Lordship Ker Sevikrage, but I see no messages from anyone else.”
“Popular guy, aren’t I?”
Medusa never seemed to smile but her eyes did crinkle with amusement. “Not many people receive over a thousand messages a day.”
“Doesn’t count if they’re all from the same person,” Zachary countered.
“If you say so, Zachary Roger Pill.”
“Couldn’t you just call me Zachary?”
“No,” Medusa said matter-of-factly, but he wasn’t going to let that ruin his mood because Bret was okay.
After thanking her for checking, he shut the system down and returned to the front of the store where he slid the tiny casket back on the shelf under the counter. Again he wished he had brought at least one of the other items from his father’s box. One day soon, he might be forced to defend himself against Krage, and without magic he was as good as dead.
Settling onto the stool beside the cash register, Zachary hoped to see Bret’s parents head off to work. Whether they liked it or not, he intended to call his friend and make sure he was alright. Friends could talk without doing more dangerous things. Unfortunately, the entire morning passed without the Volvo moving.
Zachary was dusting a chair made from an old wooden barrel when an elderly woman came in that afternoon. After browsing for over an hour, she offered to pay fifteen dollars for three old table legs. He felt bad that there was no fourth leg and offered to sell them for six dollars instead. Thrilled, the woman handed him a ten dollar bill.
He had just made his first sale. Oddly, it was kind of fun.
As Madame Kloochie had instructed, Zachary placed the bill on the register above the drawer while making change. He handed the gray-haired woman her four dollars change, closed the drawer and carried the table legs out to an old but neatly kept car. After the woman opened the trunk and he deposited the legs gently inside, Zachary returned to the store and discovered the forgotten ten dollar bill on the register. That’s when something really bizarre happened: he opened the drawer and found exactly seventeen dollars and seventeen cents.
That’s impossible!
He had counted exactly seventeen dollars and seventeen cents in the drawer that morning, so after giving the old woman four dollars there should have only been thirteen dollars and seventeen cents left.
Zachary glanced around the store. Could Madame Kloochie have come down and replaced the money he had given to the customer? Even as he thought it, Zachary doubted it. First of all, Madame Kloochie wasn’t known for moving quickly (not including the still unexplained hundred-thrown-donuts event a few days before) and if she had put money in the drawer, why wouldn’t she have taken care of the ten dollar bill on top of the register. It just didn’t make sense!
Confused, Zachary slid the ten dollars into the drawer and closed it. A few minutes later, he opened the drawer and recounted the cash. That’s when something impossible happened a second time: there was still just seventeen dollars and seventeen cents in the drawer! Zachary grabbed all the money this time, then closed and reopened the drawer. Once again, he found exactly seventeen dollars and seventeen cents in the register!
He stared at the money on the counter and at the exact same amount in the cash register. He emptied it again and again, and the same thing kept happening. Soon he had over two hundred dollars sitting beside the register. He then tried adding extra money to the drawer several times, but no matter what he did there was always seventeen dollars and seventeen cents left in the drawer when he opened it.
Madame Kloochie’s cash register was magic!
Zachary wished he had somebody to share his discovery with, but he had sworn to protect Bret from magic (though the cash register’s magic seemed harmless enough) and Madame Kloochie had obviously known about her cash register long before then. At least he now understood where all her money came from.
When she showed up at three o’clock that afternoon, she asked, “How were sales today?”
Zachary told her about the three chair legs, which really seemed to please her. He didn’t bother to tell her what the woman had paid, and she didn’t ask. As he went upstairs, he formed a plan to offer lots of discounts in the future, at least until there was enough room to walk comfortably between the aisles of junk. And that moldy couch in the far corner, that was definitely going to be a gift to the next person who would take it. In Zachary’s mind, the store already smelled better, and what difference would prices make to Madame Kloochie? She had free money whenever she wanted it.
He had been upstairs for less than an hour when the doorbell rang. He went downstairs and found Bret dressed in typical dress slacks and a button-up shirt. His black shoes were shiny as ever.
“You okay?” Zachary asked.
Bret gave a half-hearted smile and shrugged. “The doctors at the hospital said I don’t exercise enough.”
Zachary noted with pleasure that Bret’s stutter was still gone.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all they figured out after two days?”
“And I apparently don’t like hospital food,” Bret added.
Zachary wanted to give his friend a hug, but there were some lines that a guy just couldn’t cross.
“So where are your parents?”
“They just left, working back to back late shifts, of course.”
“At least you got to see them while you were in the hospital,” Zachary said, leading the way upstairs and into his room. He had already determined his closet door would remain closed.
“Not really,” Bret said. “My father works in the maternity wing, and my mother had too many emergency patients in the last couple of days to come up to my room.”
Once again, Zachary found himself thankful for his own parents. Though they weren’t with him now, he knew they loved him—wherever they were. Before he could turn the brief thought of his parents into the usual self-pity party, he asked Bret something that had been driving him crazy ever since the medics had taken him away.
“What were you trying to tell me that day on the stretcher?”
“I wanted you to ignore my parents,” Bret said. “I knew they’d try to blame you.” He wiped at his eyes, and Zachary looked away rather than embarrassing his friend. “They can’t tell me who my friends are.”
“I don’t want to make trouble—” Zachary started to say.
“What about the rest of your dad’s stuff?” Bret asked, obviously trying to change the subject. “Did you try anything else?”
Zachary didn’t know what to say. He was really glad to be hanging out with his friend, but he’d promised himself he wouldn’t put Bret in danger again, and he meant it. The silence became uncomfortable.
“I heard what my father told you,” Bret said, “and he was wrong. I didn’t get sick from anything we did. It was because of a fight I had with him and my mother.”
“But―”
“Zachary, if it weren’t for that night I’d still be stuttering, and I wouldn’t have realized how screwed up my family is. So, tell me what else you’ve found out.”
Talking about it didn’t mean Zachary had to get Bret involved, so reluctantly he said, “Okay, I figured out how to make the wand stretch out this long.” He held his hands as far apart as possible. “I also fund a spray bottled that makes a miniature whirlwind for a few seconds at a time. It would be great at the beach. Oh, yeah, and Krage is leaving me over a thousand messages a day. How could anyone even have the time to do that?”
“So you haven’t learned any more about your father’s magic?”
Zachary shook his head then remembered and told his friend about the antique cash register’s magic.
“Don’t let Robin find out,” Bret said. “She’d steal it.”
“I thought that was just a story that Kevin made up, her being a thief and everything.”
Bret shook his head.
“Did we get all of each other’s memories?”
Zachary shrugged. “A lot of them, I think.”
“See if you can remember Robin breaking into my dad’s shed.”
Zachary concentrated on Robin’s beautiful red hair and smile. He remembered having a lot of brief conversations with her and remembered walking to Pork ‘ies with her and her brother recently but nothing about a shed came to mind.
“Can’t remember her breaking into anything,” Zachary said, which suited him just fine.
“Try picturing her with short hair and glasses,” Bret suggested. “She also used to have braces.”
Zachary found it difficult but imagined the changes and was rewarded with several dozen memories of a younger Robin. The most surprising thing about them was that Bret had obviously never found her to be attractive. Zachary shuffled through the memories and was soon rewarded with the memory of catching Robin breaking into his father’s shed one night. She claimed it was open and she just wanted to borrow a rake, but he/Bret told her it was never open and he knew she had picked the lock. He also said he knew that Madame Kloochie had caught her stealing from the store.
Rather than searching the jumble of Bret’s memories, Zachary asked, “What’d Madame Kloochie do?”
“You did get those memories, too.” Bret grinned. “From an upstairs window, Madame Kloochie threw donuts at Robin’s house for several weeks. Robin’s mother never called the police—for obvious reasons.”
Like they’re all thieves.
“Finally after two weeks of cleaning jelly and frosting off their porch several times a day, Robin’s mother made her return whatever she took. She also made Robin