“I’m glad you’re here,” I told him.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Tell me about life,” I said. “What have you been up to the past…ninety or so years?Wow, that's a long time.”
“Food.”
“Ah yes, I’m sure there have been many good snacks.”
“Ice cream.”
“Ice cream is the best, isn’t it?”
He nodded.“Yes.”
“How about Mom? Has she been…okay?”
“No. Molly very sad. Run shop. Be sad. Then Lily return. Molly not so sad.”
“I’m glad she’s feeling a little better,” I said. “Ambrose helps, too, right?”
“Yes. Molly happy with Ambrose. He okay.”
“That’s good.”
“He good.”
I bit into the cone of my ice cream and watched the people walking down the street.
“You set up my phone,” I said. “Do you know how this car application works? It’s called Whirl, though I have no idea why. Supposedly it’s easy and signals this man I must speak to. It lets him know somehow that he must come to my location.”
I showed Fernando my cellular telephone.
He poked around, and the elusive green button magically appeared. He poked it for me.
“How’d you do that?”
He shrugged, then tossed the remainder of his cone in his mouth and swallowed it whole.
The countdown until the car arrived didn’t seem to be on the screen like it was when Imogen had ordered a car. Instead, it saidsearching for a driver.Any minute now, Noah would accept the request, and Fernando and I would take the opportunity to question him.
“While we wait for Noah to arrive, you didn’t happen to come across the amulet in your exploration of the town, did you?”
“No.”
“Did you find anything else of interest, aside from the ice cream, of course?”
Fernando stared at my cone, drool dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.
“Fernando?”
He snapped his attention to me.
“Are you still hungry?”
“Yes.”
Of course he was. Fernando was always hungry.