Magic Times by Click Harvey

Author:Click, Harvey [Click, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2015-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

There were only a few people in the auditorium of Haggerty Hall, so Jason had his choice of seats, but when he noticed an attractive young woman sitting in the very center of the front row he decided to sit beside her.

“Is this seat took?” he asked her.

She glanced at him, glanced around the nearly empty auditorium, pushed up her glasses and frowned at him. “Well, I suppose it isn’t,” she said.

He sat down beside her and looked at the open notebook lying in her lap with a ballpoint pen poised above it to take notes. She had written “Lawford Laughinghouse” and the date at the top of the page and had drawn a fancy little doodle beside it that looked something like a flowering thistle with bees buzzing around it.

She was small and quite studious looking, with bookish glasses and light brown hair tied back in a bookish ponytail, but her face was girlish and unbookish with pretty unpainted lips set in a wistful expression, which for some reason caused Jason to picture her fishing beside him on a grassy creek bed while a great number of butterflies fluttered about and a chorus of songbirds sang harmoniously from the trees.

His attention, however, soon strayed to her small breasts, which looked like sweet little pears beneath her thin brown sweater. She noticed him staring, frowned again, and collected her book bag from the next seat. It seemed she was preparing to move, so he unfolded his flier and pointed at the picture of Hatter.

“I know this guy,” he said. “We’re good friends, and I happen to know his name ain’t Lawford Laughinghouse.”

The young woman pushed up her glasses and regarded him rather warily. “Oh? Then what’s his name?” she asked.

“Madison Hatter.”

“Did you say Hatter?”

“Yep. H-a-t-e-r, Hatter.”

She wrote this down in her notebook and said, “How do you know him?”

“Oh, I just do. I know a lotta people, and me and him are pretty good friends. In fact we come into town together. Yesterday we met up for some lunch, then we went to a fancy nightclub and had us a real good time. He drives an old Hudson with bad brakes, likes to call it Jane.”

“So do you know where he lives?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know ‘xactly where, but I got his hotel room number right here.” He turned over the flier to show it to her.

She wrote down the information and asked, “Have you read his books? What do you think of Daniel’s Vat?”

“Uh, well, I ain’t read quite all of it just yet, but I guess it’s pretty good.”

An ancient skeletal man with a long white beard crept up to the podium and began to drone inaudibly, pausing occasionally to chuckle at his own inaudible witticisms. After many minutes of this he shuffled away, and Hatter stepped out to a small smattering of applause. He was wearing his fedora and a brown tweed suit again, but maybe it was a different one because it looked slightly less shabby than before.

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