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“Fuck. No!” Everett paced across his porch, then stopped directly in front of them once more. “That base is on our land. If they want to build there, they’d better pay me taxes!”
“You’ll need to show proof that you own that land. The government has the deed to the land and your name isn’t on it.”
Everett stared. He spat on the ground, directly in front of Tate’s shoe. Tate tightened his jaw as he stared at the older man.
Everett turned. “You have my orders.”
He stepped into his cabin, and they were roundly dismissed.
The two men who escorted them up the hill moved to either side of them and nodded toward the road down the mountain. “Let’s go.”
Chapter16
Lara stretched and prepared for another busy day at the bakery. Just before she left last night, the Bourbon Ball Committee Chair, Millie LeBeau, called and ordered twelve dozen cookies for the ball. She’d get a start on the cookies and freeze them until she had the time to decorate them next weekend. After showering and dressing, the lights in her house clicked off. She tried several switches; none of them worked.
She pressed her back to the wall of her bedroom and listened to any noise in the house. Her heart thumped so hard she felt her body move with each beat. Her breathing grew shallow, and her knees shook. Were they here? In her house?
After a few moments of quiet, she swallowed and slowly peeled herself from the wall. Sliding her feet lightly across the floor she listened intently for any movement or sound. Sliding the drawer on her night stand open, she removed her holster and buckled it on, then her pistol from inside and slid it into the holster. Feeling inside the drawer for her extra magazine, she gripped it tightly and pushed it into the loop on her holster. Taking a deep breath, she stepped from the relative safety of her bedroom and into the short hallway that led to her kitchen and living room. She had a second bathroom across the hall from the spare bedroom.
Gripping the phone tightly in her hand, she tapped the flashlight icon and lit the area in front of her. She scanned the kitchen as she entered the room. Nothing was amiss. No one was inside. Still unnerved, she moved into the living room, grateful she had an empty wall to push herself against.
Moving her flashlight back and forth and she let out a heavy breath when all seemed in place. She rested her head against the wall for a moment and willed her breathing to return to normal and her heartbeat to settle.
She pulled up the security camera on her phone to check the bakery but couldn’t get a visual, and the error message on the camera said it was ‘offline’. She grabbed her jacket from the hall closet, then stepped into the garage and tapped the opener on the wall before realizing it wasn’t going to open.
She glanced at her phone. It was close to three thirty in the morning and she had work to do. Rather than waking her father up, she pulled the ladder from the wall and opened it under the emergency pull to open her garage door manually.
She pulled the red handle and released the door opener from the door, then replaced her ladder. She lifted the door and pushed it open above her head, struggling slightly from the weight of it. She drove her vehicle out of the garage, stopped, closed the door, then jumped back in her vehicle to get to the bakery. If luck was on her side, she’d only be a couple of minutes late. Not that she answered to anyone. But, still.
The sun wouldn’t shine for a couple of hours, and the stars still shone in the sky. It was these moments right here that made her love Glen Hollow all over again. But this morning’s events so far reminded her there was a dark force running rampant through town these days and she needed to be vigilant.
As she neared the first of only two stoplights in Glen Hollow, she noted it was flashing yellow. That only happened when there’d been a power outage and the returning power had been disrupted.
She looked both ways, then moved ahead, but the little hairs at her nape prickled. She absently brushed the back of her neck with her hand and mentally noted to tell her father what happened here during the night when no one was on duty. Glancing often in her mirror, her shoulders tightened painfully.
As she drove down Main Street, she noted a few of the stores had flashing lights in their store windows and…what was that ahead?
She slowed her vehicle and squinted her eyes. Devine Designs’ inside lights blinked furiously in perfect rhythm.
The same thing was happening at Paxton’s grocery store and the gas station, and Hairy’s Beards, the barbershop in town. In Chestnut Grove, the town’s furniture store, and Bloomin Lovely, the flower shop all the lights were flashing too.
She shrugged and called her dad. His phone only rang twice, and he sounded tired when he answered.
“Dad. I’m sorry to wake you, but the power was out in town last night.”
The sound of sheets rustling and movement filled her ears as she waited for her dad to leave the bedroom so he didn’t wake her mom. She kept driving to the bakery, but the heavy feeling in her stomach grew each block closer she came to it.
“Okay, honey. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m two blocks from the bakery and every store’s lights are flashing. All of them. The stoplights are flashing yellow. The lights were off at my house too.”
“Okay honey. I’ll get in my squad car and look around. When you get to the bakery, just wait in your car and I’ll go in with you to make sure everything is alright in there.”
“You don’t think the BRR had anything to do with this do you?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. But if all the lights are flashing, and they’re watching, it may be a siren’s call for them to come down and cause trouble.”
“Oh, God. I’m so sick of this shit.”
