Chapter Six
Bertie,our town’s one and only Valkyrie, gave me a hard look followed by a fake smile that showed how white and sharp her teeth were, even though she appeared to be at least in her eighties and should, by all rights, be wearingdentures.
“You called?” Iasked.
“I did. Have a seat,Jean.”
Bertie pretty much ran the community center of Ordinary from this pleasant refurbished brick school building which also offered space for local artists. She single-handedly managed to pull off all of Ordinary’s festivals, including the Rhubarb Rally, the Cake and Skate, something that involved knitters smothering Main Street in weird socks and ugly tree sweaters, and currently, the Haunted Harbor and HarvestFestival.
Basically, the streets along the bay were transformed into all-Halloween, all-the-time. Decorations ranged from homemade and quaint, to the level of Hollywood set designers, including an entire block that was nothing but haunted houses, each with a specifictheme.
It was a huge thing for a little town to pull off, and it ran for the last two weeks of October. We were almost at the end of the month and so far, so good. Which wasn’t a surprise. If anyone could not only make this festival go, but also make it grow, it wasBertie.
Because no one said no toBertie.
“It has come to my attention that you are the contact for our autumnanimated.”
I blinked. “Is that a new filmfestival?”
She tapped her painted gold nails on the top of her desk. She had gone all out with her holiday decorations and I totally approved. There was a vulture in each corner of the ceiling, all peering down so that their hard gazes came to rest right where I wassitting.
Her desk was draped in a beautiful orange shawl of some kind. Intricate and obviously handmade lacework teased out knots of spiders, swirls of tentacles, and the detailed spread of owl feathers over the curl of ocean waves and crescentmoons.
“Gorgeous,” I said, pointing my Tootsie Pop toward her desk. I’d pretty much been eating a steady diet of Halloween candy for the last three weeks. Halloween was officially only two daysaway.
No, I hadn’t figured out how to get the gnomes to elect a new leader, even with Myra’shelp.
Also no, they hadn’t remembered they were leader-less long enough for it to be much of a problem. Like I said, short attention spans sometimes worked to ouradvantage.
“Thank you. It was agift.”
Was that a blush? Did Bertie have someone who was sweet on her? I grinned. “What a nice gift. Why it must have taken days and days to make. Someone must like you an awful lot, Bertie, to give you something sopretty.”
She pressed her lips into a line and her eyebrows arched. “We are not here to discuss my...friendships.”
Yes, I’d caught that slight hesitation. “You’reblushing.”
She pulled herself up straighter, which still didn’t make her taller than me, and blinked rapidly like a startledbird.
I just grinned. The last time I’d seen Bertie flustered was...never. Like, seriously, she was the calmest, coolest cucumber in the whole crisper drawer. This was so great, I wanted to pull out my phone and take a picture forposterity.
But I didn’t. Because I’m a professional, thankyou.
Professional or not, I couldn’t keep my gleeful chuckle inside. “You don’t have to look so shocked,” I said. “It’s okay if you have a friend that likes-you likes-you.”
She sniffed and just like that her blush disappeared. Flustered Bertie was replaced by the all-business, no-messing-around, community coordinator and battlefield soul-plucker I knew andloved.
“This is what I called you for.” She placed a square brown box big enough to hold a coffee mug between us, closer to me than to her. It had a shipping label, but there was no return address. Bertie’s office address was written by hand, large and clumsily, as if the author were writing with a blindfoldon.
The address trailed off the front of the box, wrapped around the side, and appeared to come up the other side as well. I didn’t think the post office would deliver a package addressed likethat.
Maybe it hadn’t gone through the postoffice.
A bad feeling crawled down my spine and curled up in my stomach. My gift kind of bad feeling. It wasn’t a big one, wasn’t a full-out doom twinge, but the sense of dread was big enough to make me take this box veryseriously.
“I’m not opening that until you tell me what’s init.”
Bertie must have sensed the shift in my mood. She couldn’t read my mind, but if she could, she’d know I was wondering if I needed to call in back up. Or a bombsquad.
