“This is impossible,” Evie argued, shoving the papers back into the envelope. “No one asked me to be a guardian. Shouldn’t I have signed these somewhere?”
“You’reEvangeline?” Loretta asked with what sounded like a squeak of despair. “I expected someone... bigger.”
Ouch.She couldn’t even get respect from a kid. “Five-two is a perfectly normal height,” she retorted, pushing the envelope across the counter. Of course, she’d had to take years of self-defense courses to prove that. “My great aunt is an Evangeline. Someone must have mixed us up. She married centuries ago and goes by Brindle these days, not Malcolm.”
“Centuries?” Loretta’s huge blue-pansy eyes grew wide with doubt and anxiety.
With a sigh, Evie took pity on the brat. “In a manner of speaking. Great-Aunt Evangeline is a Civil War re-enactor. She got married on the battlefield. She lives in Atlanta now.” And used her middle name of Valerie because it sounded like Valkyrie, but that wasn’t relevant.
“She doesn’t work for Psychic Solutions, then,” Loretta concluded in relief. “The Evangeline Malcolm I want works here. That must be you.”
Yeah, that had to be her, Evangeline Serena. Leave it to her clairvoyant mother to call her hyperactive, attention-deprived daughter serene.
“I only put Psychic Solutions on my resume to sound official. I’m an independent contractor.” As in, dog walker, tarot reader, and ghost buster. Try putting that on a credit application and see what happened. “And I still think you have the wrong person. Why would your parents leave you with someone they’ve met only once?’ Not that she remembered meeting them at all, which made this even more preposterous.
“Maybe because they feared they would be kidnapped and wanted a psychic to find them?”
Psychics only found kidnappers on TV. That statement required explanation.
Belatedly locking the door as Mavis had advised, Evie ushered her newly discovered “cousin” up the stairs to the apartment her mother had carved out of their attic storage room.
She filched a microwave pizza from the freezer, zapped it, and stuck it in front of Loretta. “All right, convince me not to call Stockton and Stockton and tell them I’ve found you.”
Loretta’s bangs were so long, they nearly concealed her eyes. Not until she’d finished chewing her first bite did she answer. “My guardian should have control of my millions, not the lawyers. They don’t want you to know that.”
Millions?Nuking another pizza, Evie leaned against her mother’s bright yellow kitchen wall and tried to envisionmillions.She couldn’t even envision a hundred dollars all in one place. A million kittens might populate Charleston. A million...
“Yo, Earth to Evangeline, you still here?”
Uh uh, she was in la-la land and liking it far better than her crazed reality. “Keep talking,” she told the kid. She wasn’t a material girl, but the potential of millions... Of course, sorting lie from fact was the problem here. She knew she was being played, but she didn’t own a cell phone and couldn’t leave the kid to run home and do a quick Google search for the kids’ parents. Luring the obstinate brat to her home seemed sketchy.
“The lawyers stuck me in this creepy all-girls boarding school where they teachequestrian skills,” Loretta said with a scorn that could have blistered the pizza without need of a microwave.
“Most girls your age would sell their souls for a chance to ride horses.” Evie relinquished dreams of traveling to Machu Picchu and Stonehenge onmillionsand returned to the extremely interesting moment.
Loretta transferred her evil pixie scorn to Evie. “Most girls my age wearpinkand giggle about boys. Gag me.”
Said the glasses-wearing nerd in black and brown. The kid definitely marched to a different drummer. Evie had no problem with that. “I forgot I was talking to an Indigo, sorry. Do you visit your parents on an astral plane?”
“What?” Loretta regarded her with suspicion.
Well, so much for expecting a Post to thinkreallyfar out of the box. “Look, I don’t know how else to put this. We don’t know each other.”
Evie settled at the table with her pizza so she was on a level with the kid. “I don’t remember your parents from among a kazillion other people at the only reunion I ever attended. I was only sixteen and your mother probably wasn’t even pregnant with you yet. You must have dozens of relatives more suitable to take you in. So why are you here?”
For a moment, big blue eyes puddled up and steamed Loretta’s lenses. She stopped to clean them off on her napkin. “You’re a Malcolm. You work for a place called Psychic Solutions.”
“So does my mother and half my family at one time or another. I just happened to be the one behind the counter today.” The only one not better occupied with a real job, but Evie didn’t mention that. She could get a job any time she liked. Holding them was another story. She whistled Aretha under her breath.
“You’re the Malcolm who talks to ghosts,” her pint-sized guest said with certainty. “I read it online. You convinced Mabel Ashcroft’s granddaddy’s ghost to stop uprooting the mock oranges.”
One of her more successful cases, but as far as Evie was aware, the story wasnotonline. Mabel refused to let anyone talk about it, or she’d have to explainwhyher granddaddy’s ghost was digging up bushes. “How did you learn that?”
The kid returned to her pizza with a shrug. “I ask questions. Mabel’s gardener has kids, and they talk.”
“Facebook,” Evie said with a sigh. “Unbelievable. The world doesn’t need psychics. We’ve got Facebook and Google to answer all, and YouTube to show it.”
“Anyway,” Loretta continued with a long-suffering sigh, “my parents wanted you to teach me how to use my latent talents.”