to the kitchen. Since the dog came and went constantly from Earl’s place to Hadleigh’s, her presence was nothing unusual.
Melody regarded her as part of the household.
“Do?” Hadleigh echoed. Then she giggled in a strangled sort of way and went on. “Well, let’s see now. What to do, what to do.” She paused, snapped her fingers. “I know. I could enter a convent. Or sign up for the Foreign Legion, provided they’re accepting women nowadays. Failing that, I suppose I could take to the high seas, become a merchant marine—dangerous work, but I hear the money’s good.”
Melody laughed, but the expression in her eyes remained pensive. “Stop it,” she said. “This is serious. We might have to scrap the whole marriage pact thing, start over from scratch.”
They’d reached the kitchen by then, and before Hadleigh could come up with a response, Bex Stuart peered through the oval window in the back door, rapped on the glass and let herself in.
There was something vaguely musical about the way Bex moved; Hadleigh could almost hear the tinkling chime of distant bells.
“Have you heard?” Bex blurted, breathless with excitement the second she’d crossed the threshold.
“Tripp Galloway’s back in town,” Melody and Hadleigh answered in perfect unison.
This inspired a brief ripple of nervous chuckles.
Bex, disappointed that the big story had already broken, put down her purse and a box from the local bakery, then wriggled out of her puffy nylon coat, which Hadleigh took from her.
She retraced the short trek to the coat-tree, this time with Bex and Muggles as part of the caravan, Melody along for the ride, Bex spouting questions.
Déjà vu all over again.
It was comical, really.
“Will everybody please take a breath?” Hadleigh said, while two women and a dog studied her curiously there in the foyer.
“I couldn’t get a thing out of her,” Melody confided to Bex, as though Hadleigh were suddenly absent.
Bex’s chameleon eyes, sometimes a pale shade of amber, sometimes green, widened with rising interest.
“Not only that,” Melody went on, still ignoring Hadleigh, “but he was here.”
“Wow,” Bex marveled. She glanced upward. “And the roof didn’t fall in.”
“You’re not breathing,” Hadleigh told her friends.
They were breathing, of course, just not in the calming way she’d meant. On either side of her, Melody and Bex each took one of Hadleigh’s elbows and firmly propelled her back to the kitchen. They even sat her down in a chair, as though she’d been yanked from the jaws of certain death and might still be in shock.
Muggles, tail sweeping back and forth, tagged along, cheerfully fascinated by all this moving from room to room. Strange creatures, these humans, she must’ve been thinking. No matter where they are, they want to be someplace else.
Nothing was said, but Hadleigh’s two best friends went into action, as if they’d choreographed the scene beforehand.
Bex slid a step stool in front of the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cupboard above, reaching past an I Love Lucy cookie jar and groping around for a lone and very dusty bottle of whiskey, last used to spike the eggnog at Christmas. It was still three-quarters full.
Melody, meanwhile, took a trio of squat tumblers from another cupboard, carried them to the sink, then rinsed them carefully and dried them with an embroidered dish towel.
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