Page 3

3

J ack

The Frosts lived in downtown Dead End in a two-story Victorian house painted pink, green, and yellow, three of the traditional colors of a Painted Lady. It was a lovely house, and I knew my friend Dave, Eleanor’s son, had done some work on it, keeping it in perfect condition.

When I knocked, hoping to talk her into keeping my secret if she hadn’t already taken an ad out in the Dead End Gazette, Mr. Frost opened the door with a worried expression on his face.

“She’s baking. A lot.” His frown told me he was the only person in Dead End who’d be upset about his wife baking. Her cookies regularly win baking competitions.

“Well—”

“She only bakes this much when she’s upset ,” he whispered, leaning closer. “I’m going to the store for milk, eggs, and ten pounds of flour. This is serious. ”

“I—”

“Do something!” He pushed past me and walked as fast as the new hip could take him to his car, then he peeled out like he was heading for the racetrack.

I shook my head. The woman was tiny. How could he be so scared of her?

Then I heard the metallic clatter of pots and pans. “And let me tell you something else! That floozy Nancy Joy Neederhouser never in her life made cookies as good as these!”

On second thought, maybe I had time to mow the lawn at Tess’s house before the barbecue.

I was quietly closing the door when Mrs. Frost toddled out of the kitchen, swinging a skillet around. “Have nothing to say to that, do you? Oh! Jack! What are you doing here? Where’s that husband of mine?”

She peered around the room suspiciously, as if poor Mr. Frost might be hiding behind their ancient beagle. Mr. Rogers was sleeping on his cushion in his “dead dog pose,” with all four feet in the air, tongue hanging out of the side of his graying muzzle. When I looked at him, I was glad to see his tail twitch. You had to root for the old guy. He was anywhere from eighteen to a hundred years old, from the look of him.

“He said he was going to buy you baking supplies.”

She snorted. “The least he can do after dancing with that hussy.”

“Um, how long ago was that, exactly?”

She squinted, looking back into her memory, then thumped her hand against the bottom of the skillet. “1958.”

There’s holding a grudge, and then there’s holding a grudge. If Nancy Joy Neederhouser was even still among the living, she should be glad she wasn’t standing within range of the deadly kitchen pan held by a woman who was still mad about a dance that happened almost seventy years ago.

That old saying about discretion and valor popped into my head, and I edged toward the door. “I don’t want to bother you. I’ll just?—”

“Don’t be silly, young man. I’m just finishing up the second batch of those cookies you like so well.”

Discretion is overrated.

“Mrs. Frost, there isn’t a person in all of Dead End who doesn’t love those cookies,” I said sincerely.

She sat me down at the table with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk, like I was five years old. Then she bustled about, taking trays out of the oven and putting others in. I offered to help several times, but she shooed me away, saying she was the only one who cooked in her kitchen.

Feeling like I’d given it my best valiant effort, I heroically contented myself with eating a few—okay, a dozen—of the best walnut-chocolate-chip cookies ever baked.

“Well, let me see it,” she demanded after she finished up with cookie tray duty.

“What?”

She held out her hand. “Let me see the ring. I’ve known Tess longer than you’ve been alive. I need to approve the ring before you can propose.”

That didn’t make sense, since Tess was six years younger than me, but I let it go, thinking of Nancy Jo and the skillet.

“I don’t have a ring,” I said apologetically. “Not yet.”

Shock spread over her tiny wizened-apple face. “No ring? How are you going to propose, boy?”

Feeling uncomfortably like I needed to defend myself, I put my hand around the sapphire, but I didn’t pull it out of my pocket just yet. “I’ll show you what I have, and I’d love your advice, but can we please keep this just between you and me for now?”

Plain as day, I could see the two warring emotions fighting inside her: she wanted to be the one who told everybody else in town, but she also wanted to hold it over everybody else’s head, especially her bingo club, that I’d come to her for advice first.

I thought of Tess’s Aunt Ruby’s reaction when she heard either version and mentally groaned. I was in so much trouble.

“I promise. I didn’t tell Mr. Frost, because I was so mad at him,” she finally says. “But you’d better ask her soon, or I’m likely to burst wide open with the news. Now, show me.”

I pulled the gem out of my pocket and put it in her outstretched hand.

She whistled—a surprisingly sharp and loud whistle coming from such a tiny person. “Jack. That’s beautiful! Such a vivid blue, too. But it’s huge! That must be three carats!”

“Four,” I mumbled. “My jeweler friend?—”

“Oh, good. You know a person. My third cousin, once removed, is a jeweler, too, if you want a second opinion. Do you know the source? I once saw a Kashmir sapphire from high in the Himalayas.” She sighed. “So beautiful. Nobody can afford those, though.”

“This one is from Atlantis.”

She almost dropped the gem; she sat abruptly. “Oh, my word. It must be priceless. I always forget you and Tess are friends with them, and after that nice priest healed my cataracts, too. Did he ever say if he wants me to get him in touch with my friend about raising champion hogs?”

I had to fight to keep a straight face at the idea of reminding Alaric, former high priest of Atlantis and the scariest and most powerful wizard the lost continent had ever known, if he wanted to talk about becoming a pig farmer.

“I think he’s pretty busy these days. But what about the sapphire? Is it okay? Will she like it?”

Her entire face lit up, and suddenly I could see how incredibly beautiful she must have been when she was younger.

How beautiful she still was today.

“She’ll love it, Jack. If I were twenty years younger and didn’t have Mr. Frost, I’d be tempted to steal you away for myself, just to get my hands on the ring this goes into.” She grinned at me with her new “weather girl” white teeth, and I fell a little in love.

When she handed the sapphire back to me, I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I hope he knows how lucky he was to catch a beauty like you, Mrs. Frost.”

Her cheeks turned pink, and she swatted me with a dishtowel. “You go on with your charm, young man. Take a plate of those cookies with you, now. Just bring me back the plate when you get a chance.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And choose a simple, elegant setting. Tess likes classic things. She won’t appreciate something gaudy. This gem is just barely small enough for her to wear without being overwhelmed by it.”

I had to choose the setting? I thought Tess would help me pick out the one she wanted.

Mrs. Frost must have recognized the confusion and dismay I was feeling, because she laughed. “I’d be happy to go with you, but I think you’d be better off to ask Ruby what she thinks Tess would want. These modern girls sometimes like to design their own rings. Ruby will know.”

I groaned. “I still haven’t told Ruby and Mike.”

She looked scandalized, but also a little smugger. “What are you waiting for? Get out of here and go talk to them right now!”

I thanked her again—for the cookies and the advice—and said goodbye to Mr. Rogers. When I was almost out the door, she called me back.

“How are you planning to propose?”

“What? Just ask, I guess.”

“Well, I know you’re going to ask. But where? It should be something exciting and someplace fancy!”

Oh, boy. This was getting more complicated all the time.

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Yes! We can fasten the ring to an arrow, stand Tess up against a tree with an apple on her head, and then I’ll use my crossbow and shoot the apple! When she gets over the excitement, she’ll find the ring, and you can fall to one knee right there!”

“Wow. That certainly would be exciting. I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks again, Mrs. Frost.”

I alternated laughing with eating cookies all the way to the house I shared with Grandpa Jed, imagining the look on Tess’s face if I let Mrs. Frost, cured cataracts or not, shoot an arrow at her head.

Then I imagined the look on Mike’s face when I told him I wanted to propose and choked on my cookie.

W hen I arrived, it was after six. I waved at Jed and then took the cookies inside, only mildly mortified to see there were only three left. I said hi to Millie, who looked down at the plate in confusion.

“Ah …”

“Sorry. I had a lot to think about on the way here. There were two dozen, but …”

She laughed. “Enough said. I’ve been traveling with Jed for quite a while, so I’m familiar with the appetite of a tiger shifter. We bought twenty steaks, plus veggie burgers for Shelley.”

I grinned at her and took another cookie. “Only twenty? What are the rest of you going to eat?”

I headed out to the side yard after she told me she didn’t need any help and found my ancestor messing around with the grill.

“Hey, old man. Did they even have electric grills back in the 1700s? Or did you just roast your dinosaurs over an open fire?”

“Smart alec,” he said, his green eyes, so like my own, sparkling. “Mostly, we just burned pieces of the ark when Noah wasn’t looking.”

We were happily trading insults and discussing house maintenance— we needed a new hot water heater, stuff like that—when Mike, Ruby, and Shelley showed up ten minutes later.

Tess’s Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike raised her after her mom died and her dad ran off, so they were practically her parents. Ruby had always been kind and welcoming to me; Mike made a lot of “jokes” about tiger-skin rugs.

I hoped they were jokes.

We’d started getting along better for a while, taken a few steps back when Tess and I started living together, and were back on good footing now. He’d told me once that he’d never think anybody was good enough for Tess, but I came close.

It was high praise from a man I respected and admired as much as I had the uncle who’d raised me. Hopefully, this conversation wouldn’t set things back again.

I caught myself toying with the sapphire again and stopped. I was going to lose it if I didn’t stop fussing with it.

Ruby and Mike carried dishes inside, and Shelley skipped to us, her pug puppy Pickles in her arms.

“I taught her another trick, Grandpa Jed!”

Shelley was a recent addition to the family, after she’d been through a pretty rough and nearly fatal time after her mom died. She was only recently coming completely out of the sadness.

Pickles helped. I liked to think I did, too.

But now she had the normal ebullience of a ten-year-old girl, and she only spoke in exclamation points.

“Show us,” Jed said, after leaning down to get a hug. My great-great-three-hundred-year-great grandfather had been so happy to have a family to love again. We hadn’t talked through all the details, but I knew he’d lost loved ones to illnesses and injuries back in his day, so I was glad Shelley and Tess embraced him as a new grandfather with open arms.

Well, Shelley gave him the stink eye for a while after the Leroy situation, but we were well past that now.

Shelley pointed at Pickles, who instantly dropped onto her wiggly butt in a sit.

“Hover dog,” Shelley shouted, and Pickles leaped up into the air and floated in a circle around us, barking wildly the whole time.

I blinked.

Nope. Not a hallucination brought on by a cookie overdose. The pug was floating through the air around the three of us.

“Shelley?” Jed crouched, arms out and ready to catch the little dog. “What’s happening?”

“Pickles and me just watched Back to the Future !”

I laughed. “That’s a great movie. Have you seen it, Jed?”

He shook his head, still mystified and alert for falling pug.

“It’s a classic. A kid goes back in time to save his parents from something. I don’t remember what. I fell asleep when Tess and I watched it. But the kid gets to ride a hoverboard in one of them.”

“One of them?”

“Yeah, he goes into the past and then the future, and I don’t know. It was just fun. And Tess wanted a hoverboard.” I remember trying to find a hoverboard for her with no luck. Even if I’d been able to find one, Tess had a minor tendency toward klutziness, so maybe not the best idea.

“But how are you making the dog fly?” Jed’s confused expression cleared when he looked at Shelley again. “Oh. Right.”

Shelley, the daughter of a witch, had pretty strong magical powers of her own. In fact, a friend of mine had told us we needed to get her some training soon, before she hurt herself or others.

Tess and I needed to get on with that.

Pickles, looking a little dizzy, barked again, and Shelley gently lowered her to the ground, where the pup wobbled for a few steps and then raced off to water the flowers by the porch.

“She loves it!” Shelley told us, and then she ran after her dog. The two of them headed for the backyard, where I’d set up a swing and a hammock.

Jed shook his head. “Where does that girl get her energy?”

“She’s ten,” I said ruefully. “Remember ten? We had that kind of energy, too.”

“No. I don’t remember much about ten,” he said dryly, and we were off on another discussion of dinosaurs when Uncle Mike walked out of the house, his arms full of steaks.

“Are you going to help me with this half a cow you bought, or am I just going to eat it all?” Mike grinned at us.

Mike Callahan was a retired engineer and Tess’s dad’s older brother. He wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, only drove American, could fix anything—probably even a Delorean time machine—and loved Tess fiercely.

I swallowed a momentary sense of unease. He’d be fine with me asking Tess to marry me.

He would .

Wouldn’t he?

I helped him carry the steaks, and the three of us got the meat going on the grill, and then I decided enough was enough. I’d faced entire blood covens of murderous vampires with less nervousness than this. It was ridiculous.

“Mike? Will you please ask Ruby to come outside? I need to talk to the three of you about something before Tess gets here.”

Mike gave me a sharp look but went to get his wife.

Jed took one look at me and then grabbed me in a rough hug, pounding on my back. “It’s about time, my boy. I couldn’t be happier for you. Tess is one of the best people I’ve ever met.”

“Thanks. I hope she says yes,” I mumbled.

Jed threw his head back and laughed. “She’s as gone over you as you are over her. And, hey! My new granddaughter-in-law is the best pie baker in six counties! Big win!”

I shushed him when I saw Mike and Ruby come outside, serious looks on their faces.

When they reached us, Ruby gave me a hug and burst into tears. “Jack Shepherd, if you’re about to tell us you have to move out of Dead End for that Consortium foolishness, I’m going to … to … tell the sheriff to put you in jail!”

Mayor Ruby Callahan still had a slightly shaky grasp on how much she could order Sheriff Susan Gonzalez to do, but I was pretty sure arresting me wasn’t part of it.

“No, no, no,” I rushed to reassure her. Then I took a deep breath. “In fact, just the opposite. I plan to ask Tess to marry me, and I was hoping you’d give me your blessing.”

Ruby started crying again, but this time, they were happy tears. “Why, that’s wonderful, Jack! We’ll be delighted to have you as part of the family!”

When she calmed down enough to quit crying and chattering, I turned to look at Mike. He calmly studied me with his light blue eyes until I got nervous.

“Sir?

“No.”