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CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Lex dodged an older woman in a demure velvet dress, which looked far too heavy for the weather, as she entered Deja Brew, looking inside to see it bustling already. “Good afternoon,” she said, politely, recognizing the woman as one of A Curious Bookstore’s customers.

“Miss Blair,” the woman intoned gravely. She always seemed incredibly serious, and Lex had never seen her in a garment that revealed anything more than her head and hands. “What a lovely day.”

“It is,” Lex agreed, but the woman was already gone, striding down the street without looking back. Lex shook her head; just another one of Montgomery’s eccentric crowd.

Just like Lex, many of the townspeople seemed to have the same idea: coming by after work to get a cold drink, something to refresh them before heading home. She propped the sunglasses she had been wearing against the bright June sun on top of her chin-length black hair and looked for a table.

“Hey, Lex!” Cassie called out as Lex entered, rushing past in a swirl of her 1950s-style skirt, blooming with layers of white net underneath, as she took an order over to a customer’s table. “Just grab a seat. I’ll get your usual.”

Lex smiled, moving toward the one free table left in the café—earning her a foul look from a man standing in line at the counter. Lex refused to feel guilty. There had to be some perks to living in the apartment upstairs—well, more perks, anyway, since the location, the low rent, and making friends with Cassie were all pretty good already.

Despite the busy atmosphere with customers constantly coming in and out, Cassie always seemed to be able to keep up with the orders. She was never flustered or out of breath, and she managed to see to all of her customers quickly enough that there were no complaints. By the time she brought over Lex’s current “usual”—a red fruit cooler topped up with ice slush that was perfect for the weather they’d been having lately—she even found a moment to chat.

“What are all the decorations for?” Lex asked, gesturing to the bright yellow bunting that stretched across the pale pink walls of the café. Against the black and white tiles of the floor and the turquoise retro diner furniture, it was one more splash of color.

“The Midsummer Festival,” Cassie said, as if it was obvious. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

Lex had noticed some changes. Brightly colored bunting stretched between some of the stores already, filling in the space between their roofs and dangling across the storefronts, and they still seemed to be going up.

“What is it? A big local event?”

“You could say that.” Cassie grinned. “It’s one of our busiest times of the year, along with the Harvest Festival. Tourists come from miles around. It’s on all weekend—you should come to the parade, at least!”

“I will,” Lex said, raising her eyebrows. It sounded fun, though she wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

“Are you expecting company?” Cassie asked slyly, one hand reaching up to adjust her perfectly curled auburn hair where it was pinned into victory rolls, her eyes going to the empty seat opposite Lex.

“Did Noah say something to you?” Lex asked, immediately. It was true that she’d arranged to meet Noah Peabody for a short while after work. He had been instrumental in helping her to clear her name after Mrs. Boddyworth was murdered, and he’d become a close friend in the weeks since. Lex just hadn’t expected Cassie to know about it.

“No, he didn’t,” Cassie said, smoothing her now-empty hands down over her retro apron. “I just happened to notice that you two are meeting up a lot lately.”

In spite of herself, Lex felt a slight flush starting along her cheeks. “No, we haven’t,” she protested. “I mean, no more than friends normally do.”

“Sure,” Cassie said lightly, red lipstick curving a smile across her face. “Just like friends do.”

“Oh, shush,” Lex admonished, covering her cheeks with her hands. “It’s not like that.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Cassie agreed easily. She leaned over to adjust the folding paper menu on the table, neatening up one of the edges. “But if it is, that’s pretty neat too.”

Before Lex could reply, Cassie was gone with a wink and a teasing smile, heading back to the counter to serve her next customer. Lex busied herself with reading the menu that Cassie had drawn her attention to—it was advertising a Midsummer Festival special available only for the weekend.

While she was trying to distract herself with the menu, Lex wasn’t looking up to watch the door, so Noah arrived at the table before she noticed him coming in. “Hey,” he said, dropping his ever-stuffed backpack onto the floor and sliding into the chair opposite her.

“Oh, hey!” Lex said, startled enough that her flush returned in full force. She hadn’t quite had time to get over Cassie’s teasing, and now she was worried that it might be showing in her face. God, she felt like a schoolgirl. She was thirty-two years old. She shouldn’t be getting embarrassed like this. “Um, how was work?”

“Fine,” Noah said dismissively, pushing his gold-rimmed glasses up his nose and ruffling a hand through his sandy hair as if to set it into place. “But you don’t want to know about that. You want to know about the research I was able to dig up.”

“Research?” Lex repeated. She had no idea what he was talking about.

Noah was busy pulling his laptop out of his backpack and setting it on the table between them, flipping it open so that she could see the screen. “Yeah, I’ve been looking into A Curious Bookstore. You mentioned you wanted to know more about it and how long it’s been around for, so I thought I’d look around on the internet. That turned into a bit of a rabbit hole. You’ve got to see what I’ve found.”

Lex nodded, a little surprised. She had only mentioned it in passing. Ever since she’d first called Montgomery from Boston to apply for the job, she’d felt there had been something a little odd about the bookstore and its eccentric owner. Various residents of Incanton had only confirmed her impressions when they also talked about Montgomery as being odd—but she wasn’t convinced it was anything more than that. She was touched that Noah had taken it upon himself to do the research—she thought about her ex-boyfriend, and knew he would never have done anything like that for her.

While she drifted in her own thoughts, Noah was loading up tabs, cycling through them quickly to show her all of the things he had found. “See, here?” he said, pointing at his screen. “This is a record of the store’s ownership. It turns out it’s been here in Incanton for almost a century. Not all of the records that far back have been fully digitized, but you can find scans of the original paper documents.”

“This is the current listing?” Lex asked, her eyes scanning the text. “Montgomery is listed as the owner. What’s so weird about that?” The address, description of the business, all of the rest of it—everything seemed totally normal and as she would have expected.

“Nothing,” Noah told her. “It’s the original listing that had me raising my eyebrows.”

He clicked onto another tab. This one, as promised, featured a scanned image of a weathered brown piece of paper, obviously aged over the years. The format was recognizable: the registration of the business name and address, the owner—Lex couldn’t see any difference.

Except for the date. Which, in itself, meant that something was clearly wrong with the listing.

“The owner is Montgomery David,” Lex breathed. “How can that be possible?”

“I checked the intervening years as well, just to be thorough,” Noah said. “The owner is and has always been Montgomery David. How strange is that?”

“Very strange,” Lex said, then shook her head. No; there was a logical explanation for this, just as there was always a logical explanation for everything. “It’s probably a family name. Montgomery’s… well, he isn’t young. If his father opened the business as a young man and then handed it over to Montgomery when he was around the same age, then it could easily explain the time passed. Maybe our Montgomery is even the third.”

Noah tilted his head in acknowledgment. “It could be,” he said. “But that wasn’t everything. I did find some other things, too.”

“Oh, really?” Lex asked, watching the images he was flicking through. Noah continued talking about what he’d found, but Lex found herself watching his blue-green eyes flicking rapidly over the screen as he excitedly showed her black-and-white photographs of the exterior which didn’t quite match the building as it looked today.

She took in those eyes, the color of the sea, and the way that Noah’s face brightened and became more animated when he talked about something that excited him. The way his messy curls lay against his temple, a little damp from the effort of his cycle over here in the bright summer sun, and the freckles that had slowly appeared more prominently across his nose as he spent more time outside over the last month or so.

And she was slowly realizing that Cassie was right. She did have feelings for Noah, feelings that went beyond this casual friendship.

The only problem was that in the time they’d known each other, Noah had never shown any kind of romantic interest in return. In fact, he’d only wanted to get to know her because he’d read some of the scientific titles she had published with Fully Booked, and he wanted to pick her brain about a few of them. As for their friendship since, it was clear that Noah loved getting his teeth into a good bit of research—it was not just a skill, but a passion for him.

“Well, what do you think?” Noah asked.

Lex shrugged; truth be told, the images hadn’t quite been shocking enough to prove anything was up, except for the revelation about the ownership. “I don’t know. I guess I can ask Montgomery about his father, see what he says.”

“Good idea.” Noah nodded. He closed his laptop, and Lex was just thinking about asking him to help look into her father when he continued. “Hey, have you been to The Light in the Darkness yet?”

Lex frowned, not recognizing the name. “What is that?”

“It’s the lighthouse down by the harbor. It doesn’t function anymore, so they renovated it into a restaurant. It’s one of the best places to eat around here.”

“Oh. No,” Lex replied, tucking her hair behind her ear self-consciously. “I haven’t.”

“Oh, you should definitely check it out,” Noah said. He had a deliberately distracted look, as if he was trying not to give something away. “It’s got amazing views as well. Maybe we should go sometime.”

Lex blinked. Was Noah asking her out on a date?

No, surely not—it had to be just her brain working overtime, trying to see things that weren’t there after she’d just realized that she was developing a bit of a crush on him… She was just overreacting, right?

Lex opened her mouth to answer, desperately scrambling for some way to accept that would sound cool and unaffected, but she found her voice cut off by the sound of her cell phone ringing on the table. She closed her mouth abruptly and looked down at it, taking a moment for the name on the screen to filter through her confused mind.

And it was one of the people she would least have expected to be giving her a call.

“I—I have to take this,” she said, grabbing up the phone and getting up from the table. “I’ll be right back.”

She rushed outside with trepidation, wondering exactly why he would be calling her—and why it had to come exactly at that moment.

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