A Touch of Gold

“Yeah. I know.” He put his hands in his jacket pockets. “I take it she wasn’t looking for anything?”

“She didn’t say.”

He stopped walking as we reached the Duck Shoppes parking lot. “Just there for girl talk?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I scuffed the toe of my sneaker on the sandy pavement. “She wanted to examine my chakra.” Was he pumping me for information about her?

He nodded. “I understand. Shayla is Shayla. No one is quite like her. She’s a force of nature.”

“Yeah.” Now I felt lame for saying anything. “Well, I should go. Where are you headed?”

“I actually have some business at town hall. Something about a new permit that restaurants need.” He looked away as a school bus passed us. “So, how about tonight? No chakras. We’ll see if we can find the wine and drink some of it. What do you think?”

With thousands of tiny zings of pleasure racing through me, I answered, “Sure. What time?”

I danced up the stairs to the town hall with him, hoping I wasn’t talking too much and wondering why what I felt for him made me feel like such a kid. A thirty-six-year-old kid, I reminded myself, sobering as we reached the town clerk’s office.

Nancy Boidyn, Duck’s town clerk, looked up from her typing and gave a little screech before she leapt to her feet and hugged me. “Dae! It’s so good to see you! Oh my God, I’ve been so worried since I heard what happened. I couldn’t believe it. You were so lucky that you weren’t hurt any worse.”

I hugged her back. Kevin kind of wandered away to look out the window at the Currituck Sound that flanked the boardwalk.

“Do you need anything? Should you be working?” Nancy fluttered around me with compassion. “Sit down. You probably shouldn’t be on your feet.”

“I’m fine, really. I’m going to check some email while you help Kevin with his permit. Is there coffee?”

Nancy fussed and put coffee in my seashell-shaped cup. She made coffee for Kevin too. I closed the door to my office and leaned against it as they started talking about filling out his permit.

Was I reading too much into Kevin asking me to dinner by myself? He’d invited me to dinner and asked for my help looking for the wine again, but did that make it a romantic overture? I’d had dinner at the Blue Whale a dozen times since it opened.

But not alone with him.

That was true, although I felt silly even thinking it. Usually there was a crowd of us when we had dinner at the inn because Kevin wanted to try out some new dessert or sauce. He loved to cook.

I need something new to wear.

Okay. Maybe I didn’t need something new to wear, but I wanted something new. Was there anything wrong with hoping he might see me as a force of nature someday as he did Shayla?

It might take a new dress and shoes, and maybe something different with my hair. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have him look at me in a new light.

I had hundreds of emails, of course. Most of them were well-wishers hoping I was recovering. Some were trash that I deleted. Some, like the one for the mayor’s conference we would be hosting in Duck right after the first of the year, had to be answered.

I could hear Kevin talking to Nancy at first. Then it grew quiet in the outer office. He probably had finished up and left. The knock on the door startled me, and my finger slipped over a key, causing T’s to go running across the page.

“See you later,” Kevin said with a smile. “I hope we can get those gloves off of you tonight.”

I swallowed hard and nodded. “See you later.”

Nancy’s face replaced his at the door, but all I could hear was his voice saying he wanted to get my gloves off. There was something sexy in the way he said it.

“. . . and the chief will be here later to talk to you,” Nancy said. “He’ll call first. Dae?”

“Hmm? Oh, right. He wants to talk about what I saw at the museum before it exploded.”

Nancy shut the door and sat down in one of the chairs that faced my desk. “What did you see?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. But he and Cailey and that new arson investigator from Manteo think there might be something important that I don’t realize I saw.”

“Did you”—she gulped—“did you see Max explode?”

Chapter 6

“No! He was in the museum. I didn’t really even see the museum explode. It happened so fast. One minute I was at the door, the next there was a flash of light and I was in the street.”

“Oh, Dae. How awful!”

My throat felt tight and I knew if I said anything else about it, I’d start blubbering again. Instead, I looked around my little office that had once been a storage closet. It had a window overlooking the sound, and I had put all the sea paraphernalia I could find in it. I had a ship’s bell from a freighter that went down in the early 1800s and seashells I’d collected. I’d left my white oak desk the way I’d found it so that it looked a little banged up and unfinished.

Nancy came around the desk and hugged me. “It’s all gonna work out, sweetie. You’ll see.” There were tears in her brown eyes, but her smile and resolve didn’t waver.

“Thanks,” I whispered.

“I’ll make sure you aren’t disturbed for a few minutes.” She walked out and closed the door.

My mother’s face stared back at me from a barnacleencrusted picture frame. She’d been dead thirteen long years. Like Max, she was gone too soon. I’d lived with her death on my conscience every day since she’d gone off the bridge coming back from the mainland. Her body was never recovered.

It was my fault because I was a stupid, young, knowit-all in college. We’d argued when she came to see me. My last words to her were said in anger, carelessly flung like sharp stones, meant to wound.

I came home from college after she died and had prayed every night since then to see her ghost, to have a chance to say good-bye and tell her that I was sorry. But though I could find things with my special abilities, I couldn’t see spirits like Shayla could. She’d tried to help me contact my mother, but it hadn’t happened.

I looked out of the window at the sun-kissed, sparkling water. Sniffling, barely in control of my emotions, I knew I had to get out of there. I couldn’t dredge up all the old, bad memories again to heap on the new, bad memories. I had to do something constructive.

I waved to Nancy as I left town hall, not trusting myself to speak. I headed down the gray boardwalk to Missing Pieces. I wanted to recapture the excitement I’d felt about going to Kevin’s for dinner. It wasn’t easy.

Then I remembered a dress I’d taken in early September. I’d picked it up and admired it twice since buying it with a group of other clothes from a woman in Grandy. I’d even thought about keeping it for myself, but I couldn’t imagine where I’d wear it.

With the shop door open and the blinds pulled up on the sunny day, I walked to the back of the shop where I kept the clothes. There were only a few racks since clothes weren’t my principle sales. Customers came in and bought them randomly, so I purchased with care.

The dress was still there. It was a simple, elegant creation of blue silk with a knee-length skirt and a low neckline that would be perfect for my grandmother’s pearls. I tried it on and decided it looked nice with my blue eyes and sun-bleached brown hair. I still had my summer tan, and thankfully, my bathing suit top had extended low enough that my chest had no white areas—at least none that the dress would reveal.

I twirled around in front of the mirror, feeling pretty and a little fragile. I smiled at myself and messed around with my hair, holding it back from my face on one side and simpering, “Oh, Kevin. I love it when you look at me that way.”

Someone cleared their throat behind me, and I prayed with hastily closed eyes that it wasn’t Kevin.