"I better hide that hard drive."
Nic bounded up the stairs and didn't object when Bobby Walker followed her. The hard drive was in plain sight on the table. So was the bowl of milk-soaked bread. Nic grabbed it first, but not quickly enough.
"There's where you've made your mistake," he said flatly.
"Where?"
"Well, ma'am—I told you, bread in a bowl of milk won't work. That's for Scottish brownies. What we've got around here are suth'run brownies. You want to catch a suth'run brownie, ma'am, you've got to set out beer and a dish of pork rinds, or some of those little hot dogs in a can—"
Nic froze.
"That was a joke," Bobby Walker insisted. "You've got to laugh at yourself, Nicole Larsens, or whatever's eating at you is gonna make you crazy."
"I don't belong here."
"Nobody belongs here." He opened his arms to include the whole trailer park. "We're just passing through on our way up, or down."
"Which way do you think I'm going?"
"Can't tell yet."
"And you?"
"Can't tell that either. Up, I hope."
Nic offered to make coffee and washed the incriminating evidence out of the cereal bowl while the elixir filtered into the pot. She returned the hard drive to its antistatic pouch and stuffed the pouch into the cardboard box which, after a moment's thought, she put in the oven.
"It doesn't work," she explained. "And it's so dirty, I wouldn't use it, even if it did."
"Why not just take the box to the post office?"
"Because today's Saturday and the post office isn't open at this hour on Saturdays; and, besides, I'm going to try the beer thing."
"Do you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too?"
Sarcasm sounded different with a mid-Florida drawl, but no less biting when wielded by an obvious expert. Nic had underestimated Bobby Walker and his bright-red pickup.
"There are squirrels knocking themselves silly against my window—"
But the twitchy multitude was fast departing. Only one squirrel chewed rubber on the hood of Nic's car, another pair circled the traps that held their siblings or cousins, the rest had scattered.
"Out of sight, out of mind," Nic and Bobby Walker said together, then fell silent together, wondering if something significant had taken place.
"Can I borrow a can of beer?" Nic asked to break the silence.
"You could, if I had any. Never got a liking for the stuff. Tastes like horse piss. Wouldn't do you any good right now, even if I did. According to my momma, brownies are nocturnal. 'Course, what did my momma know? She never caught one, not in Scotland or Florida. Could be our Florida brownies like their beer in the morning or, could be, they spend the whole day racing squirrels and don't get thirsty till the squirrels go to bed. My daddy's kind of like that."
Nic would have asked a few polite questions about the Walker family if she'd gotten the change, but with coffee still dripping into the pot, Bobby Walker got restless.
"I'd better load those squirrels into my truck and take them out to the woods—it's cruel to leave them trapped up. You going to want me to set 'em out again later today, or do you think the beer will do the trick?"
"Better set them out," Nic decided and knew in a dark corner of her heart that the reason had nothing to do with squirrels.
"You gonna put the beer in the oven with the box or put 'em both where the squirrels can see them?" Bobby asked, with his hand poised about the doorknob.
"I don't know, Nic admitted. "I'll decide tonight and tell you tomorrow."
Bobby Walker drove off with the squirrel traps and was still gone when Nic went shopping for a single can of beer and another of Vienna-style sausages.
His pickup was back in its usual place— partly blocking Nic's end of the dirt road—when she returned. She thought about knocking on his door for a change, but the traps were already set, and she locked herself in for the night.
After a day's contemplation, Nic had rejected both the oven and the table for her Florida-brownie trap, choosing instead to build herself a tower of beer-filled plastic cups, sausage-bearing plates, and noisy silverware on the seat of a warm rocking chair with the naked hard drive tied securely to the back. If anything happened overnight—not that anything possibly could happen— the Rube-Goldberg construction insured that Nic wouldn't sleep through it.
And she didn't. When the tower collapsed somewhere between midnight and dawn, she was sitting bolt upright in bed before the last fork clattered to the linoleum floor. There were no follow-up sounds, but there was light!
Grabbing her broom handle, Nic raced down the corridor in time to see something dark and cat-sized dart behind the refrigerator. The scuttling shadow didn't hold Nic's attention long. The light was in the living room—two lights: one feminine and familiar, the other masculine and also familiar, but more aristocratic now than he'd been in sunlight.
The man's dark eyes shone with an unfriendly temper. He tossed a flowing cape over one shoulder and stalked through the front door. The woman gathered her skirts but hestitated, watching the refrigerator as closely as she watched Nic.
"I set him free," Nic reminded her glowing guest. "Or her. I think that's what you wanted, and if it was, I think I'm entitled to an explanation. What happened? How did he, or she, wind up on a hard drive? What's with the squirrels? And, last but not least, what are you?"
"I am myself," the woman replied without moving her lips. Her voice was whisper-soft in Nic's ears, yet easily understood. "As you are yourself and the little ones—the brownies—" She made it plain that the label was not one she preferred to use. "Are themselves. They know better—" She cast a mother's stare toward the refrigerator. "But the ee-lek-trece-ity—" Another word that did not come easily to the glowing woman, "Is so sweet and their minds are so small. When they play, they cannot always remember the danger."
Darkness surrounded by dust bunnies emerged from beneath the refrigerator. Nic got an impression of spindly limbs and a leathery, sharp-featured face before it was gone—through the door—and only the dust bunnies remained, settling to the doormat.
"And they wind up trapped on a hard drive until you rescue them?" Nic asked.
The woman—the fairy queen, Titania?—shook her head. "Usually," she uttered a birdlike musical sound, "this happening is rare, very rare. We hear them suffering, but rescue is difficult —impossible."
"Without the help of something more irresistible than electricity, something like beer?"
Titania nodded. "There will be great celebration—and fear, too, that they will forget everything and think because one was rescued, there is no longer any danger. This happening was chance, not plan."
Nic heard more fear than celebration in Titania's voice. "If there's ever anything I can do ... set out another round of beer and sausages ... ?"
Titania raised her arm and Nic felt a brush of warm velvet against her cheek and the faintest scent of ozone, like dew-fresh air after a thunderstorm. Nic closed her eyes as the velvety touch passed over them. When she reopened them, she was alone.