“I meant the other one!” Apparently she’d heard that joke before.
“Er...E-C-U-M-E-N-I-C-A-L. Um, Annelise, I need to talk to your aunt. Do you know where she is? AVALON!”
He heard his voice echo: “...valon valon valon.”
There was no way Avalon would have let these little girls wander about unsupervised. He was certain she was lurking somewhere, hovering like a mad scientist observing an experiment.
He walked faster. They seemed to have imprinted on him like ducklings and they were fast as hell. He picked up the pace; they scurried behind. He stopped abruptly and they collided with each other and nearly crashed into him, too. He’d stopped because he saw a flash of pink and gleaming chestnut hair: Avalon on the upper deck. She waved gaily, like she was on a cruise ship leaving shore.
And disappeared rapidly inside.
“I think you’re dodging the question,” said Horizontal Ponytails, clearly a future lawyer. “I asked, do angels—”
“Angels poop feathers,” he said definitively.
“They doNOT!” she crowed as if she’d laid that trap particularly for him.
“See?Toldyou I didn’t know.”
For some reason this made them fall all over themselves in giggles again.
He’d never dreamed he was this amusing.
He picked up his pace, heading around the patio beneath the balcony so he could peer in at Avalon through the French doors.
They all broke into trots.
“AVALON!” he hollered again. Like Stanley Kowalski inA Streetcar Named Desire. Only more incensed than panicked.
Oops. There she was!
Craning her head to see him from theoppositewindow. He caught a glimpse of her mouth wide open in laughter.
“Listen, girls, I need to get a lot of work done today, so... AVALON!AVALON!” He waved both arms at her like a man on a desert island spotting a lone biplane.
She ducked back into the house like a gopher into a hole.
Oh, she was a she-devil. A crafty, crafty she-devil.
“Hey, Mac. Auntie Ava said she had a hunch you would show us what you’re planting and how you plant it and stuff. We need it for our badges.”
“I’ll just bet she had a hunch. Wait, what do you mean, badges? Are you sheriffs?”
How about that. He had to admit to himself that he was deliberately going for laughs.
They obliged him by erupting into those now familiar giggles. Apparently being a child was not much different from being a drunk. Life was intoxicating.
“Nooooooo!” most of them crowed.
“We’reHummingbirds,”Annelise corrected him, mopping her eyes of laughter tears.
“There’s a surprise,” he said grimly. Hummingbirds were cranky, tireless, demanding little things that never stopped moving. Nevertheless, he kept two hummingbird feeders going because they were, in a word, enchanting. “Is that like a scout troop?”
“Yep,” Annelise said firmly. “And we need to earn badges for gardening. Because Tiffany’s gang in Black Oak Hummingbirds already has them and weneedto beat them. They keep beating us! It’s embarrassing! Appalling, really.”
He blinked a little at her vocabulary. “Tiffany’s gang? You havefactionsinside the Hummingbirds?”
His own reflexive sense of competition reared up.