Free A Hiss-tory of Magic: A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 1 by Harper Lin Page B

reasons. Please don’t make me repeat them. Jake Williams has already interrogated my whole family.”
    I said to her, “If you won’t tell your side, Mrs. Park, then other townspeople are going to. I heard one witness say that you wanted to talk sense into your son. Why didn’t he have any sense in him already?”
    Mrs. Park sighed.
    “He was at the Brew-Ha-Ha before it caught fire, and you knew. Don’t let me keep thinking the worst, Mrs. Park.” I said sincerely, “Please.”
    “All right,” Mrs. Park said. “Min hates this town. After he sold the business, he traveled all over the world, looking for nice towns and cities, sending Mr. Park and me postcards saying that we should move there with him. Mr. Park refused him, told him to quit showing off.”
    “Well, that’s harsh. Did Min come back as a final act of persuasion?” I asked, looking across the grocery aisle at Min and his father. They were shaking hands.
    “No. He knows his father too well.” At last, Mrs. Park mustered up some strength behind her voice. “Still, he came back to this hometown of his, from his travels so far away. He couldn’t sleep. What do you call it? Plane…”
    I thought for a moment. “Jet lag?”
    “Yes. Thank you. He wanted to go out for a walk. When the other detective came to arrest him, he said the whole thing was suspicious.”
    “Blake said so? Detective Samberg?”
    “The nerve of that man!”
    “He’s suspicious of everything and everyone, though.”
    “What about the witness—that teenage boy who said that Min started the fire? What was he doing? Studying the glow-in-the-dark plants and animals in the lake, in the woods, alone? I can’t believe it, but he… that detective—” She cut herself off.
    I thought about Cody. When Bea had been his age, she’d been more interested in experimentation and travel than just reading about scientific facts and foreign places. After graduating high school, Bea had planned and saved up to go backpacking around Antarctica, of all things. There’s a fine line between genius and craziness, and I sensed the same attitude in Cody. “I believe both of you. It’s complicated. Cody must have been mistaken.”
    Mrs. Park, uncharacteristically, reached out to take my hand. “Thank you. This is the best life we could have hoped for, Mr. Park and I. Still, it’s so difficult in this town! The way people talk!”
    I couldn’t tell her how much I understood. Being a witch might have been a private subculture for generations, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at us that we weren’t like everyone else.
    On the other hand, once nonwitches knew who was a witch… Let’s just say history doesn’t show that people have a good record of getting over and getting used to it so that witches could just be treated like people again.
    At least Min had gotten the chance to shine, to change whatever people used to think about him.
    “That’s why,” Mrs. Park told me, “I told him that I would rather he go find a nice Korean girl to settle down with.”
    I felt a brief twist of envy, which I tried to disguise as surprise. Min was a friend. Min was a good old friend. “If that’s what Min wants, he shouldn’t have any trouble! He’s obviously a catch, Mrs. Park.”
    “It is difficult to catch a fish gone over the falls.” Mrs. Park made no gesture to emphasize what she really meant, so figuring it out took me a while.
    “So that’s the real reason that you didn’t tell me,” I said to her. “You think Min likes me?”
    Mrs. Park shook her head. “I don’t think. A mother just knows these things.”
    “Min and I are friends,” I said, as much to myself as to her. “We even need to get to know each other again. You’ve got the whole afternoon to see that we’re just big kids, and it’s just like before the fire. It’s just like it was before this awful investigation started.”
    I wanted that to be true. I’d grown up with these people even if Mrs. Park