by Jeff Shelby
The woman hefted the second pumpkin, the oval one, into her cart and I had to make a decision. Was I going to make a big deal out of it? Was I going to fight her for my pumpkins?
“Those are mine,” I said again.
The woman sneered, and her stretched red lips reminded me of a maniacal clown. I wasn’t particularly fond of clowns. “Prove it.”
I gave her a quick once-over. She was probably a few years older than me, and carried what resembled a flat tire around her midsection. Her shoes were sturdy orthopedic ones, but I noticed her calves, visible under her knee-length denim skirt, were thick and swollen. She’d probably have a hard time chasing after me.
I made my decision.
I reached into her cart and pulled out the first pumpkin.
“What are you doing?” she screeched.
“Taking my pumpkins,” I replied, trying to keep my voice calm.
“You are stealing my pumpkins!”
Everyone in the produce section was now staring at us, Vivian and the manager included. I offered them what I hoped resembled a puzzled look before diving back in for my last pumpkin.
“Stop her!” the woman cried, looking around frantically for help. “She’s stealing my pumpkins!”
The manager’s eyebrows lifted to his hairline as he assessed the situation. Then he tucked the clipboard under his arm, straightened his tie, and hurried over.
He tried, unsuccessfully, to plaster a smile on his face. “What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Grottsman?”
The woman pointed a chubby finger at me. “Her,” she fumed. She was breathing hard, and her chest heaved up and down as if she’d just run a marathon. “She’s taking things out of my cart and putting them in hers.”
Vivian had left the bakery counter and was hanging a few steps back, clearly curious but unwilling to come too close. I didn’t blame her.
Quietly, I explained the situation to the manager. He nodded, glancing between me and Mrs. Grottsman as I told him what had happened. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, and he wiped at them with the back of his hand. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed multiple times.
“I see,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Mrs. Grottsman, I’m afraid there has been a misunderstanding. I’ve been in the produce section for a while now, and I did see Ms. Day go through the pumpkins while I was helping another customer.” His gaze darted toward me before drifting to the floor. He tugged on his tie again.
“So you’re just going to let her take them?” Mrs. Grottsman demanded. “Right out of my cart? My pumpkins?”
“Technically they’re not yours, since you haven’t paid for them yet,” I pointed out.
Mrs. Grottsman growled. “They aren’t yours, either.”
No one said anything. We stood there, the pumpkins now in my cart, her cart empty, the three of us silent. Muzak drifted through the store, a classified version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Mrs. Grottsman looked as though she might turn into a werewolf at any minute and slash my throat, and I was pretty sure the manager was searching for a teleporter so he could remove himself from the situation.
I decided to make the first move. I regripped the handle to my cart and backed away from the people gathered around it. For one brief moment, I thought the almost feral woman standing next to me was going to lunge forward.
Apparently, the manager thought so, too, because he reached out a hand to stop her. Mrs. Grottsman snarled and then grabbed her cart and propelled it forward. The manager and I breathed a collective sigh of relief.
He gave me a weak smile. “Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault,” I told him. “Thanks for backing me up.”
Vivian approached us, taking tentative steps, almost as if she were afraid the woman might come back and that she herself would soon be in the line of fire.
The manager turned back to her and his smile intensified. He coughed and repositioned his clipboard. “Where were we?” he said to her.
I took that as my cue to leave. I just wanted to pay for my pumpkins—my hard-fought pumpkins—and get the heck out of there.
I headed toward the checkout, taking a quick detour to pick up some flour and brown sugar, knowing I was running low, and then made an impulse buy and bought some chocolate chips. My waistband might be snug but I’d just weight-lifted pumpkins and burned enough adrenaline fighting with Mrs. Grottsman to justify a reward in the form of chocolate chip cookies.
At least that was what I told myself.
I did a U-turn in the aisle so that the cart was pointing at the row of cash registers and pushed it along, scanning the checkout for the open lanes. There were only two, and both had people waiting. I picked one and steered in that direction.
And crashed right into Mrs. Grottsman’s cart.
She exploded. “First you steal my pumpkins and now you’re attacking me!”
I backed up. “Sorry,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“An accident?” she fumed. “This was no accident. Just like you taking my pumpkins was no accident. You are a thief and a bully. The sheriff is right about you!”
I froze.
My testy interactions with Sheriff Lewis were no secret in Latney, but this was the first time someone other than him had hurled accusations at me that attacked my character.
“Ladies.” The manager hurried over, his dark hair blowing in the breeze he was creating as he flew toward us. “Is there a problem?”
Mrs. Grottsman nodded. “She attacked me with her cart!”
“I did no such thing,” I said. My blood pressure was rising, and I felt the prickle of tears behind my eyes. Her words had stung. “I was heading to a checkout and accidentally bumped into her.”
Mrs. Grottsman opened her mouth. Spittle hung from her lips and her beady eyes bulged. “An accident? Just like that dead body was an accident? And the fire? And the kidnapping you were involved in? All of them were accidents, huh?”
The tears sprang to my eyes and, embarrassed and angry, I tried to blink them away.
“Mrs. Grottsman.” The manager’s words were sharp. “I will not have you address one of my customers that way.” He looked at me. “Please be careful as you navigate the store. Some of our aisles are narrowed right now because of floor displays, and there might be some blind spots as you round certain corners.”
I nodded.
“Mrs. Grottsman,” he began, but she growled at him and spun her cart around to leave.
And promptly knocked over a towering display of Halloween-themed cereal. The boxes tumbled to the floor, skittering and sliding several feet in every direction.
Mrs. Grottsman didn’t even look back. She abandoned her cart and headed for the entrance, her thick legs moving faster than I’d thought possible. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to outrun her, after all.
I shifted my cart to the side and leaned down to help pick up the boxes littering the floor.
“I’m sorry about all of this, Ms. Day,” the manager said. He was on his knees, sweeping his arms wide as he gathered boxes of cereal, bringing them closer to him.
“Clean up on aisle five,” a voice intoned over the loudspeaker.
“No need to apologize,” I said. A dozen boxes of cereal were stacked up next to me, with more still covering the floor. I reached for more. “And, forgive me, but I don’t know your name.”
“Brad,” he said. “Brad Lattimore.”
“Well, Mr. Lattimore, thank you for coming to my assistance.”
A young man appeared with a mop and a mobile bucket of water. He glanced at the boxes on the floor, looking perplexed. “Someone said there was a cleanup on aisle five but I don’t see it?”
Mr. Lattimore looked at the kid. “This is the cleanup.”
The kid frowned, and then his expression cleared. He snapped his fingers. “Got it,” he said, nodding. He stood there and watched us as we gathered more boxes.
“Justin, perhaps you could start rebuilding the display?” Mr. Lattimore asked.<
br />
The kid frowned again before a dawning look of recognition emerged. “Got it,” he repeated, nodding again. “Yeah, yeah, I can do that.”
Within a few minutes, the boxes were stacked next to the cardboard display and Justin was slowly, methodically stacking them back in place. At the rate he was going, it might be put back together by closing time. His mop and bucket were still in the middle of aisle five, blocking cart traffic.
Mr. Lattimore noticed this and sighed. He stooped down to pick up the mop and placed it inside the bucket.
I shouldered my purse and grabbed my cart again, but not before I noticed the clipboard he’d been holding earlier. In the commotion and aftermath of the cereal box fiasco, it must have slipped out of his hands and was now hidden halfway under the cardboard display. I bent down to retrieve it.
A normal person might not have glanced at its contents. But I wasn’t normal. I was a woman who had worked at a private investigator’s firm for twenty years. I was a woman who had been accused of all manner of crimes since moving to a new town, and who apparently was thought of as a criminal by total strangers.
And I was also nosy. Very nosy.
I peeked at the order form attached to the clipboard. The chicken scratch handwriting scrawled across it was barely legible.
But something else clipped to the board was remarkably easy to read, and very recognizable.
Because on the bottom of the order form, clear as day, was a signature.
Sophia Rey’s signature.
THIRTEEN
I held out the clipboard to Mr. Lattimore.
His fingers touched it, wrapped around it, but I was having a hard time letting go.
“Is this a pre-order?” I asked, indicating the form I was still staring at.
Mr. Lattimore’s expression screwed into one of mild confusion. “Excuse me?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “I…I just happened to notice Sophia’s signature. She’s a friend of mine,” I explained. “And I was just wondering if this was a preorder for the Fall Festival this weekend.”
“Oh,” he said, his expression clearing. “No, not a preorder. I knew they would be ordering items but Vivian came in today to place the actual order. Perhaps you saw her in the bakery when the…the pumpkin incident occurred?”
My cheeks burned at the mention of the pumpkins. “Sure, of course,” I said, nodding. “So Sophia didn’t sign this?”
He glanced down at the form, squinting at the signature. “No, Vivian must have signed it for her. I assume because she’s the treasurer. Sophia, I mean. She’ll be the one coming in with the check and picking up the order.”
I nodded again. “Of course,” I said. “That makes perfect sense.”
It was a lie. It didn’t make sense at all that Vivian had signed Sophia’s name to the order form. And she hadn’t just signed it. She’d actually mimicked Sophia’s signature, right down to the swirled R and the loopy Y in her last name, and the open circle for a dot in her first name. It was an absolutely perfect replica of Sophia’s signature. I knew this, because I’d just thumbed through the checkbook and seen it on the voided check.
I grabbed my cart again and headed for the checkout. All I wanted to do was pay for my pumpkins and leave Toby’s.
But that was a lie, too.
I wanted to do more than that. Much more. I wanted to figure out why Vivian knew how to forge Sophia’s signature.
After paying for and loading my pumpkins and other groceries into the car, I got behind the wheel and started the engine. I knew what I should do: drive home. Forget what I’d seen, forget the conversation I’d had with Brad Lattimore. It wasn’t my business. I didn’t want it to be my business. I wasn’t an investigator, and I was tired of being involved in all of the palace intrigue in town.
But when I pulled out of the parking lot and scanned the buildings in my sightline, my eyes focused on St. Simon’s. They zeroed in on the white Prius parked in the parking lot. And I knew that, despite what I kept telling myself I wanted to do, I wasn’t heading home quite yet.
Declan was in his office when I walked into the church, a group of five women circled around his desk. I could barely see him through the throng of bodies crammed into his office.
“I understand, Judith,” he was saying. His voice was calm, polite, but I could detect a subtle note of exasperation. “I’m just not sure how—”
An older woman sporting a floral shower cap on her head cut him off. “This is a fall festival at a church. We don’t want young ‘uns dressed up as witches and ghosts.”
“It’s Halloween,” Declan said.
“At a church,” she retorted.
“What would you suggest?” Declan asked. His chair squeaked and I could imagine that he was leaning back in his chair, contemplating the crowd of women gathered around him. “Although we call this a fall festival, the kids and parents think of this as a Halloween celebration. They expect to be able to come in costume.”
“They still can,” Judith insisted. “They…they can come dressed as their favorite Bible character!” She glanced around at the women standing next to her, and her eyes, magnified by the bifocals she wore, seemed almost alien-like in their appearance.
“Bible character?” Declan repeated.
“Sure,” she said, nodding. Her shower cap slipped to the side, revealing a few pink curlers. A bony hand reached up to adjust it, positioning it back in place. “There are plenty of rich, wonderful characters to dress up as. What better way to address a child’s desire to dress up and still give glory to God?”
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t think of a worse idea to foist on kids for Halloween. Even aside from the disastrous timing—the festival was four days away, which wouldn’t allow nearly enough time for families to put together new costumes—I couldn’t imagine any kid getting excited about foregoing their firefighter or princess costume to dress as a Biblical character instead.
It was time for an intervention.
I cleared my throat, and the crowd of women swiveled to face me. “I think it’s a wonderful idea!” I gushed, with as much fake enthusiasm as I could muster.
I spied Declan and his blue eyes widened slightly. I wondered if his reaction was because he was surprised to see me or if he was surprised by my reaction to Judith’s suggestion. My reluctance to embrace religion was well known.
It was probably a mixture of both.
“Bible characters!” I exclaimed, clasping my hands together. “There are so many to choose from! John the Baptist—just think how clever a beheaded costume will look. I hope no one gets too squeamish about fake blood.”
Judith’s eyes popped even wider behind her glasses.
But I wasn’t done.
“And Adam and Eve. Maybe the kids could dress up as them prior to Eve eating the apple.” I chuckled. “Silly me…’dress up’? They’d actually be able to come in no clothes at all! Oh dear. I hope the temperature won’t be too cold that night. Does anyone know the forecast?”
The crowd of women tittered.
“And let’s not forget the big guy himself,” I said.
“That would be blasphemy,” Judith gasped.
“To dress as the devil?” I asked.
A collective gasp rose from the group of women and Declan bit back a smile, shaking his head as he watched our interaction.
“A pitchfork, some horns, red clothes.” I rattled off a list of supplies. “Most kids could throw that costume together easy enough.”
Judith straightened. “Well, perhaps we should think about doing this next year,” she said. “And provide some suggestions—some good suggestions—for appropriate costumes.”
“My suggestions weren’t good?” I asked.
She pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything.
“Judith, I appreciate your concern and your ideas,” Declan said. “And we will definitely take them into consideration. Next year,” he added firmly.
Judith’s shoulders slumped a little but sh
e nodded. The other women gathered around nodded, too, and it seemed as though everyone breathed a sigh of relief. I wondered if it was because they hadn’t been on board with the idea in the first place, or if they were simply relieved that nude Adam and Eves wouldn’t be frolicking at the festival.
The group of women excused themselves and I watched as they filed past me and filed out of Declan’s office.
“Adam and Eve?” Declan said once they were gone. “Really?”
I chuckled.
“You are something else, Rainy,” he said, still smiling. “Something else indeed.”
I perched on the arm of the chair across from his desk.
“So,” he said, shuffling a stack of papers on his desk. His glasses were next to them, along with a pen and his bible. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
I didn’t respond right away. Mostly because I wasn’t exactly sure why I was there.
“Are you enjoying your new kitchen décor?” he asked.
I cocked my head, confused, and then remembered the box of items he’d dropped off a couple of days earlier. “Oh,” I said, nodding. “Yes. I haven’t gone through everything yet, but I’m sure I’ll love it. After all, I’ve seen all of it on display in your kitchen.”
“Yeah, well I guess I’m being overtaken by plants.”
“Plants?”
“Herbs and vegetables. Fiona has found all kinds of towels and potholders and stuff with that motif. My kitchen is now filled with those.”
I smiled. “It’s nice of her to do that for you.”
Declan shrugged. “She does it because she only has one kitchen of her own to decorate.”
“It’s still nice.”
“If you say so,” he said, but he was grinning. “So how are things going? What have you been busy with that has kept you from unpacking that amazing box of goodies?”
Silence greeted his question.
“Rainy?” he asked, his brow furrowing when I didn’t respond. “Is everything okay?”
