“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe an arts and crafts center. Plenty of room up there for a lot of studios and kilns and forges. Invite skilled craftspeople to come and do residencies. Teach their craft. And a shop where the artist gets the lion’s share of the sales. I might try my hand at pottery myself. Or maybe blacksmithing, if you’ve a mind to teach me.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “By the way, what was in the bottom drawer? Whatever you were about to show me when Sherry whacked me?”
“A picture of me holding your father,” she said. “At his christening. I was a godmother, you know. But I don’t suppose his adoptive parents would have mentioned it.”
We fell silent. I could hear noises drifting over from the camp. Maybe I should call Michael and ask him to bring me a breakfast doggy bag. He was probably making sure the boys were well fed before our drive. That was fine with me. I heard a car stop in front of the house. I opened my eyes to see Thor hopping out of a dark blue sedan. He headed up the walk. The sedan drove off. Toward camp, I noticed, rather than back to town. I’d seen that car somewhere before.
“Ms. Delia?” Thor was standing at the foot of the porch steps.
“Good morning, Thor,” Cordelia said. “I trust you’re not suffering any ill effects from this morning’s adventure?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I just wanted to say how sorry I was about Miss Annabel. And how glad I am that the killer didn’t get you, too.”
“Thanks in part to your help,” Cordelia said.
“Some help I was,” he muttered.
“If you hadn’t distracted Sherry, we might not be here,” I said. “So I guess I have to thank you for disobeying my orders and lurking out here to guard your friend.”
“Just lucky.” His pale redhead’s complexion turned scarlet. “Oh, and Ms. Delia—I know you won’t need to be feeding the emus anymore once Dr. Blake has rounded them up, but if you need me for anything else, just call.”
“How about tomorrow morning?” she said. “I’ve been cooped up here too long. Got a lot of friends I need to catch up with. You can drive me. Eight a.m.”
“Great! I’ll see you then!”
Thor dashed away, grinning from ear to ear. And headed around the side of the house—no doubt he was also looking forward to the celebratory breakfast.
“Well,” Cordelia said. “I can go ahead and replace the generator now. On the old spot. Just as well—it cost a lot of money to install the underground propane tank and lay such a long line to the house.”
“Good idea,” I murmured.
“Then again, I’m not sure I’ll need the generator as much. I’m thinking of taking myself off the grid.”
“Off the grid?” Surely she wasn’t thinking of living indefinitely with ice chests and LED lanterns.
“Going solar,” she said. “Plenty of room on my roof for a solar array. In fact, I could install enough solar panels in the pasture to power the town. Start my own little power company. It’s the wave of the future, solar.”
“Awesome,” I said.
We sat in silence for another minute or two. Cordelia was probably plotting her takeover of the local energy market. I had something else on my mind.
“You know,” I said aloud. “I just realized that we’ve been going about this completely backward.”
“Going about what?” Cordelia asked.
“Rounding up the emus. We shouldn’t be chasing them all over Pudding Mountain.”
“Agreed,” she said. “What’s your idea?”
“We should take some of that fencing and build a big pen around the emu feeding station,” I said. “With a lot of gates. And as soon as you get a bunch of emus in the pen, you shut the gates.”
“Should work,” she said. “I bet someone could build a remote control device for the gates, so you could shut them without having any humans so near that they’d scare the emus.”
“Someone like Thor.”
“My thoughts exactly. So are you going to tell them now, before I get a chance to see all of Monty’s shenanigans?”
“There’s plenty of video you can watch,” I said. “I think it would be better for the emus if I told them now.”
“Good point.”
We both fell silent and I pondered, idly, whether I wanted the hot tea enough to sit up and reach for it.
“Meg, dear?”
I looked up to see Mother standing at the foot of the steps.
“What in the world are you doing here?” I sat up and rubbed my eyes, to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It was too soon for her to have gotten my message and driven here.