Page 66 of Halloween Town

Poppy grinned at the irritation in Wren’s voice. She had no intention of staying up all night, but winding Wren up by talking about ghost-hunting was always fun.

The Tag & Thank event started long before Luna and her particular brand of Halloween madness swept through town, but these days it was one of the firm favorites on the town calendar.

For more than a century, an ancient American beech—old, crooked, and elegant—had stood in the town square. Its bark was a deep, weathered silver, and its long, drooping branches nearly brushed the ground. No one was sure how the tradition first started—some suggested the village was saved from a cholera or measles outbreak or received life-changing rains just before they lost their harvest to drought—but whatever the reason, and for more than a century, the residents of Solstice Springs had gathered to hang tags expressing their gratitude from its branches.

These days, both residents and tourists wrote down moments, people, small joys—sometimes profound, sometimes quirky, sometimes desperately ordinary. By the end of the night, the branches were a riot of hundreds of colorful and fluttering tags.

The True Believers—Poppy included—knew what happened next.

After the square emptied, the ghosts came out to play. Sometimes they added their own tags. Sometimes they scribbled a word or two on one already hanging there. Sometimes a tag—or six or seven—mysteriously migrated from one branch to another. Every year, a pack of brave, determined teenagers set up cameras and camp chairs, vowing to keep an eye on the tree and capture proof of supernatural shenanigans. And every year they saw absolutely nothing.

Probably because they were too busy making out. Hey, she’d been an H-Town teenager once and had sat up all night watching the tree, AKA making out with Brady Halpern. Yet somehow the next morning—despite the dodgy human surveillance—new tags appeared. Old ones shifted. Messages changed.

It was H-Town’s biggest mystery, and the town rather liked it that way.

Poppy grabbed her cup of coffee and a rather sad-looking apple and returned her attention to Wren. She checked the time; thinking about it, it was nearly noon on Wednesday, and it was a strange time for Wren to call. “Anyway. What’s up? You are normally in the studio at this time.”

“My dancers are tired and their energy is flagging, so I told them to take an early lunch,” she replied. “By the way, one of the dancers I’m working with saw my profile and commented on the pillow on my lap.”

Poppy put her call on speaker and checked Wren’s pic. On her lap was a pillow Poppy had embroidered for her years ago as a gag gift. The text was in old-fashioned calligraphy, but with a little concentration and some squinting, you could make out the pithy mantra, Calm the Fuck Down. Poppy smiled, she still thought it was funny.

“My dancer friend wants one as a birthday present for her best friend,” Wren told her. “She’s prepared to pay.”

Knocking up the pillow was easy, but the embroidery took time. “If she wants it hand-embroidered it’ll take a while and it’ll be expensive, but I could machine-embroider it. You picked up my sewing machine from Benji’s, right?”

“Yes, it’s with the rest of your stuff. She wants it to be hand-embroidered, so you can charge a premium. Listen, I’ll give her your number and you two can talk.”

“Hand-embroidered won’t be cheap, Bird,” Poppy reminded her.

“Like I said, she’s prepared to pay, and since she’s dressed head to toe in designer dance clothes, I’m sure she can afford your rates,” Wren told her. “Got to go, chat later.”

Poppy said goodbye and ambled out of the kitchen. She’d never thought about making and selling her cushions, but if it turned out to be worth her while, she could do the embroidery while she watched TV or listened to an audiobook. It could be an additional income stream.

Something to think about…

Hearing voices coming from Thom’s study, she stopped, made a U-turn, and headed down the hallway. Thom told her earlier that he was going to spend the morning at the local business center, where he’d rented a private room to do a virtual consultation. The inn was too messy and too noisy—Thom had a construction company here, and they were installing three en-suite bathrooms upstairs—and he needed quiet to talk.

Poppy poked her head into the library and saw his open laptop on the desk. Inching over, she peered over the top of the screen.

Upside down, she could see that the camera and microphone were off. Thom had apparently gone full tech-bro and joined the meeting from two devices at once—she assumed he’d left the laptop in the library to use it as a presentation hub, while he took the meeting from the business center. Amused, she sat down on the desk, and munched her apple, safe in the knowledge that no one could see or hear her.

Yeah, she was eavesdropping on his meeting, but she was curious to see Thom in professional mode.

Her eyes locked on her lover, wearing a blindingly white shirt under a black jacket that highlighted his broad shoulders. He leaned forward slightly in his chair, was mid-sentence, his voice calm but cutting.

“That’s not quite right,” he said. Poppy knew him well enough to read the, you’re being a dumbass, in his eyes.

Placing one hand on the desk, she scanned the names under the four other faces on the call: CEO, CFO, Director of Policy, Director of Environmental Affairs. They were people whose assistants had assistants, people who sat at the top of the corporate tree.

Thom waited a beat. His expression held no apology. “You’re framing algorithmic bias as a flaw in the data. It isn’t. It’s a consequence of the objectives you’ve set.”

Poppy sensed his frustration.

“When a system is rewarded for speed, scale, or engagement, it will reproduce whatever shortcuts achieve those outcomes fastest. Correcting the data set after the fact doesn’t fix that. It just obscures the mechanism.”

There was a short silence before he continued.

“If your proposal is to re-label the outputs and move on—then no, that’s not governance. That’s plausible deniability. And it will fail the first time anyone audits the incentives.”