Read The Reinvented Miss Bluebeard (London Paranormal 03) for Free Online Page B

dere," he said.
    Totter was an excellent gardener, but he had a slight speech impediment. And though he facially resembled his lanky cousin, he wasn't quite as tall. He had more bulk to his physique, which hinted at his ogrish ancestry.
    Eve smiled in thanks and took the pathway he indicated, passing brightly flowering roses and traversing the lush hedgerows until she spotted Fester's little baldhead, with its few tufts of gray hair sticking out. The crafty leprechaun was bent over an enormous hole by the hydrangea bushes.
    Shaking her head in exasperation, Eve hurried over to him, wondering what to expect. Fester was sometimes quite cranky and other times quite gregarious. With an Irish lilt to his voice but a ruddy face, the little fellow was almost ugly—all but his slanted eyes, which were fringed with thick black lashes and the color of fresh mint.
    "Fester, I've told you time and again that these holes are a danger to anyone walking in the gardens. One could break a limb if they fell into your hidey-holes."
    Fester glanced up, his eyes all buggy and round. "Well, me bucko… they're after it again, I tell ye. I heard them talking through the gilt-framed mirrors in the library this morning. They want me pots of gold. Each and every last one of them! Well, they won't find 'em—I tell ye that now, Dr. Eve! I'm onto their wicked, slick ways, and know their black hearts."
    Not the old voices of Parliament through the gilt-framed mirrors again
! Eve opened her mouth to speak, but the little man before her began hopping up and down.
    "I've foiled them this time, I have! I hid me pots of gold in the house," he said between hops, then stopped to point proudly. "So, you see, this hole here is a decoy. Parliament will think me gold is out here, when it's really inside!"
    "I see," Eve remarked, staring at the gaping wound in her garden. "That was rather clever of you." She held her temper by a slender thread indeed. She wanted to beat her head against the proverbial wall. After two years of treating Fester's paranoia, she felt he was getting no better. He was an enigma, a paranoid character with delusions of grandeur along with peculiar conspiracy theory after peculiar conspiracy theory. One of Eve's personal favorites was about Napoleon. Fester believed that Bonaparte was not really dead, and that both the British and French governments wanted gold to finance a secret army to go against him. Those governments were always trying to steal Fester's imaginary gold.
    Catering to the leprechaun was all Eve could do for the time being, as a person could argue until she was blue in the face and get nowhere with the wee stubborn man. "Well, since you've fooled them, could I request your arm in escorting me back to the Towers?" she asked politely, but her tone of voice spelled out that she would brook no argument. She would have to get Totter to attend to this hole as quickly as possible.
    "Be proud to, Dr. Eve. You never know when one of them British spies might spirit you away and torture you to find out me secrets."
    Eve gave a patently false smile and extended her arm. Fester took it, his itty bitty baldhead barely reaching her chin, and as they walked back to the asylum he began babbling more of his far-fetched theories. "I tell ye true, there ain't never been a war with them American colonies, since there ain't really any land called America. It's only British propaganda to trick people into moving to the middle of the ocean, where they set up towns like Venice..."
    Through Fester's whole paranoid tirade, Eve kept a smile plastered on her face. Here at the asylum, she had perfected that look. And as they reached the marble fountain, she handed her patient over to Mrs. Fawlty, who took Fester's arm none too gently.
    The leprechaun gave Mrs. Fawlty a kiss on her chin, knowing it would set the housekeeper off. Then, turning to Eve he said, "Me thinks our hausfrau is a double spy, pretending to be English when she really is German. She's