4.

Gus had long ago given up any notion that he understood the motives behind Shawn Spencer's actions. Somewhere in the backdrop of childhood memories, Gus had seen the Shawn of boyhood disintegrate into the warped, gifted, imaginative—at times offensive—Shawn of the present. Gus didn't envy any of their friends—and he couldn't possibly envy the figure he now thought of as "poor Lassiter"—the work, devotion and brainpower required to keep up with Shawn. In the last couple of years, Gus had struggled to remain comprehensive of his own twisting path of life: the suddenness of being single soon swallowed up by the suddenness of Juliet, Shawn's unmitigated interest in taking jobs outside of Psych with the same irreverence he showed every other job, then having a wife and important things to talk about with an actual adult, and finally the odd dynamic of a social circle dominated by the solar Shawn-Carlton dynamic.

As for the Gus-Shawn dynamic, that seemed intact except for a few rough spots here and there. Shawn did not always create the potholes. Gus knew he was capable of making them himself, without really meaning to. But Gus was the first, though thankfully not the last, who'd ever openly tolerated Shawn's ever-shifting mind. Juliet had once compared Shawn's quick-paced wit to molten lava, but faster, less destructive. "So really not like lava at all," Gus had retorted. "More like really sharp espresso that's just been poured." Yes, Juliet had said, really sharp espresso burning the gullet and had to be downed fast or it'd be too bitter.

Rather than the normal routine of Gus picking Shawn up at the Psych office or at Figueroa Palace (a.k.a. the police station), Gus found Shawn at home Monday afternoon. Unlike Shawn's previous apartment, little Mee Mee's Fluff *n Fold, Lassiter's house was usually well-aired, smelled like cleaning agents, fresh laundry, breakfast, coffee. Little Mee Mee's had smelled of musty linoleum floor, old shoes, and, if lucky, microwave popcorn. The back door of the bungalow on Sunberry Street was open if the weather was warm enough. Gus found it so that morning, and, without knocking, went in.

He wiped loafer soles on the welcome mat of what Shawn had called "the mud room." A term no doubt culled from his Scottish ancestors off their lofty estate house in Indiana. No one in Santa Barbara had mud rooms. But it lived up to its name, more or less. Welcome mat read "Wipe Your Paws." There was a stable plastic utility shelf full of pantry-style foods, and the washer and dryer, another shelf of necessary laundry implements, including Lassiter's favorite laundry splurge of Snuggle fabric softeners in its array of scents. Gus was unsurprised to hear the washer running. Shawn, he thought, must be neck-deep in laundry. He hadn't been home too awfully long, for one thing. For another, Shawn had actual chores to do, a pact he'd made with Lassiter prior to their agreement to live together. Shawn accepted Lassiter's terms. Who it was that came up with the idea of Shawn doing the household laundry—his, Carlton's, towels and bed sheets—Gus didn't know. Their foresight amazed Gus. He still did his own laundry at home, and Juliet did her own. As for kitchen and bathroom towels, that fell to whomever happened to be doing laundry that weekend. Shawn, influenced by Carlton, wanted to plan things. It was simply easier for one person to do all the laundry. The hours of a cop were odd, unpredictable. The hours of a psychic detective were flexible, but hardly stable.

Gus took the two steps up into the dining room. It opened into the living room to the west and the kitchen to the south. The dining room contained its usual mix of Shawn and Carlton goods: Carlton's coffee mug was still on the bistro table, next to Shawn's new mug that read "Kiss the Psychic" along with the dog-eared notebook, a stack of writing utensils, the morning newspaper, and a pullover sweater Shawn must've lately abandoned. The kitchen was still a mess. Shawn's kitchen goods from the apartment were strewn about, with an emptied box, full of crinkled newspaper, lay lopsided on the floor. Two cereal bowls were next to the sink, supplied with a spoon each, and each sticky with the remnants of old-fashioned oatmeal, as was the pan on the stove. A bag of locally-roasted coffee beans rested on the counter. Gus swirled the pot to catch a whiff of the coffee. Pungent, pleasant, slightly fruity: a good light roast, then. Shawn's obnoxious array of magnets mottled Carlton's refrigerator, everything from the lewd to the ancient, the latter being magnets Gus remembered from the Spencers' fridge of bygone decades, like little plastic mushrooms, garlic, celery, and one that said "Maddie's Kitchen." Although it wasn't Maddie's kitchen, that good woman had, at least, made tea in that kitchen and could at any time claim a part of it as her own. Gus straightened a few of the magnets, made the word "SNÖ" out of Shawn's weird Swedish-alphabet magnets, and left the kitchen behind him.

Down the hall to the right lay the bedrooms and the bathroom. At the end of the hall, playing in the daylight, shadows Gus assumed to be Shawn doing something in the bedroom. About to appear in front of the corner bedroom, Shawn himself emerged. His arms were loaded up with a heavy basket of laundry, with a small cardboard box on top of the piled clothes, and a plastic garbage bag shoved into one corner. It crinkled loudly as the two of them stared at each other.

"Hey," Shawn started. "Sorry, I didn't hear you come in."

"I just got here. Still getting organized?" Gus tried to peek into the bedroom, but Shawn's scoff-snort had him tipping away again.

"Don't go in there, Gus, I beg of you."

"That bad, huh?"

"There are unmentionables strewn about. And God knows what's all over the floor. I don't want you to trip and fall and hurt that sweet Lindor ball of a head of yours. Jules would whoop me. Then bastinado will ensue. Then there might be bandicoot rats involved. And in the corollary, people might say something they don't mean. All because I let you walk into that room."

Gus tried to help by taking the box off the litter of dirty clothes. His face was as flat as his expression. "What have you been reading?"

Shawn tightened his mouth, obediently following Gus out of the hall. "I don't know. I was trying to read The Taming of the Shrew last night, but I think I'd rather stick pins in my fingertips. I've never in my life voluntarily read Shakespeare, you know."

"Oh, yeah, I know. Where do you want this?"

"There," Shawn pointed to the catch-all—the bistro table—and went into the laundry room. "And now that I'm almost forty, Gus, I'm not going to read any Shakespeare voluntarily, either. I'm old now. I want to reread shit I read when I was a kid. Like Encyclopedia Brown and, um, that one with the oracular pig."

Gus found a moment to be stymied by the first mentioning of their nearing the epochal age of four decades. They hadn't really talked about it yet. "It's funny you can remember the phrase 'oracular pig' but you can't remember that those are the Chronicles of Prydain. Lloyd Alexander."

"Funny? Me? Never. Lassiter suggested I rent a version of Kiss Me, Kate and be done with the whole Taming of the Shrew thing." Shawn reappeared, basket still in his hands, but filled with different clothes. "I'm just going to hang these outside, then we can go."

"Hang them outside? Aren't you afraid someone's going to steal them?"

"Not even a little. Anyway, if they want my clothes that badly they can have them."

"As long as they're not Lassiter's."

"Some of his socks. Nothing else." Shawn opened the back door—then zoomed back again. Gus anticipated a comment, maybe one telling him to take it easy for a few minutes or have a cup of coffee. Quiet, domestic Shawn was somebody Gus was learning to handle. Quiet, existential Shawn, on the other hand . . . "Dude, I was just thinking how weird it is that my socks and Lassiter's socks are all mixed up now. What an odd world."

"The two of you sleep in the same bed, too."

"Not all the time. If one of us has been eating more beans than he should, it's the couch."

But sleeping in two beds was not as odd to Shawn as the thing about their socks. He thought about it while pinning clothes on the line to dry in the sun. He was more stunned to find that peculiar thoughts like that escaped Gus. Gus didn't think it was strange that his socks and Juliet's socks should frolic about in the laundry together. Gus was prosaic about such things. Shawn tended to celebrate life's seemingly minuscule achievements.

In the dining room, Gus couldn't help but work his way through the dog-eared notebook. Not only was it a glimpse into Shawn's mind, it was an oddment, a peculiarity, that Shawn spent so much time with this notebook, hated anyone to look at it, yet he kept it out in the open for anyone to examine, and much of it was indecipherable to a person's untrained eye. If it wasn't written in short-hand, it was written in longhand in one of the many languages that Shawn's vocabulary of nouns, if not conjugated verbs, was very proficient in. The strange European languages, too—of course. Danish and Swedish and random Italian. Shawn, probably inspired by the new purchase of the magnetized alphabet letters, seemed to be favoring Swedish. In the fresh pages in the back of the notebook, Gus read "ingen" with a line going to "inkrata?" Before Shawn came back, Gus had the notebook back in its place. He just didn't get Shawn's path of genius. He'd seen no mention of Mr. Waterstone, only he couldn't shrug off the idea that that last whole page he'd scanned had been all about Mr. Waterstone.

Gus still had no idea why they had to look at vacuum cleaners. The more he bothered Shawn about it, the more Shawn hissed in the passenger's seat.

Inside the furniture store, which did not stock, nor sell, a whole lot of vacuum cleaners, Shawn and Gus were instantly the quarry of a commissioned salesperson. Shawn was flagrantly condescending to her. She failed to notice that he was putting on a show. Most people didn't notice, such was Shawn's easiness with himself, and his awareness of his movements, from blinking to the shy turning-in of his toes. If Shawn had an audience, he could do anything.

"Do you have any nice, fluffy, cushiony chairs on sale? Clearance would be good," Shawn admitted, "but I won't be picky."

They were being escorted in the direction of chairs on sale. Gus instigated a mild round of bickering once the employee had gained several paces.

"Chairs? Why are we here for chairs?" Gus answered his own question. "No, Shawn, no. I am not helping you pick out a chair for the living room. And you are not walking out of this place with one, either, so forget about it. If you got something Lassiter didn't like—"

"Not buying a chair, Gus." Shawn saw he wasn't believed and hastily sketched an "X" over his heart. "Promise. Anyway, do you think I really want to ruin our first furniture-buying experience together? Well—not me and you—I mean—me and—"

"All right. But you promised."

"I just want to browse, anyway," Shawn went on, hoping he wouldn't be cross-examined by Carlton later, when he strode to Carlton triumphantly with news that the browsing part of furniture-buying was out of the way. "Lassie hates window-shopping proems. You should've seen him when we were in Barrel Creek. Ah, this is nice," he told the sales lady of the line of new chairs, and squinted at her brass name tag with black letters, "Sandy, is it? We'd like a moment, if that's all right. I'm sure you've seen enough customers sitting down in recliners that it's probably lost its allure by now."

She was reluctant to go, partly because they were so friendly and engaging, a rarity Monday afternoons. Nonetheless, the phone rang and ended her time with them. Shawn immediately fell into the first chair. It tipped back at the arrival of his weight. It was so enormous, so full in the back cushions, that Shawn looked small in it.

"This is an old man's chair," Gus pointed out. "You're not even forty yet. You're not even thirty-eight yet."

"Relax, old man, test out some of these posh bottom-huggers."

Gus, who rather enjoyed the scents of new furniture, did as Shawn commanded. He chose a heather-blue number two seats from Shawn. The two of them rocked gently, listening to the new-wave jazz tinny in the ceiling speakers.

"Gus?"

"What?"

"Does it bug you? Getting old."

"Not really. Carpe diem, Shawn."

"What's fish got to do with it? But you're right, Gus, one day at a time and all of that. I think I'll try this one." Shawn rose, went down the row of fresh chairs to a beige beast dotted in ecru. Gus was forced to try out another chair, too. "You know, when my dad was my age, I was already a hellion teen. I guess it's the disparity of things that makes me think about getting older, and—and—" He wanted to say something about death, but the word felt a bit taboo and contradictory in a place stuffed with new furnishings.

"Your dad's always been an old fogey," said Gus. He tried out the foot rest and the lean-back position of the recliner. "Man," he settled his shoulders into the cushions, "maybe I should talk to Juliet about getting a new chair. This is pretty nice. Are you sure Lassiter wants a recliner?"

"No, I'm not sure. If he dozes, it's usually on the couch. If it's a serious nap, he heads for the bedroom. But that's usually after yard work. And I'm not even sure that applies here. It was an Indiana thing." He'd voluntarily spent time at Lassiter's through the last year, though, when a shift in their relationship occurred—at so fine a point in time that it wouldn't show up on the head of a pin. Just something, somewhere, had shifted. Juliet and Gus's relationship might've started it, but Shawn and Carlton had done their own propelling. Shawn would've liked taking credit for the whole thing, though, in his gut, he knew it was really Carlton's doing.

Shawn lifted from the chair and decided he'd had enough of testing recliners. He shuffled them off to a portion of parlor seats: simple, round-back designs with an art deco flair. He paused in front of one specimen, darkly stained wood at the arms, legs, a bit in the back and the legs. The cushions were blue damask, swirled into copious florals and paisleys.

"Classy," Gus said. "Not really your style." He let a chuckle slip. "Or Lassiter's."

Shawn's brow knitted. Gus wasn't a naturally observant sort of man. Shawn rotated the price tag to him. Four-fifty. Not on sale. He let the ticket flop to its regular position, still eyeing the chair. "H'mm," he hummed before doling an order to Gus. "Hey, go get Sandy. I have a question."

"You get her."

"But I'm busy thinking."

"And I'm not?"

"Gus, come on."

The emphasis of their chatter alerted Sandy, and neither Shawn nor Gus had to leave the chair vigil. She came right over and asked if they needed help.

"I have a question about this chair. A couple of questions, actually. Is there a limit on the number of questions we can ask?"

Sandy glanced at the other gentleman to make sure the talkative one was sane. It seemed that he was—arguably. "No, no limit, sir."

"Shawn's the name, Sandy. Uh, this specimen," he clamped a hand on the armrest of the blue paisley, "I would like to know how long it's been in stock and if you had any more of them and if you did what happened to the others. I didn't really form those as questions, but I can go back and insert questions marks if you'd find that clarifying." He received a stealthy elbow from Gus, causing him to jerk reflexively and mouth the word "What?" with an innocent expression.

Sandy had a good memory, had learned to be proud of her listening skills. She repeated her answers directly in line with Shawn's questions. "It's been in stock since August. We ordered eight of them. Five are still in the store. This one is the floor model, and the other four are in the back room. We've sold three of them since August. Two were sold, to one buyer, last month." Shawn's eyes darkened briefly. Sandy caught on to the scheme. "Are you guys really here to buy furniture?"

"I am here to browse," Shawn proclaimed. It was good salesmanship on her part to be suspicious. "I need a new chair for my house. Not—not my house. Boyfriend's house. Boyfriend?" He looked at Gus, who shrugged; this was out of his range of thought or concern. "Man-friend. We need a chair. His ex-wife took the other one. But, other than that, we're really private detectives. Our new victim has a chair like this in his bedroom. I wondered when he'd bought it."

Sandy was stumped, as was Gus. Shawn could hand out too much information in three sentences. He slumped his way back to the first recliner he'd sat in. "And I would like to put a hold on this chair—just for the next twenty-four hours. Don't you think, Gus? This chair? Yeah? I think Carlton will like it."

They finished their business at the American Dream House furniture store. Shawn had glanced at the vacuum cleaners, but even before Gus could catch up to him there, Shawn was turning around and herding them out the door. The specific model he was after would have to be found elsewhere.

Back in the car, Gus started the engine, gripped the wheel, and stared invariably through the windshield. Shawn knew what his problem was.

"I don't know what you want me to say, Gus. You didn't go in the house and you didn't look at the crime scene photos. You wouldn't know that chair was in his house. It could've been full of dollhouse chattels for all you knew."

"So you're trying to prove that a man who bought a new piece of furniture four months ago isn't likely to hang himself? It's a weak argument, Shawn. Plenty of famous suicides are—"

"We're not talking famous people, Gus. One lonely man. That's all. With secrets. And a blue chair in his bedroom. I didn't go in the bedroom. But it looked new in the photos."

"Fine. What about the vacuum cleaner?"

Shawn waved a hand, impatient and wishing they'd get a move on. He hated sitting still in a car. Cars were meant to go. "I can't even explain that right now." With his way of thinking, though, Shawn had a destination in mind a second later. "Take us to some discount store, like Target or Wal-Mart. We might have better luck there."

At Target, Shawn found one model similar to one he'd been looking for. He wasn't interested in the components, whether it lost suction or it didn't. He was interested in the height of the wheels. He kept holding his thumb and forefinger up to the rear wheel, then pulling thumb and forefinger away to judge the distance. Using a phone app, he made a note of the acquired information. "All right, I'm done. Let's get something to eat, and you'd better get back to work."

They ate at a small Tex-Mex place near the Psych offices, but Gus was asked if he wouldn't mind taking Shawn home rather than leaving him at the office or at the police station. "Laundry," Shawn said at Gus's wordless gape. "Remember? If I leave it in the washer too long, it's all damp and stinks and wrinkles, and Lassie doesn't enjoy wearing his clothes when they're in that state. I don't know why. I'd better not risk it right now, though. And I have to clean up that bedroom before he gets home."

Gus offered to help. He'd almost rather clean than go back to work, since it was sunny and mild in Santa Barbara for the first time in weeks. Shawn declined.

"I really am afraid of you hurting yourself and me getting blamed for it."

"You didn't used to worry about that."

"You weren't married before," Shawn said, slugging Gus on the shoulder, then zipping out of the car.

He was glad to get inside, that strange, soft feeling coming over him, that he might cry or feel sick or something. As soon as he was in the dining room, he lay out on his stomach in a warm spread of sunbeams shot through the dining room window. If his mind wandered into the articles of growing-up that been bothering him lately, he veered it back to Mr. Waterstone, Christopher Sly, the blue chair, the vacuum cleaner—and how a man could hang himself without compunction. For a man like Waterstone, any stabs of regret would be kept to a minimum. He'd had no family, no friends that mattered. Men like that lived on memories. And when those grew stale, what then did he have? A mutiny against loneliness and old age. A restlessness, since he'd likely thought himself too old to get on with his life and too worn out with trying. Even in Shawn's darkest days, which he remembered now as if a cheesecloth had been placed over it, all dappled and deformed, Shawn had felt strongly that his youthfulness would revitalize him if he were patient enough, if he did a little work to make it happen.

He was a touch afraid of getting old. He did not relish the idea of turning forty—though it was still some time away—because he could not see his youthfulness lingering to revitalize him, if he should face some trauma. The death of his parents. Gus becoming emotionally distant. The improbable but still hateful loss of Carlton.

Shawn listened to the wind wheezing through window screens. After dragging the blue chair, Mr. Waterstone, Shakespeare and Christopher Sly in and out of his mind again, Shawn heard the metallic ting of the mail slot on the front door, the subsequent plop of mail hitting the foyer floor.

Cross-legged in front of the pile, Shawn fished from the wreckage of circulars and magazines a small, rectangular box. In his mother's elegant handwriting, it was addressed to him. The return address was for a pied-à-terre in southwestern Connecticut. Shawn's pocket knife slit the tape. Inside, a card in a bright green envelope, and a package in cheery wrapping paper. The card had a dancing pineapple on it, a bad pun inside, then a note from Mom. Under the wrapping paper he found a blank book with a blue cover, pages thinly lined in gray. Mom had asked him to think of it as his new notebook. "Your other one was pretty roughened up the last time I saw it. Can't imagine what it looks like now. I know you're home safe now from your uncle's. Wish I'd known you'd gone. We might've been able to meet there for a weekend. Uncle Fenz is planning a spring fishing trip to Canada and he might ask you to go out there again. I guess you and Carlton did an amazing job taking care of things! Good for you, Goose! Love to you and Carlton."

Shawn put the card on the table, so Carlton could read it when he got home, though there wasn't a present for him inside the box. As for his dog-eared notebook, he spent an hour in the silence of the late afternoon transferring notes of Mr. Waterstone's case into the crisp pages of the blank book. Anything in shorthand was switched to Swedish, and anything in Swedish was switched to shorthand—just to keep things interesting. He'd drudged his Swedish vocabulary out of nowhere, really—vaguely returned to him through a dream he'd had of friends made in Sweden ages ago, when Shawn had gone there to work a little job of no importance, learned a lot of Swedish, even if everyone spoke English, and learned curling and skiing. The curling and skiing he'd forgotten, since he wasn't traditionally athletic and wasn't very good at either. Languages stuck to his brain like glue. Actions—eh, sometimes. He hadn't forgotten how to take care of horses after being absent at Uncle Fenz's farm for years. And he hadn't forgotten how to make love to another man, after years of being absent from that activity, too. Horses were harder to take care of than Carlton. Horses were pickier. Carlton didn't care what Shawn did to him.

Months of living on his own again at Uncle Fenz's had provided Shawn with the stamina to endure the long, quiet hours at home. People said goats and cats were hard to domesticate, the quickest to go feral. Shawn felt that way about himself. He'd rarely done more than sleep at his apartment, and even then one day out of a week he might sleep at the office, or at Gus's, or on Carlton's couch. At Carlton's house Shawn had always felt at home, and residing there went well with his sense of worldly order, his very biorhythm. Occasionally things would fall out of whack, like stubbing his toe on the furniture, if he wasn't paying attention.

Then rare minutes came along, since he'd come home, that he'd shock himself by suddenly looking around as if in a strange world, in somebody else's body, in someone else's life. He couldn't really be Shawn Spencer, standing in Carlton Lassiter's house. When taking a shower that morning, Shawn had had a funny thought of "I have to get out of here by ten in case Lassie comes home for lunch and yells at me for being here." Then laughed at himself when he realized he did not have to leave by any certain hour, that Carlton would be furious at Shawn if he came home and Shawn was not there, rather than being furious that he was there. He'd shared the anecdote with Carlton, and both of them had laughed in that uncomfortable, "Can this really be happening?" kind of way. They were not blind. Or dumb. Just love-struck. They were smart enough to know that everything had grown inverted. Adjusting to the not-single lifestyle, to the lifestyle of being taken, "off the market" and other such changes, couldn't be acclimated to immediately. Shawn had taken to the role of psychic detective a lot easier than that of roommate, supporter, pledged lover. That took practice.

At least he had the laundry thing down pat, now. All of Carlton's dirty clothes were washed, some ironed, and neatly put away by the time Carlton came home. He was flushed from the brisk, chilly wind that'd zipped in from the coast, had stopped on the way to get a bushel of yellow daisies and two slices of cheesecake. Shawn put the flowers in a vase, not even sure at what point in the past he had learned where Lassiter kept the lone glass vase in his house—but that's the way things went. Shawn just picked things up. His intelligence seemed to be a series of connect-the-dots, with a large helping of poor-man's prestidigitation.

"What do you want with your cheesecake, Lass? Broccoli? Meat of some sort?" Shawn heard Carlton in the dining room, knew he was close if a bit unresponsive. Shawn fiddled with flowers and remembered the brief time he'd spent as a seed collector in a Kansas prairie.

Carlton forewent food as a topic. It might take him more than five minutes to leave work behind. Waterstone's questionable suicide was the lone case he had right now, and it was hard not to take possession of his thoughts, even as he finished up paperwork on a dozen old cases. But he wasn't without his need to be with Shawn. In the kitchen, he leaned until rested against the side of Shawn's head. "Did you and Gus look at vacuum cleaners? And would you please tell me how a vacuum cleaner ties into Waterstone's death?"

Shawn emitted a series of gargles before committing to one accusatory sentence. "Aren't you catching on?"

"I like your brain," Carlton said, massaging Shawn's hairy crown with fingertips. "I'm beginning to know how it works. One-third psychic you might be, but a third of you is still observant as hell."

"What about the other third?"

Carlton smashed his mouth together, a method of deliberating. How to answer that? "A third of you is magic. Acorns and magic wands made of yew. That sort of thing."

"Acorns and yew wands, either that's Harry Potter or druids. I forget which. There you go, Brad, some company." The vase of yellow daisies made a home in the jutting window above the kitchen sink, where lived a philodendron, a cactus, and an African violet Juliet and Gus had given them. "To answer your very probing questions about the Hoover in question, Lass, I'm not really sure where it's going to go, but I'm getting there." He liked it when Carlton hustled them together, squeezed and petted and smooched near his ear.

"I think I can help you with that."

"Oh? How? As far as I could tell, Waterstone doesn't own a vacuum cleaner."

"No, no, you're right. Nothing like it was found in the house. An old canister beast up in the crawl space."

"Looks like one of the droids on Tatooine?"

"Yeah," Lassiter responded dumbly. "How'd—? Never mind."

"Go on. Clearly, this is not the vacuum cleaner I am looking for." Shawn made a Jedi swipe with his hand.

Lassiter wished he had a Star Wars cultural potshot to hurl back at Shawn, but stark deliverance could be as dandy. "It was a little more helpful this afternoon when Waterstone's maid walked into the police station to talk to me."

That was a decent way to shock Shawn. It didn't happen too often that Shawn froze at a relayed bit of a puzzling case. Carlton gripped Shawn's jaw and kissed him.

"She wanted to talk to you, too. She couldn't stay long. Busy schedule. But you and I are going to meet her at Tanglevine at six-thirty."

Shawn slowly progressed from the fog. "So—no meat with your cheesecake. And—man, this is so unfair! You get the easy part of the job," he hastily added the appeasing word, "sometimes! I dragged poor Gus around this afternoon for nothing."

"I wouldn't say that. You would've reached an eventual conclusion about the maid."

"I was nearly there. I knew there had to be a maid, damn it. What did she tell you? Anything? Did she tell you who Christopher Sly is?"

Carlton removed plates from the cupboard, joined them with two forks. They wouldn't be able to eat much at the Tanglevine Club—Carlton didn't care for Mike's new chef, anyway—and he wasn't going to let a good slice of cheesecake go to waste. He padded Shawn in the back to lead him into the dining room, into his chair at the table.

"She didn't tell me anything about Christopher Sly. I showed her the note, though, and she said it was Mr. Waterstone's handwriting as far as she could tell."

"Nice and vague of her." Shawn opened containers of cheesecake, worked to put them on plates, and let Carlton defer their case-born chatter while he read Maddie's card.

Carlton smirked and put the card back. "I kind of love your mother."

"Me, too. That's something we have in common. Sit, Lassie, eat your food. If you're not going to talk the case with me, at least let me tell you about the chairs I looked at today." He got the lobe of his ear pinched gently before Carlton took his seat.

"I kind of love you, too."