"Okay. Okay, let's all calm down and talk about this," I said, feeling guilty that I hadn't yet done more to figure things out. I probably should have closed the shop for the day, but I'd seen all those people waiting and automatically gone into business-owner mode. Jeremiah had always impressed upon me the principles of hard work and customer service, and I had bills to pay. The festival weekend traffic was important to my little shop. As much as I wished I could blithely say to heck with it all and run around helping to solve fifty-year-old murders, I had a responsibility to keep my business running.
But even hardworking business owners deserved lunch breaks. "Let me get my phone and we'll make some calls."
"In the excitement earlier, I didn't have time to tell you I talked to Beau last night," Jack said.
Eleanor gasped. "Beau? Why Beau?"
I narrowed my eyes at the sharpness in her voice. "Why shouldn't Jack talk to Beau?"
"All this was Beau's fault in the first place! Why would he tell us he ran Earl out of town, if his body was in the swamp all these years?"
Before I could respond tothatshocker, somebody started pounding on my front door.
"Doesn't theclosedsign mean anything anymore?" I headed for the front, ready to give somebody a piece of my mind, and saw my best friend Molly's beautiful face peering in through the glass.
"Molly! I'm coming!" I ran over to open the door. "I'm so glad to see you—"
"Forget that," she said, clutching pizza boxes to her chest and shoving past me. "Quick, lock it!"
"What? Why?" I turned to look, but before I could move another woman—short, blond, and frizzy-haired—was pushing her way inside.
"I found you! I found you!" the newcomer shrieked, lunging at my friend.
Molly ducked away from her grasp and dashed over to hide behind me.
"Stop," I shouted, pointing at the woman. "Molly, what is going on?"
Behind me, Molly leaned her head on my shoulder and sighed. "Tess, this is Evie. She's—"
"I'm her number-one fan!" Evie blurted out, flashing a demented grin.
"—a groupie."
4
"Iprefer 'motivated follower' to groupie," Evie said haughtily, still trying to dodge around me to get to Molly.
"Stop," I finally growled at her. "This is not Molly fan time. And I'm closed for lunch. You'll have to come back later."
Evie blinked her watery gray-blue eyes. "But I have anitem.Topawn." She stopped jumping around and dug in her oversized tote bag, which had the name of Molly's band, Scarlett's Letters, emblazoned on it in bright red.
"You have merch now?" I grinned at Molly over my shoulder. "Getting up in the big time."
She sighed, backing away. "No. Well, we're working on it, butthat'sall Evie."
Evie squealed. "Yes! Did you see my shirt?" She yanked her sweater open and proudly displayed a T-shirt with Molly's face on it—at about three times actual size—in an improbable shade of lime green.
"That's… quite a shirt," I said sincerely. "But you have to go, now, Evie. We're—"
"Here it is!" She pulled a wooden box out of her tote bag and brandished it at me. "This music box! I want to pawn it. Or sell it. I've wanted to meet the famous Tess Callahan forever!"
"I—what?"
The famous Tess Callahan?
Realization had me closing my eyes. I'd been famous—moreinfamous—for a while after the first time my 'gift' had manifested. I'd been a teenager alone in the shop when I'd shaken a woman's hand and seen how she would die. It had been horrible and violent—both the death I'd seen and the effect of the vision itself on me. I'd gone into convulsions and would have died myself if the customer who walked in a few minutes later hadn't been an EMT. The woman I'd had the vision about had freaked out and run away, but we'd later learned that shehadactually died shortly thereafter—and exactly how I'd predicted.
Anyway, CNN had gotten hold of the story, and a bunch of crappy tabloids made a big deal about it, and I'd been a nine-day wonder. People in Dead End hadnotbeen happy, because a lot of the people who lived here, especially the supernaturals, had chosen our small town specifically to stay under the radar.
