Page 13 of The Girl on Hallow's Eve

“Nope. Absolutely not going to happen,” I reply. “I’m sure they have some sort of age limit. They are not going to want some middle-aged woman plopping down on Santa’s lap among the toddlers.”

“First, you’re not middle-aged. Second, there is no age limit on Christmas.”

I laugh and shake my head. I’m going to keep hearing about this until Christmas is over.

“What did you think about that argument?” I ask.

“I was wondering when you were going to bring that up,” Sam says, sounding somewhat less enthused than he did talking about the possibility of getting me on Santa’s lap.

He skips the turn that would bring us to our neighborhood and instead heads for Main Street.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Pearl’s,” he says. “I’m hungry.”

The diversion to the diner is as much for us to talk through the odd, whispered shouting match we’d overheard as it is to fill his belly with his favorite open-face pot roast sandwich and get me a plate of my favorite biscuits and gravy. We know each other well.

With cups of steaming coffee in front of us and the kitchen already busy with our order, Sam gestures with one hand across the table like he’s giving me the floor.

“What?” I ask.

“Go ahead. Let me know what you’re thinking,” he says.

I want to have some kind of witty response to go with that, but I don’t. The gears in my brain are turning too much for me to come up with anything. Instead, I take a deep swig of the dark, bordering on bitter coffee to steel myself, and dive in.

“There was clearly something intense going on there,” I start. “And it’s not too big of a leap to figure out it probably had to do with the protests about the mall.”

“The first guy talking, I’m assuming it was Mr. Rainey, did say he had told the other guy not to get in their way, or something like that,” he points out.

I nod. “We obviously didn’t hear him talk after he came out from the back, but I don’t think there’s any question that it was Mr. Rainey. He looked furious when he came out of that hallway, and when I saw him again right before we left, he was smiling, but it was all for show. He was definitely still angry about what went down in that storage area. He was just keeping up the super professional facade so that there isn’t any more negative press about the mall. But I’m pretty sure anyone who looked into his eyes would be able to see he wasn’t in the mood to welcome people and deal with their nonsense questions and commentary.”

“I did hear a lot of people in other tour groups interjecting little comments and things while their guides were showing them around,” Sam says. “Like they thought it was going to make a difference to the guide, or that the higher-ups were going to take notes and make changes before opening.”

It skirts a bit close to the conversation we’d had a few days ago and I decide to gloss over it and move on.

“The question is, who he was talking to,” I wonder. “Because I don’t think it was just one of the farmers.”

“Why not?” Sam asks.

“You heard Marissa. The area beyond the gray doors is off-limits to guests. It’s storage for the shops and a place set aside for the convenience of the staff as well as the guests.” I’m trying to affect my best brochure voice, but I don’t hold a candle to Marissa. “Which is probably at least in part code for it’s a place for the employees of the stores to go complain about the customers who annoy them and smoke without anyone seeing them. They wouldn’t want to say that. It would take away the mystique.”

Sam chuckles. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of gray metal doors referred to as having anything to do with mystique.”

“That’s why you married me. My whimsy,” I say.

My husband stares across the table at me with a somewhat torn expression on his face, like he can’t tell if my self-awareness has just diminished to the degree that I’d say that in all seriousness.

“Yes,” he says flatly. “A whimsical fairy just flitting about catching moonbeams and riding dragonflies. Which means you would probably be very comfortable in the tunnels.”

Sarah, our waitress, appears at the side of the table with our food and jumps slightly when I make a loud sound of realization as if I’m screaming against my pursed lips.

“Sorry,” I tell her. “Just excited about my biscuits and gravy.”

Sarah nods, her expression slightly bewildered but not as much as most people in her current position would be.

“I know it’s your favorite,” she says with a bit of bubbly, cheerful perk as she walks away.

Sam is already hunched over his sandwich, using the side of his fork to try to scoop more brown gravy up over the rest of the sandwich.

---