“If you wipe that thing any harder, you’re going to break it, sweetheart.” Elsa Boleyn, the owner of Dancing Bear, is standing behind me, wearing an amused expression on her face. “Something on your mind?”

Elsa is a human woman in her mid-fifties. She doesn’t look her age, though. If anything, I would say she appears to be in her early forties, a very attractive woman with a no-nonsense air about her. She’s been in Oakrest longer than I can remember, and she has a good ...