“Well?” Godfrey asked, sounding way too anxious for such a cool character in such formal clothes.
Quicksilver, on his chain, and I stood in the driveway, gazing on our new digs.
The place had a separate entry gate. Hector’s joint loomed like Manderley behind it, grand but totally separate, a mountain behind a molehill. This was indeed a “cottage”: one story, with a storybook roof of thick-piled green shingles that mimicked the thatch roofs of, say, the Shire. Or Forever England. Or Disneyland.
Rose bushes, climbing ivies, and tall spears of larkspur and hollyhock surrounded the stone walls, wafting an earthy, sweet scent a supermodel would have killed to call her own and bottle.
But it was all mine for a reasonable monthly rent. A half-circle of brick steps led up to the iron-hinged wood door. Mullioned windows peeked out from the riotous foliage.
“Well?” Godfrey asked again.
“I’ll sure whistle while I work here,” I said. This was my little lost Wichita house, only six times better. My throat swelled almost shut with emotion.
“Here is the key.” Godfrey planted a credit-card-size oblong of plastic in my palm.
He chuckled at my expression. Nobody had ever much chuckled at me in my life, and I liked it.
“Master Nightwine is thoroughly high-tech,” Godfrey went on. “He simply adores the illusion of low-tech. Hence my humble employment.”
“There’s nothing humble about you, Godfrey, but the manners.”
“Precisely so, Miss.”
He handed me a plain white card with seven numbers written on it, and then leaned close to whisper in my ear. That pencil-thin mustache tickled. Scratch getting one for Ric.
“This is the code that disables and reinstates Master Nightwine’s surveillance cameras at this location. In case . . . Master Quicksilver is entertaining the ladies some night.”
Quick whimpered and licked me anxiously on the wrist. I couldn’t always read dog language, but apparently he didn’t like being used as an excuse.
We all three knew who wanted to control whose privacy.
“Very good, Godfrey. You are the perfect man’s man, and the even more perfect woman’s man.”
He bowed. “I should warn you that Master Nightwine’s fascinations with all things vintage and filmic extends to the inanimate as well.”
Darn it! Godfrey talked too much like a college professor sometimes. I tried to translate his message.
“You mean, he collects film things as well as people?”
“Exactly, Miss.”
“You mean . . . things like my new residence?”
“Exactly, Miss. You are indeed quick-witted. I would refer you to a mid-nineteen-forties film featuring a fine actor-friend of mine named Robert Young. It was called The Enchanted Cottage.”
“And just what was enchanted about it, Godfrey?”
“Oh, my. I may become . . . unmanned. It is an old-style romantic fantasy. Unabashedly sentimental.”
“I’ve read a few romantic fantasies.” And had never believed a one.
“Not of your era, Miss. A facially scared World War Two veteran, Robert, meets a young but plain woman played by Dorothy Maguire. Only inside the enchanted cottage can the beauty of the inner selves they see in each other shine through.”
“A fantasy indeed.”
“But most affecting.”
“I’m no longer affected by fantasies, Godfrey.”
“Very good, Miss. Master Quicksilver. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted with your new residence.”
After he’d gone, Quick and I eased on down the fieldstone walk to the door. The card slipped easily into the old-fashioned Alice-in-Wonderland keyhole. The round-topped door squeaked open on reassuringly old hinges.
We moved into a slate-floored entry hall. Cozy rooms opened off it to either side: a kitchen and dining room, a little laundry room with a big dog bed, a back stoop and a clothesline in the garden!
Also . . . I found an office off the kitchen and a media room off the parlor. A circular staircase led to a loftlike bedroom with a huge four-poster bed topped by a mountainous embroidered feather quilt and . . . a master bath with a triple mirror, double sinks, a huge walk-in closet, and a Jacuzzi.
Quick leaped atop the four-poster, deflating the quilt about three feet. Methought the dog bed in the laundry room would make a good footrest in the parlor.
After a half-hour of exploring, Quick and I retreated to the front parlor, where I’d installed the dragon urn of Achilles’ ashes on the mantel. The place was thronged with window seats, so Quick stretched out full-length on one. I’d poured a glass of sherry from the quaint, mid-nineteenth century bottle on the silver salver. Say that three times fast: quaffing sherry from the silver salver.
I had one thing in common with Hector Nightwine, odious as it was to contemplate. I too liked to combine high and low tech. From this Stratfordian retreat of an Old World cottage I would penetrate New World perfidies of expendable media personalities, crime new and old under the sun, the fate of lost body doubles, and the world wide web of crime and extortion and immortality that made modern Las Vegas all things extravagant and evil.
Quick barked, short and sharp.
I just nodded in reply.