Murder, Money, and Moving On

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Did you buy tickets?” Adam asked.

  I was struggling to get my seatbelt over my sling. “Tickets to what?” I didn’t like admitting I needed his help, but walking home every day was proving difficult with my injury. I would be able to get the cast taken off my arm in a day or two, even though I’d actually made it worse that night I’d been caught at Les’s. At least Ryan had taken pity on me and let me off with a warning. A stern warning, though. Telling me that if I was ever caught trespassing again, I would be arrested.

  “The lotto,” Adam said with a large grin. He looked young that day. It always depended on the light with him. He was six months younger than I was. He had curly brown hair that was not yet graying, and when the light hit him right, he still looked quite boyish. Like right then. When he was excited about something. “It’s hits five hundred million tonight.” He grinned at me. “I bought twenty myself.”

  I shook my head and laughed. “No, I did not. And if you ask me, you are just throwing your money away buying that many tickets. You know what the odds are on these things, don’t you?” Well, I was pretending that was the reason I hadn’t bought tickets, but the real reason was that I hadn’t known the jackpot had reached that high. Still, I did think it was a waste of money. “I suppose it allows you to dream a little though, doesn’t it?”

  He shot me a look. “You could do your repairs if you had that sort of money.”

  “Adam,” I said with a laugh. “If I had that sort of money, I wouldn’t even bother repairing the shop… I would be laying on a beach somewhere far away from here.”

  Adam paused for a moment while we were stopped at a red light, and he gave me a funny look. Was he judging me?

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think that means something?” he asked, before starting the truck again.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s like that game you play with people. You know, to find out what their true passion in life was. You ask them, if money was no object, what would you be doing? And that thing that they answer is what they should be doing.”

  “Money is an object, though,” I said, holding on while Adam made a sharp turn. We were getting closer to the lake now. These days though, it didn’t feel like home.

  Adam sighed as though he was starting to get frustrated that I couldn’t quite grasp his point. “But if it wasn’t,” he said, emphasizing the last word. “It sounds to me like you would be living a completely different life.”

  “Adam, lots of people would quit their job and travel if they won the lottery. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean I don’t love what I do.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever you say, George.” But he had one last thing to add. He always had one last thing to add. “You know, even if I win big tonight? I would stay right here in Pottsville.”

  “Congratulations,” I said to him with a big grin as I climbed out of the truck. “You win this one, Adam.” I winked at him. “I’ll see you at the wedding.”

  It was all a moot point anyway. I hadn’t bought any tickets to the lottery and when I thought to swing by the gas station at the last moment to pick up a few tickets later that night, I was told that the draw was closed. So, I went home with a glass of wine and watched the numbers get called anyway, wondering which lucky soul was going to walk away with the five hundred million, while I let my mind wander for a few moments to white sandy beaches and endless blue seas.

  I arrived at the shop at 9:15, pulling on the door, expecting it to already be open. But it was still locked. There was no sign of Brenda. I pulled again and sighed when I realized I was going to have to find my own keys and open up, fifteen minutes late. Not such a great chunk of time, but right then, we couldn’t afford to lose even fifteen minutes of trading time.

  Brenda was supposed to be doing me a favor that morning, opening early while I was at the doctor’s office getting my cast off. The doctor had called and told me it turned out my arm hadn’t been fractured after all, it was just a bad strain, but I still had my arm in a sling. “She knows she was supposed to open up, it’s just so irr—” I stopped when I realized that I was talking to myself. That Jasper was not actually at my feet. For a second, I felt a little stupid, but then I just felt sad. I was so used to Jasper always being there to listen to me. He had been my constant companion for two years. And now it was just like a ghost at my side. I could still talk to it, but there was nothing there to give me any response.

  Well, where was Brenda anyway? I put the key in the lock and double-checked inside. Perhaps she had gotten ill—her health had been a little bad in recent months. Just like me, she had also suffered a hit to the head, and hers had temporarily altered her personality, making her nicer and more reasonable for a short while. But she’d been fit and healthy the past few weeks. There was no reason why she should miss work.

  I turned the sign to ‘open’ and hoped that we would have an onslaught of customers. But the drizzle and overcast skies had kept the tourists away that morning and it hit 10:00am before we even had our first customer. They spent a whooping $2.50 on a pair of knitting needles.

  I opened my work computer for the first time since my stay in the hospital. Partly, I’d been avoiding it because all of the business bills were sent to my business email address. I saw that we had new e-bills for gas and electricity at the top of the list. I kept scrolling. A few emails down, I saw one with the title line, “Hoping to borrow your dog,” with a winking face in the subject line. I frowned and opened it up, shivering when the draft from the hole in the roof hit me.

  “Hi, Georgina, isn’t it?” the first line said. “My name is Kit. I was given your details by a friend in the area. I own a Border Collie and was hoping to breed pups with her before she gets too old. We are looking for a purebred male Border Collie to breed with. If you’re interested, please give me a call.” She listed her number at the end of the email.

  My first thought was that I couldn’t give Kit any proof that Jasper was a purebred. But then I realized that wasn’t the biggest issue, was it?

  I started to type, “He’s not my dog anymore.” But my fingers froze. They just couldn’t type the words. I still didn’t want them to be true.

  I wondered if I should pass the email on to Alice. Maybe she would be interested in having little baby Jaspers. Maybe I could buy one of the pups. I would quite like a little baby Jasper.

  Just as I was trying to decide, and just as my heart was starting to warm up to the idea, I heard the bell on top of the front door jingle. At first, I didn’t even recognize the person standing there. I snapped the laptop screen shut, about to greet what I thought was a very glamorously dressed customer standing before me.

  My mouth dropped open. Was that…? No. No way.

  I stepped around to the other side of the counter. I wasn’t sure whether to be shocked, impressed, or to start a fight. “Brenda, please tell me you’re not wearing fur.”

  Brenda always dressed in shades of beige, grey, or occasionally brown if she was feeling really flashy. She favored turtlenecks and long sleeves, and was proud of the fact that she hadn’t bought any new clothes in five years. She liked to make do with what she had.

  “Do you like it?” she said, spinning around. It was, indeed, a brand-new fur coat. I didn’t even want to know what kind of animal that thing was made out of.

  “No. Not really, Cruella Deville. Please get that thing out of my shop.”

  She pulled her brand-new designer sunglasses off. I caught a flash of the Chanel logo on the arm. “With pleasure,” she said with a smug little smile. I had no idea what had gotten into her. Perhaps she was still suffering from that knock to the head she’d had several months earlier, or maybe she was finally going senile. We are almost the same age, but Brenda looks and acts decades older.

  Except for right then. Were those highlights in her hair? “Brenda. You’re going to have to tell me what is going on. Are you starring in a play or something? Is this some kind of joke?�
��

  She grinned at me. “I won the lotto, Georgina.”

  I just stared at her. Then I thought, wow, you really are delusional. “No, you didn’t,” I said, returning to the computer. I had decided I was going to forward the details of the breeder on to Alice. “I saw the names of the couple who won on the news this morning, and it wasn’t you.”

  She stepped over to me. I could hear that she was wearing high heels. I had to poke my head slowly around the side of the counter to confirm, and then tried not to laugh at the sight of them on her feet. “Well, there was more than one winner. My Wednesday night women’s group at church all went in and bought a few tickets. By the time we split the winnings between us and the other people who won, I still come out with several million.”

  “Brenda…you’re kidding me?” She wasn’t exactly known for her sparkling sense of humor.

  But the smug look on her face only grew smugger. My stomach dropped a little. Wow. She was telling the truth. Brenda was rich. I looked her up and down. And she wasn’t shy about flaunting her new-found wealth.

  “So that’s what that ridiculous coat is all about then…”

  But suddenly, a flush of hope ran through me. I stood up slowly. Brenda was swimming in money now. This solved all my—I meant, all our—problems. Why, the four thousand we needed for repairs would be nothing to her now that she had won the lottery. The coat she was wearing probably cost almost that much. I knew she was loyal to the shop above all else. I could even forgive her for telling Alice where to find me now.

  “I don’t know why you are grinning at me like that, Georgina.”

  I clasped my hands together. Or at least tried to. The sprained one couldn’t quite reach. “Brenda, you’re a genius. Do you hear me? A genius.” I walked around to the other side of the counter and placed my good hand on her shoulder while she stared down at it in concern.

  “I— I am?” she asked uncertainly. “W-why?”

  “For buying that ticket, Brenda. And for saving the store.”

  8

  I truly didn’t think my day could get any worse. And now it was starting to rain. A drop fell on my face. We needed to hurry up before the store was flooded again. “You’re just lucky the hail is holding off. There was supposed to be a storm, but it looks like it has missed us.” Adam looked up at the hole and then measured the right amount of tarp. It turned out that no, Brenda’s husband Tom would not be doing the repairs on the roof after all.

  “Oh, there has been a storm all right.”

  Adam had brought a stepladder with him. He climbed it and began to attach the tarp. I had thought that attaching it to the roof on the outside would have been a better idea, but Adam had said that no one was getting up on that roof again unless they were fully qualified to do so. He’d said it was cursed. “You can’t honestly have expected Brenda to save the entire store with her money.”

  I pushed the mop with my one arm, but it ended up just making the floor wetter and muddy somehow. Was Adam being serious or just winding me up? It was always difficult to tell. “Of course I expected her to give me the money, Adam.”

  He looked down at me while he tapped up the blue tarp. It looked hideous, but at least it stopped the rain. “Come on, George. Is that really fair?”

  Why not? It wasn’t like she had earned that money. It practically fell from the sky. “She just got a lucky break. It could have just as well have been me winning that money…”

  Adam shook his head and shot me a look of amusement. “But you didn’t buy a ticket in time. And Brenda did. She was prepared.”

  “That is hardly the point.”

  I could still hear her voice. Saying the three words I had never expected to come out of her mouth. “Georgina, I quit.”

  “There we go. Good as new,” Adam said wryly as he climbed off the ladder. He looked like he wanted to say something but was holding it in. I wondered if it had something to do with our near-kiss in the kitchen that we had never properly talked about. I wanted to break the tension.

  “Go on, say it,” I said, dropping the mop handle. “Something is on your mind.” He moved close to me—it was a small room—and I wondered, just for a moment, whether we are going to have another moment.

  But the thing on his mind had nothing to do with him and me. “Well, you told me that if you’d won the money, you wouldn’t have used it on the store, so isn’t it a little hypocritical to expect Brenda to when she’s not even the owner?”

  “But—but that’s different.” Brenda loved the store. She dedicated all her time to it. She’d wanted to buy it and have it all to herself at one point. Well, okay, I got Adam’s point. She had nothing at stake here. Handing the money over was just giving it straight to me. It wouldn’t have made her an owner. But I was never going to admit to my ex-husband that I agreed with him. I started to mop up the remaining water.

  “So, about this weekend,” he said, watching me pick up the broom again. “You seem like you’re feeling better…and your cast is off and your arm seems to be healing well. Do you think you’d be up for doing the speech now?”

  I quickly shook my head and dropped the mop again, just to show him how bad it actually was. “I have to take another trip to the doctors in two days.” I flashed him a smile. “So, I’ll let you know how I’m doing then—whether they think I am up to it!”

  Doctor Hamm may not have been the best doctor, but he was the cheapest, and cheap was all I could afford right then. He’d done an okay job of removing the cast, even though at one stage, I’d been concerned he was going to saw right through my arm until I’d reminded him he needed to stop when he hit the skin.

  I didn’t really need to be back so quickly. But I needed confirmation that my injury was indeed very serious. Doctor Hamm didn’t seem to agree with me when he picked it up and looked at it. “Your arm is healing nicely. It wasn’t even a fracture in the end. You didn’t even need it to be in a cast. They were probably being overly cautious at the hospital. You can take it out of the sling now.”

  “Erm, I’d really rather leave it in.”

  He stared at me. Almost looked disapproving under his thick dark eyebrows. “There’s really no reason to. It would be more beneficial if you tried to move your arm more and used your fingers to grip things.”

  “Like microphones?” I joked through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, that would be perfect actually.” He shot me a smile.

  “Erm, what about my head?” I said, reaching up to touch the still tender bump on the back of it. If my arm wasn’t going to work as an excuse, I was going to have to find another one.

  Doctor Hamm go out his flashlight and shone it into my eyes, asking me to look first to the right and then to the left as he stared into them. He asked if I was having any problems with my memory. “It’s getting better,” I had to admit. “Though the day of the accident is still a blank.” He turned off the flashlight and examined the bump. Sure, maybe he wasn’t a neurosurgeon, but I had to trust his opinion. “No further signs of concussion. Georgina, you are, all in all, in very good health now. There’s no reason you can’t go back to your regular activities.”

  I nodded and reached for my purse. “Great. Thanks, Doctor. Just what I wanted to hear.”

  Outside, I reached into my purse to grab my phone to call Adam and tell him the news.

  “The doctor is worried I’m overdoing it… Yes, he told me to take it easy for at least a few more weeks. Head injuries can’t really be messed with. Sorry, Adam, I definitely won’t be able to give the speech at your wedding.”

  9

  Oh, you had to be kidding me. I dropped my purse and started yelling, loudly enough so that the teenagers on the roof could hear me. “Hey!” I said, aware that I had suddenly become the cranky old lady that yelled at kids to get off her lawn. “Get away from there.”

  They just laughed and ignored me. Was one of them smoking? I thought about the tarp and whether it would prevent smoke from snaking through into the shop. “If yo
u don’t get down from there within ten seconds, I am going to call the cops!”

  One of them just laughed at me and then sat back down. He was precariously close to the tarp. I did NOT want him falling through the roof and onto the floor of the shop.

  But sometimes, timing is a friend to me. Not always. But it was on this day.

  Ryan just happened to be coming by for a visit. He didn’t have his lights on as he approached, but when he saw what I was dealing with, he must have flipped the siren on, startling the lingerers.

  “Oh, shoot, it really is the cops!” one of them called out, throwing his cigarette butt down the side of the shop and then throwing himself after it while Ryan parked the car.

  I just watched as they jumped and scaled the side of the building with ease. I thought about my own far less graceful descent a week earlier. As I watched the last one hit the ground, it started to come back to me. I’d been up there, hunting for clues. And then the fate had befallen me as it had the kids—Ryan had turned up and I’d needed to get down quickly. I remembered the ladder shaking underneath me.

  Ryan watched them race away on their bikes. “You recognize any of them?” he asked me, looking suspicious. “They get up there quite often, don’t they? Do you remember any of them being up there on the night that Lleyton was killed?”

  “Do you mean, do I think any of them could have killed Lleyton?” I shrugged a little. “Yeah, I’ve seen them up on the roof before. My main concern in the past was that one of them might get hurt. But now I’ve seen what little terrors they are, I’m more concerned about the damage they could do to my property.” I shook my head. “No wonder there was a hole in my roof.”

  Ryan nodded. He laughed a little and then looked thoughtful as he leaned back against the side of his car. “You know, most of my job is just things like this—telling kids to get off roofs. Move them along when they are loitering in the front of shops.”