Thistle Down Read Free

off, too! Pioneer Days nonsense. It’s going to be a bad Festival this year.”
    Thistle risked looking around.
    Behind her, Florentine swoops and curls carved into a stone urn. Water spouted up and out from the top. All around the fountain, dozens of human automobiles sat at odd angles in the six-way intersection. They should be flowing in a smooth circle around the fountain.
    Oftentimes, in her delightful Pixie size, she’d flitted from car hood to rooftop to trunk, diverting a driver’s attention and causing him to swerve oddly for several moments.
    But she’d never done anything to cause this much chaos before. This looked like a masterwork of Pixie tricks.
    Would she get the credit for it, or would Alder?
    She smiled at the tall blond man in a police uniform. Not a man alive had resisted that smile, especially if she threw in a few Pixie sparkles. He towered over her, glowering.
    Not a good sign, nor a bit of Pixie dust in the air.

     
    “Will someone get the phone!” Dusty Carrick called up the basement stairs.
    The shrill ring continued.
    “Lazy, self-centered, know-nothings, can’t remember the date of the Oregon Provisional Government in 1843,” she muttered as she dashed up the steep and dusty risers to the kitchen of the historic-house-turnedmuseum. She had to hike her long calico skirts and apron above her knees to keep from tripping. A very modern, cream-colored wall phone blended into the sprigged wallpaper of the pantry at the top. Dusty had painted tiny sprigs of pink flowers on the Bakelite to make sure it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.
    She reached around the corner and grabbed the receiver on the seventh ring, just before it clicked over to the answering machine. Where was everybody? A half hour after opening on a summer Friday morning, there should be a full crew of tour guides and administrative staff around.
    Hadn’t Joe Newberry said something about an appointment first thing this morning and that she was in charge until he got back? That notation should be on the wall calendar in the employee lounge that she hadn’t bothered checking when she came to work at six. If there had been something about the archaeological dig or reference documents, she’d have noticed.
    She inhaled sharply, bracing herself to talk to someone she didn’t know about something other than history. Still, carrying on a stilted business conversation had to be better than listening to the slightly accusatory tone of a message on the machine. Or confronting the person face-to-face.
    Her inhalation caught on a dust mote and pushed it deep inside her. She sneezed horrendously before she could say anything. Her wire-rimmed glasses slid to the end of her nose, teetered a moment, then settled without hitting the floor.
    “That you, Dusty?” Police Sergeant Chase Norton asked from the other end of the line. She’d know that voice anywhere.
    “Excuse me, Skene County Historical Society,” she said stuffily and sneezed again. This time she managed to stick a finger under her nose and keep the glasses from falling off.
    “Your brother named you right,” Chase chuckled. “You been mucking about in the basement of that old mausoleum again? More dust than artifacts down there.”
    “Benedict has a foul sense of humor,” Dusty said. Actually, he’d done her a favor in nearly eliminating her full name from people’s memories. She’d done the same for him. Most of the world, except their mother, knew him as only Dick Carrick, from his business cards to his phone listing.
    Their mother, Juliet, was too enamored of Shakespearean character names. Thank God she hadn’t named her two children Shylock and Hero. Benedict and Desdemona were bad enough.
    Dusty also thanked whatever deity might listen that her parents had gone to Stratford-upon-Avon, England for the first summer of their retirement to absorb even more Shakespeare.
    They could have stayed home and spent their time finding blind dates for Dusty.
    “Look,