Page 39 of Silver Linings

“Sounds like a plan,” he said, then paused. Might as well ask the question, he supposed. “Are you expecting any blowblack from this?”

“Probably,” she answered at once, although she didn’t appear overly concerned. “Jim Tillman will probably come in here and try to get me to see reason or whatever, but I’m just going to tell him it’s a free country and I’m allowed to express my opinions. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the general sentiment will be on my side, since no one wants to see the forest torn up. Everyone knows you have to clamp down pretty hard on these companies — if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.”

Sadly, that was only the truth. While Ben would have liked to believe corporations existed that played fairly and didn’t break the rules, his personal experience was that they’d usually do whatever they could to get away with all kinds of crap if they thought no one was looking too closely.

“Well, that’s good to know,” he said as he opened up the bag of flyers and handed the majority of them over to Sidney. “Any other place you want me to post one of these?”

“There’s also a sort of town bulletin board at the artist co-op at the end of Main Street,” she replied. “It’s right across from the library, so it’ll be easy enough for you to put one there, too.”

That seemed to be that. Even though he knew asking the question would sound far too obvious, he also didn’t want this to be their only meeting today, not when he still had no clear idea as to how long he planned to stay in Silver Hollow.

“Okay,” he said, then allowed himself a mental breath. “Do you want to meet up tonight after work to talk about how everything went?”

For the longest moment, she only gazed back at him, her expression unreadable. Ben did his best not to let any hope show in his face, nothing except mild interest in comparing notes and seeing what reactions — if any — the people in town had to their new conservation campaign.

But then her full lips quirked just the slightest bit, and she said, “Sure. You can come over around six-thirty. Can we do pizza, though? If I keep feeding you my grandmother’s leftovers, I’m going to run out pretty fast.”

He thought she was teasing him, even though he didn’t know her well enough to say for sure. “I didn’t realize you had a pizza place here in Silver Hollow.”

“Of course we do,” she responded, now openly amused. “It’s not on Main Street, but what kind of self-respecting town would we be if we didn’t have pizza?”

A fair assessment, he supposed. “I’ll pick up the pizza. What would you like?”

For a second or two, she only looked at him, lips slightly parted as if she intended to say he didn’t have to go to all that trouble. However, she must have done the mental math and realized she’d fed him the night before, so it was only fair that he take care of things this evening.

Besides, by six-thirty, she would have been home already, and it seemed kind of silly to have her come back downtown to pick up a pizza when he could just grab it on his way to her house. Yesterday he’d walked because it had been a fine, mild day, and it wasn’t that far, but today he’d drive just to make sure the pizza arrived at her place piping hot.

A lift of her shoulders, and she said, “I like their all-meat version, but if that’s too heavy for you, I’m fine with pepperoni. Or even just veggie,” she added, now looking a little worried, as though she’d just paused to determine if her suggestions might be completely off base.

True, the one time they’d eaten together, they’d both had fish, so she probably had no idea whether he was a carnivore or a vegetarian who occasionally shook up his diet with a little seafood.

Luckily for her, he was just fine with a meat pizza.

“No, we can go for the caveman special,” he said with a grin, and she smiled back.

The bell attached to the door handle jingled, and another older woman came in, this one without a dog in her purse. Well, it was the time of day when most people would probably be at work, even if it was remote from a home office, so it made sense that the majority of Sidney’s customers right now would look as if they must be retired. Not for the first time, he wondered what the people in Silver Hollow who weren’t in the service industry did for a living.

Worked in Eureka, probably; the city wasn’t so far away that it wouldn’t be a manageable commute.

“See you at six-thirty, then,” Sidney told him, and he took the cue, tilting his head at her in acknowledgment before he headed outside.

Well, at least they’d made plans for dinner, and he had a task he needed to accomplish now, even though he doubted it would take him very long.

The bulletin board at the library was right inside the front door, so it was easy enough to tack up one of the flyers — this version featured the spotted owl — in a space where he guessed a poster advertising an event that had already passed must have hung. Once he was done with that, however, an idea struck him.

He hadn’t been able to find a whole lot online about Silver Hollow, but maybe that was because the town hadn’t bothered to digitize its older records. For all he knew, there could be all sorts of troves here that held information about the elusive silver horse…or possibly some clues as to why a mysterious person or persons had felt compelled to scratch a bunch of Ogham letters into an oak tree.

A woman who looked a little older than he, maybe in her mid-thirties, was working at the front desk directly opposite the bulletin board. She was scanning in a group of books that had just been returned, but looked up from her work and smiled at him as he approached.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” he said. “Do you have a collection of vintage Silver Hollow newspapers here? I didn’t find anything online, but….”

He let the words trail off, mostly because he wasn’t sure how to explain that he was looking for any evidence that something supernatural might have been occurring in the woods outside town.

At once, the clerk shook her head. She had light brown hair cut in a bob that brushed her collarbones, and tortoiseshell glasses warmed her soft brown eyes. If she was auditioning for a role as the librarian, Ben thought she was already off to a good start.

“No, all those materials are in the archives at City Hall,” she told him. “In the basement,” she added helpfully. “Someone at the front desk can show you.”

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