by Cat Johnson
“Of course.”
“And at the farm market?” I turned to Stone.
He drew in a breath, looking less than enthusiastic. “Sure.”
“Oh, and we’ll have to make sure whoever’s handling the farm’s Instagram account posts a lot. Maybe a daily countdown to election day. And pictures of the signs. And of you. Can you do that?” I asked him.
His lids drifted shut for a moment before, lips pressed tightly together, he nodded. “Okay.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked since it was obvious something was. “You don’t look happy.”
“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” He huffed out a laugh ripe with sarcasm.
As I waited, he let out another big breath.
Finally, he said, “It’s fine. But before you drop off hundreds of signs and flyers at the farm, can you please let me break the news to the family that we’re now election central?”
“Sure. I can do that.” Besides, no matter how much I paid in rush fees, I didn’t think the little local printing place could deliver an order that size in a day anyway.
“Come on, Stone. It’s only for a few weeks,” Cash said.
“Ugh. Don’t remind me.” Timing was going to be an issue.
We didn’t have much time at all. Maybe I really would have to search online to see if there was a big chain store not too far away that could do the job in an hour.
I rubbed a hand over my forehead, not that the action would calm my racing thoughts.
“We only have a short time, but we can do it. I have to get on social media and update all the pages and events to reflect the change in candidate. Oh, and I should post on the Mudville forum too.” I glanced around the room. “Can all of you put up posts on the forum too? Something like how you’re so excited to have Stone as the new write-in candidate for this election.”
Red nodded. “Sure. No problem. And I’ll text Bethany and catch her up on what she missed. She can tell Brandon.”
“Perfect.” I switched my focus to Cash. “Are you on the forum?”
He frowned. “No. I get enough interaction with the people of this town from the time I spend at the farm stand and in Red’s shop. More than enough. Believe me.”
Seeing Cash was a lost cause, I turned to Stone. “Are you on the Mudville forum?”
His eyes momentarily widened at my question. “Um, I think I might have opened an account on there at one time.”
He must be hedging because he knew I was going to force him to post on social media, which I knew he really didn’t like. But he was going to have to suck it up and get over that. We were in the middle of an election here.
I cocked a brow high. “Please check. Stone, it’s important. We can post all we want on Facebook, but the fact is only about one percent of the people will see our posts. The visibility will be exponentially higher in the forum and it’s a micro-targeted audience. Only Mudville residents. That’s our exact demographic, so it’s important we all post there.”
“The marketing goddess has spoken. You better listen, bro,” Cash joked.
Stone nodded but still looked miserable. “All right. I will.”
“What’s your username on the forum? I want to be able to share and comment on your posts,” I said.
Again, that deer-in-headlights expression passed over Stone’s face before he recovered. “I’ll have to look. I, uh, don’t remember.”
I sighed. “All right. We’ll figure it out. Until then I’ll start the ball rolling.”
“After you eat.” Agnes moved to the long wood kitchen table with a platter overflowing with scrambled eggs.
“After we eat,” I agreed.
We were going to need the fuel for the fight ahead. And I saw I was going to need all the energy I could find to convince my reluctant boyfriend to be the kind of candidate he needed to be.
NINE
Stone
Cash was silent as I drove back to the farm. Usually I’d be grateful for the reprieve from his smart-ass mouth.
Today, I wasn’t. Unlike usual, there was something going on in his head and I wanted to know what it was.
“Why aren’t you talking?” I asked.
Brows raised, he turned in the passenger seat toward me. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Why you’re so quiet for one. I get suspicious when you’re quiet.”
“Seems to me the person you should worry about is Harper. What’s she got on you that you agreed to run for mayor?”
“What? Nothing.”
Cash laughed. “I know you, bro. And you’d rather move to the hunting cabin and live off the grid than be in the public eye. But for some reason, you agreed to run for the most public position in Mudville without even a fight. So what’s up?”
“First of all, it was your damn idea,” I pointed out.
“Yes.” Cash nodded. “But I was just messing with you. I figured you’d say no and that would be the end of it. But damned if you didn’t say yes. Because of Harper.”
“She’s my girlfriend. You know how it is. Would you say no to Red?”
“In this situation? Yeah. In a heartbeat.” Cash snorted.
“Well that’s where you and I are different, I guess. I wanna make Harper happy.”
Cash scowled at me. “I make Red plenty happy. Don’t you worry.”
“If you say so.”
Teasing Cash helped, but it didn’t alleviate my guilt.
What Cash didn’t know was that a good part of the reason I’d said yes to the crazy scheme to run for mayor—besides the fact that I was pretty sure I was going to lose—was that I felt horrible about that damn Mudville forum.
Or, actually, over my not confessing to Harper right away, there in bed when she’d first mentioned it, that I was Anonymous. The poster who had made her so angry.
Why hadn’t I told her that night? I didn’t know. But how could I tell her now without her being mad that I’d kept it from her for this long?
Still without any answers, I pulled into the driveway of the farm and parked near the back door. I had a different challenge to face—telling my parents I was suddenly a candidate in the election.
“Stone’s running for mayor,” Cash announced the moment we walked into the kitchen, before I even had a chance to get the door closed behind me.
“Excuse me?” Mom looked up from the computer, a furrow between her brows.
“You’re running against Harper?” Boone, seated next to our mother, looked equally confused.
I backhanded Cash. “You said you’d let me tell them.”
“No, Harper said she’d let you tell them. I never said any such thing.” Cash grinned.
I scowled and turned my attention back to my mother and Boone. “It turns out Harper can’t run because she’s not a Mudville resident. So . . . I’m running.”
“That’s great.” Mom beamed at me.
“Is it?” I asked.
Boone nodded. “Yes. Now you can be in charge of all the town meetings and get some shit done in this town.”
“Yeah, great. And I can also be the one getting called when old man Nichols' bull gets out and runs down Martin Road.” I rolled my eyes, not as excited about this prospect as my family.
The back door opened and Dad stepped inside. “Heard you’re running for mayor.”
I spun to face him. “How did you hear that already?”
“I ran into the Trouts.”
How the hell did they hear in the time that it had taken us to drive from Agnes’s to the farm?
“And it’s posted on the Mudville community board,” Dad continued.
“Already?” My shock over the speed with which Harper had accomplished that was only surpassed by the fact my father was obviously a frequent visitor on that damn online forum that was rapidly becoming the bane of my existence.
“Yeah. Look.” After scrolling for a moment, he handed his cell phone over to me.
I took it and looked at the screen and sure enough, there it was.
/> Someone, a name I didn’t know, had posted their support for my campaign for mayor. Then someone else had reposted it.
Both had gotten a bunch of comments, all positive and supportive with the exception of the one guy who commented, “Never heard of him.”
I found Red’s post. And Bethany’s. Even Laney was posting about the election under the Muddy River Inn’s account.
Then finally, I found Harper’s original post about my running for mayor.
The old Aerosmith song streaming on the local station from the radio on the counter ended and Wolfman’s voice came on.
In my misery, I was barely paying attention as he delivered the station’s call letters and identified the song. I had long ago stopped paying a whole lot of attention to the radio that had been white noise in my house since I’d been a child.
But then I heard, “News in the race for mayor in Mudville. Morgan Farm’s own Stone Morgan has entered the mayoral race as a write-in candidate. He’s challenging the incumbent and formerly unopposed Fox Picket. Voting will take place from nine until four at the Community House on Main Street in Mudville . . .”
I stopped listening as I wondered how the hell did the local radio station get that information?
I didn’t have to think all that hard. This smacked of Harper. She’d probably written a damn press release. It would probably be in the local paper tomorrow too.
If I had any doubts that this was happening, they were gone now. Right along with my confidence that I didn’t have to worry about actually winning this thing.
Suddenly, it looked like I had a chance.
Cash slapped me on the back. “See, bro? The word is already out. You’re a sure thing.”
The question was, did I want to be?
I sighed and turned to the family. “Anyway, this isn’t going to get in the way of my work here or with my helping with the preparation for the wedding.” I glanced at Boone as I said that.
I’d been against his wedding in the beginning. But if my helping get the farm ready for it got me out of doing campaign stuff, I was all for it.
“Thanks, bro.” Boone nodded.
“No problem. Nothing’s going to change around here at all.”
“Except Harper plastering the farm with a hundred campaign signs,” Cash reminded me.
Yeah, except for that.
Mom’s eyes widened and Dad cocked up a brow, but they didn’t say a word about the election. At least, not to me.
All the better. I was done talking about this. “I’m gonna go get back to work.”
I headed for the barn. And judging by how long it took Cash and Boone to get outside after me, I’d bet there was plenty of discussion about the campaign and me after I’d left.
The rest of my day was far from peaceful. I had three phone calls from Harper about the election. And I had to put up with Boone and Cash calling me Mr. Mayor every time they talked to me, which didn’t make me all that happy.
Neither did having to work late building a twig arbor for Boone and Sarah’s ceremony.
That kept me working past sunset to finish it rather than walking away and finishing it when I had time. But finally, the job was done, and it looked pretty damn good if I did say so myself.
Once we strung it with white lights, it’d be even better. I snapped a picture, because my cousin Shalene, who was the main contributor to the Morgan Farm Instagram, would kill me if I didn’t.
I texted the picture to her so she could worry about the caption and the damn hashtags since I never seemed to get that part right, according to her. Then I declared myself done for the day.
According to the big calendar hanging on the wall, our parents were playing in the card tournament at the Muddy River Inn.
Harper texted me a list of a dozen campaign things she wanted to get done today so I decided it was safest not to go over there tonight. Instead, I microwaved some leftovers from the fridge, brought them to my bedroom and grabbed the iPad.
Finally alone and with a minute to myself, I logged into the community forum.
Out of guilt, I’d been trying to avoid posting since Harper had revealed she was Ms. Naughty and had mentioned her hatred for Anonymous, aka, me. But as I scrolled the feed I saw my stepping away from the site hadn’t exactly worked as I’d planned.
People were still commenting—in droves—on my past posts.
And although I did try to stop posting, sometimes I couldn’t help myself. Some things just couldn’t be ignored.
Like the guy who set up his new beehives along the bank of the river. Of course I had to remind him of last year’s flood. And that moving a beehive wasn’t as easy as getting a refrigerator dolly and wheeling it away. There would be fifty-thousand stinging residents inside who might object.
But I wasn’t the only one still interacting on the forum. Harper had been busy herself, jumping into almost every conversation I was involved in.
Not so much when it came to farming or even bees, but definitely on the relationship posts. I didn’t seek them out, but dammit, how could I stay silent after I read the post where a guy was complaining his wife had left him when he asked for a threesome for his birthday?
I’d told the guy to just tell his wife he’d been joking and say sorry, that he didn’t realize she couldn’t take a joke. I didn’t like condoning lying but if it could save a marriage, it was worth it.
Of course, Harper disagreed with that advice, which had spurred more and more contentious debate among the other commenters. In fact, an all-out war had broken out in the comments section on that thread.
There were two-hundred and eleven comments to be exact.
As I read through them, I could see a trend developing. Most of them were defending me and slamming Harper. The men all had taken my side, and the few women who’d commented, the very few, had taken hers.
I had to think the male versus female ratio was so skewed because when the forum started a couple of years ago, most of the posts were for things like tractors or tires for sale.
The forum had only started to change recently to include more stuff.
I kept scrolling through, shaking my head as some of the posts got pretty heated, even devolving into name calling.
There was a lot to read. A lot to scroll through. But one post stopped my thumb. Ms. Naughty had posted asking for questions. She’s posted to ask her anything and she’d answer.
There was only one comment on the post. Some idiot had commented, “I have a question for you. Wanna get naughty with me?”
“Asshole.” I felt my blood pressure rising as I punched in a reply telling him exactly how I felt about him talking to a woman like that and before I knew it, for better or worse, I’d posted it.
I stared at the post with its two comments, the idiot’s and mine, or rather the one from Anonymous, and sighed.
Poor Harper.
I knew how she thought. I knew if she didn’t get over two hundred likes on a single picture on Instagram she felt like a failure. And I knew she’d see that post with the two hundred comments and compare it to hers with only two.
And above all else, I knew if . . . no, when . . . okay, maybe if I told her who I was, it wasn’t going to go over well. Not at all.
TEN
Harper
“Brr. It got cold out there.” I came through the back door and headed directly to stand in front of the space heater Agnes had running in the kitchen as she cooked.
“Autumn in upstate New York is unpredictable. You have to dress—”
“Dress in layers. I know.” I nodded and glanced past her to see the counter. “Whatcha making? It smells good.”
Agnes was dressed impeccably, as usual, in a black and white wool plaid skirt with black boots and a black turtleneck.
She shot me a sideways glance. “What I’m making is not even near ready yet. I’m marinating meat for dinner. So what had you up and out so early this morning?”
Finally warm enough, I stopped hovering by the heater a
nd sat. “I drove around and counted the campaign signs to make sure they were all still there.”
She abandoned the dinner prep and turned to face me. “All one hundred of them?”
“I decided to only order fifty.” But I did make up for it by ordering two hundred flyers.
“And? Were they all there?” she asked.
“I only counted forty-eight. But I’m trying not to think the worst. I might have lost track when I was trying to count the ones on the highway while talking to Red on the phone.”
“Harper, sweetie, you’re becoming obsessed.”
“No . . . maybe. But seriously, Aunt Agnes, Carson hasn’t found who stole my signs. The thief is still out there and he can strike again.”
“He or she could. But it’ll be okay. Even if they do take some signs, Stone will survive.”
“Hmm. She . . . I hadn’t thought of that before. It could have been a woman. Or even a group of people.”
“Harper. You need to move on. Go work on your book.”
I fought my pout at being reprimanded like a child who hadn’t done her homework and said, “I am. I’m plotting.”
Agnes glanced back at me. “Well, that’s very good to hear.”
“But it would be easier to concentrate on work if Carson had found something. I know it’s too much to ask that Mudville have street cams, but does no one on Main Street have a security camera? A doorbell camera? Anything?”
Maybe I was expecting too much from small town law enforcement. The sheriff’s department in this town probably still used a fax machine and paper files. Sadly, the old biddies probably had more information than the sheriff—
Oh my God. The old biddies. My eyes widened with the idea.
“Aunt Agnes. How close are you with old—uh, Mrs. Trout and Alice Mudd and Mary Brimley?” I’d nearly called her Old Lady Trout and had censored myself on Aunt Agnes’s account, just in case they were closer than I thought.
She turned and narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”
“Um, no reason. I was just wondering if you ever had them over. You know for afternoon tea. Or something.”
Her graying eyebrows rose. “Afternoon tea? You mean like with scones and clotted cream?”
