Page 1 of Coveted By the Bear

Chapter One

Caleb

The bell dinged above the front door of Jake’s Quickstop. My brothers and I turned our heads from our conversation just enough to see who had come in. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone.

Old man Tucker sauntered in and called out a greeting to Bernard behind the counter. I nodded my hello when he waved in our direction.

“Here you go, boys,” the waitress said, setting three full plates down in front of Evan, Brian, and me.

She wore a red and white, tight-fitting dress with white sneakers. The dress looked young for her, but she had been working at Jake’s for as long as I could remember. The uniform had never changed. She’d probably filled it out nicely in her twenties.

“Thanks, Leona,” I said through a smile before I dug in. I was starving. Working on an oil rig meant physical effort and exertion from the moment I stepped onto that platform until the moment I climbed back down the clanking metal stairs to my truck. I was always hungry enough to eat a horse when my shift ended.

Jake’s was quite the hotspot in town. It had multiple functions for a rancher or an oilman on the go. It tripled as a grocery store, gas station, and fine dining. By fine dining, I meant the best burgers and fried burritos in town. It was also Bryson’s social apex where all the old ladies picked up on the latest gossip. A boisterous group of them chattered away at the booth nearest the casino machine and rack of Twizzlers.

The bell above the door dinged again, but I didn’t look up. The burger was good enough to hold my attention. Jake’s grew eerily quiet. The kind of quiet you feel more than you hear. Even the old ladies had stopped their chattering. Evan elbowed me, but I was already turning my head to see who had caused friction in a room full of old friends.

“It’s Crazy Mira,” Evan whispered.

I could hear the smile in his words. When Crazy Mira came to town, everyone had enough entertainment to last them a week.

Each member of the crowd had frozen in whatever position they had been in when she came through the door. The audience held more interest for me than Crazy Mira did. Nelda Jenkins had a string of pasta hanging out of her mouth like she had been mid-slurp when the girl had arrived. It dangled there.

Nelda reminded me of a fishing trip I had taken with my dad. The water had been so uncharacteristically clear, we could see the green and brown backs of the fish we were after. I had plunked my worm in the water in front of a big one and waited, excitement humming through me as the fish moved closer. I had never seen anything like it, but the fish clamped on and stayed there. I didn’t even feel the pull of the pole. We just stayed tethered to each other by this thin, almost invisible line while he started to digest my worm. I had often wondered if I would ever feel so tethered to another living creature again.

Nelda’s worm didn’t know it was being eaten yet.

I could hear the sharp intake of air from Mira when she looked up enough to notice Jake’s was abnormally busy for this time of day. The girl was swimming in a cloud of mystery, but that she tried to avoid people wasn’t one of them. She’d failed.

Mira dropped her chin to her chest and skittered for the grocery aisles. She picked up a small blue plastic basket from an end cap and began to fill it with items from a list she held clenched tightly in her white-knuckled grip.

I tried to ignore her, if for nothing else than to give her peace from one pair of prying eyes. My gaze kept drifting just far enough in her direction to catch her movement in my peripheral, though. Something about the strange woman demanded attention.

I saw Nelda make the sign for the devil with her hands. If ever anyone mentioned a witch, people knew who they were talking about. Crazy Mira and witch were one in the same.

Nelda’s gesture at Mira pissed me off, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

“Did you hear about Dina Manchester?” I asked Evan, loud enough for the others to hear.

Evan still looked dumbly in Mira’s direction.

It was my other brother, Brian, who took the bait. “No. Why, did you hear something?”

“Nope. Just wondering why she put off the wedding. Again.”

The ladies in the booth looked at each other with wide eyes and started to whisper amongst themselves.

Crazy Mira’s movements became less jerky and robotic with some of the attention directed elsewhere. She rushed. She didn’t get many groceries, but it felt like she’d been in here for hours. Acutely aware of her effect on everything to function normally, I wished she would finish shopping already and leave.

She dropped a can of soup, and the sound of metal on tile cracked through the room. Everyone became quiet and attentive again. She apologized. To the soup? I shook my head. Crazy Mira.

I wasn’t hungry anymore so I pushed off and laid a crumpled ten dollar bill on the counter. Leona smiled at me. She probably loved serving the McCreedy boys. We always tipped her what our meal cost. Our dad always taught us that kindness and a good tip kept the spittle out of our food.

“Good burger, as always,” I told Leona.

She beamed.

“Why are you leaving so soon?” Evan asked incredulously. What he was really asking was, why in the hell are you leaving before Crazy Mira finishes her show?