Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Thom
The next morning, Thom dropped into one of the chairs in his kitchen and pushed his thumb and index finger into his eye sockets. What a shitshow. He tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, wondering why life had it in for him.
He looked at his half-empty bottle of whiskey and remembered the three—four?—shots he’d tipped down his throat last night. He normally stuck to beer if he wanted a drink, but yesterday’d been a three-shot day. In fact, it might even have been a slam-back-a-whole-bottle day.
After his ears had stopped ringing from Poppy’s banshee-like scream, he’d spent the next hour looking for the scattered pearls, while Poppy sat on his kitchen floor, her arms wrapped around her knees, sobbing.
Thinking that a good cry would do her the world of good—truthfully, he hadn’t known how to comfort her or what to say—he’d used the flashlight on his phone to locate her missing pearls.
When he thought he had all of them, he placed them in an empty screw jar, before gently pulling the string and what looked to be a diamond clasp from Poppy’s tight fist and dropping it into the jar as well.
He’d crouched on his haunches in front of her, noticing her eyes were fixed on something he couldn’t see.
She’d stopped crying, but she seemed oblivious to the fact that she was sitting on his cold floor, in her wedding lingerie.
The day had caught up to her, and when he suggested that she take a shower and she didn’t respond, he knew she’d checked out.
All he could do was to scoop her up, carry her up the stairs to his bedroom, and slide her into his bed.
When her head—stiff hair and all—hit his pillow, she closed her eyes, sighed once, and slid straight into sleep. Out cold.
Thom showered. Watched a movie on the sofa. Told Hayes the whole sorry story. Opened and closed the bedroom door three times to let Felony in and out before deciding to leave the door open—those three Scotches had messed with his thinking. And through it all, Poppy didn’t move.
Eventually, after failing to fall asleep on the couch—too short, too narrow, deeply uncomfortable—he decided she wouldn’t notice if he took the other side of the bed.
He lay down on top of the covers, hands on his stomach.
Felony took that as an invitation, hopped up, wedged himself between them, and promptly licked Poppy’s face.
Thom grinned. She already had so much crap on her face that a little dog spit wasn’t going to make a difference.
Then Felony sprawled out between them, snoring loudly, a dog-shaped barrier.
When he’d woken up, an hour ago, he’d looked over Felony’s head and seen that she hadn’t moved. In fact, she was so still he checked whether her chest was rising and even placed his fingers under her nose to check her breathing. When he was certain she wasn’t dead, he got up.
Felony, the bastard, just stretched his legs out and rolled over into the space he’d recently occupied, tummy exposed, legs in the air.
Thom found a T-shirt and a pair of his boxers for Poppy to wear—there was a good chance they’d fall down, but maybe if she rolled the band a few times—and left the clothes, and a clean towel on the arm of the sofa, where she was sure to find them. After his own shower, he headed downstairs.
In his chair, he yawned, then stretched his spine. He had a dull headache from a combination of the Scotch and stress, and was nursing an extra-strong, double shot of espresso from his state-of-the-art coffee machine.
Hell, this morning he needed an intravenous drip of caffeine and sugar.
“Yahoo, Thomas!”
Tom heard the strident female voice and tipped his head back to look up at the ceiling. It had, strangely, molded roses in the center and in the corners. A bit over the top for a Victorian kitchen, but over-the-top was every True Believer’s default setting.
And now the current leader of the True Believers, and a descendant of the original settlers, was making her way through his house and would appear in his kitchen in…
Five, four, three, two, one—
“Thomas!” He rolled his eyes; Luna never called him Thom. She appeared in the doorway and immediately crossed the kitchen to stand in front of him. She wore khaki cargo shorts and a lumo-pink T-shirt declaring that she was “A Witch 365 Days a Year—Not Just at Halloween.”
False advertising?
Luna was, apparently, part of H-Town’s coven, but her attendance was a bit hit and miss.
What she was, everyone agreed, was a fantastic mayor.
It was her foresight, badgering, and threatening to hex anyone who got in her way, that had transformed H-Town from being another pretty, western Massachusetts town into a thriving, Halloween-obsessed, tourism hotspot.
The shopkeepers, either enthused or ultimately exhausted by Luna’s haranguing, adopted the Halloween-all-year-around ethos and branding, and the town hummed with tourists.
“Luna, come on in,” Thom said sarcastically. He lifted his small cup. “Do you want coffee?” Now that he’d offered, he didn’t know if he had the energy to get up and make it.
“No, I picked up a Coven Cream from Spirited Grounds. Effie says hi and wants to know why you haven’t been in lately.”
Thom closed his eyes and shook his head.
Now, if Luna had sent greetings from Earl or Marigold, the owners of Spirited Grounds, he wouldn’t think twice.
But no, Luna was passing on a message from Effie, the ghost said to haunt the coffee shop.
Her favorite party trick was to routinely trip the power to the shop, always at 3.
33 p.m. Thom believed the power tripping was deliberate, and a gimmick, and suspected that Earl, Marigold’s husband, had installed a timer on the breaker switch.
Thom shook his head, too tired to state his “I don’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal” position. “Tell Effie I say hey.”
Luna frowned at his sarcasm. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts.” Not even a little bit. “Just so you know, Cedric has gone upstairs to say hello to the inn’s ghosts,” she added.
He squinted at her. “Remind me, who is Cedric again?” Then he gave himself a mental punch to the throat. Why was he even asking? He didn’t believe and didn’t care.
“He’s the Senior Spectral Historian to the Township of Solstice Springs,” Luna explained, then frowned. “I am a bit concerned about him, he’s very clingy at the moment.”
A clingy ghost, excellent. His headache intensified. But it was his fault for asking.
Luna rested her ample butt on the edge of his dining table and pushed her hand through her hair. It looked fairly normal today—mostly white—but tomorrow it could be ash-blonde or acid-green or solidly black. With Luna, you never knew.
“Last night, I got word that a bride was stomping through town and made her way here. It’s Poppy, right?”
He nodded and crossed one ankle over the other.
“So where is she and what the hell happened?”
“Upstairs and still sleeping, I presume.”
Luna’s gaze skittered off him and onto Poppy’s wedding dress, now hanging over the back of the other chair. “I’ve had numerous reports that she was barefoot and was only carrying her phone.”
Ah, H-Town’s gossip line was fire, and unusually accurate. “True.”
Luna picked up the jar full of pearls and shook it. “Miss Millie’s pearls.” She stroked the bodice of Poppy’s godawful wedding dress. “How did she and the dress get separated, Thomas?”
Thom held her direct stare. “Felony peed on it. Poppy decided she wanted to get out of it, but as she was taking it off, the string on her necklace broke.” He rubbed his right knee and scowled.
“I spent an hour on my knees collecting damn pearls while she sobbed. Then I took her upstairs and put her in my bed, the only bed in this house. She fell asleep immediately and is, as far as I know, still asleep.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, oh. “And why are you only here now?” Thom demanded. “I expected you to come as soon as you heard. Which I’m pretty sure was about five minutes after she stepped off the bus.”
Luna nodded. “I was away yesterday and only got in late last night. I figured she was safe with you, and that you’d take care of her.” Luna pushed herself up to sit on the table and swung her legs. “So, what happened? Why did she run away?”
“Didn’t ask. She didn’t tell.”
“Huh. I mean, we all knew that marrying Benji was a bad idea, but Wren and I hoped she’d come to her senses long before this. Maybe she ran because something happened with Benji’s family.”
Benji’s family, his family…
He met Luna’s inquisitive gaze and lifted one eyebrow, an obvious challenge for her to ask. No one in town, except for Hayes, knew what had caused the rift between him and Benji. And that was how it was going to stay.
Partly because it wasn’t anyone else’s business. Mostly because he wasn’t the type to whine about how he’d been shafted.
What Benji had done made sure of one thing: there was no going back. Not for them. Not for him.
Bastard.
“Where is Wren?” he asked. If Poppy’s best and oldest friend had been here, then he wouldn’t have had to deal with a surprisingly stunning but sobbing, then checked-out, bride last night.
His house would be empty, and he certainly wouldn’t have the town’s most lackadaisical witch sitting on his kitchen table.
“I thought she would’ve been at Poppy’s side during this shitshow. ”
Luna wrinkled her nose. “She picked up food poisoning last week. It wasn’t too debilitating, so she carried on working—”
He lifted his eyebrows. “And Dane was okay with that?”
Dane was a trauma doctor, Wren’s significant other, and back in the summer, he’d struck a deal with Luna to work as H-Town’s resident doctor for two months while she looked for someone to take over ancient Dr. Morris’s practice.
Wren had resumed work, and Thom knew Dane was itching to get back to being a trauma surgeon. Luna was running out of time.