Barrel smiled.

"Sure," he said.

It got him out of work for just a little longer, and he wasn't about to turn that down. He walked with Agatha back to the shop. The bell rang. Shock had taken a break from chipping glue off the ceiling, and was calmly sitting on top of the shelf with the wedding broom and rubbing the handle down with acetone to clean it off. She glanced over to see who had entered, rolled her eyes, then went back to work.

Aggie was at the counter, where she could both keep an eye on Shock and wait for her niece. She gave Agatha a knowing smile, but there was an edge to it that showed her niece was in more than a bit of trouble.

"I take it that it was [i]quite[/i] an emergency to leave the shop unattended," she asked calmly, "while there are...[i]guests[/i] here?"

Her eyes glanced up at Shock, who simply stuck out her tongue at the old bat, then went back to her task. Barrel stopped in his tracks. He looked at Aggie, then Agatha, then back to Aggie. He tried to think of something, since Agatha was doing him a favor.

"She was...um...helping me?" he asked as he reached behind his neck in a nervous scratch.