I could come up with a good response for why I was getting myself involved in another poltergeist case. “Are they friends of yours?”
“Well, not friends, but they’re both pretty nice. Pretty quiet,” he answered with a shrug. “Hannah came in the other day with a black eye and this big bandage across her cheek.”
I felt my heart drop down to my toes. “What happened?”
Finn shrugged again. “I dunno. When we asked her about it, she said she didn’t want to talk about it.”
I nodded, my mind made up now more than ever that I needed to get involved in this case. No poltergeist was going to harm a child, if I could help it.
And I could help it.
Chapter Fifteen
I glanced down at the stack of brochures Marty had whipped up and grinned. Over the last week, we’d agreed on a logo, a slogan (“Poppy’s Potions: cures for all ailments”) and he’d created a three-fold brochure, a sheet of instructions for each potion and business cards. We’d spent a good two nights folding the brochures, and now they were ready to go.
I closed my shop early because I’d decided to visit all the stores in town in order to ask them if I could leave a few brochures where their customers could see them. My first stop was Stanley Stomper’s Creamery.
Stanley was leaning half out of his window, as usual, offering a middle-aged woman a chocolate twist cone. I’d never seen him come out from behind the counter, and neither had Marty. Something that made you say: hmm…
Stanley’s one customer made herself scarce pretty quickly, leaving me alone with just the ambient sounds of the street filtering in through the door. After exchanging greetings, Stanley said he was only too happy to accept my brochures, and I dropped them off, heading for the next store on my route, Sweeter Haunts.
Halloween music trickled from the open door, accompanied by the smell of baking chocolate. It must have been fudge day. Ergh…
After leaving a handful of brochures at the front counter, and with my willpower still intact (I’d successfully talked myself down from sampling any of the delicious smelling treats), I found myself standing in front of the Half-Moon Bar and Grill.
And this stop made me nervous. Recalling the way the owner, Roy, had looked at me when Marty, Finn and I had had dinner here the other night, my heart was already pounding. I could remember the raw animal magnetism that wafted off him, even from across the room.
I rubbed at my arms self-consciously even as I began a brisk walk through the open doors, and I noticed a different hostess standing behind the podium. She was probably just over nineteen.
After telling her I was here to ask Roy if I could leave some brochures for my store, she escorted me to the bar, winding through a maze of mostly empty tables. There was a smattering of chatting couples, but that was about it. The large room seemed as cavernous as a cathedral when not at capacity. There was only one patron at the bar, hunched over his drink, which appeared to be made of way too much grenadine syrup. He might have just been drinking the syrup itself, because the liquid was a dark, viscous red.
He was busy talking to the bartender, Roy, who immediately glanced at me as I approached. That same sweltering expression appeared in his eyes, and it was all I could do to force myself to hold his gaze. Up close and personal, he was even taller and broader than I remembered and, ahem, hotter.
“Blast,” the man beside me muttered. I detected just the faintest hint of an Irish accent as he spoke.
I vaguely recognized the man from his profile picture on Match.com—he was the dentist Marty had told me about. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember his name. He looked like he was suffering from a bad head cold. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and bruise-like circles bagged just beneath them. He rubbed vigorously at his temples.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He looked at me and shook his head. “I can’t get this damned headache to go away.” Then he looked at the drink before him. “I thought this hair of the dog rot was supposed to work.” Then he looked over at Roy, who was already giving him a smirk. “I thought you were the authority on that sort of thing.”
“If you’d listened to me last night, you wouldn’t have had a