Watching Mr. Leary make a drink was like how I imagine watching a Japanese tea ceremony must be, every movement precise and ritualized. He emptied his glass, washed it under the tap, and dried it with a tea towel, then folded the tea towel just so and placed it on the counter. Three ice cubes were plucked from an ice bucket with a pair of silver tongs and placed one by one in the glass. Half a lime was squeezed with a fancy little juicer and poured atop the ice, followed by an exactly measured one and a half ounces of gin, topped with club soda until it fizzed to the rim.

I waited patiently, knowing there was no rushing him. Actually, it looked pretty damn refreshing.

“Ahh!” He sighed in bliss at the first sip. “There’s no finer libation on a hot summer day. Are you sure I can’t tempt you?”

“I’m sure.”

In the living room, he took a seat on the overstuffed sofa, the arms and back covered with old-fashioned antimacassars. I sat opposite him on a matching chair. “Is this about the Vanderhei boy?” he asked me.

“You know I can’t comment on that,” I said.

Mr. Leary’s wide mouth curved in a saturnine smile. “It’s always worth a try. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. What can I do for you, Daisy?”

“I’m looking for a spider.”

“A spider.” He didn’t ask me to elaborate; he didn’t have to. I’d come to him with this kind of puzzle before. He simply set his glass neatly down on a coaster, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes in thought.

Despite being a regular full-blooded human, Mr. Leary knew more about mythology, religion, and folklore than pretty much anyone in the eldritch community except the Sphinx, and he was a lot more loquacious. And yes, that’s another one of his vocabulary words. According to the folk wisdom of Mrs. Browne, madmen, poets, and drunkards all have half a foot in the eldritch world. I figured Mr. Leary qualified on at least one count, and I had a suspicion he might write poetry, too.

Beads of condensation formed on the glass containing his gin rickey, trickling slowly down. “There’s Arachne, of course,” Mr. Leary said without opening his eyes. “I should hope one of my students would have thought of her.”

“I did,” I said. “It’s not her. It might be something more literal.”

He steepled his fingers. “There’s Argiope aurantia, also known as the writing spider, rather fetching specimens with bright yellow and black markings. I had one in my garden a few years ago. I named her Agatha.”

“Not Charlotte?” I couldn’t help but ask.