Fair Play (continued)

Westville Book 2 Preview

5

A thick waft of fryer grease and spun sugar clung to the air like pollen, smelling of childhood and heartburn and a hundred regrets wrapped in bacon.

Casey felt like he needed a shower just walking through it. He couldn’t help feeling a night here could spike your cholesterol and blood sugar through osmosis alone. And yet, he wanted a corn dog. Maybe even the deep-fried Oreos.

When in Rome.

The 4-H fair was a sensory ambush. Every dozen steps, the golden haze of powdered sugar and peanut oil gave way to the ripe bite of manure and chicken shit. The transition was so seamless, so accepted, most folks didn’t even blink. Probably because half of them were parked out here in the makeshift RV village, soaking in the smell with their morning coffee.

He caught sight of Aly laughing with Stephanie Wilkons, who he hadn’t seen since he left her stranded at prom a lifetime ago. Steph spotted him, and Casey tried to manage a wave and half-smile. What he got in return was a stiff nod and a razor-wire grin—the kind that read Hurt her, and I will end you—before she turned back and beamed at Aly with pageant warmth.

Westville didn’t forgive and forget. Not really. Especially not the girls who grew up into women who still remembered what dress they wore the night you ditched them.

“Man, people change fast,” Aly said, watching Steph walk off.

“Yea?”

“Steph just told me Billy ran out on her last year.”

“Ah,” Casey said, connecting the dots. Billy Meyers had always been a tool, so that tracked. He fumbled to put together words of agreement and commisseration in his mind like the vinyl image of a clown plastered on the side of the fair food truck juggling a stick of cotton candy and fried chicken legs. What came out was, “You want a corn dog?”

Aly arched an eyebrow, lips twitching into that half-grin that always made him want to kiss her right there in public and dare someone to say something about it.

“Benson,” she said, “I just told you a friend of mine got left by her husband and your first thought is food?”

“I forgot to eat today,” he said with a shrug.

Which was mostly true. Or at least true enough that it gave him an excuse to avoid talking about the disaster that had been the newly reopened Fischer’s. Their longtime cook hadn’t come back after the rebuild, and the replacement had all the culinary instincts of a cafeteria sub. The only reason they’d reopened at all was because Special Agent Stephen Lochlear had applied pressure in the right places, which Casey didn’t let him forget on their monthly calls.

One of which had just wrapped an hour ago.

He was trying—really trying—not to think about work when he was with Aly. After everything that went down last fall, he’d spent months a ghost in his own relationship. Now that things felt… better, he wasn’t about to screw it up. Even if he wasn’t always sure he deserved it. Being here with her, under these lights and smells and bad decisions on sticks, made him think maybe—just maybe—there was still a future for the both of them.

Her green eyes caught the carnival light just right as she walked toward the concessions stand, looking like reflected stars. Something good. Something real.

They sat on a wooden bench across from the big red-and-white tent where the 4-H Variety Show was about to kick off. Mayor Douglas tapped the mic inside, warming up with that sing-song radio DJ cadence he never dropped, even when issuing evacuation orders.

Casey gnawed down the last of his corn dog, snapping the wooden stick between his teeth before he realized it. The taste lingered—bitter grease and shame. Aly was watching him with that look.

“What?” he said through a mouthful of pseudo-meat and breading.

“Something on your mind?”

“No. I mean—not really.” He wiped his mouth. “Why?”

“You eat faster when something’s bothering you.”

“Do I?”

“How was the call today?”

He nodded. “Fine. It was Lochlear. The usual runaround. Nothing new.”

Aly dipped a fry into ketchup, dragging it in neat little swirls. “You think it’s really over?”

He paused. Thought about it. The ‘aftershocks’ Lochlear and Heiser had warned about hadn’t shown up. Nothing that would even hint at it really—until today seeing those cattle.

Heiser—now reinstated as head of the Bureau’s Phenomenological Research Division—had said in a memo two months back that geomagnetic readings around Westville were stabilizing faster than expected. Reeves had hand-delivered that report, part of a new team working a few miles out, in a location Casey wasn’t cleared to disclose. Not even to Aly.

He hated keeping anything from her. He’d spent too long doing that already.

But he looked her in the eye now and said, “I think it might be. They’re still watching, but... yeah. Maybe we’re out of the woods.”

Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and he couldn’t blame her.

Sometimes it was easier to believe none of it had happened than to believe it had and still expect the world to go back to normal.

A sudden high-pitched whine cut through the fairgrounds and made Casey wince and gave him an instaneous. He thought—for half a second—it was something else. A whisper. A hissing. But it was just the PA system squawking back to life.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Good evening Westville,” Douglas boomed, voice bright and hollow as the sky above them. “And welcome to the 56th Annual 4-H Fair Variety Show!”

Casey spotted Millie and Olivia approaching from the midway, flanked by the boys and Henry Morgan—Jim Morgan’s kid. Erin Thompson stood near one of the tent poles, arms folding her daughter into a hug.

A hollow ache rose in Casey’s chest. And it wasn’t just the fair food settling in sideways.

He thought of Joe.

She’s alright, he told himself, though the words rang thinner than he’d like.

“Shall we?” Aly asked, standing with her Coke in hand.

Casey scooped up their half-eaten fries, the paper basket streaked with fading swirls of ketchup, and dropped it into a nearby trash can.

The seats under the tent were packed, so he leaned against one of the center poles while Aly chatted with Nancy Meyers. She had that easy way with people, probably honed from years at Fischer’s, but Casey knew it went deeper. She actually cared. That was what made her different. What made her her.

Then there was Mayor Douglas, doing what he did best—standing on a stage and playing the role of beloved small-town champion like he’d been born for it.

To be fair, the man had somehow wrangled near-universal support from the town’s fractured factions. No small feat in Westville, especially after what the town had just gone through. Even Old Westville—the long-established families with too many stories and too little patience—seemed willing to clap along, if only because the Thompson scandal had given them a bigger target to gossip about.

Casey watched Douglas bask in applause and wondered if the man had any clue what really lurked beneath this town. Even Chief Reynolds didn’t know everything. Hell, Casey wished he didn’t know everything.

The secrecy sat heavy in his bones. He hated it. Which was ironic, considering how well-practiced he’d once been at keeping things to himself. But last year had burned through that—burned through a lot. He’d had to lay it all bare, let the worst of it out. And somehow, Aly had stayed and seen through the wreckage.

He looked over at her now—lit by the harsh fluorescents and carnival reds—and felt something fragile and necessary shift in his chest. She was still here by his side. That had to count for something.

Sometimes he thought about yanking the pager from his pocket and tossing it into the Slate, watching it vanish beneath the muck. Let the Bureau call someone else the next time things got weird.

But that hadn’t been the deal.

In exchange for his continued cooperation with the D.C.B.—now embedded, “temporarily,” in a secured wing of the Allwell Factory—he was a liaison. An inside man. The town’s buffer between the government’s shadow play and the fragile façade of normalcy.

Douglas had moved on to reading off sponsor names, droning thanks to banks and barns alike. Casey’s mind drifted to Morgan’s Dairy.

Something about that place still felt wrong.

He knew the Bureau was listening. Their scanners would’ve picked up the call. They were aware of the cattle.

And if they weren’t reacting yet, it just meant it hadn’t tripped the threshold. Not yet.

But Casey had learned to trust his gut.

If this was chronic wasting disease—or anything close—fine. He could live with that. But it wasn’t. He could feel it in the space behind his ribs. Like pressure before a storm. It was coming. Always had been.

He just hoped he could buy the town enough time to breathe before the next wave hit.

That was his job now. Keep things quiet. Keep people safe. But sometimes he wondered how long anything could stay quiet. People always found the cracks. They always brought light. And the truth never stayed buried forever.

He glanced around the fairgrounds. Families drifted through the booths. Old couples leaned into each other like they always had. Kids chased each other between tents, sticky fingers and half-eaten funnel cakes. It looked like it always had.

Now, more than ever, he didn’t want that to change.

But he had changed. Some of it good. Some... not.

And something was still moving under the surface that he couldn’t put a name to.

Just a feeling.

That creeping dread had a rhythm now—always arriving with the sting of a migraine, always accompanied by something just off. A shimmer in the air, the warping of corners, the red flare at the edge of vision that vanished when you turned to meet it.

Casey told himself it was just his imagination. That it wasn’t connected to the “telepathic sensitivities” Heiser kept suggesting in those dense-ass reports.

But Casey wasn’t an idiot. He knew better.

And just now, as Mayor Douglas shook hands with the owner of Beaconlite—a salad dressing outfit that sponsored half the town’s PTA fundraisers—he saw it again.

A shadow. Thin. Lurking just behind the Mayor.

He blinked. Straightened. Took two careful steps forward.

Gone.

Only a sharp pressure behind his eyes, faint but rising. A signal.

“Alright now your just staring off into space. Seriously, are you alright?” Aly asked.

Casey shook his head, smirking. “If I had a dollar for every time you asked me that—”

“You could take me out on a real date,” she quipped, barely missing a beat.

He grinned. “That new place in Iron Falls.”

“The one with the table-made guacamole?”

“Best Mexican food around, supposedly.”

“Next week?” she asked, teasing, skeptical.

“I’m serious.”

She winked. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

God, she drove him crazy. The way she grinned with her whole face, the way her eyes softened when she laughed—it made him want to stop everything and pull her in. Just tell her. Just show her.

Before he could say more, Olivia slid up beside them, Henry Morgan in tow.

“Hey, sis,” Olivia said, then flicked her chin toward Casey. “Hey, Stiff.”

The nickname had stuck. He didn’t love it, but given the months of tension he’d carried like a second spine, he couldn’t exactly argue.

Casey gave her a dry look. “Gotta apologize to you, kid,” he said, directing the comment at Henry instead. “She’s a lot.”

Liv raised her brows, half offended, half amused. That was their dance. Mutual respect forged in fire. In the snow. In the dark.

“No need, sir,” Henry stammered, a little too formal. Liv elbowed him. “I mean—yeah. We’ve all got our quirks.”

Casey cracked a small laugh and nodded.

Henry looked at him, hesitant. “Were you at the dairy earlier?”

“I was,” Casey said. “Bit of a mess.”

“My dad’s still freaking out. I mean, it’s not every day you find cows that look like they got... sucked dry.”

“Weren’t they headed for slaughter anyway?” Liv offered, deflecting.

“Not like that,” Henry said. “They were... hollow.”

He explained what he’d seen—how the cows were drained, no blood, no mess, just skin sagging over bone. Casey listened closely, but his eyes were on Olivia.

She made a joke but he saw it there still, flickering beneath the surface. Recognition. Worry. The memory of a thing they didn’t talk about. Not in daylight.

Casey looked past them, heart hitching. “Weren’t you supposed to meet Millie here?”

Olivia snorted. “Wow. Keeping tabs on all of us now? Her mom came to grab her.”

Casey followed Olivia’s glance to the edge of the stage. Erin Thompson stood beside Millie, one hand resting protectively on her daughter’s shoulder.

Casey’s stomach turned.

He remembered now—Douglas had said there’d be a moment of silence for the victims of the ‘mill disaster’. Most of which had been the men he was forced to shoot to protect the kids, and himself.

But unlike those, Joe Thompson’s name was at the top of that list. A friend and father lost to the wages of Janus and the Thompson families long burning secrets.

What he hadn’t heard was that Douglas planned to call Erin and Millie up on stage.

Olivia leaned closer, voice low. “You think she’s up for this?”

“You’d know better than I would,” Casey said. He’d been relying on Liv’s updates, his unofficial informant on Millie’s condition—per Heiser’s recommendation. The doctor was convinced Millie was still the most at risk for... relapse.

Which made sense. She was the conduit. The girl whose blood had pulled something from the dark and given it form.

“She’s been okay, mostly,” Olivia said. “But in the funhouse earlier, she had one of those... episodes.”

“What kind of episodes?”

“You know. Waking nightmares.”

“I thought those only happened at night—like sleepwalking?”

Liv shook her head. “There’ve been a few during the day now. She doesn’t say what she sees, but it rattles her.”

“You should’ve told me sooner.”

“Not like I see you every day.”

“Tell your sister, then.”

Aly had taken a seat with her mom, who was chatting animatedly with a friend from church. Casey stayed standing.

His eyes never left the girl on stage.

Millie stepped into the spotlight, flanked by her mother. Her posture stiff, but her chin lifted.

Mayor Douglas tapped the mic and began his closing remarks. “And now, a brief moment to remember those we lost last year. Their families still carry the weight. And tonight, I’d like to ask Erin and Millie Thompson to join me...”

The lights dimmed.