Page 71 of The Fall Back Plan
I, Jolie McGraw,chooseHarvest Hollow. This place isn’t my fall back plan; it’s my endgame.
“I’m an idiot,” I say.
Ry looks up. “You are many things, but that isn’t one of them.”
“About Lucas. I’ve been an idiot.”
Ry studies me. “An idiot like you realize you should one hundred percent take him up on all that sweet, sweet love he’s trying to throw your way?”
I look at him uncertainly. “I think . . . yes?”
He grabs a bar towel and whips it over his head like a propeller. “Hallelujah! Definitely yes. Heck yes to all the yeses. You need to go and get your man, cuz!”
A grin is spreading over my face. “What do I do? Just drop in at the station and be like ‘Let’s date’?”
“Sure. Or grab him and lay a big, juicy smooch on him. That’s my vote. But yes. Go!”
I’m laughing now, and I jump to my feet. “Okay, okay, I’m going. I’ll be back.” I text Lucas as I head toward the exit.
JOLIE:I’m coming to see you. Right now. It’s good. I think.
LUCAS:You have my attention.
I’m still grinning as I push open the rear exit door, still grinning as I read his response, still grinning as I reach for my truck door, still grinning as I notice a cream-colored envelope tucked into the window.
I pluck it out and open it, and then I freeze as the words sink in.
To the owner of the Mockingbird,
Meet me at Green Oaks cemetery by the weeping mother statue tonight at 8:00. It’s time to end the doll terror.
It’s handwritten in fine cursive and unsigned, and it wipes my smile right out.
Chapter Thirty
Jolie
“Thisisthegoodthing you wanted to see me about?” Lucas says, accepting the note I hand to him.
“Not exactly. Found it on my truck when I walked out of the bar. Read it.”
He scans and his eyes shoot to mine. “No way. You’re not going to meet an anonymous stranger in a cemetery after dark.”
His objection isn’t a surprise, but it bugs me anyway. “At the risk of sounding fifteen again, you are not the boss of me.”
He waves his hand around his office. “I’m the boss of this investigation. And possibly your common sense. Show me a single word in there that suggests to you it would be a good idea to do what the note says. At best, this is a joke and some dumb teenagers are going to jump out from behind tombstones and scare you. It’s not a coincidence that today is the first day of October. We’ll have a spike in nuisance complaints like we do every year.”
I try to hold on to my patience. I know this whole doll situation has been an irritant to him too, but it hasn’t upended his life the way it has mine for the last ten days. “You sound very condescending right now.”
He sighs. “I’m not trying to. But do you understand from my perspective why this sounds like a bad idea?”
I lean forward in my chair across the desk from him. “I do. I know I don’t have any proof, but my gut tells me this isn’t a joke. Maybe it’s the handwriting. It’s old school. Proper. Trained. It reminds me of Mrs. Herring’s. If it was kids, would they even handwrite it? On nice stationery? And how could they fake that older-style cursive?”
He keeps his eyes on mine for a few seconds before he looks down and picks up the note in front of him, rubbing the paper between his fingers. Two deep grooves, a mirror of my worry brackets, appear between his eyebrows.
“I need to be done with this. I don’t need your permission, but I was hoping for your support.” For the three months after Phillip dumped me and I started putting together my Chicago exit plan, coming back to Harvest Hollow had felt like the next and final step. I’d move here, run a bar, and live down to the McGraw reputation. I didn’t see much beyond that, and my whole life, I’d always been thinking about what came next. About when my real life would start once I left this town.
Coming back? That had been the whole plan. I was too worn out inside to think of what anything past opening the bar would look like. No thoughts of expansion, weaving into the town fabric. Nothing like volunteering at the library or making new friends in town. Harvest Hollow was somewhere familiar, even if unloved. By me, at least.
