Free A Familiar Tail by Delia James

interview for that newspaper, which, as you so helpfully pointed out, is on shaky ground. So if you both will excuse me. I need to lock up.” He fished around in his jacket pocket and came up with his keys. “You’ll let me know if you see Alistair again, won’t you, Anna? If he’s letting you feed him, maybe youcan coax him into staying put long enough for me to catch up with him.”
    â€œSure.” I got to my thankfully steady feet. Frank and I locked gazes. His said we weren’t done here. Mine agreed. It didn’t matter that I had no way to contact him. Portsmouth was not a big place. We’d find each other whether we wanted to or not.
    Ellis held out his hand to the other man. “We’ll talk later, all right, Frank?”
    â€œYeah, sure.” There was no enthusiasm in Frank’s answer, or the handshake. Then he walked us back through the shadowy house and out the front door, which he shut on us both. Firmly. That was followed up with the clacking of locks and dead bolts being turned.
    â€œYou have to excuse Frank,” Ellis said. “Dorothy’s death hit him really hard.”
    â€œThat’s not surprising, I guess.” I also backed up as much as the small porch allowed. I needed some breathing space. Ellis Maitland was a tall, broad man, and whether he meant to or not, he loomed. “It sounds like they were really close.”
    â€œThey were, but, you know, there’s mourning and there’s hanging on to the past for no good reason. It’s not like Dorothy was . . .” He stopped and chuckled. “Well, she was a character, right? We all get like that when we pass a certain age, I guess.”
    He was saying this to the house as much as to me. I wrapped my arms around myself. I really wasn’t ready to leave yet. There were too many unanswered questions. They included whether Frank had gone back to looking for stuff that might have gone missing, like the wand from his aunt’saltar. Abruptly and ridiculously, I wished Alistair was still here. I wanted something to hold on to.
    At the same time, I felt like I owed Frank for what I’d just put him through. The least I could do was get this guy off his porch. There was definitely history there, and not the good kind.
    â€œI heard Dorothy’s death was very sudden,” I said as I started down the short stone path toward the picket fence and the front gate. “That’d be hard on anybody.”
    â€œSure, sure. Of course.” Ellis gestured me through the gate ahead of him. “Dorothy raised Frank, you know, after his mother died. His father did his best, but he was always on the road . . .” There was a sleek black BMW parked at the curb. Ellis paused at the passenger side and drummed his fingers on the roof. “I just wish he could get over feeling guilty about this house.”
    â€œWhy guilty?”
    â€œHe was trying hard to get Dorothy to sell right before she died.”
    â€œOh.” I hitched up my purse strap.
    â€œYeah. Oh.” Ellis shook his perfectly groomed head. “I’m sure Frank was really worried about all the stairs in the old place. Dorothy was sharp as a new pin—nobody could say she wasn’t—but she was eighty and her balance wasn’t what it used to be. A house like this takes a lot of upkeep, too.” His fingers stopped their drumming. Instead, he brushed at some speck of dust on the glossy black paint job. “Unfortunately, people knew that they were fighting about the house. So when Dorothy did fall, some of them jumped to a set of really shameful conclusions, which hasn’t made things any easier for him.”
    â€œIt’s a reality-show world.” I murmured Sean’s words. “Nobody wants to believe in normal anymore.”
    â€œExactly. The most dramatic conclusion has to be the right one.”
    There was one problem. In this case, I happened to