All Together Dead

my Tupperware box in which I stored any cookies that happened to cross my threshold—not a frequent occurrence, since I have a tendency to put on weight when sweets are in the house. Amelia had no such problem, and she’d stocked the box with a couple of kinds of Keebler cookies and told Quinn he was welcome to help himself.
    Amelia nodded, much more fascinated by Bob’s fur than she had been a moment before. “Yeah, he’s got a crew on it,” she said.
    This was news to me.
    “So who is your dad?” Quinn was keeping up the directness. So far it had worked for him.
    Amelia squirmed on the kitchen chair, making Bob raise his head in protest.
    “Copley Carmichael,” she muttered.
    We were both silent with shock. After a minute, she looked up at us. “What?” she said. “Okay, so he’s famous. Okay, so he’s rich. So?”
    “Different last name?” I said.
    “I use my mom’s. I got tired of people being weird around me,” Amelia said pointedly.
    Quinn and I exchanged glances. Copley Carmichael was a big name in the state of Louisiana. He had fingers in all kinds of financial pies, and all those fingers were pretty dirty. But he was an old-fashioned human wheeler-dealer: no whiff of the supernatural around Copley Carmichael.
    “Does he know you’re a witch?” I asked.
    “He doesn’t believe it for a minute,” Amelia said, sounding frustrated and forlorn. “He thinks I’m a deluded little wannabe, that I’m hanging with weird little people and doing weird little jobs to stick my tongue out at him. He wouldn’t believe in vampires if he hadn’t seen them over and over.”
    “What about your mom?” Quinn asked. I got myself a refill on my tea. I knew the answer to this one.
    “Dead,” Amelia told him. “Three years ago. That’s when I moved out of my dad’s house and into the bottom floor of the house on Chloe. He’d given it to me when I graduated from high school so I’d have my own income, but he made me manage it myself so I’d have the experience.”
    That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Hesitantly I said, “Wasn’t that the right thing to do? Get you to learn by doing?”
    “Well, yeah,” she admitted. “But when I moved out, he wanted to give me an allowance…at my age! I knew I had to make it on my own. Between the rent, and the money I picked up doing fortunes, and magic jobs I got on my own, I’ve been making a living.” She threw up her head proudly.
    Amelia didn’t seem to realize the rent was income from a gift of her father’s, not something she’d actually earned. Amelia was truly pleased as punch with her own self-sufficiency. My new friend, whom I’d acquired almost by accident, was a bundle of contradictions. Since she was a very clear broadcaster, I got her thoughts loud and clear. When I was alone with Amelia, I had to shield like crazy. I’d relaxed with Quinn around, but I shouldn’t have. I was getting a whole mess from Amelia’s head.
    “So, could your dad help you find your mentor?” Quinn asked.
    Amelia looked blank for a moment, as if she was considering that. “I don’t see how,” she said slowly. “He’s a powerful guy; you know that. But he’s having as much trouble in New Orleans since Katrina as the rest of the people are.”
    Except he had a lot more money and he could go somewhere else, returning when he pleased, which most of the inhabitants of the city could not. I closed my mouth to keep this observation to myself. Time to change the topic.
    “Amelia,” I said. “How well did you know Bob, anyway? Who’s looking for him?”
    She looked a little frightened, not Amelia’s normal thing. “I’m wondering, too,” she said. “I just knew Bob to speak to, before that night. But I do know that Bob had—has—great friends in the magic community. I don’t think any of them know we got together. That night, the night before the queen’s ball when the shit hit the fan between the Arkansas vamps and our vamps, Bob and I went back to my place after we’d left Terry and Patsy at the pizza place. Bob called in sick to work the next day, since we had celebrated so hard, and then he spent that day with me.”
    “So it’s possible Bob’s family has been looking for him for months? Wondering if he’s dead or alive?”
    “Hey, chill. I’m not that awful. Bob was raised by his aunt, but they don’t get along at all. He hasn’t had much contact with her for years. I’m sure he does have friends that are worrying, and