by Laura Kirwan
“Oh, nice one, Meg,” she muttered as she followed him.
“Hey, John,” she heard Russ call. “How’s business?”
John looked up from his money counting, saw Russ, shoved the bills into the pocket of his worn jeans, and smiled. He saw Meaghan a moment later. His face turned red and he stared back down at the table.
Russ walked up, hand out. John shook it, still looking down.
“The last batch you dropped by was awesome,” Russ said. “How are the bees doing?”
John shrugged. “They seem happy. I added more hives. In the lower clearing.”
“You met Meaghan, I hear,” Russ said, throwing her another frosty look.
“I did,” John said.
Standing near him, seeing him up close, Meaghan felt a rush of shame for her glib remarks. She could see faint scars around his wrists and on his forearms. A big man, he did all he could to appear small. He carried himself cautiously, with a slight crouch, arms held close to his sides, ready to flee or curl into a protective ball at the slightest sign of trouble. He reminded her of the abused dogs a friend in Phoenix used to foster, the fight beaten out of them, expecting every human touch to hurt.
“Well,” Russ said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “I guess we’ll be moving along.” He grabbed Meaghan’s arm and tugged her away from the table. “Good to see you, John.”
“Did you meet my son?” John asked. Meaghan turned. John was staring at her, a hungry look on his face.
“I did. A few days ago,” Meaghan said, forcing herself to look in his eyes. Trying to be tough and smug with John about being a drunk would be like kicking a frightened puppy, Meaghan thought. Goddammit. It would be a lot easier to smother her attraction if she could feel scorn for him. But up close, it was impossible.
“Is he well? Is he happy?”
“Yes,” she said. “He seems to be.”
“And you met his family, the babies?”
Again she saw the hunger in his eyes. You do not need a man to save, she told herself. Don’t go there. “Only saw pictures.”
“I see them around town sometimes, but they don’t know me.” He returned his gaze to the table. “It’s better this way, I think. For them.”
Meaghan felt the tears begin to build. They were always close by since she’d arrived in Eldrich. She clenched her hand and dug her fingernails into her palm, forcing them back down. She had no idea how to reply to him.
Russ jumped in. “Jamie took Dad fishing. We’ll see him later. I’ll tell him we saw you.”
John shook his head. “Don’t. It only upsets him.” He tried to change the subject. “Your father, he is well?”
Russ shrugged. “As well as can be expected. I’m sure Dad would be thrilled to see you if you want to drop by. Think about it, okay?”
John nodded. A knot of people stopped in front of the table and began asking him questions about the honey.
Russ pulled Meaghan away. “Yeah, he should simply tell himself no and then he’d be all better.”
“Russ, I . . . I’m sorry. I let my mouth get out in front of my brain back there.”
“I forgive you, Meg, but I don’t understand you,” he said. “When did you get so hard?”
She had no answer for that. “He really doesn’t know his grandkids?”
Russ shook his head. “And Jamie would go ballistic if John tried to make contact. When they got here, John was . . . well, he was in no shape to raise Jamie, so he let Dad step in. Jamie doesn’t want anything to do with him now. Sound familiar?”
Meaghan stopped walking and let the crowd flow around her. She could no longer keep her tears at bay. “My coffee’s cold and I barely drank any,” she said in a small voice. “Can we go home now?”
He handed her the car keys. “I’ve got a couple more stops here and then the co-op. If you aren’t in the car, I’ll look for you in the coffee shop.” He relented a bit. “I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. Guess I’ve gotten a little hard too.” He pulled a bandana out of his pocket and handed it to her. “It’s clean. Blow your nose and I’ll see you in few minutes.” He took a few steps away, but turned before melting into the growing crowd. “Sally—the one with all the tattoos—will be happy to warm that coffee up if you ask nice.”
Meaghan nodded, and then he was gone.
Chapter 10
Monday, Meaghan’s first day on the new job, dawned cool and rainy. Jamie had assured her that the dress code in City Hall was casual, but she put on the black power suit anyway. After a moment’s hesitation, she opted for the trousers instead of the skirt. She’d never make it all day in heels with her still tender big toe, so trousers it was.
Meaghan checked herself in the mirror. She looked good for fifty. She had taken care of her skin, protecting it from the Arizona sun, and her silver hair made her face look younger in comparison rather than aging her. She was a swimmer since childhood, an avid hiker, and remained strong and fit.
Too many angles to her face and the hawk-like brow she’d inherited from her father prevented Meaghan from being pretty in the conventional sense. But she was striking, she knew that. A Victorian novelist would have termed her a “handsome woman.”
Her face had been rounder when she was young. Aging had carved out cheekbones that fit better with her heavy brow. She really did look better now than when she was younger. Too bad, she thought, that modern culture only values twenty-five-year-olds.
“All right, Miss America,” she said to her reflection. “Good enough.”
Russ had a simple breakfast waiting and had packed her a lunch. “I’m sure they’ll take you out, but in case they don’t, here you go.” He handed her a tiny soft-sided cooler.
She peeked inside. Sandwich, apple, green salad, and some cookies. Good old Russ. “Thanks, Mommy,” she said.
Russ made a face and pointed at the door. “Go and lawyer, smart ass.”
She’d seen city hall, which sat on the block north of the town square, on her trip to the farmers’ market but hadn’t taken a close look.
City hall rose three stories with a clock tower rising an additional two stories above the roofline. A stone layer cake of a building, city hall looked like a Gothic castle. Gargoyles sprang from the roof and ornate carvings covered the stone walls. Around it lay another lush green square, with huge old trees, a fountain, and iron benches.
Meaghan found her assigned parking space in the small circular drive that led up to the building. Most city employees parked in a lot across the street, but as city solicitor Meaghan got to park up close, along with the mayor, the council members, and a handful of high-ranking staff.
For a city as tiny as Eldrich, Meaghan thought, walking in the main door, it was a bit much. The architectural excess continued inside. A reception desk sat in the corner of a large vaulted lobby. An elderly security guard greeted her with a beaming smile.
“I know who you are,” he quavered. “You have your dad’s eyes. How is Mr. Keele doing these days?”
Meaghan wasn’t surprised he recognized her. She doubted more than a handful of unfamiliar people walked by his checkpoint each day. “Well, he has good days and bad days. You know how it is.” She held out her hand across the desk. “I’m Meaghan.”
“Oh, where are my manners?” He shuffled from behind the desk towards her. “Rainy days are hard on the knees.” He took her outstretched hand and shook it warmly. “Moyer. Meb Moyer, Miss Keele. Call me Meb.”
“Only if you call me Meaghan.” He was, she realized, more akin to a Walmart greeter than a security guard. “Good to meet you, Meb. Can you point me towards the solicitor’s office?”
He showed her the elevator and told her to go the third floor. She told him she’d rather take the stairs. With a nervous grin, he told her the tiled stairs were slick and wet shoes made it worse and with the ceilings so high it was really more like climbing five stories than three. He gestured again toward the elevator.
It was like Russ and the drive through the woods. “Do people walk up th
e stairs and disappear never to be heard from again?” she asked, before she could stop herself.
Now poor Meb looked panicky. And miserable, like he wanted to tell her something he knew he couldn’t.
She let him off the hook. “I’m kidding.” She smiled at him. “I’m sorry. You reminded me of how nervous my brother was the first time I drove up from the interstate.”
Meb relaxed. “Why climb the stairs when you don’t have to?”
“Why indeed,” Meaghan answered. “You have a good day, Meb.” She walked to the open elevator and stepped in. She felt an odd prickle on the back of her neck. She knew she was being silly, but it felt like people were trying to keep a big secret. She thought of her dream and her mother’s cryptic warning to trust her gut. She shivered.
Enough, she thought, disgusted with herself. She’d worked before in organizations poisoned by the dysfunctional antics of a few difficult personalities and she knew what was going on. Matthew had, no doubt, crossed swords with some half-baked martinet or queen bee. Everyone was waiting for the fireworks to being anew now that Meaghan had arrived. What they were hiding from her was the common knowledge that her new job was going to be a monumental pain in the ass.
Chapter 11
With a jerk, the elevator car stopped and the door slid open on the third floor.
Like many old buildings, city hall was rumored to be haunted, with the third floor at the center of most of the stories. Meaghan didn’t care. She’d known people over the years who had experienced unexplainable things. She hadn’t. Whether that had more to do with them or with her, she wasn’t sure. Meaghan would worry about ghosts if and when she saw one. And if she was right about the fireworks to come, at least a few of the living people in the building were scarier than the dead ones.
Haunted or not, city hall was a beautiful old building, rich in detail and character, unlike the ugly sealed brick-and-glass boxes she’d worked in before. The windows even opened. Encounters with the supernatural seemed a small price to pay for fresh air.
A few steps from the elevator, a glass-and-wood door marked “City Solicitor” in ornate gold script stood open. Meaghan walked into an open reception area containing two desks. A young woman sat behind one of them. The nameplate identified her as Kady Cressley. The nameplate on the other desk read “Natalie Segretti.”
Kady gave Meaghan a glowing smile and jumped to her feet. “Ms. Keele?”
Meaghan smiled back. “That’s me. And it’s Meaghan, okay?”
“Got it.” Kady walked around the desk. “I’m Kady.” She wore jeans and a plaid hoodie. “We are so happy you’re here. Especially Jamie. I don’t think he wants to be the big boss anymore.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling. He was way too eager to bring me stuff when I hurt my foot.”
Kady tried to muffle a laugh. “Oh, he’s so ready not to be in charge. Let me take you to your office. Natalie’s around here somewhere. She’s the office manager.”
A four-person office needed a manager? Meaghan wondered if Natalie could be the queen bee she suspected lurked somewhere in the building. But that wasn’t the feeling she got from the way Russ and Jamie spoke about Natalie. They seemed to like her quite a bit.
Kady led Meaghan down a short hallway and gestured at the open doorway. “Here’s your office. Not as big as the downstairs offices but a lot more fun.” She giggled. “At least I think so.”
Meaghan walked through the doorway and her mouth dropped open. The small office was round. Meaghan realized she was in one of the turrets. Light streamed in from three directions through six windows, tall and narrow to compensate for the curve of the walls. Even with the gray rain clouds hanging in the sky, the office was filled with natural light. Meaghan couldn’t wait to see how it looked on a sunny day.
“Do those windows open?” Meaghan asked.
“They sure do,” Kady said with obvious pride.
“Wow. I’ve never had office windows that open before.” Meaghan laughed, delighted with the space. “I’ve never had a round office either.”
“Not big.”
“Who cares,” Meaghan said. “It’s round.”
Meaghan had never fallen in love with a room before. The space felt right. It felt good.
It felt like home.
She shook her head, chalking up the rush of feeling to the general weirdness that seemed to be swirling all around her. It was stress-induced, she was sure, manufactured by the too-rapid transition from the life she’d long known, a bad case of nerves caused by being abruptly dumped into a whole new life.
Kady giggled some more. “I know, right? That’s what I thought the first time I saw it. A bitch to furnish, though.” She stopped and looked at Meaghan, waiting for a reaction. “Sorry.”
Meaghan raised an eyebrow. “You know, I’ve heard that word before. Even used it a few times. Sometimes I use much worse words.”
Kady relaxed and her smile returned. “That makes things easier. Natalie and I both swear like dock workers. Drives poor Jamie nuts.”
Meaghan dropped her purse and umbrella behind the desk and Kady took her on a tour of the rest of the small office suite. They crossed the hall to the small copy room and smaller file room. According to Kady, the door at the back of the file room led into a larger storage area carved out of the unfinished attic. It was always kept locked, more for the safety of people who might enter than to protect anything inside. The storage area was only partially finished and surrounded by unreinforced floors and exposed stone walls. One wrong step and you’d find yourself dropping in, literally, on the mayor, whose second floor office sat below.
Natalie, Kady told her, kept the attic key. They found her in Jamie’s office, which sat next to Meaghan’s.
Natalie sat in Jamie’s desk chair, staring at his computer with a scowl. She muttered under her breath, reached down, and whacked the computer tower with her hand. “Work already, you evil piece of shit.”
Kady cleared her throat. Natalie turned to look at Kady and Meaghan standing in the doorway and smiled. She was in her early thirties, with wild auburn hair, curled in ringlets, and the greenest eyes Meaghan had ever seen.
Natalie hopped to her feet and came around the desk with her hand out. She was tall and curvy, like an ancient fertility goddess. Renaissance artists would have killed for the chance to paint her. “Hey, boss. Welcome aboard. Just knocking some sense into Jamie’s computer.”
Meaghan shook her offered hand. Natalie’s grip was firm and her hand so warm it felt like a heating pad. Jamie hadn’t been kidding about it being casual dress around here, Meaghan thought. Like Kady, Natalie wore jeans. She also wore a lavender T-shirt with “Humboldt Hydroponics” written in dark green Gothic script punctuated with a pot leaf, a spangly knit scarf around her neck, and black engineer boots.
Meaghan liked her right away. She never cared what her administrative staff wore, only that the work got done. Despite her wild hair and stoner T-shirt, Natalie exuded competence. According to Jamie, Natalie always got the job done, on time and with minimal drama.
“Kady give you the tour?” Natalie asked.
“Sure did.” Meaghan hesitated. What the hell was she doing here? At that moment, the realization of the enormity of the changes she’d undergone in the last few weeks, of how far she was from what she thought of as home, hit her like a fist. The room began to spin, gently at first, and then picked up speed, and now Kady and Natalie were easing her into a chair.
Meaghan, her eyes screwed shut, let the room come to a stop.
She felt Natalie’s warm hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”
Meaghan opened her eyes. “Yeah, better.” She took a few deep breaths to steady herself and then tried to make a joke. “And I’m not even in the round office. I may need hand rails in there.”
Natalie laughed, but it sounded forced and she looked concerned. She and Kady exchanged a meaningful glance. Again, Meaghan sensed an unspoken conversation.
“Seriously,” Meaghan said.
“I’m fine. Just got a little woozy for a sec.”
Natalie frowned. “Does that happen often?”
“No,” Meaghan said. “Not since high school choir. Don’t worry. I won’t be swooning all over the office. I’m fine.”
Natalie’s frown relaxed into a smile. “Has anyone ever told you you’re exactly like your father?”
Meaghan grinned back. “No. Not ever once in my whole life.”
“Yeah, right,” Natalie shot back. She turned to Kady. “Would you get Meaghan a cup of . . .” She turned back to Meaghan. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee,” Meaghan told her.
“On it,” Kady said, and headed down the hall.
“Okay, lady,” Natalie said. “Let’s get you into your office and see if the computer guy did his job.”
Meaghan rose with care, but the dizziness was gone. A small fountain of fear bubbled in the back of her mind. She was exactly like Matthew. What if she was getting his disease now too? Did Alzheimer’s have a genetic component?
The fear must have shown on her face. Natalie said, “I don’t know if you believe in any of the ghost stories, but you’re not the first person who’s gotten woozy in that office. Bob, the guy before you, always got the wobbles in there. If he had to talk to Jamie, he’d stand in the doorway but wouldn’t go in. Otherwise he’d end up on the floor.”
“You’re saying it’s ghosts?”
Natalie laughed. “Oh, hell. I don’t know. But Bob had a bunch of tests done, an EEG and some other stuff, and they never found anything wrong. And he didn’t have the problem anywhere else.”
“So I shouldn’t worry,” Meaghan said.
Natalie nodded. “Right. You shouldn’t worry.”
And for whatever reason, maybe Natalie’s kind, open face, Meaghan felt the cloud lift.
She felt better as soon as she entered her little round office. “I’m fine in here,” she told Natalie. “No ghosts?”
“Oh, God. I never should have said that. Now you think I’m some crazy crystal grabber.”
Meaghan laughed and plopped into one of the side chairs in front of her desk, gesturing to Natalie to take the desk chair. “I’m from Arizona, remember? There are as many people down there packing crystals as there are packing guns. Ever been to Sedona? Maybe it’s an energy vortex.”