Deadly Cost of Goods

by Margaret Evans

  “Well, Laura,” Eric continued, “I’m flattered you think my sales pitches are so effective that you’re using them in your shop. I wish happy sales for you that rival mine.”

  “You’re leaving?” she asked.

  “I have a meeting with a potential new customer, and I don’t want to be late. Text me with any questions you have on the policy,” he added, pointing to the paperwork on her counter. “I put a note on the front of the packet that tells you what it’s for. And remember, I always have your best interests at heart. Bye!”

  Colin moved in closer as the door jangled shut behind Eric.

  “How’s everything going, really?”

  “Great. We’re almost ready for the Heritage Days festivities.”

  “Yes, I see you have lots of patriotic items in your store,” he mentioned, looking around. “I also heard there’s going to be a dunk tank at the fair.”

  “We have quite a line-up of ‘dunkees.’ Would you care to join the list?” she offered with a teasing smile.

  Anderson returned her smile.

  “While I appreciate the kind offer, I have to decline, as I’ll be at the medical center during all of the Heritage Days Festival events.”

  “So your other medical professionals can have a little summer fun?”

  He nodded.

  “Some. During holidays, we get all kinds of emergencies, especially the Fourth of July. Almost as bad as Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.”

  “Well, if you change your mind, let me know.”

  “How’s your security system working?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Doing well. It’s very helpful to see when deliveries are arriving at the back door. Saves me from running to check throughout the day,” Laura added lightly. She shared nothing of the system with anybody beyond this one detail.

  “I’m glad it’s helpful for you. Now, I must get back to the medical center.”

  She would have been sadder to see him leave except that Erica jangled her way into the shop, crossing Colin in the store, as they nodded to each other.

  “Hey, kiddo!” Erica called before she got to the register.

  “Hi, Erica. Hey, can we run across the street for lunch today? I’m getting hungry.”

  “Oh, sorry, no can do today. Torrey and I are going to a concert at the university this afternoon. I just stopped by to let you know that if you needed anything, Mom’s helping Dad in the florist shop this afternoon. Just give them a shout.”

  Torrey Culver was Erica’s boyfriend and currently finishing up engineering graduate school at the University of Minnesota. He was also helping with her design and a business plan for a hair salon that she hoped would open next year.

  After the door shut behind Erica, Laura was beginning to wonder about the young man in the store and why he was here so long. Apparently, no one could stop to talk with her for any length of time to help her not think about missing Connor, and all other customers had long gone, so she left the register to offer him some help.

  “Oh, sorry I’m taking a long time,” he said, “but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. My girlfriend’s birthday is coming up next month, and I have to admit that you have really nice things in your shop. This should be all.”

  After she rang him up and bagged his purchases, she was caught again by his apparent friendliness. It just seemed something was off with him, and she was glad there were more cameras inside the shop and out than she could count. They would catch him in all directions.

  Before she had any more time to devote to thoughts about her last customer, Jenna sprang through the bell-laden door and raced to the counter, placing both hands on it, her eyes bright.

  “I have a lunch date, Laura. And he seems very nice. If everything turns out, you’ll be the first to know!”

  And with that, she was off.

  Okay, no lunch with Jenna, either.

  It was at this very moment that Empress Isabella chose to show up on the counter, or more specifically, on top of the register. Her long tail waved back and forth around her and over the back of the register in full view of any customers. Or it would have been, had anyone else besides Laura been able to see the feline.

  And it was at the very next moment that Kelly Rogers came into Laura’s shop and headed right for the counter, as had Jenna and Erica and Colin and Eric before her.

  Her sketches were placed in front of Laura.

  “Can we go over these at lunch?” Laura asked hopefully.

  “I can’t today or tomorrow. Maybe next week? I trust your judgment, Laura. Just look them over and tell me if I’m on the right track. We have to go to press for the Memorial Day flyer by Wednesday.”

  With that she was gone.

  But the cat remained, unseen by all save Laura.

  She scratched the cat behind its ears and heard the low purring, and pulled her hand away just as her front door ringers were shaken once again.

  This time it was Harry.

  “Laura, everything okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Beth and I are heading to her sister’s in Eagle Junction for lunch, so the barbershop is closed this afternoon. Wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  “Thanks and have fun!” she called to his back as he left her store.

  She turned again to the cat.

  “Well, I guess it’s you and me, Isabella.”

  * * *

  Justin had left Second Treasures, but not the neighborhood. He had actually gone to the barbershop next door for a trim as the barber’s final customer for the day and spent the time wondering about all the relationships his sister had with the townsfolk. He was not particularly interested in her girlfriends, but rather the man she called Eric, who was apparently an insurance salesman, and Colin, whom he had heard say he worked at the medical center in Raging Ford. It was probably not a big deal, but he also had picked up that she had a boyfriend who was a cop, and that interested him because now he wondered what her relationship was with these two men. If he was supposed to protect her in some way, he had better be alert to those closest to her.

  Chapter 14

  An unmemorable lunch brought Laura quickly back to the shop. Her afternoon was as lackluster as the morning had been, and she was grateful to close up at the end of the day, grab a bite of dinner, and drive over to Charlie Kovacs’s newspaper to attack the archives. She was hopeful she would discover something important about the Old Library that would prove useful in her research.

  Charlie was helpful, as always. He directed her to exactly where in the archives she would find information about the Old Library.

  “That’s quite a beautiful old building,” he remarked. “I hope one day somebody decides to clean it up.”

  “You know, Charlie, that’s exactly what I hope I can do. First I need permission from the owner.”

  “Oh. It’s in some kind of trust, I think.”

  “Do you know who the beneficiary is?”

  He shook his head.

  “But everything you want to know about the library, besides the trust, is in these files.”

  Laura spent the next hour and a half pouring through old newspapers looking for anything to do with how the library was run, how they cleaned the interior, how they painted or whitewashed the exterior, and how often they had to re-tar the roof. Even broken window panes were replaced from time to time.

  She found some of these items under a police blotter that spoke of occasional juvenile disturbances and minor vandalism. The maintenance information was spread across a number of editions.

  There was a weekly cleaning crew called Library Experts that mopped the oak floors with wood polish. Another crew, also from the same company as the floor cleaners, did the dusting and polishing and window cleaning. Trash was emptied daily by the staff into a bin at the far end of the parking lot near the woods.

  Raging Ford Paint and Tile was the group that painted inside and whitewashed outside. These activities were both done once every two y
ears.

  Louis Roofing checked the roof every spring for damage or leakage and repaired it as needed. Generally, according to one newspaper report, the entire roof needed a complete re-tarring every two years due to the heavy snows. It was scheduled at the same time as the painting and whitewashing for minimal disruption to the library.

  When Laura looked up Library Experts, she saw it had been a small company owned and operated by Darius Munley, a descendant of one of the three founders. Under Library Experts was a list of affiliated companies, including Raging Ford Paint and Tile and Louis Roofing.

  She recalled that one of the library cards she had found among the old books belonged to Darius Munley. The news stories and picture advertisements indicated that the Munley family owned all three of the companies responsible for maintenance at the Old Library. Whom they might have hired was a different story. She found none of these businesses in a Google search, suggesting they were no longer in business.

  The newspaper editions were copied and pasted onto her flash drive. Somewhere in one of them, a schedule of maintenance existed that included dates around the time when Lorelei disappeared. Unfortunately, she couldn’t perform a search for Lorelei, as that would give it all away to Charlie. At this point, everything she did had to remain quiet.

  Maybe no such schedule existed. But maybe it did. Or maybe, just maybe, it existed someplace else, such as in the stories about Lorelei Rage’s disappearance. This evening was not the evening she would be able to find that out. It would need to be on her own laptop in the privacy of her own home.

  Laura found more pictures and stories of the Old Library’s history, including the laying of its cornerstone by the three town founders, and copied everything to her thumb drive, logged out, and drove home.

  * * *

  In short, summer PJs and fuzzy slippers, Laura curled up on the couch upstairs in her apartment holding her mother’s diary to search for more possible information about Lorelei. She’d kept it close to her heart and in the nightstand next to her bed, although, in the nearly twelve years since her parents were murdered, she had never read it. Now she flipped open the cover.

  Tears stung her eyes at seeing her mother’s handwriting. She flipped through the journal just enjoying it at first. When she focused on anything at all about Lorelei, all she could find was mention of the tale that Lorelei’s ghost appeared in the Old Library only when another Rage family member was present. Frannie Keene quoted her mother (Laura’s grandmother) as telling her this was so, and how certain Grandma was that someone in their family would one day discover what happened to the child.

  Years later, when Laura and the group snuck into the Old Library, there was another entry about the ghost and her telephone conversation with Alison Fitzpatrick. Alison was afraid the stories were going around the town once again, so the police ran extra patrols down Route 4 and made sure the door in the shed next to the bait and tackle shop was locked down. Connor and his friends got in before the place was secured but hadn’t been back since that time to test it.

  Laura wished she could have found Great-aunt Rose’s diary. She had searched the townhouse in Maryland after Rose’s death from cancer but couldn’t locate it anywhere. It was frustrating because she knew it existed and had seen her aunt writing in it from time to time. She gave up looking before she left for Minnesota but kept the desire to look for it in the future. It had to be locked away somewhere—but where? Her friend Kayla Boyer was renting the townhouse and would have told her if she found it, so Laura was certain it was well hidden.

  She felt certain that Rose would have included a lot more information, if only because she’d lived longer than Frances Keene and known more that happened in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Those were the days in which people passed down lots of stories orally.

  Laura wiped her eyes and fell asleep wishing that Connor would call her, but she knew it was the beginning of his jaunt at the academy and he would be very busy and very tired tonight. He would know just what to tell her at this low point in her day, just the thing that would bring her peace. Either that or he would make her laugh which was like a sweet, reset button.

  * * *

  After the last presentation and discussions for the day were completed at the Minneapolis Police Academy, the cadets were allowed to gather on the stage and meet the speakers. Most of the twenty-five cadets who hoped to graduate in December flocked to meet Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick from Raging Ford. Not because he knew the founder of the Walk-A-Mile program or because he was closer to their ages than the older speakers, nor was it because they were inspired by his talk today, but for an entirely different reason.

  They wanted to know how he had learned to dance as well as he did in the YouTube videos. And they wanted to know if the woman with whom he had danced was single and available.

  Several phones were held up for him to see and he watched all of them, some multiple times. He just shook his head and laughed at the title to one post of “Dancing with the Stars.”

  “Let’s go eat dinner. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “But, Sergeant, is she available?”

  “You’ll have to ask her that. I’m sure she would appreciate the attention.”

  “That means I’d have to come to Raging Ford. Is that where she is?”

  Fitzpatrick relished the thought of watching, on multiple camera feeds from Laura’s shop, ten or fifteen young peace officers fighting their way into her store to ask if she was single and available. Just the look on her face would be worth a million bucks. Naw, he wouldn’t tell them; it would be far more entertaining to watch Laura do that.

  Chapter 15

  “The name of this place reminds me of that old TV show, Andy-something.”

  “Andy Griffith. Can’t you remember anything?”

  “Look, Bronco—”

  “No names!” Bronco hissed. “You’ve had too much to drink.” He leaned toward a third man’s ear. “We have to do something about Elijah’s drinking, Bucky. Maybe meet someplace where there’s only food.”

  “Well, could be you’re just a dark and smooth horse, right?” Elijah laughed. “That’s what you told us your girlfriend said about you.”

  Elijah laughed at his own joke and stood up to look at the framed copies of photos on the walls, almost lost his balance and grabbed the edge of their booth.

  “Hey, guys. Look at all these Hollywood stars who signed pictures. This here must be a real famous place to eat! Maybe even that Andy feller was here.” But as he craned his neck toward the next picture, he stumbled back into his seat; missing it would have landed him on the floor.

  “How much did you let him drink while I was outside on the call with Ruby?” Bucky asked.

  “I thought he was on his second when I got out of the restroom.”

  “Looks more like six or seven.”

  Bucky and Bronco exchanged a look.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Bucky said to Elijah. “You shut up and do all the listening. And you stop drinking. There’s a lot Ruby told me and we need to follow directions…exactly. Or it could screw up the whole operation. Capisce?”

  Elijah made a frustrated face.

  “You guys are—”

  “Zip it!” Bucky snapped.

  Elijah stopped, turned to his third-fourth-fifth-or-sixth shot of whisky and looked into its shallow depths. Almost gone again.

  “We have the truck painted and uniforms ready. We have paperwork, all legit-looking. Ruby says our first batches of duds start next week. It will not be every pill. We’ll stock everything in different piles in the library, like three-to-four pills in one batch, six-to-eight in another, and so on until we have a ‘mostly all dud’ batch in another pile. They all have to be ready to go at the same time so we can release them one after another quickly. She asked if our labeling is ready. Is it?” Bucky asked Bronco.

  “Almost. Invoices and other paperwork, including scrip inserts are done. Just finished up getting the National Dr
ug Code numbers from the real distributor. We can easily print the stick-on labels that look like they came from them.”

  “Your hacking is a big help. Are you sure they can’t be traced back to us?”

  Ruby had asked Bucky that very question, and he assured her that Bronco was the best.

  “Not to worry,” Bronco said. “I was careful to use several different real batch numbers so they can be traced back only to the distributor. They won’t know what hit them, and it will cost them a fortune to figure out what’s wrong. In the meantime, we walk away with lots of money and go somewhere else. And do it again.”

  “Who gets the first delivery?”

  “Raging Ford Medical Center.”

  * * *

  “Wouldn’t you just love to see the Old Library all cleaned up and shining?” Laura asked Jenna on Friday during an extended lunchtime while they sifted through literally hundreds of online photographs at the Michael Pickens Photography Studio. It was so much less lonely than Thursday had been.

  “That would take a lot of money, I think, but it’s a nice idea.”

  “We could add it in with the other Heritage Days activities, maybe even give tours.”

  Jenna paused her search and turned toward her friend.

  “That might turn out to be a very good idea of yours. We’ve done that with several of the older buildings here. We can find more around the town and set up a walking or bicycle or even a horse-drawn tour beyond what Harry does during the Festival, just like other towns. Maybe at Christmas time, too!”

  “We’d have to find out who owns it first,” Laura let fly with her fishing rod. Eric Williams would have been proud. “It’s not like we can just hold some fund-raisers and fix it up without the owner’s permission.”