“Zeke?” Erma said, wriggling her eyebrows, which seemed to have only a few hairs left in each. “He’s a hottie.”

Chase laughed. “You ladies know Zeke? He said he plays the piano here sometimes.”

“We don’t like Zeke. He’s not welcome here,” one of the older men at Chase’s former table called out. The man sounded put out, which made Olivia’s mouth twitch.

“They don’t like him,” Rita said with a giggle. “’Cause all of us don’t have to be rolled down here when Zeke comes. We roll ourselves.”

Chase looked delighted with this information. “Okay, so next week instead of playing games, we prepare for our own games, ladies.”

Rita grinned, the silver on her bridge giving a little twinkle in the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. “Bring Zeke with you. I’ll let him do me. My hair, I mean.”

The ladies around the table tittered like wrens.

Erma grinned. “Oh, I do love it when you misbehave, Rita.”

“You ladies are bad,” Chase said, her eyes dancing. “I think I’m going to fit right in.”

Chase drew a snowman in the margin of the legal pad Olivia had given her for the meeting of the Mount Larsen Daughters of Gold Prospectors, which cohosted the Mount Larsen Fall Festival with the Redmond Civitans. She wasn’t certain what she was supposed to take notes about since she’d essentially been relegated to selling tickets for the agriculture exhibit in the Cornucopia Hall on Friday evening. Olivia had been assigned to the food booths—something about a runner with money and food tickets. They’d given them both green aprons with pumpkins and Ferris wheels stitched to the pockets. Chase had never been on a committee and hadn’t expected it to be so tedious, but it was.

Very.

“So now that we have brought you two up to speed and made sure all of our volunteer positions are covered, we need to talk about security and the carousing the people who run the carnival rides do in their mobile village. Dianne McFarren said she saw one of them smoking weed last year, and as you know, we cannot have that sort of activity in full view of children who may be passing by.”

Several of the women launched into horror stories of all the things “carnies” did that could be construed as inappropriate and a safety risk.

Quickly the conversation moved to calling the police as soon as they saw the first signs of carousing, which seemed to be their term for getting loaded.

Chase raised her hand. “Um, excuse me.”

The ladies—half of whom had treated her like an alien, trying not to stare at her too long through their sideways glances, and half of whom seemed to not care that she was a celebrity—looked at her.

Olivia’s eyes widened as she opened her mouth as if she was about to stop Chase from speaking.