Page 24 of Lion's Share
Of course it wasn’t…for her. This was just another case of the residents of Silver Hollow sticking together. As far as she knew, there hadn’t been anything criminal or supernatural about Victor Maplehurst’s death. It was just another commonplace tragedy, the sort of bolt out of the blue that could strike a person anywhere or anytime.
I knew better, though. There had been absolutely nothing natural about the man’s death…and I had to make sure the FBI never learned the truth about what had really happened to him.
Even before the kiss, Ben and I had made plans for him to come over for dinner that Friday night. A real dinner, too, not just takeout or leftovers from the stash my grandmother had left behind in the freezer. Chicken paprikash from a recipe I’d gotten from my mother, and rice and salad and red velvet cake for dessert.
All right, I didn’t make the cake, had instead picked it up from the bakery on my way home from work, but still, that was a lot more cooking than I usually did.
In a way, I was glad of the work, glad I could find something to distract myself. During the process of making the food, the electricity glitched again, long enough that I started to wonder if it was going to come back on at all, but luckily, the oven was gas, and that part of the process didn’t get interrupted.
Just as I was about to grab my phone and check the Pacific Gas & Electric outage map — Silver Hollow had its own municipal system but connected to PG&E’s grid — everything came back on, the oven clock blinking again.
Right then, I wondered if I should bother resetting it. However, habit wore out, even as I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what this more extended outage meant. I still couldn’t help thinking it had something to do with the Ogham symbols we’d seen in the forest, although I didn’t think I could have cogently explained why.
Like everything else that had been going on around here, a lot of this didn’t seem to make much sense at all.
Hopefully, Ben would be able to shed some light on the situation. We hadn’t talked much today, mostly because he’d driven into Eureka to run some errands and make use of the much larger public library there. Although I’d thought he should be able to do most of his research online, he’d only told me there were still some things it was better to investigate in person.
But he’d be at the house in a few minutes, and I knew I had to content myself with that. Funny how I found myself craving his presence after only a couple of kisses.
Actually, scratch that. I’d already wanted to be around him as much as possible, although I’d managed to convince myself that was mostly because he was the only person in my life who knew the entirety of what was going on in Silver Hollow, the only one I could really talk to about all this stuff.
I knew it was much more than that, however.
Ben knocked at the door just as I was pulling the casserole dish of paprikash out of the oven. I set it down on the stovetop and hurried over to let him in.
“Did you get that last one?” he asked without bothering with a greeting, although he did bend down to press a kiss against my cheek.
“The outage?” I replied, and he nodded.
“I think that was the worst yet.”
“I got that impression, too,” I said. “But we can talk about that in a minute. Could you open the wine while I bring in the food? The bottle’s already on the table.”
“Sure.”
He headed into the dining room while I went to the kitchen to fetch the paprikash and then the salad and rice and the basket of dinner rolls, also a purchase from the bakery.
“This looks amazing,” Ben said as he pulled the cork from the wine, a Hungarian Bull’s Blood that I’d gotten from the BevMo in Eureka. “When did you have the time to put all this together?”
“It wasn’t as hard as it looks,” I told him, then sat down in my chair. “But I figured it was Friday night, so what the heck.”
He smiled, then poured wine into my glass and into his before he took a seat at the head of the table. “Then let’s drink to Friday night paprikash.”
We clinked glasses and each had a sip. The wine was wonderful, dark and rich, bold enough to stand up to the heavily paprika-laden dish. A minute or so went by as we helped ourselves to the various goodies and had a few bites.
But then Ben set down his fork and sent me a serious look. “This latest outage…it’s not good.”
“I kind of figured that,” I replied. “What do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I talked to Marjorie today and she said the energy fluctuations still seemed erratic, but obviously, none of them was big enough to cause any real trouble.”
“Until six o’clock tonight.”
“Right.”
Expression still sober, he cut off a piece of chicken and put it in his mouth. Clearly, while he might have been worried about all the various weirdnesses happening in and around Silver Hollow, they weren’t enough to prevent him from enjoying his meal.
“Did you know there are federal agents here asking about Victor Maplehurst?” I said abruptly, and Ben set down his fork.
