Page 11 of Big Witch Energy

He held up his gloved hands. “Of course, of course. It’s just that I got used to…not seeing you.”

Her bowed mouth quirked downward. Because that was an incredibly stupid way for him to put it. Why would he want to not see her? He wanted to see her as much as possible. He wanted to talk to her, to find out what had happened in her life over the last two decades because the life he’d built hadn’t allowed him that sort of indulgence.

“Not that it’s a bad thing, to see you. It’s a good thing,” he insisted. “I’m just getting used to the idea that I could run into you at any moment.”

Her expression shifted into vaguely offended. “Because you think I’m going to be following you around or something?”

Ben shook his head. “No, no, I just meant…”

The phone in his pocket rang. Mina’s number was scrolling across the screen when he took it out. “It’s my daughter. Hold on just one second.”

“That’s fine. I need to get to work,” she said, giving him a discomfited little wave.

As his phone continued to ring, he watched her carefully walk the icy sidewalk toward the public library. He swiped a hand over his face. He had faced down actual medical inquisitions and hadn’t been this shaken up.

Across the street, he saw a dark shadowy figure in a long cloak step behind the Starfall Community Theater building. As cold as it got in the winter here, he’d never seen someone wear an actual cloak. Maybe it was part of some production at the theater?

But the theater only did summer shows.

Weird.

Chapter 3

Caroline

When Caroline was agitated, she cleaned.

It was a habit she’d picked up in childhood, being left alone with her brothers, who seemed to leave a sticky film of spilled something on everything that they touched—even the two that were older than her. Things had been different then. Her father, Denny, had been the one running the Rose, with the cheerful confidence of someone who had never suffered a soul-shattering tragedy. And her mom had run knitting classes at fiber shop when she felt like it. The Wilted Rose had always provided enough of a living that Gert Wilton could decide when and how she would work. Then Caroline’s brother, Chris, died, and Denny collapsed in on himself. Caroline had to move her cleaning habits to the Rose.

“She’s panic-cleaning,” Alice muttered out of the side of her mouth. “I’ve never seen her do this.”

“Well, there was that time that she organized all the teas in my pantry by brand and then type. But that was when that antique dealer in Modesto shipped us a box full of—”

“Squirrels!” Alice chimed in.

Riley cleared her throat. “Yes, ‘squirrels.’ The noise alone was enough to drive her to alphabetize.”

“They weren’t that bad,” Alice insisted.

“They were carrying their own heads around the house, and those heads were yelling—in French—until we managed to bind them inside that creepy basket,” Riley reminded her. “I felt really bad moving them to the previously unknown secret supervillain basement level so we wouldn’t have to hear them. Also, what sort of person wants to buy an executioner’s basket from the French Revolution? Can’t really blame the squirrels for being emotionally attached to the last thing they saw before they were guillotined.”

“We really need to do some sort of mass email to let your aunt’s old contacts know to slow down the ‘squirrel donation’ mailings,” Alice said, sipping her coffee. From the corner of her eye, Caroline could see her trying not to grimace. Coffee served from the Rose’s twenty-year-old coffee machine had a distinct bitter burned taste that the older locals appreciated. Alice was used to making her own coffee in her little single-serve coffeepot at Superior Antiques, which she cleaned and descaled religiously. Riley, however, had worked in so many weird office complexes over the years that she was immune to bad coffee.

“Shaddow House is the only safe place they know to send them,” Riley said, shrugging. “It’s more difficult than you would think to off-load squirrels from your home or business.”

“You two know I can hear you, right?” Caroline said, turning to them. “And that means customers can probably hear you. Also, our rodent code word for ghosts probably isn’t nearly as clever as we think it is.”

Caroline waved a hand around the bar’s wood-paneled interior, which was lit with an array of neon beer signs that coordinated with racks of taps from the beers served over the years. Particular attention was paid to classic Guinness ads, which had been a favorite of Caroline’s great-uncle Louis.

In the afternoons, the Rose was definitely more of a restaurant than a bar, where a lunch crowd gathered when they couldn’t find room at one the more tourist-oriented Main Square bistros. Over the years, Gert had mastered the art of dressing up canned soups and basic sandwiches with a few flashy ingredients so they could charge fourteen ninety-five for a tuna melt. Caroline didn’t have the heart to tell people who praised her mother’s chicken chowder that it was basically watered-down cream of celery with chopped rotisserie chicken and green onion chiffonade. She considered this an abuse of the Food Network’s teachings. Sometimes, Caroline thought it was the pretense that exhausted her mother, pretending she was the woman who could handle it all.

“I concede your point,” Riley noted. “But I think perhaps you’re a little more stressed out by the return of a certain someone than our too-loud discussion of squirrel matters.”

“It only makes people think we’re a little off,” Alice told Caroline. “People have thought I’m a little off for years. But I agree that it’s the awkward interaction from last night that has you all atwitter.”

“You mean Sally?” Caroline replied blithely.

“Yes, clearly, I mean Sally,” Riley deadpanned.

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