“I do.” I started to hand her the book, but she waved me off. “You should read it first. It might indicate if your men will be safe here or not.”
“Okay, I’ll read it.” I looked around at my guys. “Are you okay working here today? If not, I’ll pull you off this job and send you to another site.”
Sean was defiant. “No way am I leaving.”
“I think we’ll be okay, boss,” Wade said. “I don’t feel the same vibes anymore.”
“Nor do I,” Emily murmured, meeting my gaze. “There’s a sadness still, but it’s mixed with a sort of positive resolve. And you’re looking at me as though I’ve lost my mind.”
“Then we’ve all lost our minds,” I said. “So I guess we’ll carry on.”
*
After sensing a grieving ghost that morning, I figured nothing else could scare me. At least, I hoped not as I strolled into Cuckoo Clemens’s shop on Main Street.
Cuckoo turned at the sound of the doorbells chiming and I saw that he was rearranging a clothing rack stuffed with old tuxedos along the back wall of the store.
“Well, well,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “If it isn’t Miss Pinky Tool Time herself.”
I’d been called “Pink” and “Pinky” plenty of times in my life and it rarely bothered me, but I didn’t like hearing it from him.
The nickname had started after my mother died, when my dad used to bring my little sister, Chloe, and me to his construction sites in lieu of hiring babysitters. The guys on Dad’s crew began teaching us how to build birdhouses and other small projects like that. That led to them buying us little pink tool chests and hard hats. Chloe was too much of a tomboy to go crazy over the pink thing, but I loved it. Because of that, the guys would sometimes call me Pink or Pinky, and the nickname stuck for a while. I still liked using pink tools because they were just as functional and strong as regular tools; plus, my guys didn’t walk off with them.
These days, none of my crew dared to call me Pinky. To my face, anyway.
“Hello, Cuckoo,” I said, attempting to sound cheerful. I tried to calm my nerves by taking in the ambience of the shop. It was clean, at least, and well stocked. Six shiny vintage guitars were hanging on the left wall with several old amplifiers, a drum set, and an electronic keyboard placed below them.
One shelf featured all sorts of items purported to have come from the Glorious Maiden, including a brass porthole, several old jars, an old apple peeler, and various other types of shipboard kitchen appliances, circa 1839. A stuffed moose head stared down at me from the wall above the cash register, its glassy eyes following me through the store until I had to look away. If that wasn’t creepy enough, there was a display of marionettes hanging from a rack in the center of the store. At any minute I expected them to start talking to me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Cuckoo asked, sneering at me.
“I’ve been thinking about that necklace you claim Jesse had.”
He leaned against the front counter and folded his long, bony arms across his sunken chest. “I don’t claim it, little girl. I know it.”
As a female contractor, I’d been dealing with sexist attitudes all my life, but his arrogance really irritated me. I stood up straighter and found myself actually looking down at him. I mentally gave myself a high five for wearing two-inch heels. The guy was barely five foot eight with his shoes on. Where did he get off calling me little girl?
“I saw the thing with my own eyes,” he asserted, “and Jesse offered to sell it to me more than once. I didn’t have the money then, but I do now. And since I was the first one he showed it to, I should have first dibs on it.”
I hadn’t known how I would approach Cuckoo when I first walked in, but now I had the urge to shove him. Hard.
“But these deals usually favor the highest bidder,” I said, flexing my fists reactively. “Not the first one.”
He chuckled without humor. “I haven’t seen anyone else bargaining for it, so I just might be the highest bidder, too.”
“Yes, you might. If we were certain that the necklace existed.”
“What did I just tell you?” he shouted. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes took on a wild edge that left me with no doubt about why people had started calling him Cuckoo. “I said I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“That’s what you’ve said, more than once.” I prayed my tone was reasonable despite my desire to run screaming out of the store. But if I wanted answers from him, I needed to keep things calm. “It’s just that Jane has never seen the necklace and neither have I. Did Jesse tell you where he kept it? Maybe he sold it somewhere else. Or maybe it’s in a bank vault. If we could find it, you might be able to make the deal with Jane.”
His face was turning red. “How the hell should I know where he squirreled it away?”
“You really don’t know?”