blackmailed me. You are not invited for these theoretical fried tomatoes."
"Nonsense," Caldenia said. "They're my theoretical tomatoes. You are invited."
I sighed. That was all I could do.
Caldenia headed up the stairs and stopped. "By the way. Back in my younger days, a man broke into my estate and stole the Star of Inndar. It was a beautiful jewel, light blue and excellent for storing light-recorded data. I was keeping my financial records on it. I'd thought the man was perhaps a revolutionary come to heroically overthrow my rule, but sadly he was just an ordinary thief motivated by money. He was a karian, and he'd hidden dozens of pouches in his flesh. Before he was captured, he'd hidden the Star somewhere in his body. I required the jewel that evening to complete a certain financial agreement, and I didn't have time to dig through him and risk damaging the Star in the process."
"So what did you do?" Sean said.
Never ask that question.
"I boiled him, my dear. It is still the only sure way to separate hard bits from all that flesh. And you have the added advantage of your captive being already dead, so there will be none of those annoying screams to alert the neighborhood. Good luck."
She went up the stairs.
Sean looked at me. "Is she for real?"
"Very much so." I looked at the body. "If we try to boil it, there's no telling what sort of gasses or poisons it will release. We'll have to vent it outside, and it's going to stink." And it will be the kind of stench that would cause the whole neighborhood to call 911.
Sean thought about it. "Is that smoker I saw on the back porch okay to use?"
"Probably. Are you suggesting we smoke it?" What in the world...
"No, I am suggesting we smoke a side of pork ribs. With lots and lots of hickory wood."
The stalker's body sprawled on the table like some grotesque butterfly straight out of a drug-induced nightmare. Although most of the blood had evaporated, it still had to weigh close to a hundred pounds. We'd have to take it apart.
"Do you have a really large pot?" Sean asked.
"Follow me."
I led him into the kitchen and to the door of my pantry, located a couple of cabinets away from the refrigerator. Sean leaned back out of the kitchen doorway, checked the wall width—it was a regular six-inch wall—and leaned back. "Follow you where? Into the closet?"
Oh, you chucklehead. I opened the door and flicked the light on. Five hundred square feet of pantry space greeted Sean. Nine rows of shelves lined the walls, all the way to the nine-foot ceiling. Pots and pans filled the front shelves, and past them flour, sugar, and other dry goods waited in large plastic containers, each with a small label. A large chest freezer stood on the right against the wall.
Sean surveyed the pantry, turned on his foot, went to check the wall again, and came back. "How?"
I waved my fingers at him. "Magic."
"But..."
"Magic, Sean." I walked in and pulled the enormous sixty-quart pot from the shelf in the corner. "I have several of those."
"Where did you get all this stuff?"
"Before this inn was orphaned, it was a thriving place. Many guests meant a lot of large meals. The question now is how will we boil the bodies? I'm not too wild about having them in my kitchen. I suppose we can get some electric hotplates, set them on the back patio on the slab, and put the pots on top of that."
"Mhm." Sean didn't seem convinced. "Would it be hot enough, that's the question."
"We might have to take that chance. We want low heat anyway."
He smirked at me. "Boiled many bodies, have you?"
"No, but I've made a lot of pulled pork."
"Sixty quarts is a lot of water to heat."
"What's the alternative?"
"Let me think about it," Sean said. "I'm off to Home Depot, then. I should be back in an hour. Do I need to pick up some pork ribs?"
"No." I opened the chest freezer. Sean stared at a three-foot-high tower of pork rib sides vacuum sealed in plastic. I'd stacked them up like cordwood.
Sean struggled to process the ribs. Clearly he had been slapped with one surprise too many today.
"Okay," he said finally. "I'll bite. Why?"
"Beast likes to eat them."
"That explains it." He turned to the door.
"Sean, how much money do you need?"
He gave me a flat look. No outrage, no anger, just a wall of no. "I'll be back in an hour." He went out the door.
Hell would bloom before Sean Evans started taking care of my bills. I'd make him take the money. I just had to be smart about it.
I looked at Beast. "I'm having serious doubts about our partnership."
Beast didn't answer.
I still had to do something about the stalker bodies. Folding them in half wouldn't do it. They still wouldn't fit. I picked up my broom and pushed my magic. The metal flowed, folding itself into a razor-sharp machete blade.
This would get messy.
Fifty-two minutes later, I heard a truck. The magic boomed as the vehicle came up my driveway... and kept going, around the house, rolling over my grass until it stopped at my back patio.
I strode to the back door. It opened for me and I stepped out onto the porch. Beast followed me. An orange rental truck from Home Depot waited on the grass, parked so the truck bed faced me. It was filled with stacks of paver stones. Next to them rested bags of gravel, sand, a two-by-four, fireproof bricks... Sean hopped out of the front seat, opened the tailgate, and picked up two fifty-pound bags of sand without any apparent effort, as if they were jugs of milk.
"What happened to the hot-plate plan?"
"I did some thinking and one, it won't generate enough heat and two, we need additional fire to cover the stench."
"Aha."
"I checked the fire ordinance and it says all fire pits of this type should be twenty-five feet from any flammable structure. This patio is too close to the house, so I'm going to build you a new one."
I smiled at him and tapped the patio with my broom, sending a pulse of magic through it. The concrete slab rose out of the ground and slid over the grass. I put it about thirty feet out. "Far enough?"
Sean blinked.
"Sean?"
He recovered. "Sure. Saves me some work."