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I climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to see Claire.
Most nights it took me a while to fall asleep. As a result, I often overslept and had to race to work, hair still wet after I’d drunk a single cup of coffee in the shower.
This morning, dawn had just spilled over the horizon as I drove my dad’s faded red pickup down Center Street. A bread truck was parked outside the Good Eatin’ Cafe. The open sign sprang to life in the Center Perk as I went by. The coffee shop specialized in the fancy lattes and teas popular in big cities—over the summer we earned a good portion of our income off the tourists—but the Perk also sold good old-fashioned java in a go-cup to appease the locals, like me.
A moving van idled in front of what used to be a doll shop, until eighteen months ago when the owner died. The store had been empty ever since. I made a mental note to see who’d bought the place and then welcome him or her to the neighborhood.
Claire owned the largest house in Lake Bluff. Not that she’d planned to, but when her dad—the former mayor—had died, he’d left her not only the family homestead but also his job.
Claire had never wanted to be the mayor. She’d wanted to be a news anchor, and she’d run off to Atlanta to do it. There she’d discovered that the talent and brains that had made her hot shit in Lake Bluff only made her average, or less, in the big city. She’d wound up a producer instead, and she hadn’t liked it.
She did like being the mayor, and she was a good one. Much to her own, and pretty much everyone else’s, surprise.
I was just glad to have her back. Claire and I had been pals since our mothers had left. Hers to Heaven, mine to Lord only knew where. Our fathers had been friends, too—the mayor and the sheriff—and they’d thrown us together often, leaving one or another of my brothers in charge. Claire and I had survived. Then, as now, we’d depended on each other.
I parked in front of the white rambling two-story near the end of Center Street. Claire walked to work every day, as her father had before her. In a town of just under five thousand, nothing was very far aw
ay.
The door opened before I knocked.
“Who hit you?” Claire demanded. “And what did you say to make them?”
Her hands were clenched into fists, and she appeared ready to take on anyone who’d dared touch me. Not that she wouldn’t get her ass kicked. Claire was a girl in the true sense of the word—soft, round, with the fire red hair, moon-pale skin, and clear blue eyes of her Scotch-Irish ancestors.
“Why do you think I said something?”
“Because you always do?”
“Not this time. My face had an intimate encounter with an air bag.”
Her fingers unfurled. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. But the squad car doesn’t look half as good as I do.”
She lifted a brow. “Lucky we can afford another.”
Since Claire had taken over, the town treasury had done a complete about-face. Not only had our last Full Moon Festival been a huge success, despite the werewolves, but she’d also figured out a lot of other ways to bring tourists to town the whole year through, instead of only during that single week in August.
“There’s something I have to talk to you about.”
Claire waved me inside and headed for the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“God, yes.”
I glanced around for Oprah, the cat—named during Claire’s talk-show-host phase—before I remembered that she’d developed an instant adoration for the baby and rarely left his side.
Whenever Noah slept in his crib, Oprah lay beneath it. If he fell asleep anywhere in the house, she stayed right next to him, and if anyone came in the room, she set up a squalling that would wake the dead yet never seemed to wake the baby. Oprah was the next best thing to a watchdog Claire could find.
“Where are the guys?” I asked.
“Still sleeping, thank God.”
Claire had married Malachi Cartwright early last fall. Their son, Noah, had been born in May, which meant Claire was getting far too little sleep. Luckily, Mal took care of the baby during the day so she could take care of Lake Bluff.
Mal was an oddity here, and not just because he was a househusband. He had come to town with his band of traveling Gypsies to entertain at the festival. After a whole lot of spooky stuff had gone on, he’d stayed behind when the rest of his people left.
From the beginning a more unlikely pair could not be imagined—the mayor and the Gypsy horse trainer, the First Lady of Lake Bluff and the hired help. I could go on and on, making comparisons directly out of historical fiction. But the truth was, they’d been destined to meet, fated to fall in love, and they were the happiest couple I’d ever seen. I guess Claire had forgiven, if not forgotten, that Malachi had come here to kill her.
