Since she had a point, he began at the moment he’d looked up and seen the crows.

“What were you doing right before you looked up?”

“Walking up Main. I was going to drop in and see Cal. Buy a beer.” Lips curved in a half smile, he lifted the bottle. “Came here and got one free.”

“You bought them, as I recall. It just seems if you were walking toward the Square, and these birds were doing their Hitchcock thing above the intersection, you’d have noticed before you said you did.”

“I was distracted, thinking about… work, and stuff.” He raked his fingers through hair still damp from being stuck under the faucet to wash the bird gunk out. “I guess I was looking across the street more than up the street. Layla came out of Ma’s.”

“She walked over to get some of Quinn’s revolting two percent milk. Was it luck-good or bad-that both of you were there, right on the spot?” Her head cocked to the side; her eyebrow lifted. “Or was that the point?”

He liked that she was quick, that she was sharp. “I lean toward it being the point. If the Big Evil Bastard wanted to announce it was back to play, it makes a bigger impact if at least one of us was on the scene. It wouldn’t be as much fun if we’d just heard about it.”

“I lean the same way. We agreed before that it’s able to influence animals or people under some kind of impairment easier, quicker. So, crows. That’s happened before.”

“Yeah. Crows or other birds flying into windows, into people, buildings. When it does, even people who were here when it happened before are surprised. Like it was the first time they’d seen anything like it. That’s part of the symptoms, we’ll call it.”

“There were other people out-pedestrians, people driving by.”

“Sure.”

“And none of them stopped and said: Holy crap, look at all those crows up there.”