“You being a friend of Grey’s,” he said, “I’ll have your car ready for you this afternoon—no charge.”

“But—”

“I won’t argue about it,” Tommy told her, “and that’s a solid fact, missy. I’m right pleased to do a favour for any friend of Grey’s.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to. You come on back this afternoon, and I’ll have that car of yours purring like a kitten.”

“I really don’t need it that fast.”

But, “We’ll see you tonight at your show,” he said and turned away.

Lizzie looked at her cousin. Siobhan looked as confused as Lizzie felt, but she didn’t say anything. She only took Lizzie’s arm and led her away from the garage. But Lizzie couldn’t let it go.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. “He knows this Grey fellow. He said the car wouldn’t run with the alternator being like it was.”

“I heard.”

“Jaysus.”

Siobhan nodded. “Yeah, it’s a kicker all right. Looks like you weren’t dreaming.”

“But . . . that’s impossible, right?”

Siobhan didn’t have an answer for her.

Sweetwater got its start as a mill town at the turn of the last century when Thomas Fairburn built the area’s first grain mill. The old stone mill stood where the Ashbless River fell into the Kickaha on its own endless journey down from the mountains to what was now Newford and the lake shore upon which the city was built. In recent times, the mill had become a high-class hotel and conference center, part of the ongoing transformation of the whole village into a tourist haven.

The most successful refurbishing had taken place along the stretch of Main Street where it ran closest to the Kickaha River. Although there were a few holdouts—scruffy country cousins like the old general store and a few residential properties that were yet to become commercial—most of the buildings sported a new tourist-friendly look: folksy wood fronts on the stores, old-fashioned hand-painted signs, shop windows full of souvenirs and crafts.

The Custom House was somewhere in between. Its stucco walls boasted a new paint job, and Cindy’s Cafe had an outdoor patio for use in the summer, but inside the hotel, the guest rooms were as they’d been for thirty years and the bar room was still more of a roadhouse. Its regular patrons didn’t care, neither the locals who came by for a drink after work nor the hipper crowd that showed up in the evenings for entertainment. The bar room of the Custom House provided an eclectic mix of live music that rivaled any big city venue.