LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 1

      Remember the big moment in The Wizard of Oz movie when Dorothy says, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?” Boy, could I relate. Only a twister hadn’t brought me here; a promise had. This wasn’t the Emerald City, but the Emerald Coast of Florida. Ruby slippers wouldn’t get me home to Chicago. And neither would my red, vintage Volkswagen Beetle, if anyone believed the story I’d spread around. Nothing like lying to people you’d just met. But it couldn’t be helped. Really, it couldn’t.

      The truth was, as a twenty-eight-year-old children’s librarian, I never imagined I’d end up working in a beach bar in Emerald Cove, Florida. In the week I’d been here I’d already learned toddlers and drunk people weren’t that different. Both were unsteady on their feet, prone to temper tantrums one minute and sloppy hugs the next, and they liked to take naps wherever they happened to be. Go figure. But knowing that wasn’t helping me right now. I was currently giving the side-eye to one of the regulars.

      “Joaquín, why the heck is Elwell wearing that armadillo on his head?” I asked in a low voice. Elwell Pugh sat at the end of the bar, his back to the beach, nursing a beer in his wrinkled hands. I had known life would be different in the Panhandle of Florida, but armadillo shells on people’s heads?—that was a real conversation starter.

      “It’s not like it’s alive, Chloe,” Joaquín Diaz answered, as if that made sense of a man wearing a hollowed-out armadillo shell as a hat. Joaquín raised two perfectly manicured eyebrows at me.

      What? Maybe it was some kind of lodge thing down here. My uncle had been a member of a lodge in Chicago complete with funny fez hats, parades, and clowns riding miniature motorcycles. But he usually didn’t sit in bars in his hat—at least not alone.

      Elwell sported the deep tan of a Florida native. A few faded tattoos sprinkled his arms. His gray hair, cropped short, and grizzled face made him look unhappy—maybe he was. I’d met Elwell when I started working at the Sea Glass. I already knew that Elwell was a great tipper, didn’t make off-color comments, and kept his hands to himself. That alone made him a saint among men to me, because all three were rare when waitressing in a bar. At least in this one, the only bar I’d ever worked in.

      It hadn’t taken me long to figure out Elwell’s good points. But I’d seen more than one tourist start to walk in off the beach, spot him, and leave. There were other bars farther down the beach, plenty of places to drink. So, Elwell and his armadillo hat seemed like a problem to me.

      “Elwell started wearing it a few weeks back,” Joaquín said with a shrug that indicated what are you going to do about it. Joaquín’s eyes were almost the same color as the aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which sparkled across the wide expanse of beach in front of the Sea Glass. With his tousled dark hair, Joaquín looked way more like a Hollywood heartthrob than a fisherman by morning, bartender by afternoon. That combination had the women who stopped in here swooning. He looked like he was a few years older than me.

      “It keeps the gub’ment from tracking me,” Elwell said in a drawl that dragged “guh-buh-men-t” into four syllables.

      Apparently, Elwell had exceptional hearing, or the armadillo shell was some kind of echo chamber.

      “Some fools,” Elwell continued, “believe tinfoil will stop the gub’ment, but they don’t understand radio waves.”

      Great, a science lesson from a man with an armadillo on his head. I nodded, keeping a straight face because I didn’t want to anger a man who seemed a tad crazy. He watched me for

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