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  “No,” he said. “I said Amy wanted me to look at the electricity.”

  “Right this way,” Sophie said, leaving Amy to handle the mess on the porch. Five minutes later, she was in the dark farmhouse basement, wishing she was back on the porch. At least in the sunlight she could see what the mayor was up to. “Uh, what are we doing, Mr. Tucker?”

  “Phin,” he said. “And this is your fuse box. We’re looking at it to see if it’s going to burn your house down.”

  “Where are the little switches?” Sophie squinted around his shoulder in the dim light. She’d expected to get a whiff of some expensive cologne as she leaned closer, but instead he smelled of soap and sun, clean, and she swallowed and concentrated on the fuse box.

  There were no switches, just little round things that looked sinister.

  “Switches would be circuit breakers.” Phin said. “For which you need circuits not fuses. This is the old way.”

  “Is this better?”

  “No. But it’s more exciting.”

  “I don’t want exciting.” Sophie took a step back. “I want functioning, non-shocking, neat little switches. I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. You do it.”

  “That’s the problem with you city folk. No sense of adventure. Let me explain how this works.”

  “No,” Sophie said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I want switches. I know how they work.”

  “You can’t have switches. Get over it.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I’ve heard about these things. You stick pennies in them, and they shock you.”

  “You do not put pennies in them.” He sounded as if he were trying not to laugh. “If you put pennies in them, you deserve to be shocked. Not to mention have the house burn down. Do not put pennies in them.”

  “Not a problem. I’m not going near that thing.” Sophie started up the stairs. “Thank you very much, but no.” When she realized he wasn’t following her, she stopped. “You can come up now. The electricity lesson is over.”

  He grinned at her in the light that filtered down the stairs from the kitchen. “Quitter,” he said, and her pulse skipped a little at the challenge in his voice.

  “Only on the stuff that will get me electrocuted,” she told him. “I believe in safety first.” She escaped back up the stairs and put on Dusty in Memphis to calm her nerves.

  Phin followed a few minutes later.

  “They’re all working,” he told her, washing his hands at the sink. “If you have trouble, yell, and Wes or I will come out and fix it.”

  Sophie blinked at him. “That’s extremely nice of you.”

  “We’re extremely nice people.” Phin smiled at her, and Sophie had a brief moment where she thought he might be a good guy after all before he said, “So tell me about this movie,” and she took a step back.

  “I told you, it’s just an audition tape,” she said. “It was Clea’s idea, and she hired us because we did such a good job filming her wedding. Amy’s shooting it on the porch because it’s easier to light.” Even as she said it, the lights in the kitchen went out, and she heard Amy out on the porch say, “Oh, damn.”

  “If there was a switch,” Sophie said, “I could go throw it now.”

  “But there’s a fuse instead.” Phin pointed at the basement door. “So you can go replace it. Like an adventurous adult.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” Sophie said, and Phin sighed and went downstairs, shortly after which the porch lights evidently came back on because Amy called, “Thank you!”

  “You do very nice work,” she told him when he came back upstairs, trying to be nice since he wasn’t Chad. Exactly. “For that, you get lemonade.”

  “You know, a little adventure in your life wouldn’t kill you,” he said as he sat at the table. “Especially if it’s just replacing a fuse.”

  “I had enough adventure as a child,” Sophie said firmly as she poured. “I’m having a staid adulthood to make up for it.”

  “That’s a waste,” Phin said. “Do you make staid movies, too?”

  Sophie slapped a glass of lemonade down in front of him so that some of it slopped out on the table. “What is it with you and this movie?”

  “What is it with you and this hostility?” He got up and pulled a paper towel off the roll by the sink and mopped up the spill. “You’ve been tense from the minute I said hello.”

  “It was the way you said it,” Sophie said. “And I’ve told you. The movie is a short, improvised film for Clea which Clea asked us to do because she likes Amy’s work.”

  “Not your work?” Phin sat down and sipped his lemonade. “This is very good. Thank you.”

  “Don’t patronize me, just drink it,” Sophie said. “Clea wants Amy because I don’t do improvised. I shoot all the necessary parts of the wedding and manage the business, and Amy gets the weird stuff around the edges and cuts the video. She’s the artist.”

  “ ‘Weird stuff’?” Phin said.

  Sophie folded her arms and leaned against the sink. “People can get the stuff I shoot from any video company, but they can’t get the stuff that Amy finds. But if they only got what Amy shoots, they’d be mad because people like things like their vows in their wedding videos. So we work together.”

  “And why is Clea making this video?”

  Sophie scowled at him. “Why do you care so much about this movie?”

  “As long as you’re out of here before Wednesday, I don’t.”

  “Well, we’re out of here on Sunday.”

  “Fine,” Phin said. “And I wasn’t patronizing you, the lemonade really is good.”

  “Thank you,” Sophie said, feeling slightly anticlimactic.

  “And for whatever I did in a former life to make you so damn mad, I apologize.” Phin smiled at her, clearly used to charming everyone in his path. “Now, will you please stop spitting at me?”

  “Considering that former life, an apology is not nearly enough. ‘My name is Inigo Montoya’ on this one.”

  “Who?” Phin said.

  Sophie picked up the pitcher and said, “Lemonade?”— sounding more threatening than she meant to.

  Phin pushed his glass back. “No, I’ve had enough, thank you.”

  He got up and went back to the porch, and Sophie felt a little guilty for taking her frustrations out on him. She put his lemonade glass in the sink and went out onto the low, wide, back porch to calm her nerves. If she could get just get rid of that constant feeling that something awful was bearing down on her—

  Something furry brushed her leg and she looked down and screamed.

  There was an animal there —a big one, it came halfway up to her knee— and it had matted red-brown fur on its barrel-like body and short white legs with little black spots on them, and Sophie had never seen anything like it in her life. It was crouched now that she’d screamed, in the attack position she was sure, and when it moved, she leaped back against the wall of the house and screamed again.

  Phin slammed the screen door open as he came out onto the porch. “What?” he said, and Sophie pointed down. He let his shoulders slump. “You’re kidding. You scream like that for a dog?”

  That’s a dog? “They bite,” Sophie said in her own defense. It seemed feasible.

  “Some do,” Phin said. “This one appears not to.”

  Sophie followed his eyes down to the dog, which had rolled over on its back with its four stumpy white legs in the air. “It looks weird.”

  “It’s built like a Welsh corgi.” Phin craned his head sideways to get a better look at the prostrate animal. “And a few other things mixed in to keep it interesting.” He squinted at it. “God knows where the black spots came from. It’s probably a highway dog.”

  “A highway dog.” Sophie looked down at the dog, which was now looking up at them from its back. It was splashed with mud and quivering, possibly the ugliest living thing Sophie had ever seen. Its huge, black-ringed brown eyes stared at her pathetically, and she felt bad for thinking it wa