Page 59 of Wayward

“Is it okay to bring Misha?” I asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said warmly, smiling at my dog.

“He’s had his shots, right?” Gale chimed in.

“You’re just a delight,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said smugly.

I shook my head at him, he put a leash on Misha, and we were off. When I began to walk toward the front of the house, both Ada and Gale asked what I was doing.

“I should go in the front door, don’t you think? To get the full effect of walking into the house for the first time?”

“Oh, darling, you can’t get in via the front door. I’m not even certain there’s a porch there anymore.”

I glanced at Gale, who waggled his eyebrows at me.

“Seriously?”

They both nodded.

“Ada, why did you let it get so bad?”

She turned to Gale and then back to me. “Did you miss where I explained that I didn’t have a caretaker? I had no idea what to do.”

I glared at Gale. “And you couldn’t have helped?”

“I do some food runs, but I’m not the caretaker. I have a job, you know.”

I did know, and speaking of… “Since technically, as the deputy chief of police, it is your job to keep Ada safe, shouldn’t you have kept her out of the house?”

He stopped walking to address me. “Listen,” he began, sounding very serious and professional. “I tried to tell her to live in the caretaker’s house until everything was fixed, but she said it wasn’t her place to simply take over.”

“But it was.”

“But it’s not,” Ada argued, stepping in beside Gale. “It’s the caretaker’s house, not mine. And I was fairly certain a new wonderful person would be along soon and I was right because voila, here you are.”

“No,” I assured her, and then turned back to Gale. “Couldn’t you have forced her to stay there?”

Gale shook his head. “She is competent to make her own choices even if I don’t agree with them.”

“Thank you for sticking up for my sanity, dear,” she said to Gale.

He grunted and then gestured at the house. “Let’s go in the back,” Gale stated in a voice that brooked no protest, pointing at the wooden cricket bats by the gate, “and grab one of those in case you need to keep a snake or something off you.” He picked up Misha and turned to Ada. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“Stop. You know as well as I do that the alligator has been gone for some time.”

He looked at me and laughed. It was probably my stunned expression that did it.

Ada said, “Cecil got far too big for the downstairs baths, even with how deep we made them. He lives at the San Diego Zoo now and loves it, as they have quite the area for him.”

“Baths?”

“Like a Roman bathhouse,” Gale clarified. “That’s how they were built in the basement. There were frescoes and everything.”

I glanced at Ada, who nodded.

“And you had an alligator down there?”