Page 5 of The Aura Answer
Another of the suits, incongruously wearing cowboy boots, glared at the mayor in surprise, muttered imprecations, and marched out as if offended by the company. Nick gathered he wasn’t one of Larraine’s fans.
Roark gestured for the mayor to follow him upstairs, but she knew her own mind and began shaking hands with the few people who hadn’t departed, apologizing for thealtercationand checking to see if they were okay.
When she arrived at Nick, Larraine Ward met him nose to nose in her in four-inch heels. “Mr. Gladwell, so glad you’re stillwith us! I do hope none of your family was caught up in this unfortunate episode.”
Hisfamilywere all in a Charleston jail awaiting trial on murder, kidnapping, theft, and assorted other sacrileges. If they’d been inside, he’d have set fire to the courthouse himself.
“Jax and Rube are in there,” Roark answered for him. “Troy, two deputies, and a few more reporters.” He turned to Nick. “Evie and Mavis?”
“Marching uptown with a bevy of aunts and flame throwers. Shall we rescue reporters next or let them suffer?” Despite the press essentially being his bread and butter, Nick had no particular fondness for them.
“Dante and Priscilla!” Mayor Ward abruptly cried. “They aren’t marching with Evie, are they? I’m supposed to meet with them tomorrow about the restaurant.”
“They’re Christmas shopping in Charleston,” Nick reassured her, edging toward the door. “I’m a wee bit concerned about the flaming brooms though. If you’re all hunky-dory...”
“You go on. Reuben will have my head if anything happens to Miz Ward.” Roark gestured at two men now carrying their black robes. “Your honors, would you like to come upstairs with the mayor? Jax has a mini-bar.”
Nervous around officialdom, Nick preferred to wait outside. His phone rang, and he used that as an excuse to exit along with the other escapees who weren’t invited upstairs.
“The children!” Evie’s sister Gracie cried in his ear. “They’ve quit working on the parade floats for the day, and others are leaving play rehearsal, and Main Street is blocked. What on earth is going on?”
Nick had only a vague concept of where things were. He stepped into the street and glanced to his left, in the opposite direction of Evie’s house and the mob.
Far down the hill, children were dashing from a big brick building that was most likely the school.
Painted hordes of savages smashing glass, brandishing tire irons—and the student-decorated Christmas tree—swarmed the road through town.
Well, hell of a merry Christmas, peace-to-all example that set.
“Water cannon,” he remembered. “Don’t take Main. I’ll see what I can do from here.”
Terrified,idling her aging Kia off Main, Gracie checked on her six-year-old in the backseat. Aster seemed content to watch people running down the streets as if their pants were on fire. Thank heavens she was too young for after-school activities.
Things like this didn’t happen in sleepy Afterthought! That was the whole entire reason for living in this backwater where she knew everyone and felt safe.
Swallowing her fear, Gracie began calling people she knew near the school. After verifying a mob surrounded the courthouse and blocked Main, she formed a map in her head. Praying, she maneuvered back streets and lanes, trying to work around the courthouse area to reach the school.
She was supposed to be looking after Loretta, Jax and Evie’s eleven-year-old millionaire ward. Thunder, lightning, and swarms of locusts would probably rain on their heads for a thousand years if any harm came to their precocious Indigo child.
Gracie had to admit, Loretta was a very unusual child, even for a Malcolm.
“Mama, look, it’th Thanta Clawth,” Aster cried, straining at her car seat to watch out the backseat window. “It’s lots of Thanta Clawtheth! And Cwismas trees! And thnowmen!”
Aster’s missing front teeth produced an exercise in elocution.
Winding through the city parking lot that had once been the trailer park her mother lived in, Gracie halted before exiting into the road in front of the school. Afterthought was a rural town, the seat of a tiny county consisting of cotton fields and little else. The two-lane into town wasn’t big enough for two tractors side-by-side, but it had a gravel shoulder parents used for parking when picking up their kids.
Today, in the middle of that road, students gathered around a veritable wonderland of flashing Christmas lawn decorations. Unable to drive through the colorful barricade, cars stopped along the side of the road, spilling parents and children. Men in red Santa hats scrambled around the ornaments, stringing blinking lights they’d plugged into... Gracie strained to see, but a dozen cords ran in different directions, and she gave up.
Against the lowering clouds and late afternoon gloom, the colorful lights were probably a wise idea. If the sheriff didn’t have enough patrol cars to cordon off the mob-filled streets, this was a much jollier method.
She parked the car and helped Aster out. She wouldn’t be able to find Loretta from this distance, not with the crowd forming around... a cart manned by a jolly Pakistani elf in green hat, handing out candy.
“Don’t take candy from strangers,” she muttered under her breath as she looked both ways and plunged into the fray. Although she knew Mr. Patel owned the produce market nearby, he wasn’t exactly a real elf.
The younger children recognized her and shouted her name. She’d been a teacher for years and knew them all. She huggedone of her students and scoured the crowd for familiar—adult—faces.
Sirens wailed uptown. A boom box playing holiday music boomed louder. She recognized the band director standing on a folding chair and waving his baton to direct his caroling chorus.
