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it without ruffling their feelings.
    “I have a splitting headache,” I said, reaching into my bag for a couple of aspirin. “Chantel was off her game today, wasn’t she?”
    “Completely. That girl wasn’t getting anything right, bless her heart.”
    Whenever Vera Mae says “bless her heart,” it means, “I’d like to wring her gosh-darn neck.”
    “I don’t suppose Cyrus will care, though. We’ll still have to invite her back next week.”
    “Oh, she’ll be back like clockwork,” Vera Mae said glumly. “All Cyrus cares about are the ratings, sugar.” She was nibbling on a Twizzler, the latest in her string of stop-smoking strategies. Before Twizzlers, she worked her way through a candy mountain of malted milk balls and Reese’s Pieces. “For some reason, your listeners are connecting with her, and that’s a fact. You know, we’re running those séance spots every hour on the hour. Who knew that dead folks would have so much to say?”
    “That reminds me,” I said, my spirits sinking. “I’m supposed to go to one of Chantel’s séances tonight. For some reason she wants me to see her in action. Maybe she thinks it’ll give me some new insight into her spirit work, as she calls it.”
    Vera Mae pulled a face. “I promised her I’d go, too. Do you want to go together? It’s down at the historical society on Water Street. We could order in a pizza and go straight from here.” She gave a wry smile. “My car’s still in the shop. I don’t know what in the world Jeb Peterson is doing to it, so if I could hitch a ride with you, that would be great.”
    “Sounds good. Lark and Lola want to come, too. So we’ll swing by my place and get them on the way, if that’s okay.”
    “Of course it is. The more, the merrier. You know what they say—misery loves company,” Vera Mae added wryly.
    Lark, my twenty-three-year-old roommate, is into all things New Age and would never forgive me if I denied her the chance to go to a ghostly encounter. And Lola, my glamorous fiftysomething mother, is game for anything that will improve her “art.”
    Lola is an aspiring actress who’s appeared in a string of B movies, and she’s always up for a new experience. It’s doubtful she’ll ever be called on to play a medium or psychic on-screen, but she’s a confirmed people watcher, and a séance was the perfect place to do it.
    I opened a press packet that included a self-published book on Cypress Grove history, written by Professor Bernard Grossman, a local author. It had a cheesy cover and a gluey binding, but it was obviously a three-hundred-page labor of love. I held it up for Vera Mae. “Save or toss?”
    “I’ll take it, sugar.” Vera Mae peered at the cover. “You know, I can probably get some good material out of here for those time capsule promos.” For the past month, we’d been running a major promotion called “Take Me Back in Time,” in honor of an upcoming Cypress Grove event.
    Several decades ago, the town council buried a time capsule under the courthouse, with the stipulation that it would be dug up in a hundred years. But a few months ago, a developer named Mark Sanderson started negotiating to buy the courthouse. He doesn’t care about the ugly mock-Gothic building; all he’s interested in is the prime real estate it stands on. Sanderson plans on razing the courthouse and building a towering condo project on the valuable two-acre lot in the center of town. So that means the time capsule is going to be unearthed in less than two weeks, way ahead of schedule.
    Cyrus, who always has an eye out for ratings, decided we could get some mileage out of the time capsule story by running contests, offering prizes to listeners, and interviewing local historians.
    Vera Mae had assigned the project to Kevin Whitley, our college intern, mostly to give him something to do. Kevin is barely twenty, but he dresses like someone forty years older. Today he was sporting Larry King suspenders, a Matlock