Janie gave him a flirty smile and tossed her hair a little as she handed him the photo.

I spent a little bit of each work day envying Janie. It’s not that she’d dated some guy I wanted, or anything like that. I just wished in general I could be more like her, at least in some ways. She was pretty, yeah, but more than that, she just seemed comfortable in her own skin. She was never anxious, never restless. She seemed grounded, like she knew what was important to her and was sure she was going to get it eventually. For lack of a better word, she seemed satisfied. I’d never felt that way.

Maybe it came from growing up in a big farming family. I used to love hanging out at her place when we were kids. There was always a lot of noise and bustle, and plenty of arguments, but it was clearly a happy, loving group of people. Not that my mother hadn’t loved me plenty, but for much of my life, it had just been the two of us. Janie’s family was different. With a family like that, you’d never be lonely.

Doyle took the print from Janie and looked at it. His expression turned serious. He looked up at me searchingly.

“What time did you take this, exactly?” he asked, casting a meaningful glance across the table at Billy, then handing him the picture.

“Um … about 2:00 in the afternoon, I think. Is something wrong?”

“I might have to take this in as evidence, Betty.”

I felt a little breathless. “Really? Why?”

“About that time yesterday, there was an APB out for a seven-foot-tall bagel monster,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at me.

Jackie, Janie, and Billy laughed, and I blushed all over again. Even worse, people at the tables around us started asking what was so funny. Soon the picture was being passed around Pete’s Eats to a mixture of guffaws and speculations about Photoshopping.

If Justine had somehow engineered this to make me look stupid in front of the whole town, she’d sure as hell succeeded.

I went back to my meal, watching out of the corner of my eye as Jackie circulated among the tables, laughing with folks — no doubt at my expense. Someone’s gaze caught mine. It was Callie McCallister, Dorf’s most committed moral crusader. She was holding the photo and looking right at me, fear and revulsion plain on her face. Great. My picture was in the hands of the one person in town most likely to think I’d actually photographed a monster.

Sure enough, on her way out of Pete’s ten minutes later, Callie stopped to drop the picture on our table. Her tiny hands were shaking. When she spoke, so was her voice.

“Elizabeth, you have to stop spreading this image. Glorifying hellspawn this way — it’s unlawful.”