Legal Seagull

Chapter Fourteen

About an hour and a half later, Nan returned from the mechanic with Melissa’s husband in tow.

“They fixed my girl up as best they could,” she said with a far-off glance that may or may not have hid tears threatening to spill. “One of the tires blew out, but the engine is fine. They swapped it out and said I’ll have to get the upholstery in the back seat fixed once we’re back home again.”

“That’s good, right?” I asked, more than ready to be on our way. Melissa was nice and all, but she was Nan’s friend—not mine. Besides, I was worried about Octo-Cat skulking off by himself in the unfamiliar woods outside.

“It’ll drive fine,” she said with a dejected sigh. I knew how much that little sports coupe meant to her, but it would be completely fixed soon enough. Besides, maybe now she’d agree to stop off at a hotel so we could both rest properly between shifts.

“Then let’s go. I’m wide awake now.” I smiled back at Melissa, hoping she wouldn’t find my eagerness to get back on the road offensive. “Thanks so much for your hospitality and for the company.”

She gave me a quick hug, which surprised me as I was not exactly the hugging strangers type. “I’m so jealous of you,” she whispered into my ear. “What you can do is so cool. I’d love to talk to you about it more sometime.”

And then pulling away, she finished at full volume, “Nan knows where to find me online. Oh, before you go, let me load you up with some treats for you and the pets.”

And about twenty minutes later, we were back on the expressway.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t just head home?” I asked as I took a swig from one of the cold brew coffees Melissa had sent with us. “We’ve been through a lot already and we’re still only half-way there.”

“You may think you’ve been through a lot,” Octo-Cat shouted. “But you didn’t have to wait around outside back there. Consider yourself lucky that the other guy wasn’t an outdoors cat, otherwise things would have gotten really ugly.”

“Stop complaining and have a treat stick,” I said with a smirk. “Um, can you toss him one, Nan?”

Unsurprisingly, Octo-Cat enjoyed this strange Slim Jim like treat just as much as Melissa’s cat Merlin had. And it took him a bit longer to eat this thing than one of his smaller treats, which meant it gave us a few minutes of blessed silence every time we tossed him a new one. Honestly, this discovery alone was worth the unplanned detour.

“We may as well keep going, seeing as we have a long drive ahead of us either way,” Nan said after unwrapping the kitty treat stick and chucking it into the back seat.

“Get some sleep if you can,” I told her, setting the bottle of coffee into the cup holder and returning both hands to the wheel. “I’m wide awake for now, but I promise I’ll get you up the moment I feel too tired to keep going. We can decide then if you’re going to take over or if we should stop and rest for a while.”

“Fair enough,” she agreed, then leaned her seat back as far as it would go and left me to my own thoughts.

I had enough to think about to keep myself occupied for a while. Not only was there the seagulls’ original case but also the mystery of what had happened to that other flock. And we still needed to find Pringle and convince him to spy on our behalf.

On an unrelated note, Nan and I needed to have a very long talk about her revealing my ability to talk with animals to anyone really, but especially to strangers over the Internet. I shuddered to think of the dangers her loose lips could mean for me in the future. Sometimes my octogenarian grandmother acted like a little kid, I swear.

How could she not know that random people on the Internet weren’t to be trusted with the intimate details of our lives?

Yes, we’d gotten lucky this time, seeing as her friends in Michigan had proven to be helpful—and while a little animal-crazy, at least they weren’t full-on psychopaths.

But how many others had she also told?

As much as I wanted to jump into this topic with Nan right now, I also knew it would be better to wait until we’d finished our trip and were back home. We already had one accident under our belts, and I wasn’t eager to add another.

Because Nan had already hooked my phone to the Bluetooth in her car, I was easily able to pull up my favorite 80s love ballads playlist and send it piping through the speakers. The emotional, up-tempo songs kept me company while the others slept in bursts and fits, each occasionally waking up to chat with me for a few minutes before drifting back to the sandman.

When the sound of my phone ringing drowned out the music a couple of hours later, I was so surprised I almost didn’t realize what was happening.

Nan snorted in her sleep, leaned forward to press a button on the stereo, and then settled back in her seat.

“Hello? Angie?” Charles’s voice called out, unsure.

“Yes, it’s me. Hi!” I tightened both hands on the wheel.

“It’s not too early. Is it?”

“No, I’ve been up for hours.” I considered telling him about our accident and the detour that had followed, but I didn’t want to worry him when there was nothing he could do from back in Maine. I’d catch him up on our random Midwest adventure later. We had enough to focus on right now as it was.

Charles let out a soft sigh. “Good. Well, I decided to wake up early and swing by your house before heading to the firm, and it’s a good thing I did, because I found Pringle.”

My heart sped up a little at this announcement. At least one thing was now going our way. “You found him? Did he listen to my message? Is he there now?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Charles responded with a laugh that made me yearn for him. It was strange how someone I hadn’t even known about a year ago had now become such an integral part of my world. “Do you want to talk with him?”

“Yes, but hang on. I’m going to pull over to the side of the road. Can you wait a few minutes then call me back on FaceTime?” It was always easiest to talk to animals if I could also see them, and I definitely needed every advantage I could get when it came to negotiating with the greedy trickster of a raccoon.

Yes, we needed his help, but I also knew that it would come with a price. His help always came with a price, which is why he had two custom treehouses, two big-screen televisions, two rapid-firing Nerf guns—one of which was named Carla—and countless other doubles of the types of belongings you would never think a raccoon even needed in the first place.

He had two of practically everything because, in Pringle’s mind, if it was worth doing, then it was worth overdoing. I was definitely thankful he and Nan couldn’t speak directly to each other, at least not without looping me in as a translator. Together, they’d not only live the most charmed, extra existence possible, but they’d also blab my secrets to the whole entire world…

That is if they hadn’t done so already. And that was a massive if.

My stomach churned at the memory of how cavalier Melissa had been in discussing facts she shouldn’t have even been privy to. One thing at a time, I reminded myself and let out a ragged breath.

We hadn’t even made it to Colorado yet, and already I couldn’t wait to be back home.