Page 19 of Lion's Share
“Well, just let me know if you need me to put up any campaign posters in the shop windows,” I said, and she grinned.
“I’m not even sure if that’s going to be necessary, considering it sounds like I’ll be running unopposed. But I’ll let you know.”
She waved then and headed out, and the bell on the door tinkled faintly as it closed behind her.
Still, her visit had cheered me up. Mayor Tillman would soon be a thing of the past, and in a few hours, I’d be seeing Ben again. Not for anything romantic, of course, just an expedition to the forest to see if we could find anything that hadn’t turned up on the trail cams, but still, it would be good to spend a few hours together.
And we hadn’t had a single glitch in the town’s electricity today. Maybe that meant things were stabilizing, for whatever reason.
Fingers crossed.
Ben and I actually went out to eat that evening, this time at Molly’s Corner, which was casual enough, with its wood-paneled walls and macramé relics from the 1970s, that we didn’t have to worry about our hiking boots and jeans. Although we attracted a few curious glances, it seemed the town’s residents had mostly accepted our relationship…whatever it was…as an established fact and had moved on to more interesting topics of discussion.
“Have you heard anything from Marjorie?” I asked, figuring that was probably a safe enough subject to discuss. She would have been out and about and seen by enough people in town that it wasn’t as if she was a total secret.
He nodded, then set down his French dip. Once again, we weren’t drinking anything stronger than iced tea, since we knew we’d be tromping around in the forest soon enough.
“She said the readings were different from yesterday, practically flat.”
I let myself smile just a little. “Well, I could have told her that. Not a single light flicker or a glitch in my cell service.”
Ben didn’t look as pleased by that information as I’d thought he would. “Same here.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
He shrugged as he reached for a French fry. “I’d like to think so. But you know what they say about things being too quiet.”
Yes, I did, and unease stirred in my midsection, even as I told it to settle down, that this could be a good thing. “Maybe we’ve just been experiencing a natural series of fluctuations, and now we’re heading back into calmer waters.”
Ben’s expression was noncommittal, to say the least. “That would be good.”
I could tell he wasn’t buying it, and so for the rest of the meal, we stuck to much safer topics, like Eliza getting the necessary signatures to recall the mayor and set up another election.
“We’ll have to wait until the end of July at the earliest for that to happen,” I remarked. “But still, it’s nice to know that we’re getting close to the end of dear Mayor Tillman’s reign.”
“That is a good thing,” Ben agreed. “And although we sure haven’t seen any sign of Northwest Pacific coming back to finish the job, I know I’ll feel better once he’s out of power and doesn’t have nearly the opportunity to do more damage.”
“Same here,” I said. I was quiet for a moment as I dipped a fry in some ketchup, then added, “Although he has to know that everyone’s keeping an eye out for any skullduggery. Exactly what does he think he could even get away with?”
“Hard to say.” A few seconds passed as Ben swirled the straw in his glass of iced tea, his expression thoughtful. “With a guy like that, it’s probably better to expect the worst.”
Yes, as my mother’s favorite Maya Angelou quote went, when a person shows you who they are the first time, believe them.
And Jim Tillman had definitely shown us that he couldn’t be trusted.
I made a noncommittal sound, and soon afterward, we got up from our table to pay our bill at the counter near the entrance, where you could also get cookies and slices of pie to go. Just as Teri, the woman working the cash register…someone who’d babysat me sometimes when I was a little kid…handed me the receipt, the lights overhead flickered.
She shot an annoyed glance upward. “I was kind of hoping we were done with all this nonsense.”
So was I, went through my mind, but I just nodded. “It is kind of frustrating. I’m just glad that so far it hasn’t glitched when I was right in the middle of a transaction.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Happened to me twice last week. Good thing we’re still able to do things the old-fashioned way if we have to.”
And she reached under the counter and pulled out an old mechanical credit card reader, one that was identical to the reader I kept at the pet store. It was a relic of the time before my mother finally caved and got a real electronic credit card processor, but I knew I’d had several occasions over the past couple of weeks when I’d wondered if I would have to press it into service once again.
“Well, here’s hoping this was the last time,” I said as I took the paper receipt from her and signed my name on the designated line.
Teri raised a penciled eyebrow, telling me she was none too sanguine about that possibility.
