A Calamity of Contagious Curses by Cordelia Rook

Author:Cordelia Rook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cordelia Rook

Chapter Twelve

I’d barely gotten back inside when Marie’s doorbell rang. Gravy didn’t just bark; he jumped and scratched at the door, the way he would if it were a friend. Which was odd, since Gravy didn’t really have friends in Granbery. The only person here he really got excited to see was Clemson, and I doubted Ladd’s dog could’ve walked over here on her own. Or rung the bell.

The mystery was solved when I swung the door open to find Trevor on Marie’s front porch, clothes rumpled, hair messed up like he’d been running his hands through it. Gravy immediately launched himself at him, apparently not frozen in surprise like I was. Maybe he’d been expecting him.

“Soooo I gather you heard the shot,” I said. For Trevor to be here already, he must’ve left very shortly after we ended our call, and sent most of his fourteen messages while simultaneously speeding. (This didn’t seem like a good time to lecture him on distracted driving. At least his phone connected to his car speakers, so he wouldn’t have had to look at it.) Only something as ominous as a gunshot would’ve panicked him that badly.

“I heard the shot.” He picked up Gravy and stepped inside.

“But you must’ve gotten my message that I was okay.”

He raised a brow. “An hour later, you mean?”

“Was it a whole hour? It didn’t feel like an hour.”

“Fine, it was fifty-six minutes, but the extra four minutes doesn’t buy you any good will. Unless you’re actually hurt. But you don’t look hurt, you look guilty.”

“I’m not hurt. And I do feel terrible. I’m so sorry you came all the way out here. I’m the worst friend ever.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about the worst.”

“Bottom five?”

“Bottom twenty, maybe. We do have to factor in that me coming all the way out here was not whatsoever your idea, even a little bit. Anyway, I was already halfway here by the time I got your message, so I figured I’d better come and see for myself. For all I knew, the psycho who shot you could’ve been texting me from your phone to cover their crimes. We should come up with some kind of signal, by the way, a code word or something.”

“Ghost emoji,” I said immediately.

Trevor nodded without asking why I would choose the ghost emoji as code for “This is really me and I am not in ghost form.” We’d seen enough thriller movies together for him to know as well as I did that the ghost would be the last thing the psycho would think of. Probably even behind the skull, because it was slightly random. It was as close to an unbreakable code as an emoji could get.

“Trevor!” Holly and Ivy spoke in unison as they came into the front hall together. They looked happy to see him.

Aunt Fiona trailed only slightly behind them, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She decidedly did not. “What brings you?”

I cleared my throat. “There was a slight misunderstanding over whether or not I’d been shot.

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