Many Blessings

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mandaline actually managed to get out of bed Wednesday morning without being molested by her men only because she woke up before them. She was already out of the shower and dressed and downstairs working on putting the order away by the time they got out of bed.

Brad wandered downstairs looking like a pouty boy. “No fair.” He pulled her in for a kiss.

“Yes fair,” she said, smiling. “I have readings this morning. I need to clear my mind, not have my brains bonked out. I’ll make it up to you tonight.”

He surveyed the stock they still had to put away. “Looks like it bred and multiplied over night.”

“You never know. We are a magick shop. It might have.” She released him after giving him another kiss.

When she went upstairs to refill her coffee, she met Ellis coming out of the shower and gave him a kiss, too. “Morning.”

His blue eyes sparkled as his cock hardened. “No fair.”

She burst out laughing. “You guys reading from the same script? That’s what he said downstairs.”

“No.” He pointed at his cock. “I just rubbed one out in the shower and you got me all excited again.”

“Aww, poor guy. Like I told him, I’ll make it up to both of you tonight.”

He gave her another kiss before letting her go. “Fair enough. I have an early appointment anyway.”

Wednesday night, the men piled into the Element with Sachi and Mandaline to go do the investigation. “So what exactly are we supposed to be doing tonight to help?” Ellis asked from the backseat, where he sat with Brad.

“You mean other than being great eye candy?”

“Sachi!” Mandaline scolded.

She shrugged. “What? I’m just being honest. I thought saying ‘pack animal’ or ‘equipment bitch’ would sound a little rude.”

Ellis and Brad laughed from the backseat. Mandaline felt some relief over that. Secretly, she was worried Ellis might have another freak-out during the investigation. Or at the very least that seeing what she did up close and personal might totally turn him off of a relationship with her.

But the only way to find out was to see what happened.

I have to believe.

“You know,” Sachi continued, “you should be thanking me, boss. The fact that I haven’t scared them off yet says a lot about their character.”

Mandaline gripped the steering wheel a little harder and tried to ignore her friend. “To answer your question,” she said to Ellis, “you two can help us get the equipment set up. It’s not that hard. You saw most of what we’re doing tonight when we were at your house. We’ll do an initial walk-through with the homeowner, find out what they’re experiencing and where, and go from there.”

“Do you think there’s anything supernatural going on?” he asked.

She hesitated before answering, weighing his tone first for any hint of sarcasm. She found none. “I don’t know. Percentage-wise, probably not. We can almost always find something completely benign as the reason. Or we might find something we can’t explain, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s supernatural in origin.”

“When was the last time you found something really supernatural?”

She glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’d consider Julie coming to both me and Brad after her death supernatural. And obviously Julie experienced something not of this world over in Croom before she was murdered.”

“Ouch,” Sachi grumbled from the passenger seat. “That was harsh even by my standards. Go a little easier on him, boss.”

Mandaline took a deep breath. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Ellis said. “I deserved it. If you’d heard me the other night, you wouldn’t be defending me right now.”

“He’s right,” Brad agreed. “He was an asshole.” Mandaline glanced in the mirror and spotted his playful grin. “But he got better,” he said in a fake British accent.

“Just to let you know, in case you like, lose your brain or something, I’m calling permanent dibs on both of them,” Sachi joked. “They’re cute and they like quoting Monty Python. You tell me they like skeet, too, and I’m stealing them.”

They easily found Marjorie Caswell’s home. Tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac, it wasn’t much different from the other well-kept homes in her deed-restricted community. Steam wafted from the pavement, which had been thoroughly soaked earlier by afternoon thunderstorms.

“Let’s go do a walk-through before we unload any equipment,” Mandaline said as she shut the engine off. “I want to make sure she’s not just suffering dementia or something.”

Marjorie met them at the door with a smile. “Thank you all for coming.” She led them inside to a neatly kept living room. “I really hope you can convince Gerald to move on.”

“Could you show us around?” Mandaline asked. “We’d like to get a feel for the house, and where you’re experiencing the phenomenon.”

Marjorie looked a little confused. “I’m not sure where it happens. Just that I’m hearing it.”

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” Mandaline suggested.

“Well, we bought this house fifteen years ago and moved in. Gerald was very much a creature of habit. If we weren’t going out with friends or something, he always wanted to eat dinner at seven, so that he could…” She hesitated, a smile finally breaking through. “Well, not to get too graphic, but he wanted to have time to have a constitutional, if you know what I mean, before his TV shows came on at eight.”

She looked a little sad as she clasped her hands together. “Well, Gerald had been in the Army for a lot of years. He was in artillery, and did two tours of Vietnam before he was able to retire. He was deaf as a doornail, as they say. Every night after he’d go to the bathroom, I’d hear this noise, like someone knocking on the pipes, at the same time.”

Mandaline exchanged a glance with Ellis, who looked confused. Brad, however, looked like a lightbulb had gone off inside his brain.

Marjorie continued. “I still hear that noise. It started the night he died.” She smiled. “I told him, ‘Now, Gerald, I appreciate you don’t want to go, but I’ll be all right.’ Heaven knows I spent a lot of time alone as an Army wife. I love him and miss him, but he didn’t need to hang around on my account.

“I thought maybe after a few days, he’d get tired of it and go on. But it’s still continuing!” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my children. But if I told them this, do you know what they’d do? They’d want to ship me off to some assisted-living facility. Or worse, make me move in with one of them! I might look frail, but I do okay. I haven’t broken any bones, I get a driving test every year to make sure I’m still safe behind the wheel, and I’m perfectly capable of adding my own bank balances.”

“Let’s go ahead and do a tour,” Mandaline said, “before we set up our equipment.”

Brad singled Mandaline out as Marjorie led the way. “She’s not senile,” he whispered to her.

“I know.” She glanced at her phone. “It’s not quite eight yet.”

He nodded. “I think I know exactly what’s going on, but we’ll have to wait for it to happen for me to prove it.”

She wanted to ask him what, but Marjorie turned at the door to one of the bedrooms. “This is the master bedroom,” she said as she reached in and turned on the light. She walked across the room to another door. “This is the master bath, where Gerald used to come every night. So if I had to make a guess, maybe this is where the phenomenon happens, as you called it.”

Brad caught Mandaline’s eye and winked. As everyone started filing out behind Marjorie, he stuck his head in the bathroom and looked around.

Twenty minutes later they were outside unloading equipment. “Spill it,” Mandaline asked after he returned from taking a tour around the back side of the house.

He grinned. “A good magician never reveals his secrets.”

She gave Ellis credit where credit was due. He threw himself into the work and didn’t utter a single sarcastic comment about their purpose.

Maybe there’s hope for him yet.

They set up the cameras and sensors. They were about to go dark when an odd, faint pinging noise started. Mandaline glanced at the time as Marjorie’s face lit up. “See? There it is!”

Brad bolted out the front door. A moment later, the noise happened again.

Marjorie frowned. “He’s never done that before.”

It sounded again.

And again.

Brad returned a moment later. “Marjorie, if you’ll follow me I’ll show you what’s going on.”

Everyone followed Brad outside and around the back of the house. He led them to a water softener unit, which had been installed within feet of the master bedroom window.

“Marjorie, did this come with the house?”

She frowned. “I believe so. A company comes out every couple of weeks to service it.”

He lifted an access panel at the head of the unit and changed a setting.

The noise started again.

Her eyes widened. “How did you do that?”

Brad turned his mega-smile on the woman. “It’s set to go off at the same time every day. To complete its cycle. I don’t know why it’s set this early in the evening, usually they set them up to go off in the middle of the night. But there’s something going on in the pipes when it starts its flush cycle, and it’s making air hammer in the pipes. That’s your noise. Sometimes there’s a thing they can add on to the pipes to make that stop happening.” He tweaked the setting back to where it had originally been. “I’ll leave it set to the current time so it doesn’t wake you up in the middle of the night, but here’s how you change the time.” He showed her how to adjust the setting.

“Oh!” Mandaline worried the woman might be disappointed it wasn’t her husband, but Marjorie surprised them. “That’s all?” She laughed. “What a relief! I’ll have my plumber come out tomorrow to look at it. I’m so sorry I dragged you all out here for something so silly.”

“No, it’s quite all right,” Mandaline said, relieved to have the mystery solved so easily and drama-free. “This is what we do.”

“Well, can I at least pay you for your time?”

“No, that’s not necessary. We do this for free to help people.” She paused. “If you wanted to make a donation to a charity of your choice in my friend Julie’s name, that would be greatly appreciated.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll send a donation off to the animal shelter.”

Mandaline hugged her. “Thank you.”

It took them longer to pack up than it did to unpack. They were back on the road by ten, headed to the shop.

Sachi shook her head. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Tarzan. That was brilliant. I honestly thought we were dealing with an early dementia patient.”

Mandaline glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him shrug. “When you’re rehabbing an old house, you learn a lot about plumbing issues. We had a problem with ours, the washing machine would make the pipes hammer like crazy. Remember?” he asked Ellis.

Ellis nodded. “That’s right. I forgot about that.

“So, chief,” Sachi said. “What’d you think of your first investigation? On this side of things, I mean.”

“I have to admit I’m impressed.”

Mandaline kept her mouth shut, but felt a little more of the cloud inside her lift. She could tell from his tone he wasn’t just giving Sachi lip service. He really meant it.

Sachi turned in her seat. “Really? Pray tell.”

“I respect that you take a logical, step-by-step approach to things. You don’t just jump in and assume something is supernatural. Like with our house, you found a non-supernatural cause, solved that woman’s problem, and everyone’s happy.”

“They don’t all go like this,” Sachi said, turning back to the front. “We do have some that leave us scratching our heads.” She shuddered. “Although there was that one house last year that literally left us scratching. We all ended up with head lice from that dump. Blech!”

Sachi bid them good-night while the men volunteered to unload the vehicle. Mandaline certainly wasn’t complaining about the early end to the investigation.

She was definitely in the mood to play considering she’d spent most of the day thinking about tonight. She’d never considered herself much of a morning person before, but with those two in her bed, she now had something to look forward to every morning.

When the men got upstairs, they found her naked in the middle of the bed, kneeling on all fours with her ass facing the bedroom door.

She wiggled her hips at them. “Gentlemen’s choice tonight, boys. Come and get me.”

The men exchanged a look before nearly climbing all over each other to get naked and into bed with her.

Brad got there first and slid under her sixty-nine, grabbing her hips and pulling her down on top of him so he could bury his tongue deep inside her pussy. With his stiff cock waving in her face, she didn’t need any urging to go down on him. She let out a soft moan as his cock filled her mouth, the head brushing against the back of her throat as she took him as deeply as she could. She curled her fingers around the base, stroking him and making him moan into her pussy. He speared her cunt with his tongue, every moan he drew out of her making him moan as the sensation vibrated down his cock and back into her pussy through his mouth.

A deliciously vicious cycle, she thought.

Behind her, Ellis had grabbed a condom and carefully knelt between her legs. “I think I’m only good for one tonight,” he told her. He took his time working his cock inside her, slowly, taking short thrusts and going a little deeper each time. With Brad firmly holding her hips in place, she couldn’t move, couldn’t thrust back against him.

Finally, Brad let go of her hips and she loudly moaned around his cock as she could rock back a little, taking Ellis deeper even as Brad started sucking her clit.

Then Brad reached down and found her nipples and she thought her world would implode. It triggered her first release. She went deep onto Brad’s cock, Ellis’ hands now holding on to her hips and forcing her clit to stay between Brad’s tenacious lips. She was helpless to do anything but suck Brad’s cock, laving it with her tongue as the men wrung another orgasm out of her.

Ellis sounded strained. “You better come fast, buddy,” he told Brad, “because she’s squeezing me like crazy and I can’t hold back much longer.”

Brad bucked his hips up against Mandaline’s face, his fingers pinching her nipples. The delicious bite of pain amped up her pleasure, triggering another wave of orgasms inside her.

She was rewarded with a flood of cum exploding from Brad’s cock in her mouth. She eagerly swallowed, still trembling from the last echoes of her orgasm while Ellis slammed his hips into her.

She felt his fingers dig in hard, one last little climax popping free at the sensation as he came inside her and finally fell still. After a moment he withdrew and stretched out next to her on the bed.

Eyes closed, she rested her cheek against Brad’s thigh. He stroked her hair, slowly, then her arms. Then he started patting her arms.

When he started patting a little harder, she realized what he needed and sat up. “Oh, sorry.”

He laughed as he looked up at her. “Well, I knew I could survive a little longer, but I didn’t want my death certificate to read ‘drowning by cunnilingus.’”