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“Every four minutes or so,” Pearl admitted. “Longer at night.”
“Compressor’s short-cycling. Probably the fan motor.” He didn’t look up. “I’ll come by after this. If it’s the motor it’s a forty-dollar part and I can get it from Frank.”
“Frank won’t sell it to you.”
“Then I’ll ask him to sell it to you and I’ll stand outside.”
Pearl’s eyebrows went up half an inch, which for Pearl is a standing ovation. She left the coffees and headed out. The stairwell door swung shut behind her, and neither of us rushed to fill the quiet.
“Your friend is observant,” Griffin said.
“My friend is a menace.”
“Walk Main Street with me,” he said. “We’ll start at Sweet Provisions so I can hear the walk-in before it eats four hundred dollars’ worth of butter. Then show me what you see when you look at these buildings.”
“You want me to hand you ammunition for your renovation plans?”
“I want you to hand me the part my research doesn’t have.” He moved toward the door, then paused. “You said I look at your building and calculate demolition value. So show me what you’re defending. Not the statistics. The real thing.”
He’d handed my own accusation back to me.
“Fine.” I locked the vendor binders in the filing cabinet and slipped my bag over my shoulder. “I’m doing this because Owen will ask what we accomplished, and I’d rather show progress than explain why we spent our first meeting arguing about sleigh rides.”
“Whatever motivation works.”
He held the door. I went through with my bag. I had agreed to show Griffin Cole the parts of Main Street his research had missed. I hadn’t considered how many of those stories were mine.
CHAPTER 4
GRIFFIN
We started at Sweet Provisions because four hundred dollars’ worth of butter outranked my walking tour. Pearl led us to the walk-in and folded her arms while we waited for the noise. The unit cleared its throat twenty seconds later. Her description had been disturbingly accurate.
I shut off the breaker, removed the vent panel, and spun the condenser fan by hand. The bearings dragged, then caught. “The fan motor is failing,” I said. “Frank should have the replacement. Keep this door closed, and don’t let the unit run unattended until I change it.”
Pearl checked the clock above the prep sink. “That took four minutes.”
“It was a loud four minutes.” We were back outside before Pearl remembered anything else in the bakery that needed fixing. In the first block, Nora stopped for a teenager hauling recycling, an elderly woman adjusting a display, and a delivery driver who knew her supplier, the week her shipment was late, and whether the glass had survived.
She never made any of them feel like an interruption. I noticed because I usually did.
“You’re making a list,” she said without turning around.
“I’m observing.”
“Same thing, for you.” She paused outside Callahan’s Books, its window showing winter novels arranged around a vintage typewriter and a foil star with one point taped back on. “This is Ivy’s place. She’s been here thirty-one years. Survived the Amazon apocalypse by specializing in rare editions and hosting the only book club that serves wine instead of that sparkling cider nonsense.”
“Annual revenue?”
“I have no idea. She doesn’t share numbers.” Nora’s tone suggested I’d asked an inappropriate question. “What I know is that she gave me my first paying job the day I arrived in Holly Creek with nothing but two suitcases and no idea what came next. She taught me how to run a register, how to talk to customers, how to pretend I wasn’t falling apart while I figured out who I wanted to be.”
She listed the facts without pausing, but her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag. I didn’t know what to say.
“What happened?” I asked, before I’d finished deciding whether asking was appropriate. “When you got here?”
“Nothing worth discussing.” She moved toward the bookshop door. “Come on. Ivy will want to meet you properly.”
The shop smelled like old paper and lavender, with narrow aisles packed floor to ceiling in a system only Ivy understood. Ivy Callahan, a woman in her sixties, looked up from behind a counter cluttered with reading glasses and handwritten notecards. “Nora. And the developer.” Ivy Callahan spoke each word slowly. “I wondered when you’d bring him around.”
