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Allie replied glumly. “For the loss of a nail,” she continued when Charlie shook her head. “Horseshoe, horse, battle all lost. This is the nail.”
    “It’s rusty.”
    “Don’t think that matters,” Joe muttered. He wore a mid-thirties glamour these days. Young enough for Auntie Gwen’s ego, old enough that public PDAs had stopped attracting dangerous attention. The aunties’ response to people stuffing their noses in where they didn’t belong was not subtle by several fairly terrifying degrees of not . “It was in a jar with a bunch of screws, nuts, bolts . . .”
    “Nails?” Charlie offered.
    “Yeah.”
    “What’s it do?”
    “Nothing until you lose it. Then you lose everything else.”
    “So put it back in the jar and sell it.”
    Allie looked disapproving. “That’s a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?”
    Charlie shrugged. “Depends on how you’re defining irresponsible. Seems like the responsible thing would be to get it the hell out of here. It’s not like family’s going to pick it up.”
    “Tony, your drummer, he builds stuff, doesn’t he? Suppose he came down and bought the jar with the nail in it because he needed some cheap screws and then he took it home and somehow lost the nail and lost his wife and his house and . . .”
    “Yeah.” Charlie cut her off. “I get it. It’s dangerous. So what are you going to do with it? Lock it up with the monkey’s paw?”
    “No . . .” Allie reached under the counter and came up with a hammer. “. . . I’m going to put it where it can’t get lost.” She turned, lifted the signed photo of Boris off the wall, used the claw to pull the more mundane nail, and slammed the lost nail in about two centimeters higher.
    “Gale girls know where the studs are,” Charlie said.
    Joe snickered.
    “Why don’t you go next door and get coffee,” Allie muttered, hanging the Minotaur’s photo back up.

     
    Kenny Shoji looked up as Charlie came through the door of the coffee shop, muttered something that sounded uncomplimentary even at a distance, then moved to the row of urns behind the counter to start filling the tall red mugs he kept for the Emporium staff.
    “So,” he said without turning, “you’re hanging around again. Wasting your life.”
    “I like my life.”
    “So you say.”
    “I don’t feel trapped!”
    He turned then. “Who said anything about trapped?”
    “No one. You just . . . I mean . . . Look, whatever.” She frowned purposefully at the small TV next to the cash register. The mute was on, but the banner across the bottom of the screen announced CBC News at Noon was showing visuals of the Hay Island Seal Rookery. Why did that sound familiar?
    She jumped a little when Kenny set the three mugs down in front of her.
    He looked from her to the television and shook his head. “Bad deal that. Some oil company’s been pushing the Nova Scotia government for permits to drill just off the island. All hush hush. Some group that works to protect the seals found out, just about at the last minute, and there were a couple days of protest but they seem quiet now. Lots of oil, the company says, and no one’s arguing that, but too close to shore and way too close to the seals if anything goes wrong.”
    “What could go wrong?” Charlie snorted. The visuals changed to an attractive woman speaking earnestly to a reporter. The banner now read Amelia Carlson, CEO of Carlson Oil. She wore the glamour money provided in order to look in her mid-thirties, plumped lips lifted in a smile equally as unreal. “I met some guys up in Fort McMurray . . .”
    “Good for you!” Kenny’s face pleated into a thousand wrinkles when he smiled. Even when it was a sarcastic smile. “I hear that’s what happens when you hang out in bars. You should watch the news more.”
    “. . . they were from Cape Breton,” Charlie continued, ignoring him. “They talked about Carlson Oil trying to get offshore drilling permits. Said the company’d build a