Just a Memory

by Lois Carroll

  Praise for Lois Carroll

  Just a Memory

  “Just a Memory is a well-developed and suspenseful story with an exciting climax and a satisfying ending.”

  4 ½ stars

  Scribes World Reviews

  “This is truly a romantic suspense. Ms. Carroll has given us a story and two characters that will not be forgotten.”

  Sharpwriter

  “A story and two characters that will not be forgotten…”

  Affaire de Coeur

  “…highly suspenseful and most definitely a page-turner…”

  4 stars

  Romantic Times

  Overbyte

  “…strong voice and sensual hero and heroine…full of characters so realistic, you feel as though you’ve lived next door to them your entire life. …a book that will bring tears, smiles, and a blissful sigh at the close of the last page.”

  4 ½ stars

  Word Museum

  Snowbound

  “…a delightful book and one guaranteed to please.”

  WCRG, The AOL Review Board

  Books by

  Lois Carroll

  Almost Home

  Snowbound

  Once Upon a Lie

  Overbyte

  Chimera

  Short Stories

  Last Visit

  Just a Memory

  By

  Lois Carroll

  JUST A MEMORY

  An Echelon Press Book

  First Echelon Press paperback printing / 2008

  All rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2008 by Lois Carroll

  Cover and illustration © Nathalie Moore

  Echelon Press

  9735 Country Meadows Lane 1-D

  Laurel, MD 20723

  www.echelonpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Echelon Press.

  ISBN: 1-59080-624-7

  PRODUCED in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Chapter One

  The multicolored lights that lit up the street entrance to her shop were dark. Strange. She left them on all the time.

  More irritated than uneasy, Carolyn Blake pulled into her usual parking space behind The Costume Nook, her costume rental/custom sewing business. She would check the row of colored lights as soon as she got inside. The shop needed their inviting brightness on such a bleak November Monday morning.

  Using her briefcase as a makeshift umbrella, Carolyn dashed through the rain to the back entrance. Holding the storm door open with her hip, she raised her key toward the deadbolt, but before she could insert it, her case bumped the door. It swung inward. Only wood splinters remained where the lock had been.

  She froze with fear. Chilled, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Peering into the dark storeroom, she listened intently. Or tried to. Her heart pounded in her ears, almost obscuring the sounds of rain falling, water rushing over the full gutters, splashing into puddles on the walk. From inside she heard only the clacking of beads.

  Hesitating no longer, she took two tentative steps into the storeroom and looked around. Nothing appeared out of place. She glanced toward the arched doorway into the showroom. The curtain of colored beads danced merrily in the breeze from the open door behind her.

  Beyond the cheerful partition, only silence and near darkness.

  Carolyn eased her briefcase onto one of the wooden shelves. She took a deep breath and tiptoed forward. In the archway she spread her hands, separated the waving strings of beads, and looked into the room beyond. She gasped at the mess she saw before her.

  Costumes piled on the floor. Wigs pulled from their tall rack and thrown onto the costumes. The slanted front of her antique showcase smashed. Glass shards sparkled among the rows of makeup and accessories on the shelves.

  Suddenly, the weakness and fear that had filled her were replaced by feelings of anger and frustration. Her spine straightened and her chin rose. “How can this be?” she said aloud. “This is Lakehaven, for heaven’s sake!” She’d never expected anything like this to happen in her safe little hometown.

  Sidestepping the piles of costumes, she strode down the short hall from the showroom to her sewing area. There, she was almost startled to see everything exactly as she’d left it at the close of business Saturday afternoon. Strangely, her small adjacent office seemed to be all in order, too. Rather than wonder why nothing had been disturbed, Carolyn breathed a sigh of relief, snatched up the phone, and dialed the number printed in red on the base.

  “Good morning, Lakehaven Police Department. This is Officer Eleanna Cordoba. How can I help you?”

  In a wobbly voice Carolyn hardly recognized as her own, she reported all the details about the breakin and answered the officer’s queries, including giving the date of her birth that announced she was thirty-four today–a fact she didn’t like to think about. Unbidden, tears pricked at the backs of her eyes.

  “Someone will be there right away, Miss Blake,” the officer told her. “Please don’t touch anything.”

  “It’s Mrs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s Mrs. Blake. I’m a widow.”

  “Oh, I beg your-”

  “Never mind. Just get someone here quick. And thank you,” Carolyn finished with mechanical politeness. She hung up the phone and raised her arms as if surrendering to a holdup before slumping into her desk chair. What a way to start a new week.

  She thought back over the nine years she’d owned and single-handedly managed the shop–since before her husband had died. The results of her long hours of hard work had attracted customers from as far away as Syracuse, and had made the unique shop a success despite the town’s population of less than five thousand.

  Carolyn rubbed her hands on her tailored rayon-and-wool slacks. She felt dirty because of some stranger being in her shop and manhandling her things. She vowed to clean very thoroughly before her seven-year-old daughter, Terri, came to the shop again.

  She frowned. Terri was due to come there after school. How could Carolyn explain what had happened? She didn’t want the child to feel the fear she’d felt when she saw the broken door. Maybe she shouldn’t tell her at all. Terri was doing well in her classes and enjoyed the school bus ride to the shop where she played each afternoon until they went home together for dinner. In fact, other than constantly hinting that she wanted a father like other kids, Terri was a bright, well-adjusted child. Why upset her at all?

  Carolyn nodded to punctuate her decision not to mention the breakin. Now she had to concentrate on getting the store cleaned up and back into shape. She was able to earn a living there for herself and Terri, but she certainly couldn’t afford to be closed and lose any business. She waited impatiently until a policeman knocked at the rear entrance.

  She thought she knew all three men on the Lakehaven police force. She’d met them at one community event or another.

  Officer Hines was a stranger, however. His mahogany-complexioned face and closely cropped black hair glistened with rain that also soaked much of his dark blue uniform. As she invited him in, the odor of wet wool permeated the air and made her stomach queasy. She wondered how he could stand to breathe in that odor all the time.

  He studied the crime scene and asked a steady stream of questions. No, she didn’t leave any money in the shop. Someone broke in some time between closing Saturday afternoon and this morning just before ten o’clock. Yes, it did seem odd that the costumes had been laid carefully in stacks on the floor with the hangers still in them. She hadn’t noticed that before he pointed it out, and she couldn�
�t imagine why anyone would do it. Apparently he couldn’t either.

  “Thank you,” she said as Officer Hines left with her promise to call him once she’d compiled a list of stolen items. She closed the splintered door after him and shoved a box of plastic helmets against it to hold it shut in the wind.

  Feeling tired as she walked back into the showroom, she thought of the years of sleepless nights she’d spent worrying about making the shop succeed. She’d opened it shortly before her husband Richard became ill and died. Terri had been an infant then.

  Thinking about Richard, she had to admit she was forgetting many little details she thought she would remember forever. While memory loss was probably normal with the passage of time, she still felt the void in her life his passing had left–a void she purposely filled with work.

  Without the shop to support them, Carolyn would have been forced to leave town to find a job, but she wanted to raise her daughter in safe, friendly little Lakehaven. This morning, however, her idyllic town didn’t feel so safe or so friendly.

  Carolyn wrapped her arms around her waist in the only embrace she could expect to get and sighed. Thinking wouldn’t get the mess cleaned up, so she got right to work. First she called her landlord’s office to request the door be fixed. Next she called Judy Kitman, her next-door neighbor and mother of Terri’s best friend, Christie.

  After hearing what had happened, Judy said Terri was welcome at her house after school instead of going to the store as usual. “Should I set another plate for Terri at dinner here? I’ve got plenty. It’s no bother.”

  “I guess maybe you’d better. No telling how long it will take to clean this place up. I’ve just got to open again tomorrow. I can’t afford to be closed.”

  “No problem,” Judy assured her. “I owe you babysitting time anyway. This will help even the score for all the times you’ve kept Christie. But evening the score because you’re working late isn’t quite what I was hoping for….”

  Carolyn laughed. “You still expect me to find a special someone here in Lakehaven and go on a real date?”

  “Hey, you’ll meet a man one of these days, and he’ll knock you for a loop. Mark my words. Your life will never be the same again.”

  “So says Madame Judy, the fortune teller, huh? Is he going to be tall, dark, and handsome?”

  “Absolutely. Why not?” Judy responded with a laugh.

  “You’d better clean that crystal ball. I guess you haven’t noticed there are no tall, dark, and handsome men in this town. Are you sure you have your fortune teller turban on straight?”

  “Go ahead and make fun of my fan-tah-stic powers, but zhust you wait and see,” she said in a dramatic accent, making Carolyn laugh harder. “After zee special man comes into your life, all your loneliness will be just a memory. Madame Judy has spoken.”

  “Thanks, Judy. I needed the laugh.” Carolyn glanced at her watch. “Hey, I’ve got to call the school. Talk to you tonight.” She ended the call and, after contacting the school to ensure her child’s safe delivery to her neighbor’s house, Carolyn picked her way through the mounds of costumes toward the showcase.

  It was November and customers would soon be coming to reserve Thanksgiving pilgrim costumes, and then Santa suits and beards. Carolyn felt thankful the intruder hadn’t hit her store before Halloween. That would have been disastrous. To lose business during her biggest season would have meant a serious cut in the one month’s income that paid a third of the bills for the whole year.

  Carolyn switched on one of the classical concert tapes she always played while she worked alone and turned the volume way up. From below the counter, she pulled out an old faded Christmas smock she’d saved to wear while she cleaned.

  After putting up the “Temporarily Closed” sign she used when she slipped out for an appointment, she discovered the entrance lights were just switched off, not burned out. Relieved, she turned them all back on. She felt better now that the shop looked the way it should from the outside, but she had a long way to go to make it look right on the inside.

  The costumes stacked on the floor in piles made the showroom look like a theater’s laundry-sorting room. Garish clown wigs dotted the bright piles like clumps of vivid flowers on multicolored hillsides. Sighing, Carolyn began to hang the costumes back in their proper categories on the rods. She’d let them hang for a while before she decided which ones needed pressing. She thought it odd that even the most delicate fabrics appeared undamaged; but mostly she just felt thankful. It could have been so much worse.

  Engrossed in her work, she hummed along with the orchestra playing more than loudly enough to mask all other sounds in her shop.

  Acting Lakehaven Chief of Police John ‘Mac’ MacDonald climbed into the village’s one unmarked white sedan. He never would understand why tiny Lakehaven had an unmarked car. Everyone living within thirty miles of the burg knew which car it was.

  The radio pager beeped and he grabbed the handset. “Mac here. Whatcha got, Ellie?”

  “Sounds like a burglary at The Costume Nook on the corner of Falls and Lake Streets. The owner says everything’s a mess.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, sounding surprised.

  Mac knew the former police chief had rarely left his office. Just sitting there, with little to do, had driven Mac out onto the streets after only a few hours.

  “Hines already responded, Chief. Should I radio him and tell him to wait for you?”

  “Yeah, thanks, Ellie.”

  Mac signed off as he drove the few blocks down the hill to Lake Street. The Costume Nook occupied the corner brick building anchoring one end of a row of stores, a bank, a restaurant with a weird combination of Greek and Chinese food, a decades-old movie theater, and two bars–the entire Lakehaven downtown business district. The town’s only major grocery store and gas station were out near the exit from the state highway. A motel with a coffee shop overlooked the nearby lake, one of many glacial lakes dotting Upstate New York. The newer cement block building housing the police station was on the other side of downtown. There was no jail in Lakehaven other than a holding cell in the station. They had never needed one.

  Mac pulled into the parking lot behind the corner building where he saw the patrol car parked beside a small sedan. As he unfolded his long legs from the mid-size car, he saw Hines waiting for him. Seeing his customary cocky grin always made Mac feel good that his friend had been assigned to come with him from the big city to Lakehaven.

  The last time Mac had worked with a partner, he’d been paired with Sam Johnson. That’s when Mac’s friendship with Hines had begun. Mac, Sam, Hines, and Hines’s partner Dawkins were the four musketeers. On their last assignment together, a special undercover operation in New York City, they had been assigned to infiltrate a smuggling operation. Bob Morris had been their contact with NYPD, Mac remembered.

  Hines, Dawkins, and Morris were the backup unit one night when everything went wrong. That night Mac was shot twice in the shoulder as he watched his partner Sam Johnson get killed. That was all he could remember. Amnesia due to traumatic shock, the doc had told him. Memories of Sam’s death still haunted him, though mostly at night in the form of nightmares. He slammed the car door shut and strode toward Hines with a smile.

  “Does it rain here every day?” Mac asked, unable to keep the disgust from his voice.

  “No, Mac,” Hines answered with a laugh. “They tell me it only rains when you want to go out and do something.”

  “It never rained once when I was here looking into this job back in the summer. Someone should have warned me.” Holding the front of his trench coat out like a cape, Mac shook it briskly from side to side. “I don’t think this coat has dried out completely since I arrived three weeks ago.” He pulled it back onto his broad shoulders. “You look like a drowned rat, Hines. Why don’t you wear a department slicker and stay dry?”

  “Listen, man, I refuse to wear that damned orange thing with ‘Lakehave
n Police’ in reflective tape across the back. Hell, I’d look like an orange-frosted cookie with a chocolate chip on top. No way. I’d rather be soaked to the skin.”

  “Looks like you got your wish,” Mac responded. “Your uniform is so wet the blue looks black.”

  Hines’s grin broadened. “Black is beautiful, haven’t you heard? And it’s a good excuse to take the damn thing off the minute I get back to the station instead of waiting ‘til the end of my shift.”

  “Just don’t hang it up where anyone can smell it. That odor is deadly!”

  “You don’t need to remind me. Practically everyone else tells me the same thing.” Hines ran a hand through his wet hair, unintentionally pushing water down the side of his neck. “Ugh! What a guy won’t put up with for a good friend. Damn, I wish we could clear up the real reason I’m here on assignment with you. Then we could get out of these damn old smelly uniforms for good and get back to where we belong.”

  Mac stiffened. “Hey, you don’t have to stay here,” he said, his voice steady but softened considerably.

  “Yeah, I do,” Hines answered without hesitation. “You know I’m just here because the boss hopes my handsome face will help your memory come back.” He grinned, but his expression sobered when Mac didn’t follow suit.

  Mac looked at him a moment longer. “Yeah, I know.” He nodded and glanced down before looking back at Hines with a smile. “I probably should thank you, but it would only swell that big black ugly head of yours.” Hines laughed and Mac couldn’t help but do the same. “I suppose we should get to work.”

  “The job can’t feel like a vacation every day,” Hines agreed.

  Mac turned to look at the back entrance of the costume shop. “What have you got? What happened, besides someone smashing in that door?”

  Hines pulled out his notes and filled Mac in on what he’d found inside.

  “Pretty cut and dried. Doesn’t sound like I need to retrace your steps inside.” Mac turned toward his car.

  “Wait a minute, Mac.” He caught Mac’s arm and then quickly released it. “Ah, you should go in. Mrs. Blake, the shop owner, well, I…I think you should talk to her. I, ah, told her you might stop in. You know. Good PR.”