Free Night Mares in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome

Maybe she’d meet me at the library?
    â€œWhen pigs fly,” was her answer.
    Which might be coming next for all I knew. I put everything I could into the deli bag and headed toward the arts and recreation center.
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    The center was only a few years old and the pride of Paumanok Harbor. Built with a huge legacy from one of the former residents on donated land, the place hadn’t cost the taxpayers a lot, and benefited them all. On one side was a gym and a pool where they held youth nights and senior yoga and ballroom dance lessons. On the other was a gallery with much of the donor’s private collection, classrooms for after school programs, and studios for visiting artists.
    My friend Louisa Rivera used to run the whole thing. With two children and another on the way, she stuck to the arts side now. I was looking forward to seeing her if she had a rare two minutes to spare. We’d been friends forever, it seemed, since both of us were summer kids and not really part of the locals’ groups.
    Mostly I wanted to know what she was feeling. As far as I knew, neither she nor her parents were born in Paumanok Harbor, and I’d never seen a twinge of paranormal ability in her. Her husband came here as a young boy, a hellion, in fact. His only claim to extraordinary power, other than his amazing good looks, was in making money, first in the computer business, then in land speculation. Now I was curious if they or their children were affected at all by the nightmares.
    â€œI’m pregnant,” Louisa told me. “I barely sleep at night anyway. Who has time for nightmares between peeing every couple of hours?”
    â€œWhat about mood shifts?”
    â€œWilly, I’m pregnant. That’s another name for bitchy. And no, I don’t know anything about white horses or the new missing one everyone’s talking about this morning. Sorry.”
    â€œWhat about Dante?”
    She smiled, the way she always did when someone mentioned his name. “Nope, he never mentioned anything about them, except to worry that our daughter wants pony lessons, too. We hardly get a chance to speak anyway. He falls into bed exhausted as soon as the kids are asleep and never moves once his head hits the pillow. The poor guy’s been taking care of the children all day so I can get the summer programs up and running.”
    Which reminded both of us that I had agreed to teach a creative writing course for teenagers in a couple of weeks. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Now it sounded like another nightmare.
    I looked at the flyers around Louisa’s office while she hung one of mine and took several others to post in the classrooms and the rec center. Yup, my name was right there, with pictures of my latest book covers. No backing out now. I saw Louisa had talked Dante into doing two weeks on designing computer games. Someone else was teaching digital photography, and one of the summer interns had ongoing painting classes. I wish there’d been something like that when I spent summers here. All we had was the library.
    Oh, boy.
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    Mrs. Terwilliger had been librarian when my mother was a girl, back when they used the old Shrade house on Main Street for a library. She had to be close to ninety, but no one ever even thought about her retiring. Hell, no. Everyone was afraid of the old bat. So maybe she never turned anyone into a toad when they talked out loud or gave them warts if they put a book back on the shelf out of alphabetical order, she was still scary. She’d give Dewey himself nightmares if he spilled juice on one of the books.
    Put a gun in her age-spotted hand and you were asking for trouble.
    Taking a dog into the library was putting your library privileges on the line—if not your life.
    But this was Little Red, who did not take kindly to being left anywhere, anytime. Out in the sun, tied to a bench where seagulls and squirrels could insult him? My mother would kill me. So I