Chapter 1 #2
Just the briefest flash as I was standing at the kitchen sink and rinsing out my coffee mug, and yet I knew that blaze of pure white at the edge of the forest couldn’t have been anything else. I set down the mug and stared, but the unicorn had already disappeared.
I’d never seen him during the daytime hours before. Sometimes at the edge of dusk before true dark descended, but that was very different from the creature standing there in broad daylight before he vanished into the forest once again.
What did it mean?
I had no idea. If something was making the portal into this world unstable, then maybe that would explain why the unicorn had shown up now.
True, he — and his predecessors — seemed to have more mobility than the other legendary beasts that wandered in these woods, coming and going with far more regularity than only appearing during the dark of the moon when the portal opened, but I still couldn’t figure out why he would have taken the risk of showing himself during the daytime.
My house was located toward the edge of town and sat on a big plot of land, nearly three acres, and yet I had neighbors close enough that someone might have spied the unicorn if they happened to look out their windows at the exact right time.
But maybe all they would have thought they’d seen was a white horse.
After all, if the unicorn’s magic could make it seem as if Victor Maplehurst had died of a stroke rather than getting gored by a yard-long horn, then almost anything was possible, up to and including deploying some sort of protective camouflage to make sure no one spied the creature if he didn’t want them to see him.
I stuck my coffee mug in the dishwasher and dried my hands, then went upstairs to brush my teeth. Magical conundrums would have to wait for now.
It was time for me to get to work.
Tourist traffic had definitely picked up this summer.
I guessed it was partly because of the very visible campaign we were waging against Northwest Pacific; a lot of our visitors came here to hike or to birdwatch or simply soak up nature, so they weren’t exactly the types to be on the side of the big, bad logging company.
No, if they’d caught wind of what the outfit was trying to do to our small, historic town, then they might have decided Silver Hollow was a good place to spend their vacation dollars.
It couldn’t be people visiting because they were hoping to catch a glimpse of a unicorn. Ben knew how important it was to keep that secret between us, so he wouldn’t have said anything…even if spilling the beans would have meant hugely increased traffic to his cryptozoology-focused YouTube channel.
No, he’d been doing his best to get settled in, and also to see whether he could decipher anything more from the Ogham letters — an ancient Irish alphabet — that we’d found carved into some oak trees in a grove hidden deep within the forest. I knew he’d been communicating with a professor at UC Davis, Dr. Henry Ogilvy, but it didn’t seem as if they’d been able to figure out too much so far beyond the basics.
Whatever the reason for the increased foot traffic in Silver Hollow Feathers and Fur, the pet store my family had owned for more than fifty years, I was glad of it, if only because waiting on all those customers kept me busy and stopped me from brooding too much about what was going on in the forest…
or what might or might not be happening between Ben and me.
Eliza Cartwright stopped in around three-thirty, right after she would have closed up her eponymous café, which only served breakfast and lunch and therefore gave her a good chunk of the afternoon to do with as she wished.
Her daughter Bethany had started high school the year before and was on the cheer squad, so even over the summer, she tended to be busy right up until dinnertime, allowing her mother to be something of a free agent during those hours.
“Almost there,” Eliza said as she set her clipboard down on the counter.
She was tall and thin, with elegant bone structure and blonde hair in a pixie cut, and sort of looked like a runway model who’d decided to give up the high life so she could retire to a small town and make omelets.
“Just nine signatures to go, and then we’ll have the thousand we need to officially recall Tillman. ”
Considering that Silver Hollow’s entire population was only a little over two thousand people, that was a pretty impressive accomplishment. The charter was clear, though; at least half the town had to agree that the mayor needed to be recalled from office, or the whole thing would be a no-go.
“Everyone seems fairly united on this,” I replied. “I doubt you’ll have too much trouble getting those extra nine signatures.”
She grimaced. “You’d be surprised. Only eligible voters can weigh in, so they have to be over eighteen and they have to be legal to vote in local elections.
” Her expression turned a little sly as she added, “But your Ben very kindly changed his voter registration right away, so I was able to add him to the petition.”
“He’s not ‘my’ Ben,” I told her, although I knew the protest sounded a little feeble even to me.
Her greenish eyes danced. “Well, he’s certainly not anyone else’s. And it’s about time you got yourself a personal life. You can’t tell me he picked up stakes and moved here just because he suddenly became an environmentalist.”
“Archaeology and environmental concerns often go hand in hand,” I said primly, but she just chuckled.
“It doesn’t look like he’s doing much archaeology these days,” she remarked. “Just that YouTube channel about all those crazy monsters.”
“They’re not necessarily monsters,” I said automatically.
An eyebrow quirked. “Call ’em what you want. But there must be decent money in that, considering how I saw that his channel has more than a hundred thousand subscribers.”
“I guess so,” I said vaguely. “It’s not really my business.”
Her mouth opened to reply, but right then, the fluorescent lights overhead flickered. “You having problems, too?” she asked instead, and I nodded.
“For the past couple of weeks,” I replied. “I had Jimmy come out and take a look, but he said there was nothing wrong with the wiring.”
Jimmy Hansen was the local handyman, and I doubted there was much he didn’t know about electrical systems and plumbing and general carpentry. If some kind of problem had been lurking in the walls of my store, he would have found it.
“I had him take a look, too,” Eliza said. “But if we’re both having problems, then it can’t be the wiring. Maybe we need to check around and see if anyone else is experiencing the same issues. That would mean it’s probably something going on with the grid itself.”
Which, if that turned out to be the case, could turn into a huge mess.
Silver Hollow’s electrical grid had been built in the early twentieth century and basically held together with spit and baling wire ever since.
The whole thing should have been upgraded years ago, but since it seemed to soldier on despite the antiquated equipment, no one had wanted to spend the money to improve the system.
If it decided to collapse now, during the height of tourist season….
“That’s not the only thing, though,” Eliza went on. “My cell phone’s been acting up, too. Bethany told me her friends’ parents are saying it’s sunspots or something, but I haven’t heard anything on the news about that.”
Once again, it seemed as if Eliza’s…and her daughter Bethany’s…
experiences were mirroring my own. Not that I used my cell phone very much — who would I even be calling, when pretty much everyone I knew was right here in Silver Hollow and a five-minute walk away?
— and yet I recalled that several times Ben had sworn he’d sent me a text, and it seemed to have disappeared into the ether.
If I were dealing with a few of the guys I’d dated in the past, I would have said he was lying and just trying to make himself look good, but I knew Ben Sanders didn’t operate that way.
Not that we were really dating. We had dinner at least three nights a week, and we got together at other times to share theories about what was going on in the forest, but it still felt as if we were stubbornly occupying the friend zone.
“I haven’t heard anything, either,” I said. “But my phone’s been a little glitchy, too. There couldn’t be a connection with the electrical grid, could there?”
Her slim shoulders lifted. “I have no idea. It doesn’t seem like one would affect the other, but I’m not exactly what you could call an electrical engineer.”
And neither was I. Well, Ben and I were already planning to have dinner at my house. I’d just have to ask him if he’d been experiencing similar glitchiness.
Knowing Ben Sanders, he’d probably have a few theories.
He was right on time, showing up at exactly seven o’clock as we’d planned.
And, as usual, he carried a bottle of wine with him.
We often didn’t drink the whole thing, but rather corked it up and left the remainder for whatever dinner we had planned next.
Was that because we were both a bit concerned about what might happen if we let ourselves get a little tipsy?
Maybe. There was still so much about him I didn’t know — not because he wasn’t happy to volunteer that information when asked, but because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to probe. If I kept things surface level, then maybe we could coast along like this for a while longer.
I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to him…and yet I also couldn’t help thinking my life had enough complications as it was.
The meal was simple enough, just enchiladas I’d put together with shredded chicken from a crockpot meal the day before yesterday, but he ate with a good appetite.
I’d never claim to be the world’s greatest cook, although my grandmother had taught me enough that at least I didn’t have to worry about giving him food poisoning.
After we’d both had a few bites and drunk some wine, I said, “Have you been having any issues with the electricity at your place?”
He set down his fork and sent me a serious look. About three years older than my own twenty-seven, he had thick, medium-brown hair and hazel eyes that reminded me of the depths of a forest pond, and was probably the best-looking man I’d ever seen.
Then again, I’d be the first to admit that I was a little biased.
“As a matter of fact, I have,” he replied.
“Nothing huge, just the lights flickering from time to time and one time a brownout that lasted long enough that I had to reset the clocks on the stove and the microwave, but it’s been a little weird.
I asked Nancy about it, and she told me she’s been having trouble, too, mostly with her garage door opener.
The thing keeps glitching for no reason. ”
Nancy Petterson was Ben’s landlady. She had a big Victorian house about a five-minute walk from my place, and a while back, she and her husband had fixed up the small cottage on their sprawling property as a way of bringing in some additional income.
As fate would have it, the place had become available just as Ben was looking to relocate to Silver Hollow, and he’d been living there for nearly a month now.
But because I knew the cottage had been completely updated less than five years ago, I also realized that the wiring shouldn’t be acting up.
The glitches I’d experienced here at the house and even at the pet shop could have been excused, since my home was more than a hundred years old and the building where the store was located wasn’t much newer.
And when you threw in the problems with the cell service….
“Do you think it could all be connected to that?” I asked, and tilted my head in the general direction of the forest.
Being Ben, he didn’t try to argue or tell me I was being ridiculous. Instead, his expression grew thoughtful.
“I suppose it’s possible,” he replied. “After all, we don’t really know for sure how the portal operates. I could see how something about the way it comes and goes might be affecting the electromagnetism in the area, although I’d be the first to admit that this isn’t exactly my field of expertise.”
Maybe he didn’t have any real background in this sort of thing, but the more I thought about it, the more his theory seemed to make sense.
Everything that was being temperamental would be affected by fluctuations in those fields, although, like Ben, this was way outside my knowledge base.
I’d taken a lot of math and chemistry and biology in preparation for getting my DVM degree, but physics hadn’t seemed like anything I needed, so I’d mostly skipped those courses except for a really introductory class during my sophomore year at Humboldt State.
“Is there anyone you can ask?” I said.
Ben set down his fork and reached for the glass of wine that waited at his place setting. “Not offhand, but because I’ve been emailing with Henry Ogilvy a good bit, I can see if he knows someone in the physics department at UC Davis who might be interested in coming up here to take some readings.”
“That’s a long way to go for something that might turn out to be nothing,” I said, knowing how doubtful I sounded.
Since I’d made the drive plenty of times, I knew it took just a hair under five hours to get from Davis to Silver Hollow.
Not insurmountable by a long shot, but also not a quickie afternoon trip, either.
He grinned. “Oh, you’d be surprised by what a researcher will do when they’re following an interesting lead.
Not that I expect one of the professors to drop everything and come running up here, but I’m sure there are probably a couple of grad students in the physics department who’d be all too glad to take a break from teaching summer classes and come to Silver Hollow to investigate any electromagnetic anomalies we might be experiencing. ”
Well, when he put it that way….
“All right,” I said. Whatever was going on, we needed to get to the bottom of it, and this wasn’t the sort of thing that either Ben or I could handle on our own. “Then make some calls, and I suppose we’ll see if this all turns out to be nothing.”
His smile didn’t fade. “This is Silver Hollow,” he replied, and took a sip of merlot. “I’m pretty sure it’ll turn out to be something.”
I had a feeling he was right.