It was officially sweater weather, and though Nora was a little chilly in her white blouse and book-print scarf, she didn’t mind. After being inside for most of the day, the crisp evening air felt invigorating.
Nora paused under Soothe’s purple awning and gazed into the store. Other than the lights in the display window, the shop was dark. All was quiet. When Nora glanced up to the second story, she saw a buttery light in two of the windows. Celeste was in her apartment, safe and sound. Satisfied, Nora turned for home.
The chill in the evening air called for comfort food, so Nora decided to make turkey chili for supper. While the ground turkey was browning on the stovetop, she drained a can of kidney beans and started chopping a small onion. She usually listened to music when she cooked, but tonight, she wanted to think. How could the Secret, Book, and Scone Society do their part to aid and protect Celeste when they knew so little about her?
With the chili simmering, Nora opened a notebook and powered up her laptop. It was time to search for answers, starting with Pine Hollow, North Carolina.
It took no time at all to learn that Pine Hollow was a very small town—probably half the size of Miracle Springs—but just as remote. Miracle Springs was surrounded by mountains while Pine Hollow was surrounded by either farm or swamplands. As Nora looked at photos and read about the town’s history, she got the sense of a quiet place, well off the beaten path. Theirs was not a town hosting festivals or food trucks. Leisure-time activities were limited to fishing the lake or hunting the woods. There were no movie theaters or strip malls. No coffee shops or ice cream parlors. No subdivisions with playgrounds and clubhouses.
“A lonely town,” Nora said, getting up to turn off the stove burner.
When she returned to the table with a steaming bowl of chili and a heel of brown bread, she decided to postpone her research until after her meal. She didn’t have enough hands to eat, type, and take notes, but she could easily eat and read.
Two chapters later, Nora was full and a little disoriented. She’d become so invested in the lives of the fictional characters she’d come to love that she’d forgotten about Celeste. Her confusion didn’t last long, and Nora knew she could continue The Flatshare as soon as she was done sleuthing, but it was still hard to set the book aside and return to reality.
After putting her chili bowl in the sink to soak and refilling her glass with sparkling water, Nora hit the space bar on her laptop. It seemed to take forever for the machine, which was getting old, to wake up.
“I get it,” Nora told her computer. “Some days, you just want to keep dreaming.”
She typed “Cecily Leopold” and “North Carolina” into Google’s search box and found a result that contained both Cecily Leopold’s name and the word “community.”
Nora clicked on the link, which brought her to the site of a daily newspaper located in the eastern part of the state. The article, entitled “School Employee Fired After CBD Use Results in Failed Drug Test,” had been written back in March.
“CBD,” Nora whispered. “Oh, no.”
The article’s focus was one Lazarus Harper, sixty-four-year-old cafeteria worker employed by the Washington County Schools. Harper, who’d suffered from chronic lower back pain for more than a decade, had become fed up with his prescription medicine. The high cost and negative side effects had him looking for alternatives. He was delighted to find that CBD oil was an affordable source of pain relief without any adverse side effects. Unfortunately, in January, he failed a state-mandated drug test. Harper’s THC levels were higher than 0.3 percent, despite the fact that the product label on his CBD oil declared it to be THC-free. Harper purchased the CBD oil from Cecily Leopold of the Still Waters Community. He intended to take legal action against Ms. Leopold and the leader of the Community for selling a defective product as well as the Washington County Schools for wrongful termination.
A headshot of Lazarus Harper accompanied the article. Harper had a scruffy beard, leathery skin, and sunken eyes. The lines on his face, the broken capillaries near his nose, and his thinning hair spoke of a hard life.
“Are you the man from the park?” Nora asked.
Since she couldn’t see any of Harper’s body in the photo, she ran a search for other images but found nothing.
Foiled, she turned her attention to the Still Waters Community. This must be the place mentioned during Celeste’s sedative-induced confession to Deputy Andrews. The place she should have left sooner.
Still Waters appeared as a commercial website and was referenced in three articles besides the Harper piece.