Cropped to Death (Faith Hunter Scrap This Mystery)

by Freeburn, Christina

  The aloofness left his expression and softness replaced it. “Because you’re a sweetheart.” He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, brown gaze locked onto brown gaze.

  The expression in his eyes quaked my knees. I had fantasized about kissing Steve, wondered about it, but never gave him the impression I was interested in him. I fought against the instinct begging me to close my eyes and raise up on my toes. Self-preservation required I avoid a romantic relationship with the assistant county prosecutor.

  I stepped back and turned from him. I needed back on safer ground, my choice of defending Marilyn.

  “I know she didn’t do it. If the police believed Marilyn said she wanted Michael dead because I said it, why won’t they even reconsider when I say she wouldn’t actually do it?”

  “This isn’t about believing in someone or not. It’s all about evidence.” Steve opened the door.

  I rushed after him and then grabbed hold of his arm. “What evidence?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. You worked in the legal field. You know the police wouldn’t unjustly bring charges against Marilyn.”

  Wrong. People lied. Police bought every made up word and innocent people suffered. I pushed down the brewing anger and the past. “Tell Roget I won’t talk to Annette anymore.”

  “If Marilyn needs help, she should hire a defense attorney. Or if she really wants a private detective, there are professionals out there.”

  “Are you saying I’m not capable of being a private detective?” I glared at him. “That I would mess up?”

  Steve gaped at me. “Do you seriously want to become an investigator?”

  I bit my lip. “Well, no. Not really.” Heck, I didn’t even think I was qualified to track down a murderer.

  “Then why are you mad at me?” He raised his arms in surrender. “I can’t believe you want to argue about this. Think about it, Faith. If you’re right, then the best people to confront a murderer are the police. Not you.”

  TEN

  After Steve left, I minded my own business as well as I could while still being a friendly representative for the store. I kept an interested look plastered on my face as customers swirled around me, gossiping about who killed Michael Kane.

  Half the customers believed a displeased client at Michael’s law firm killed him. Made sense. Even people who committed crimes didn’t like going to jail or forking out loads of money to the plaintiff. The other half sided with the police and felt Marilyn killed her husband. For those who believed Marilyn did it, seventy percent felt Michael deserved it.

  Keeping my opinions inside my mind was a tiring job. I feared my head would fall off my neck from all the bobbing up and down. A group of teenagers walked into the store and glanced around. I gave them my entire attention.

  “Can I help you find anything?” I asked.

  Four awe-struck gazes focused on me.

  “Is this where the killer works?” A girl with shiny blond hair asked. The other three, two boys and a girl, stood behind her and gawked.

  “Man, I wonder if she got her weapon here.” The tallest boy pointed to the rack with the remainder of our cutting tools. They headed toward that section of the store.

  “You’d think this would work?” One of the boys reached for a pair of decorative scissors.

  “You touch it. You buy it,” I said, in the tone I used when talking to the Hooligans, Sierra’s delightful children.

  After shooting me a look of disgust, the teenagers stomped out of the store complaining about the lady with no sense of fun. I knew fun. I liked fun. I didn’t appreciate Scrap This becoming a spot on the Criminals in Eden Tour. Other customers in the store redirected their focus to merchandise and the talk of Marilyn fizzled out.

  Linda rushed into the store twenty minutes late, and almost collided into a customer. No surprise. Since Linda started working at Scrap This three months ago, she’d never arrived on time. It was an ingrained fault that had lost her other jobs. Scrap This was her sixth job in the last year.

  Linda stashed her purse underneath the counter and offered an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”

  “If you man the register, I’ll finish putting up the display boards.” I pointed at the mess in the middle of the floor.

  “Sure,” she said and sat on a stool.

  I skirted around the counter and returned to the mess in the middle of the floor. An easier chaos to deal with than the one I created by helping Marilyn. I lifted up one of the display boards and started to pull the wooden legs apart but my tugs were in vain. I let out a puff of breath and eased the display back to the floor. Maybe if I stepped on one of the legs and used both of my hands, I could open it.

  As I leaned over to grab hold of the wooden post, a voice snapped behind me. “What are the rules?”

  I peered over my shoulder and spotted Darlene, our most competitive and spendthrift customer. Holding in a groan, I straightened and faced her. Cheryl was better at dealing with tantrums, but she had stepped out for a late lunch.

  “Rules?” I asked.

  Darlene, life artist extraordinaire, whipped out a small recorder from her gigantic Vera Bradley purse and pressed the record button. “For the layout contest the store, Scrap This, is running for the seasoned scrapbookers. I assume the artists competing for the cutting machine cannot have help on their entry. So, if an artist wasn’t able to attend the Art Benefit Show, may they use pictures taken by another person who attended the event?”

  “How should I know?” I returned to setting up the displays.

  “You are an employee here. You are the granddaughter of the owners.” She poked me in the shoulder. “You’re not allowed to enter are you?”

  Releasing a sigh, I gave her more patience than I naturally possessed. “I’m not entering the contest. I was busy running the store’s booth and had no time to take photos.”

  Suspicion deepened the frown on her mouth and the lines around her brown eyes. “But could you if you wanted to? What if a friend took photos and then gave them to you to scrapbook?”

  “Darlene, write your concerns down and I’ll ask the owners about them.”

  “I’d like an answer now.” She plopped down on the floor and folded her legs into a pretzel shape. “I refuse to leave until the rules are confirmed and written down.”

  “Fine. I’ll go see if Cheryl’s back.” Right now, I wished Steve was still here. I doubted Darlene would react in such a manner with a hot guy in the store.

  Whispers drifted from behind the curtained partition of the storage room. I parted the fabric.

  Hope and Cheryl stood huddled together. Hope gestured at the back door, then toward the front of the store. Cheryl’s gaze flicked in that direction and widened when she saw me. She elbowed Hope.

  The quiet argument stopped and they looked at me as if I was the center of their world.

  They were hiding something.

  Cheryl grinned at me. “Faith, how’s Steve?”

  I narrowed my gaze. Grandma Cheryl never grinned like a staged candid moment of children dressed in matching outfits as they skipped through the surf. “You don’t care how Steve is.”

  “Of course I do,” Cheryl said.

  I muttered in my head and addressed my grandmothers. “I know you two weren’t back here clucking about Steve.”

  Nothing happened. No lecture, no grandmotherly narrowed gaze. No reminder of how I wasn’t raised to talk to my elders like that. The ignoring of my snark concerned me more than their actions.

  Hope pointed a shaking finger toward the door. “There’s a police car in our employee parking lot.”

  What did Roget want now? Were the police tying the store into the murder? It was bad enough the police arrested one of my grandmothers’ employees for murder. Pinpointing their beloved store as a supply house for weapons would hurt them even more. If Roget wanted a showdown, I’d give him one. “I’ll go find out what he wants.”

  Cheryl puckered her lips. “Maybe the officer wants to question your
choice of lunch break.”

  Steve. The man ratted me out to my grandmothers, which meant the worry I saw on Hope’s face resulted from my behavior, not the police’s. “I just asked Annette a few questions.”

  “Faith, stay out of it,” Cheryl ordered.

  “Marilyn asked for my help.”

  Hope walked over and hugged me. “We’ll find her a better defense attorney since hers isn’t doing a good job. We’ll even help with the costs of her legal defense. One thing we shouldn’t do is personally involve ourselves in the investigation.”

  “You instilled in me that family means everything. No one should ever turn their back on family when they were needed the most.” I held out my arms. “You’ve always said the employees in this store are family. I can’t abandon Marilyn when she needs me most.”

  Cheryl and Hope exchanged a quick glance, one that said they weren’t pleased their words were being used against them.

  “This is different,” Cheryl said.

  “How is it different? Because someone accused her of a crime, we should just forget about her?” I crossed my arms so my grandmothers’ didn’t see how much I was starting to shake. I didn’t know if it was from building anger or fear of what my grandmothers’ answer would be.

  “Playing detective is liable to hurt you and Marilyn. What’s wrong with hiring a private detective?”

  Hope smiled. “That sounds like the perfect answer. We need you here doing work for Scrap This. I’m sure a detective would have plenty of resources to get this solved a lot quicker. Not that you wouldn’t do a wonderful job, sweetie.”

  Cheryl rolled her eyes. “You shouldn’t encourage her.”

  “I don’t want my granddaughter thinking I don’t believe in her.” Hope glared at Cheryl. “We never told Faith she wasn’t capable of doing something.”

  “Well she never tried solving a murder before. Do we really want our granddaughter skulking about after a murderer?”

  Hope tapped her chin. “That is a good point.”

  “I haven’t been skulking,” I said. Somehow my grandmothers forget I was there.

  “Faith can do anything she sets her mind on and that’s the problem.” Cheryl pointed a finger at me. “Messing with the type of people willing to kill isn’t something you just decide to do one day.”

  Hope nodded. “There are professionals for that.”

  “Like the police who believe Marilyn is guilty,” I said.

  “How many times have you walked straight into trouble because of being overly helpful when you shouldn’t have been?” Cheryl asked.

  Thankfully it was a rhetorical question because the actual number was hard to remember. As a child, I could be convinced to ask the teacher the questions resulting in detention. That trait also led me to take every word Adam spoke as truth, so I ignored glaring inconsistencies. Lies that ended my legal career.

  And there was one person I wasn’t ever overly helpful for, and she was still sitting in the middle of the store. “Darlene wants a written copy of the rules for the layout contest clarifying if the entry must be the sole work of the artist. And if employees are allowed to enter.”

  Cheryl and Hope exchanged an eye-roll.

  “She’s holding a one woman protest by the display boards.” I tilted my head toward the curtain.

  “I’ll handle this.” Cheryl motioned for me to follow her out into the store. I was either backup or a potential witness in case Darlene decided to take us to court over rule-breaking. Or to hold my grandmother’s earrings while she and Darlene tussled.

  We entered into the shopping area. I groaned. The problem had escalated while I went for backup.

  Darlene was in a heated argument with Robyn and Stephanie, Darlene’s bitter rivals in the professional scrapbooking circle. A clear understanding of Darlene’s needs for written rules and regulations became apparent. Stephanie was an awesome scrapbooker, but a horrible photographer, while Robyn had the opposite strengths and weaknesses. Since the sisters cropped together, they could share the prize of the die cut machine. The only way Darlene stood a chance was making sure the sisters couldn’t compete as one.

  Cheryl shoved her way through the threesome, moving them away from each other. “Ladies, what’s the problem?”

  “They…” Darlene said the pronoun in the tone usually reserved for those who licked their fingers and then touched the pattern paper. “…want to convince you there should be no rules for Scrap This page contest. But contests need rules. All the good ones have rules.”

  The ultimate challenge. If we ran a legitimate contest, then rules existed.

  “That’s not true. We didn’t come here to force the store into writing down rules to sway the outcome.” Robyn held up a sealed envelope the size of a large pizza box. “We just completed our entry.”

  Darlene hissed at the news. Stephanie flashed a confident smile. Robyn tried keeping her expression neutral.

  “The layout needs to be designed by the entrant,” Cheryl said.

  “We did design it ourselves,” Stephanie said. “We did it together, both of our names are on the entry.”

  “It should be a blind contest.” Darlene glared at sisters. “People will play favorites.”

  “Our names are on a three by five index card. It can be slipped out from the page protector,” Robyn said.

  I ventured into the conversation. “Since the Art Benefit Show will be the focus of the photos, rather than family members, favoritism shouldn’t be a problem. Not that we have any favorite customers.” Though for least favorite, I had a nice list building with Darlene’s name at the top.

  “I don’t think it’s fair two scrappers can work on a layout together. They have an advantage,” Darlene said.

  Cheryl smiled at her. “I think a collaboration is fine as long as both artists are willing to share the prize. I’m sure they put a lot of work into their layout and I don’t want to disqualify them because they worked as a team.”

  Darlene’s face blossomed red. She sputtered and stopped before lashing out. “It’s cheating! If they can’t scrap an award-winning layout alone, then they shouldn’t enter contests. A great designer doesn’t need a partner.”

  I shrugged. “Most interior designers I know have employees working with them.”

  “That’s different.” She shot me a shut-up glare.

  “Even authors co-write books together,” I continued. “And what about all those layout design books where multiple artists contribute?”

  Cheryl, Stephanie and Robyn monitored our discussion with rapt interest.

  Darlene continued giving me the evil eye. “That’s different and you know it. They each work on separate projects and then those layouts are combined to make a complete design book. The artists don’t work on layouts together.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve seen some online scrapbook boards where designers give each other tips and pointers,” I said. “They critique each other’s work and make suggestions on what to take out or add to the layouts. Isn’t that collaborating?”

  Smug smiles erupted all around. Except for Darlene. She paled. Everyone knew Darlene participated in a critique group for layout designers. If she pushed hard enough, then her own work would be disqualified. She did have help, though not literal hands-on contribution.

  Darlene huffed, then stomped out the front door. The bell jingled and jangled from the violent movement. Robyn and Stephanie smiled their thanks and browsed around the store. Cheryl headed for the storage room.

  Since the entries were coming in, I tried setting up the display boards again. This time I’d use my weight as a leverage to pry open the wooden posts. I grabbed hold of the legs and tugged them toward me while keeping my left foot planted on the other post.

  Frustration built in my muscles and I hoped it gave me the strength to pry the wooden stand apart so I could set-up the first board. At this rate, I’d be at the store until tomorrow morning getting the displays upright. Or more likely, my grandmothers would call Steve
so I could borrow his brawn. Not something I wanted since I was irritated at the man.

  “Need some help?” A deep male voice asked from behind me.

  Startled, I lost my balance and almost fell onto the wooden posts. An arm snagged my waist and pulled me backwards. I fell back into a broad chest and the arm kept me snug against a well-toned male body. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  The words drifted across my cheeks and brushed my ear and the smell of mint and spice wrapped around me. A small trickle of delight warmed my face and danced across my nerves. I didn’t even know this guy and I was swooning like a heroine in a Victorian romance novel. Gathering back my equilibrium and wits, I removed myself from the saving grasp that bordered on an embrace. I turned and bit back a gasp.

  Detective Roget smiled.

  I pressed my lips together and stopped myself from saying something I’d regret. That feeling of shame at being conned wasn’t Roget’s fault. He didn’t expect my mind—for a brief, unsettling moment—would find a little thrill at being in his arms. Of course, if I’d suspected it was Roget, I’d have elbowed him in the gut.

  Wiping my sweaty hands on my pants, I gave my bland customer service smile. “I didn’t realize you scrapped.”

  “I’m not a hobby kind of guy.” He kept his eyes on me, the smile never wavering.

  The last thing I wanted was to ask him why he was at Scrap This. Linda’s gaze was on us, a curious expression filling her face.

  “I’ll take you up on your offer.” I knelt and motioned for him to grab the top of the display board. “If you can lift this up, I’ll pull the legs out.”

  Without argument, he complied with my instructions. In twenty minutes, we had all the display boards raised. Now all I had left was prettying up the wooden elements that would remain unadorned by layouts with some bling. I scanned the store. Yards of ribbon would work, along with some distressing ink. Maybe some faux crystals jewels in a zebra pattern, either pink and black or white and turquoise.

  “After all that hard work, a drink would be nice,” Roget said. “Why don’t you join me?”