if he agrees to take care of this, maybe you could pass it around that he did a favor for Hallow Hill?” She nodded slowly. “Regarding the second thing. Finding out who sent it? Maggie says we don’t know where the stuff comes from. I guess there hasn’t been a problem with inventory supply in the past.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” Coming from Esmerelda, it was a quip.
“You’re quoting Mundies?” It was hard to believe, given the level of prejudice I’d come to expect.
With a feminine shrug of a shoulder, she said, “What makes you think Mundies are responsible for that expression?”
“Why, Esmerelda. Was that a joke?”
At the end of a sharp look, she said, “Of course not, Rita. You know I don’t joke.”
I watched her walk to the exit and step out into the wind in a sleeveless sweater, seemingly impervious to the cold that had tried to bite through my clothes.
Turning back to Dolan, I said, “Did this hodgepodgette…?”
“Hobknobbit,” he corrected.
“Yes. What did it come in?” He pointed to a small wooden crate lined with heavy foam. “Is that unusual?” He looked at the crate. “I mean is this the way pieces normally arrive? Packed like this?”
“There’s not one particular way,” he said.
“So, nothing about the packing raised your antennae.”
He looked offended to the point of color rising in his complexion. “I don’t have antennae.”
“Dolan!” I confess that I was beginning to lose patience with people for not sharing my culture, if it can be called that. “It’s an expression. When you opened it, was there anything about it that made you think it was unusual?” I was finding it exhilaratingly refreshing to be on the other side of acting like someone was dense.
He looked back at the crate. “No.”
“Okay. So, it was after you took it out that you perceived something off kilter.”
“Not after. It happened as I was removing it, I…”
“What? Got a creepy feeling?”
“If that means what I think it means, then yes.”
“What do you know about hobknobbits?” I felt very proud of myself for getting the term right. I knew I was right about that because no one corrected me.
“Not very much.”
“Well, like would this head be life sized?”
He stared at it and nodded. “I think so.”
“In general, would you say that people, magic kind, had a favorable view of hobknobbits?” I was feeling at home with this line of questioning, hitting my stride while I pulled on my insurance adjuster experience.
He shook his head as if to say he didn’t know, but I could tell by his expression that he wished he did, that he would’ve liked to be able to give me what I needed.
“Thanks, Dolan. Will you be here for a while? Until, say, five thirty?”
“Can be.”
“If Mr. Weir agrees to take the thing with him, I’ll need you to wrap it back up.”
He nodded and turned away.
Then I added, “We can wave some white sage around you afterward if you like.”
Poor Dolan squinted in confusion. “What?”
“Um, never mind.” Having thus exhausted my feeble contribution to magical solutions, I decided to quietly withdraw.
I headed upstairs to the safe to retrieve the blue velvet book. There was sure to be some reference to hobknobbits in there.
It wasn’t the sort of book that lent itself to leafing through quickly, but I did the best I could with limited time, catching glimpses of all manner of creatures I had yet to read about. Just past the halfway mark, the book being open almost equally on both sides, was a collection of sketches of hobknobbits. Two wearing hats like the one downstairs and two without. My initial impression was that the hat was an improvement as the thing was even less attractive without a head covering.
The script wasn’t easily decipherable. Among other things the letter s looked like f and the letter u looking like v. But I gathered that the creatures were prevalent in Western Europe and the British Isles during the Middle Ages. They were “city dwellers”, not fond of the wild. They preferred areas with larger populations, particularly the fae court. The fae regarded them as inconsequential except for the fact that they liked to get underfoot and trip people. Their diminutive stature of four hands, which I believed to be about twenty inches, made it easy for them to go unnoticed until victims of their mischief were splayed on the ground.
I concluded that they must’ve thus pranked someone powerful once too often and a decision was made to ‘exterminate’ the