Chapter 2
SOMETHING HINKY IS GOING ON (AND IT ISN’T BDSM, HOWEVER YOU DEFINE IT)
PARKER
I wasn’t unhappy to see Nana—not exactly—but this was the first time she’d ever visited me, which was suspicious. We usually only saw one another at family functions or on our bi-monthly video chats. It was safer that way.
I loved her, but Edith Girard was a force to be reckoned with.
She wasn’t shy about offering her opinions and she had a lot of them, particularly about the lives of her unmarried grandchildren.
She’d also made a formidable drill sergeant during her mandatory summer bootcamps, and that was an image that would be etched in my mind for the rest of my life.
You know the grandmotherly stereotype of a plump older woman who perpetually smelled of cookies, wore indulgent smiles when they saw their grandchildren, and dressed in pastels and polyester? That was not my grandmother.
Nana was more angles than curves, she couldn’t bake to save her life, she was more apt to make you want to confess to things you didn’t do than cheat to help a little kid win a game, she wouldn’t be caught dead in polyester, and she thought pastels should be reserved for children who hadn’t figured out how to talk yet.
Presumably, at least according to Nana, once they could talk, they would then know how to protest such horrendous fashion decisions.
Today she wore a form-fitting black turtleneck and slim black slacks, like she was prepared to carry out a heist at a moment’s notice. The outfit was a striking contrast to the gray of her hair. I bet she had a black balaclava tucked away in her bags so her head could match the rest of her outfit.
“Your mugs should be above the dishwasher, not all the way over by the fridge,” she said without looking at me. She frowned at the kettle, like her ire would make it boil faster.
“Has something happened?” I asked, ignoring her commentary on the organization of my kitchen. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
She walked over to the window and flicked the curtain aside so she could look out at the street below.
She glanced one way and then the other, as if checking no one was close enough to hear what she had to say.
It didn’t matter that we were on the second floor.
It was all very double-0. She tugged the curtain closed again, seemingly satisfied with what she saw… or didn’t see, maybe?
“You said something hinky is happening in this town,” Nana said .
“What? No, I…” My words trailed off. Shit. I’d forgotten about our chat last night. That explained why I was so tired today. The café opened at six, so I wasn’t usually up late.
It was all coming back to me now, though.
As soon as I’d opened my mouth last night and mentioned how Willow Lake gave me a weird feeling sometimes, I regretted it.
The silence on the other end of the line had been what you might call a speaking silence.
I hadn’t really understood what that phrase meant until that moment.
There was so much expectation and anticipation and tension suddenly between us.
Even half-asleep, I remembered worrying about what she’d do.
In my defense, I’d been sound asleep when she called.
Hell, for all I knew, she’d chosen to call after midnight for that exact reason—knowing that if she woke me, I wouldn’t be as guarded. She was sneaky like that.
The kettle beeped to say the water was hot, and Nana set about making her tea.
“Do you want a cup?”
I got up to make my own, because I was too tired to have a conversation with my grandmother without some kind of bracing drink. Tea would have to do. It worked for the British, right?
“Well?” Nana asked once we were seated at my small dining room table. She narrowed her cool blue eyes at me.
My grandmother had worked for the government her whole life, but no one in the family knew what her job had been.
My mother thought I was fanciful in thinking it had something to do with spying or interrogation—” She started working there in the seventies ,” she’d say.
“ Of course she was a secretary” —but I didn’t believe it.
Not for a minute. Especially not with my grandmother looking at me the way she was right now.
Of course, my mother didn’t know about Nana’s summer bootcamp either. The motto What happens at Nana’s house, stays at Nana’s house was a promise I’d never broken.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
She pressed her lips in a tight line, a clear sign of her disappointment. “Don’t ignore your intuition, Parker. I taught you better.”
Yeah. I guess she had, which is probably why I’d talked to her about it when I was sleepy last night. I truly believed nothing heinous was going on in Willow Lake, but something wasn’t quite right.
I wasn’t imagining how the back of my neck itched sometimes, like predators surrounded me, and I was the prey.
The weird feeling didn’t bother me exactly, but it wasn’t easily dismissed either.
I mostly noticed it at the pub. Some days, I swore my skin tingled with apprehension.
Of what, I didn’t know. And, if it wasn’t nefarious or illegal, why did people regularly stop talking when I approached?
“I don’t know what you mean,” I hedged. Although I knew the gate had been broken open and whatever horses I had in that stable had bolted and were on the other side of the country by now.
She pierced me with her gaze, letting me know without words that she wasn’t buying my weak attempt to dissuade her. “What happens at that pub you always talk about?”
Oh God. She wouldn’t try to stake out the pub, would she? My heart picked up its pace. These people were my friends. They might laugh off her behavior as a funny little quirk in the beginning, but if she caught the scent of anything hinky, as she called it, she could be unrelenting.
I had to reroute her line of questioning. Distract, distract, distract.
“Why is Finley here?”
“He’s useful.”
My fingers tightened on my mug. “Why aren’t you answering my question?”
She stared at me for a moment. “He and his university friends have dubbed themselves paranormal investigators. The whole thing is all a bunch of hogwash, but that’s the brilliance of having them here.
No one will take them seriously. They own some surprisingly decent surveillance equipment and when people find out about the couple hundred thousand yahoos who follow their YouTube channel, Finley and his wannabe spiritualist friends can usually gain access to places others can’t.
I wished I’d thought of a cover like that…
” Her eyes widened slightly, like she realized she had been about to say something she shouldn’t in front of me.
Rather than finish her sentence, like I wished she would, she took a sip of her tea.
“What do you mean? Does he really try to find ghosts and things? Or is it a ruse?”
“Oh, they think they’re going to find ghosts.
Foolish kids. These ones he’s with today look like they have more sense than the last ones he went out investigating with, but they’re all still determined to prove ghosts exist. I don’t know what is wrong with people these days, letting themselves believe such hocus-pocus baloney.
But that doesn’t mean Finley and his friends aren’t useful.
They’re usually so busy looking for orbs and listening for disembodied voices that they ignore what’s right in front of them. ”
“Have you joined them in their investigations before?” It sounded like she had. How had my mother missed this?
“They can be useful, but they aren’t my only options.” She lifted her eyebrow as she stared me down. “Now it’s your turn to answer my questions. Tell me about the pub. And quit stalling.”
I pursed my lips. There had to be something else I could ask her to redirect her questions.
“Parker Llewellyn Girard, I said quit stalling.”
God. She’d pulled out my middle name. She was serious. I huffed out a breath and stared at my tea. “There’s nothing to talk about. I go there. I play pool. I have a few drinks. That’s it.”
She hummed and narrowed her eyes at me. “Are you telling me the truth? You don’t have to sugarcoat things for me like you do your mother. I’ve seen a lot in my years on this earth.”
“Huh?”
“I looked the place up online. It’s the pub that’s attached to the old inn with the same name, right?
Willow Lake Inn and Willow Lake Pub.” She shook her head in disappointment.
“Terrible names. But that’s beside the point.
Neither place has much of an internet presence and what is there isn’t good.
A rudimentary webpage and nothing more. It looks like someone put it together in 2001 using duct tape, a pencil, and a beginner’s guide to HTML. ”
I was about to explain that Ryley, a new guy in town, was redesigning the websites for a bunch of businesses in town, mine included, but she kept on talking.
“And the reviews for the inn are horrible. They talk about strange sounds and other dodgy things. Seems like it could be a front for something else. Human trafficking? Drug running? It could be anything. And there’s an article online about an explosion there earlier this summer. Was it a meth lab?”
“A front? A meth lab?” When did my life become a police drama? “No way. The chief of police and one of his deputies hang out there all the time. I think he would have noticed something.”
“Right. So, he’s on the take.” Nana nodded and tapped her chin.
“It makes sense. They’d need the local LEOs to be in on it.
The town is too small to let something that big go on without detection otherwise.
Unless the police are completely incompetent.
Which is possible…” she mused. I got the sense she was talking to herself more than to me, but I was compelled to speak, to defend my friends.