Home to Sparrow Lake (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Lynn Patrick

  No doubt this was the reason her aunt wanted some ideas about growing the business. Aunt Margaret might fear she would have to sell the house if she couldn’t raise the store’s income. Having lost her own home to the economy, Kristen wasn’t about to let that happen to someone she loved, a senior citizen who deserved to retire in comfort and security.

  The first thing she could do was to get a better sales system in place for customers who called in orders. Now, whoever answered the phone wrote the customer’s name and what she wanted on a piece of paper. Kristen looked through the box of scraps that held unfulfilled orders. An archaic and fallible system. She would start by installing a simple computer program so the person taking the order could enter the details. Then someone should be assigned to checking orders and fulfilling them on a specific day every week. Regular customers would be on file, as well, and their information automatically brought up via a database. The same database could be used for mailings.

  “Aren’t your eyes crossing from being on that computer so many hours yesterday?”

  Kristen started. Both customers had left the store, and Heather was standing over her. “They are a bit tired.” Having managed little more than six hours sleep, she was tired. No late night, working or otherwise, for her today.

  “So take a break. We’ve hardly had a chance to talk since you got here.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t talked in ages,” Kristen said, thinking of their weekly Sunday-night phone calls.

  “But now I can see you.”

  “Okay, okay.” Kristen smothered a yawn. “I need coffee anyway.”

  Heather poured two cups. “You seem to be taking to working here.”

  Kristen didn’t want to get her sister’s hopes up. “It’s only temporary, you know. Until I get on my feet.” She took her mug from Heather. “Then I’m going to start job hunting again.”

  That was the agreement she’d made with Aunt Margaret. She would work here while sending out her résumé and driving into Chicago for interviews. If she could get them.

  “You’re going to look for a job in Chicago?” Heather asked, her voice filled with disappointment.

  “That is my home.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You mean, not at the moment.” Kristen sipped her coffee, willing it to give her extra energy to get through the day.

  She was hoping to be back in a new job and a new Chicago apartment before winter. Surely that would give her enough time to help grow Sew Fine into a more viable business.

  “What have you got against living here?” Heather demanded. “I miss you. Aunt Margaret misses you. And now that Brian is back, he would miss you if you left again.”

  “Wait a minute. Isn’t Brian supposed to be working this morning?” Kristen had thought he could sweep up the broken glass.

  “Brian doesn’t always keep to schedule.”

  “And you’re okay with that?” Heather was the manager, after all, Kristen thought.

  “He is very helpful, Kristen. He’ll do anything I ask of him.”

  “When he’s here.”

  “So I give him a break. He’s had a hard couple of years since Mom remarried and moved to California.”

  “Losing his friends in the middle of his freshman year of high school must have been difficult,” Kristen admitted.

  “Not to mention he lost his job. Mom used to call him the man of the house. You remember that, don’t you? Even as a little kid, he took on a lot of responsibility, so he wouldn’t let her down. Well, maybe you don’t really know, because you went away to college so soon after Dad left. Mom was so proud of Brian. Mom thought it was great that he didn’t have to keep that responsibility anymore when she married Mike, but I’m not so sure.”

  Kristen understood completely. “Brian lost his identity.” He must have felt as if he had failed their mother. Just as Kristen had failed at the career she’d so wanted.

  Now Kristen felt even worse about Brian than she had before. Their kid brother could probably barely remember having a father in his life, and then when their mother had remarried, he hadn’t taken to his stepfather. According to Mom, Mike and Brian had been continually at odds. No doubt Brian resented having a man tell him what to do if he’d considered himself the man of the house all his young life. Her mother had mentioned increasing problems with Brian and decided the only way to make the kid happy was to let him go to college in Wisconsin.

  According to Aunt Margaret, Brian could do no wrong. The change in address had seemingly made the difference. Now if only he would get to work on time.

  And if only she would get a new job even better than the one she’d had.

  Kristen said, “You can all come down to Chicago to see me for more than a day or two, you know. And I can come back here more weekends than I did before. It’s not that I don’t like Sparrow Lake, because I do, but there’s no opportunity here for me to prove myself.”

  “You always had more drive than anyone I know. Except for Mom, if in a different way. She was always working, too.”

  “To support us,” Kristen reminded her. “You know Mom didn’t have a choice. She didn’t have a career when Dad left. She had to take whatever job she could get.”

  Which for years had been two and three part-time jobs all at once to make ends meet. Kristen had vowed then to get an education that would provide her with enough security so she never had to scrape by. She would never be a failure like her father, who couldn’t seem to succeed at anything, not even at having a family. Losing her job, then her savings and finally her home had been humiliating to someone with her work ethic.

  She had to get back everything she’d lost. It was a matter of pride.

  She just needed a timeout first.

  “Have you heard from Jason?” Heather asked.

  Okay, he was one thing she’d lost that she didn’t want back. “No, why would I?”

  “You were together for nearly three years.”

  “And I was fooled into thinking he loved me.” At least, that’s what he’d told her. “When you care for a person, you support them, good times or bad. He didn’t want to hear about my job search or my fear that I would lose my condo when I went through my savings. He wanted me to be the same bright, busy working woman who supported him emotionally.”

  Eventually, he’d simply moved on to someone less complicated, though of course the way he put it was I’m doing this for you because you’re using me as a crutch and you need to stand on your own two feet.

  Right.

  Soured on relationships, Kristen would focus all her energies on rebuilding her career. She’d always known she had to learn to rely on herself, and nothing in her experience had changed her mind.

  *

  ALEX PARKED IN his spot in front of the police station and hurried inside to meet with Officer Owen Larson. After his late-night adventure, Alex had slept in. On the way here, he’d stopped in front of Sew Fine for a moment. He hadn’t been able to help himself. Part of him had wanted to go in and see if Kristen Lange was as feisty as he remembered. He hadn’t been able to put her out of mind.

  He stopped at the desk. “Is Owen in?”

  Before the receptionist could answer, Owen called, “Over here!”

  Alex waved and walked back to the desk where Owen was checking his smartphone. His buddy was twenty-six but looked closer to sixteen with reddish hair, freckles and a wiry body that had little discernible bulk. Looks could be deceiving. As slight as he appeared, Owen had incredible muscle strength, could bench press his own weight and dead lift even more. He was fast on his feet and could jump a fence without hesitating. He’d been the star of the high school cross-country team and a champion in college.

  “You’re late,” Owen said. “What’s up?”

  “Late night.”

  “So I heard.” Owen set his phone down, but he kept one eye on it.

  “Expecting a call?” Alex asked.

  “A text.”

  Alex didn’t have to ask
from whom. Owen and his new wife, Trina, had to text each other love notes all day. As long as Owen wasn’t behind the wheel of a patrol car when he did so, that was fine with Alex. Owen had become his good friend in the two years since he’d left the city and moved to Sparrow Lake, and he’d even been best man for Owen’s wedding a few months back. Though he was younger than Alex, Owen seemed to have his life far more together. Owen now had a wife he loved and plans to start a family.

  “So what’s with you and Margaret’s niece?” Owen asked.

  Alex frowned at him. “I caught her breaking into her aunt’s store, and I brought her in for questioning.”

  “I hear there was more to it. A little something special going on between you two?”

  Wishful thinking. Alex hadn’t had anything going on with any woman for far too long. “Who’s making up stories now?”

  “Janet. She said the way you looked at the Lange woman and the tone you used when you spoke to her made them all think there was more to the story than you were telling.”

  “They just need something juicy to chew over. A new woman in town fits the bill.”

  “I might believe you, but—”

  “What?”

  “That expression on your face now. I know you too well, buddy. You may not have anything going yet, emphasis on the yet, but you’re sure thinking about it.”

  Owen meant well, and he wasn’t wrong, but Alex wasn’t about to start talking about a woman he didn’t even know yet.

  “Any new reports about the pranks being pulled around town last night?” Alex asked.

  “Not last night.” Owen sighed. “At nine-fifteen this morning, the fire truck showed up at the library to find someone had pulled the alarm. Of course there was no fire. Not even a wisp of smoke.”

  Alex shook his head in disgust. “I wonder where Brian Lange was at nine-fifteen.” And he wondered if Brian’s sister could tell him. That might be a sticking point in getting to know her better.

  “If we could catch Brian and Matt and Andy in the act—”

  “We could put the fear of jail time in them before they go too far.”

  They talked for a bit about the situation with the boys running wild. Something bad had been brewing in this area of the state since the summer before. Alex had heard rumors of drug trafficking, and there had been a few armed robberies in nearby towns. He wasn’t about to let anything like that go down here in his town.

  Sparrow Lake was pretty much crime free. So far.

  Owen got to his feet. “I’d better get back to work or my boss might fire me.”

  Alex grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. But once the officer left the station, Alex found himself brooding over the problem.

  Since Brian Lange had moved back to town the month before, he’d been hanging out with two high school students a year younger than he was. Alex had seen the three of them together, and to his way of thinking, the local boys idolized the California transplant and would do anything to impress him. Since his return, all kinds of odd events had started happening. Pranks that made people angry. The three boys had been sighted several times in the areas where pranks had been pulled, although no one had actually seen them in action.

  Nothing serious. Yet.

  And Alex wanted to make sure it stayed that way by nipping trouble in the bud.

  While on the job in Chicago, he’d seen terrible things happen to kids because no one got in their way when they started down the wrong path. Things that destroyed their futures. Things that took away any future they might have at all.

  That was the reason he’d left Chicago. He’d been part of a gang unit in the Chicago Police Department, and they’d been dealing with a crime in progress. A crazed, drug-ridden kid had fired at his team and then had pointed a gun straight at Alex. Instinct had kicked in faster than he’d had time to blink, and he’d fired his own weapon. He’d been in the right. Had done exactly as he’d been trained to do. After the investigation, he’d been exonerated. None of that mattered, not even the fact that the kid had survived.

  Alex had kind of gone crazy after that.

  Haunted by the what-ifs, he swore he wouldn’t let the kids here, in his town, get on such a self-destructive road when he could steer them down a more positive path before it was too late.

  Feeling down just thinking about Chicago, he went to his office and tried to bury himself in paperwork, but he simply couldn’t concentrate. He needed a distraction, something to take away the dark cloud that hung over him. Something to make him smile.

  A few minutes later, he found himself in his squad car heading back to Sew Fine.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “YOU WERE SCHEDULED to work at nine this morning,” Kristen told Brian when he finally strolled in the door just before noon.

  “I was? Oh, sorry. The time must have slipped my mind.”

  He gave her an innocent expression, yet Kristen couldn’t tell if it was genuine. He was still a kid, though, and needed some guidelines.

  Kristen sighed. “Maybe you should add your work schedule to the calendar on your phone.”

  “I’ll do that.” Brian kissed her on the cheek. “Sorry, sis.”

  Okay, how mad at him could she be? Instead of chastising him, she gave him a big hug.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “I just missed you, is all.” She’d missed a lot of things while he was growing up, as Heather had reminded her.

  His answering smile lit up his big blue eyes. He would be handsome if only he would grow out his faux-Mohawk haircut. The sides were sheared short and the top was spiked, making his already narrow face seem thinner. Not that she would make any suggestions in the haircut department and chance hurting his feelings.

  Brian asked, “So what do you want me to do first?”

  Not having wanted to leave the shards of glass from the window on the floor any longer, she’d swept them up herself. And after her talk about Brian with Heather, she’d gotten a better idea of how she could make him feel like a more important member of the Sew Fine team—by giving him more responsibility. Heather had enthusiastically agreed.

  So Kristen asked, “How would you like to be in charge of fulfilling orders for the store?”

  “What? You mean be a clerk? I don’t know anything about quilting.”

  Kristen jiggled the box of orders written on scraps of paper. “I mean fulfill these. We need someone to be in charge of phoned-in orders, to make sure they all go out once each week.”

  “You want me to be in charge of something?” Brian sounded surprised.

  “Why not? This is a family business, and you’re part of the family.”

  “Yeah, okay. What do I do?”

  “Round up the items being ordered. If you need material cut, or you need to know what an item is or where to find it, ask Heather or Gloria. You’ll get the hang of how the store is organized fast enough. When you have everything in an order, package it and go on to the next one. When you complete all of the orders, sort them into store pick-up or mail. Then you can run the orders that need to be mailed over to the post office.”

  Brian grinned and nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Great. I’m installing a computer program so future orders will be more organized, but in the meantime, good luck with these.” She handed him the box.

  Not looking in the least daunted, Brian took the handwritten orders over to one of the class tables and started sorting through them. Maybe having actual responsibility would make Brian feel more needed at the store, and encourage him to keep to the hours he was scheduled.

  She’d assured her brother that he would quickly learn how the store was organized, something she hadn’t yet explored. She needed to know exactly what they were selling so she could get some marketing ideas. With that in mind, she decided to stretch her legs and take a more thorough look for herself.

  Heather and Gloria were both busy with customers. As had happened yesterday around noon, the customers seemed to multiply, no doubt taking
advantage of their lunch hours. So, thinking to get a more thorough idea of their product lines and whether or not they could display goods more effectively or perhaps offer some kind of incentive to customers, Kristen decided to check out the stock on her own.

  Closest to the office space were shelves of books and videos about quilting. A half-dozen colorful baskets held samples of the patterns that were stored in a file cabinet. Notions—rulers, cutting tools, pins and needles, and spools of thread—took up the center of the store. And brilliantly colored fabrics were displayed closest to the windows to take advantage of the natural light. It was only when she was admiring some batik prints that she noticed a black-and-white patrol car stop next to the curb directly outside the store.

  Pulse humming, she ducked down to take a better look at the driver…just as Police Chief Alex Novak looked back.

  Was he checking up on her?

  Without thinking it through, Kristen left the store to find out. Through the windshield, she could see that his expression changed, as if he hadn’t expected a confrontation. And then, appearing resigned, he got out of the vehicle. She came face-to-face with him curbside. His feet were still planted on the street, while she was on the higher curb, so they were actually eye to eye. Not that she could see the soft gray color of his eyes through his dark sunglasses.

  “Is there a problem, Chief?”

  “Alex, please.”

  He was wearing a uniform today, looking unbelievably good in stark black. Not wanting to be attracted to him, she swallowed hard. “Okay, Alex, do you have a problem with me?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “This is the second time today that you stopped in front of the store, as if you were casing it. Or maybe you’re expecting me to be doing something not to your liking. Maybe you just want to arrest me again.”

  The way he was staring at her intently, as if he wanted to say something but was reluctant, made her mouth go dry. Was he really not going to explain himself? The way he was staring at her was so…so personal.