Whack The Mole (Lucy McGuffin, Psychic Amateur Detective 2)

She stops and looks at me. “I know I haven’t been in town long, and we don’t know each other all that well, but I thought you and Will had something going.”

“Me and Will?” I do the laugh snort thing. “No, no, no. We’re just friends.”

Sally shakes her head sadly. “Life is too short, Lucy. You should tell Will how you feel. You might just be surprised to find that he feels the same way too.” Her smart watch beeps. “Oops. This thing is telling me I need to start running again.” She begins jogging in place. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee soon, okay?”

Chapter Sixteen

That’s two people in the last twenty-four hours who have told me I need to tell Will how I feel. I admit I was startled by how easily Sally figured it out. But I can’t think about that right now. I have more important matters at hand. Like how I’m going to save my town’s rep and get us back in the Cooking Channel’s good graces.

I stayed up half the night formulating my plot to catch El Tigre, and I’ve come up with the perfect solution. My plan is beautiful in its simplicity. All I have to do is get Mike to come to The Bistro (not difficult since he’s doing our deliveries). We aren’t due for another three days, but I’ll make something up. An emergency or whatever. He will of course jump at the chance to come here because it gives him the perfect opportunity to leave his signature clue. The feds will get it on tape and bada-bing bada-boom, he’s toast.

It’s brilliant. Even if I say so myself.

At exactly five a.m. I email Rocko.

Disaster! Our flour batch is filled with bugs. Is there any way you can get Mike to deliver some STAT this morning? Thanks!

There. That ought to do it.

Of course, our flour is perfectly fine, but I toss it anyway because if Mike comes and sees it, he’ll immediately become suspicious and who knows what someone named El Tigre might do if he feels cornered? I certainly don’t want to find out.

Since Sarah can’t know what’s going on, I keep up the pretense with her as well. “Bugs? In our flour?” She makes a disgusted face. “Do you think it’s a problem with the vendor or do we have an infestation in our pantry?”

Rats. I hadn’t thought that far. It would be unfair to blame the vendor. And I’m not about to let poor Sarah clean out our pantry. Not when it’s already meticulously clean.

“I think it was just a freak one-time thing,” I say. “It’s not all bad. We had enough untainted flour that I was able to make a few dozen muffins, so we’re not totally out. Just mostly out.” After all, I don’t want everyone in town to suffer.

“Sorry you had to deal with that, Lucy. Hopefully, Mike will be able to work us into his delivery route this morning.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” I say confidently.

We open at exactly seven and one by one our regular customers start filing in.

“What do you mean you’re out of blueberry muffins?” asks Victor. I forgot that on Mondays he and some of his pals from the Sunshine Ghost Society come in for breakfast and talk about what sightings they’ve seen over the weekend. And they all love the boring blueberry. I wish I’d thought to make some of those.

“We have lemon poppy seed and pumpkin spice,” I offer. I also have some double chocolate chip stashed away, in case of a muffin emergency, but this doesn’t qualify.

Before Victor can tell me which kind he wants, the door opens and in walk the last two people on earth I want to see today.

Tara and Man Bun.

I freeze. What are they doing here?

“Don’t mind us!” Tara says, “We’re here to get more footage.”

Man Bun aims his camera at me. “Smile,” he says like he hates his job.

“What’s going on?”

“The main honchos over at the network want me to recoup the footage we lost on Saturday on the slim chance Whispering Bay gets picked up for the show. Kind of ironic, huh? We told you we’d be here Monday and here we are. Surprise! Just keep doing what you’re doing. Pretend we’re not here.”

Victor raps his knuckles on the counter to get my attention. “My order, remember?”

“Yes, of course. So what’ll it be? Lemon poppy seed or pumpkin spice?”

“Neither. I want blueberry. You always have those available.”

“Sorry, we had a crisis with our flour this morning.”