Morbid Monday

The navy stretch town car that pulled up in front of the café Sunday morning immediately caught my attention, but I barely recognized the man who stepped out of it.

Ever since he’d been elected to office, I thought of our interim mayor as a man afraid to make any real changes to better the town. He’d come across as timid when his announcement was made in the town square, and he barely said two words in way of an introduction of himself.

However, that was not the same man who walked through the café door on Sunday morning, greeting me with a large politician’s grin. “Well, hello there!” he bellowed, even though the café was almost empty this morning. The only patrons were a group of witches near the back. “You’re new to town, right?” He didn’t give me time to answer. “I’m Mayor Gregory. I never caught your name.”

I’d been living in Crystal Cove for more than a year. I gnawed my lip to keep my immediate irritation to myself. Everything about his words reminded me of a hundred other politicians I’d met over the years on my dad’s campaign trails. It just didn’t remind me of the man that had been passed the baton of our town’s leadership only three months ago.

Mayor Gregory was really only meant to be a council member. I didn’t know him at all, but in the past couple of months, I’d noticed him to be overly cautious, especially concerning the witches. He wasn’t trying to push them out of town, as our last mayor, Matthew Kelsey had. But he also didn’t seem like he was promoting any of their events. In my opinion, Crystal Cove needed a stronger hand, especially now, while the camaraderie between townsfolk and witches was fracturing.

I reached out a hand to meet his outstretched one. “I’m Tabitha—Tabby,” I corrected, remembering myself. Dad used to always introduce me as Tabitha, and said it sounded more professional, but since moving to Crystal Cove, everyone now knew me as what I felt was a more personable nickname. “What can I get you, sir?”

He chuckled. “Oh, no. Nothing for me.”

A man I’d barely noticed stood behind him and gave the mayor a nudge toward the back of the café. Without another word, Mayor Gregory turned his large smile toward the group of witches and I was left staring across at a slim, academic looking man in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses.

He pulled a folder out from under his arm and opened it to a stack of bright orange pamphlets. He passed a small stack over. “We were hoping we could get you to pass these out here at the café.”

I was confused. These looked like voter’s pamphlets—brighter ones than I’d ever seen—but Tim Gregory already held the position of Mayor in Crystal Cove.

I opened to ask the man in front of me, but he answered before I could.

“We feel that Crystal Cove needs to know they can count on their new mayor for the long term. We want to spread the word as quickly as possible so we can get Mayor Gregory’s appointment upgraded from simply an interim solution.”

My heart sank. I had finally convinced my detective-friend Aaron Thom to run for mayor. I hadn’t thought he would have much opposition, but maybe I was wrong.

Was this man Mayor Gregory’s campaign manager? He didn’t seem much more outgoing than Mayor Gregory, although something about this man’s nudges were bringing our interim mayor out of his shell.

Olivia had never liked flyers on her counters. She used to compromise with a corkboard, but lately, she’d done away with that as well because she didn’t like the vibe it gave the cafe. On the odd occasion, if the local dance studio was putting on a fundraiser, or if the city would be holding an outdoor movie in the park, she’d think about posting their flyer for a week at most, but generally her café remained flyer free.

I didn’t take time to look at the pamphlet, and explained to the man, “If you want to leave one with me, I can ask the café owner. I can’t put anything out without her permission.”

He let out a low chuckle. “Oh, Olivia? She’ll support our efforts. She’ll let you pass out every one of these.” The man glanced at the front window, as though he wanted to tape one right up against the glass.

I reiterated, “I’m sure that’s true, but I still have to get her permission.” I attempted to hand the pamphlets back. “She’s not big on papers lying around, so you may only want to just leave one.”

A crease appeared between his eyebrows, but just for a second. Then it was gone. He waved off my outstretched hand. “Keep ‘em all. She’ll distribute them.” He reached into his folder and passed me a business card. “Have her call me if she has any concerns.”

The business card read: ALFRED CUNNINGHAM. DEPUTY MAYOR.

I hadn’t been aware we even had a deputy mayor in Crystal Cove.

Without any thank you or any words at all, Cunningham spun and headed to the rear of the café, where Mayor Gregory seemed to be getting on famously with the witches. While I was happy to see him making an effort, the sea glass around my neck cooled, and something about the camaraderie between them gave me pause. The five witches that were in today were all familiar to me, but the only one that appeared to be speaking to Mayor Gregory was Barbara Colling.

She laughed a loud laugh, and even though I couldn’t hear any of their words from the café counter, her body language as she played with her graying hair and her glasses appeared flirtatious. At sixty years old, she had to be almost two decades older than our interim mayor. She was heavyset and walked with a bit of a limp. Did she really think she had a chance with him?

But the way he smiled back at her, at the very least, he seemed to be pandering to her interests.

Marigold Weathers, a commanding purple-haired witch, usually had the loudest mouth of all the witches in town, but she sat back in her seat, flashing a look of consternation between Barbara and Mayor Gregory and not saying a word.

Seconds later, the mayor was laughing, too, and then he passed out orange pamphlets to all five of them. This reminded me to look down at what it was they wanted Olivia to distribute throughout her café.

It read: VOTE GREGORY FOR YOUR LONG-TERM MAYOR ON APRIL 10^TH.

It included a photo of our interim mayor, but his face didn’t look terribly attractive on the bright orange paper. My brow furrowed at the date. April 10^th was less than two weeks away. The immediacy seemed highly unusual—perhaps even illegal. By the large amount of fine print included on the double-sided pamphlet, though, it seemed like they had gone to a lot of trouble to make this election legitimate.

I gnawed at my lip. I’d suggested Aaron would make a great mayor for this town. As a local detective, he had such an authority about him and he truly cared about Crystal Cove. But we thought we had until the fall to plan his campaign. The local council had elected Tim Gregory from within, to take over until such a time as the town could plan another election to permanently elect someone to the position.

Why was Mayor Gregory suddenly pushing to make his position permanent?

But more importantly, was there any way we could plan a successful mayoral campaign for Aaron in less than two weeks?

After almost a year of living on my own in Crystal Cove, Oregon, I still felt like a child at the thought of having a conversation with my father. I was twenty-eight years old, for crying out loud.

My sister Pepper sat across from me on the purple sofa aboard the Lady of Fortune and prompted, “Just call him, already, Tabby.” She ran a lazy hand over my cat Sherlock, who appeared to be sleeping, but I doubted that intuitive cat ever really slept.

Easy for her to say. She was sitting cross-legged with her casual ponytail off camera. But she was right. I needed to get this over with. I would need my senator-father’s advice if I planned to act as campaign manager for Aaron and get him quickly into the running for mayor.

Pepper was here for emotional support, and while I appreciated it, part of me wanted to throw her under the bus and get Dad’s criticisms focused on her choosing to intern at the hospital at Crystal Cove, rather than one at a more advanced hospital in Portland.

But I would never do that, especially because she was learning far more at our small hospital, where she’d been taken under the wing of the chief physician, than she would have at a larger hospital. I was simply getting aggravated by her silent presence. She wasn’t offering any words of encouragement, because she knew as well as I did there was nothing encouraging about the idea of talking to our father.

I took in a breath and hit the call button on my laptop. Within seconds, Mom was on the screen, her smile brighter than I’d seen it in a long time. She had been begging both me and Pepper to talk to our dad, to be the bigger people, she always said. I figured she just wanted family harmony no matter the cost, and since Dad would never in a million years admit that he’d been wrong about anything, she realized her only option was to talk us into admitting some wrongdoing of our own. He had wanted both me and Pepper to stick around Portland—her pursuing a career in medicine and me pursuing my career as a realtor. But the city hadn’t suited either of us. We’d both quickly found a place to belong in Crystal Cove, and there was no explaining that to my ambitious father, who only thought that bigger meant better.

I had asked specifically for Dad to be on the call today, rather than purposely connecting with Mom when I knew he’d be away from the house, and she was clearly happy about me finally making a move to talk to him.

“Tabby, how are you? You’re looking so good! You must be getting lots of sun there in Crystal Cove. Is Pepper there, too?”

I had promised Pepper she could stay in the background, so I chose to respond to one of my mom’s other rambling statements. “I’m good, Mom. And, yeah, it has been sunny here the last few days. Pepper’s been working a lot, but I have a new possible venture to talk with Dad about. Is he there?” I let out a whoosh of a breath the second I had made myself admit my need for him.

“He sure is! Conrad,” she called. “Tabby’s on. Can you join the call?”

“Tell Tabitha I’ll be with her in just a minute,” he said off screen, in a tone that made it sound like I was his employee.

I looked over at Pepper, who straightened in her seat and balled her fists in my direction, as if telling me to stay strong. I copied her posture and asked Mom about her life and about Portland in the breeziest voice I could manage. Sherlock stretched out a paw and yawned and then shifted positions. His relaxation only highlighted how tense I was.

Mom was just getting to the azaleas she wanted to plant along the front walkway when Dad interrupted, turning the laptop toward him so he could see me.

“Tabitha? It’s so dark, I can barely see you.” He squinted at his laptop.

This wasn’t true. Sure, the houseboat was dim compared to outside, but in the upper right screen I could tell he could see me just fine. This was his way of starting the conversation off with a criticism, showing his authority. I’d been watching him do this with everyone from political running mates to dishwasher repairmen since I was a young child.

“Ah, that’s okay, Dad. As long as you can hear me. That’s what matters, right?”

His lips tightened. When he complained about something, he expected people to fall all over themselves trying to fix it for him. It was instantly clear that he didn’t appreciate me ignoring his complaint.

I decided to jump in with my pre-prepared bullet points before he said or did something else to prove his authority. “I guess I can’t show you around Crystal Cove through a laptop, but this town, it really is something special, and I’ve spent a lot of time fixing up Aunt Lizzie’s houseboat since I’ve been here.” I picked up the laptop and flashed it around quickly, avoiding Pepper and the purple couch.

Even though dad likely wouldn’t remember a single thing about what the Lady of Fortune looked like before, this was somewhat of an apology on my part. After my Aunt Lizzie’s death, Dad had initially sent me to Crystal Cove to fix up her houseboat and make a quick sale. He had expected me to return to Portland and my job as a junior realtor a week or two later, but now I’d been here a year, managing houseboat rentals, working as a barista, and helping to solve the odd murder.

My parents didn’t know about that last one, but I was focusing on the fact that I had at least followed his orders to fix up the houseboat.

At his grunt, which could have meant anything from approval to disgust, I went on. “The houseboat rental market will be picking up sometime in the next month for the busy summer season.” I took a breath and then launched into my main point for this call. “And a friend of mine, a detective on the local police force, he’s going to run for mayor and he wants my help.”

I had the laptop faced to me now, so I didn’t miss Dad’s humor-filled scowl. “Oh, Tabitha. Small-town politics is the last thing you want to get involved with.” He said it as though he would be patting my head if he were closer.

I squared my shoulders. “Well, too late, Dad, because I’m already committed.” In an instant I knew this was the wrong tone to take with him. He would come back with mockery, and years of proof of things I had failed at. In an attempt to circumvent this, I threw the subject back onto him. “I realize I know very little about running a campaign, but I have the master of it in my family. Come on, Dad, you know as well as I do that I can’t do this without some advice from someone like you. And this detective, he would be so great for the town. In some ways, he reminds me of you, actually.”

This last statement did it. I could see it in my dad’s countenance as his scowl morphed into something not quite happy, but almost. “When did you say this election is?” he asked.

I didn’t, but I was happy to go on to explain more if he was softening to the idea of helping me. “Well, that’s the thing, Dad. You see our old mayor was pulled out of office and arrested a few months ago. The current mayor is only supposed to be an interim replacement from the council, but the guy doesn’t have the strong hand this town needs. I think he’s expecting to run unopposed on this month’s election.”

“This month?” Dad interrupted. “You would have had to have started much earlier, if you planned for your friend to run against him.”

“That’s the thing, though. He just announced his plans. He was passing out pamphlets around town.”

Dad’s eyes narrowed. “He was hand delivering them?”

I nodded. “I have no idea how he arranged it so fast. It doesn’t give anyone else much time to campaign against him. If it wasn’t for the possibility of having expertise from someone like you, I would think it couldn’t be done.”

“This month?” Dad’s eyebrows shot up and I wasn’t surprised that this had brought on a flash of outrage. Next thing I knew, he pulled his phone in front of him, slid his glasses down his nose and was scrolling through, looking for something. “What’s this interim mayor’s name?” After I told him, he made a note and said, “I’ll get Tory to send you a condensed campaign timeline…” Tory was Dad’s assistant. She’d helped him through his last two campaigns, and I immediately felt better knowing I’d be able to contact her with my questions. While she was competent and knew the business of politics well, she was a lot friendlier than my father.

Dad went on, his gaze still fixed on his phone. “I could possibly move my council meeting on Tuesday. That would get me down there by the afternoon.”

I froze as his words computed. “Down…here?”

Dad’s gaze met mine through the screen. “Yes, of course. You’re going to need me there in person if you plan to launch a mayoral campaign against this shyster with zero experience, Tabitha.” He went on with details of how this would work as I did my best to catch my breath. “You said the houseboat season hasn’t heated up yet. You can slot us in a rental for the week.” I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement, but I was frozen solid, unable even to nod. Dad wanted to come to Crystal Cove? Did I want that? Could I handle that?

But more importantly, was there any way to help Aaron get elected without him?