Kiki Lowenstein Books 1-3 & Cara Mia Delgatto Books 1-3: The Perfect Series for Crafters, Pet Lovers, and Readers Who Like Upbeat Books!

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  The guests were taking their seats and marking their territory. Dodie gave me a nod, the signal we were almost ready to begin. I felt a rush of happy excitement. My efforts were about to pay off. The page kits I’d created for this outing represented my best efforts. Dodie had lobbied hard for membership in the Crop Around Missouri Program (CAMP), a coalition of area independent retailers. Since independents don’t have the buying power or ad budget of big chains, we have to find other ways to keep our customers happy. The store owners created CAMP to pool their resources, making all of them stronger retailers and sharing the cost of promotion. They had also put aside their differences. All of them, that is, except Ellen Harmon, owner of Memories First. Ellen seemed determined to cause dissension and trouble. Worse yet, Dodie and I had noticed whatever classes we offered, Ellen copied immediately — at a lower price.

  But Ellen could not possibly beat us when it came to original ideas. That was my area of specialty. I smiled inwardly and outwardly, as I moved to the rolling cart where I’d organized our supplies. My back was to the front of the room when Ellen Harmon called out, “Welcome everyone! Let me talk, then you can eat!”

  Dodie and I exchanged shocked glances. Ellen Harmon had commandeered the microphone at the front of the room. This was our crop. It was customary for the hosting store to start the festivities. Ellen had just robbed Dodie of the privilege of greeting the crowd.

  2

  Everyone’s eyes were on Ellen. She’d dressed for the occasion in a bold pink and black tunic top decorated with butterflies outlined in silver sequins. In her jet-black hair, she wore a sparkling butterfly pin. All these shiny surfaces caught the light as she announced, “As all of you know, the most prestigious contest in scrapbooking is the Scrapbook Stars competition held by Saving Memories magazine. Thousands of scrapbookers enter each year.” Ellen paused to give her words full effect. “We are delighted to announce that one of our Memories First Design Team members has been named a Scrapbook Star! Let’s hear it for … Yvonne Gaynor!”

  A cheer erupted from the crowd; Yvonne stood and waved to acknowledge the applause.

  Ellen hadn’t finished. “Yvonne’s winning pages are on the magazine website. She’ll be teaching classes exclusively at my store, Memories First. You’ll want to sign up lickety-split. Space in her classes will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. I am sure that all of you are going to love what she has to share.”

  Ellen paused, turned, and stared directly at me. “Yvonne is a unique talent in an industry full of copycats.”

  My face turned hot with embarrassment. That was rich. Calling me a copycat? What colossal nerve!

  Shake it off, I warned myself. You don’t want these women to know how upset you are!

  “Now, we have lots of yummy food,” said Ellen as she gestured at the serving tables. “Yvonne, why don’t you lead the way to our brunch?”

  I stood there feeling like the uninvited kid who’s resigned to sneaking peeks through a window at a popular girl’s birthday party. We’d organized this whole event — and for what? For Ellen Harmon to take over? For her to call me a copycat and slip in an advertisement for her store? None of us had tried to stop Ellen. How could we? Anything we’d say would make us come off like poor sports.

  Bama, Mert and I stood in a gaggle at the back of the room. We were all kinds of speechless and totally dismayed.

  Fortunately, Dodie knew how to handle this. Our boss strode up to the microphone where she tapped a spoon against a glass and shushed the crowd. “All of us at Time in a Bottle want to add our congratulations. Let’s hear it for Yvonne! Hip-hip-hooray!”

  Mert and I followed her lead, raising our hands high and cheering. Bama hesitated before chiming in, plastering a painful grin on her face.

  Ellen’s expression turned sour as she looked over from her place in the food line. She knew exactly what we were doing. When giving credit, the rule is: The person giving credit has more stature than the person receiving. Time in a Bottle had once again regained the high ground.

  “Please, help yourself to the food.” Dodie smiled as the women all scurried to get in line. “Go ahead and make two lines. There are plenty of utensils. Eat up. I don’t want anyone to go home hungry. Kiki Lowenstein will pass out your supplies and explain our first project while you’re eating.”

  “Nice save,” I muttered to my boss as women streamed past us with plates in hand.

  Following Ellen’s suggestion, Yvonne had taken her place at the head of the line. She would have been a terrific plus-size model. She had gorgeous blonde hair and a classy but fashion forward style in her clothes. Today she wore a huge statement necklace of gold links that contrasted nicely with her simple cobalt blue tunic top. Her skinny jeans were tucked into a pair of adorable short cowboy boots in various shades of blue.

  Her best pals, Nettie Klasser and Rena Rimmel, took their places behind her. Nettie was tall and large-boned with an awkward way about her, and her clothes always looked as if she’d slept in them. Rena wore her hair in various shades of red, colors that changed from month to month. She was the smallest of the three, and dressed nicely, but her choices could best be labeled “forgettable.”

  As Yvonne walked by me to get to her seat, I noticed she’d overloaded her plate with food. She wouldn’t possibly be able to eat all that. Most of it would go to waste.

  Dodie noticed the gluttony, too. She whispered in my ear, “I don’t care what contest she won; I’m glad I fired Yvonne as a customer.”

  Shortly after I had joined Dodie at Time in a Bottle, my boss had told me, “I’ve banned Yvonne from the store. She’s no longer welcome to shop here. That woman costs me money, and she runs off other customers, too. I hope we won’t lose her friends as customers, but I have to draw a line somewhere.”

  I was alone in the store on the day when Yvonne’s friends stopped by to make it clear they didn’t intend to boycott Time in a Bottle.

  “Hey, we know Yvonne’s faults,” said Rena as she signed up for a crop. “We’re her friends, but we aren’t clueless.”

  Nettie agreed. “That’s right. She can be downright mean.”

  I wondered how Yvonne would treat her old pals now that she’d become a celebrity.

  Dodie came up behind me and whispered, “Give them five minutes before you start. This might be a good time to go and make nice to Yvonne.”

  “Gotcha.” Walking over to the Scrapbook Star’s table, I managed a warm smile. “Yvonne, that’s great news about the contest. Congratulations.”

  She barely nodded to me, and she didn’t stop eating. Clearly, she found me an annoyance.

  I was determined to be gracious. “Did you all drive over together?” The women nodded. “How fun. Rena, what’s that I see? Is it the new stapler you can use anywhere on your page? I’ve been meaning to try that.” I lied. I’d been using one for ages, but Rena preened after being acknowledged “Hey, Nettie, good to see you. What are you working on today?”

  Nettie didn’t like to create pages in front of other scrapbookers. She’d participate in the projects I planned, but she liked to do her own original work in private.

  “Today I’m sorting photos.” Nettie removed her white cotton gloves so she could blow her nose. Dedicated hobbyists wear white cotton gloves to protect the surfaces of our photos from oil and dirt on our skin. Nettie sniffled and reached for a Mountain Dew. “Sorry. With all the rain we’ve had, the mold count is unbelievable.”

  “Are you finished, Rena? Let me take that empty plate so you can go back for more food.” I was going to be helpful if it killed me.

  “Me, too,” Nettie said, and she handed me her plate.

  I balanced the dirty dishes and said, “Yvonne?” But Yvonne was still cramming her mouth. She spread a hand over her orange scone to warn me away from her food.

  “No problem. I’ll catch you later,” I said.

  I deposited the two plates in the dirty dish cart – and heard a crash, the sound of glass hittin
g the floor.

  I whirled around.

  Yvonne had knocked over a glass of cola. Her hands moved across the table, searching blindly. Instead of mopping it up with her napkin, she pushed aside her plate. Next, she knocked her eating utensils to the floor.

  What on earth?

  “Help!” yelled Rena, leaning nearer to her friend’s face. “Something’s wrong!”

  I ran to the table where the trio was sitting. Yvonne turned wild eyes on me. A wheezing sound rumbled deep inside her.

  “Call 911!” I yelled to Dodie.

  “Are you choking?” I asked Yvonne.

  “Slap her back,” said Nettie. Before I could do that, Nettie gave her pal a hearty blow to the midsection.

  Yvonne thumped the table with her fists. She struggled to say, “Urs! Urs!”

  Nettie offered her friend a glass of water. Yvonne knocked from her hand. The liquid flew all over us and the floor.

  “Here—” Rena handed her friend the purse, and Yvonne dumped all contents of her handbag onto the table. Her fingers raced through the mess, discarding this and that. Tissues, lipstick, wallet, cell phone, pencil, notebook, checkbook all went flying. Time seemed to slow down.

  Yvonne seized a yellow box. Her skin was a dusky shade; her lips were trembling. She unscrewed a cap. A tube fell apart in her hands, exposing a syringe. Holding the implement like a hammer, she swung her arm wide and jammed the needle through her slacks into her leg. Her eyes were wide with fright.

  Her body bucked in the chair. She beat her fists against her thighs. The syringe dropped from her hand and rolled across the floor as Yvonne slumped to one side. She slid toward the floor. Her friends and I grabbed at her, trying to soften her impact. As we held on to her, Yvonne wheezed, bucked, and wheezed some more. I tried to keep her head up in the hopes it would help her breathe. She was heavy, and our grip wasn’t secure, so we laid her out on the tile. Someone handed us a sweater, I rolled it up and slipped it under Yvonne’s head. Her lips had turned blue. I was afraid to look away in case I could help and terrified to keep watching because I knew I couldn’t.

  It seemed as though it took forever for the Emergency Medical Service crew to arrive, but it must have been only minutes.

  The medics pushed me aside, stepping forward to work on Yvonne, asking questions, examining the silver Medical Alert bracelet on her wrist, checking her vitals, and moving in a synchronized blur.

  I backed away from the furious activity, shaking my head in horror.

  Mert took me by the arm. “This don’t look good.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’ve got that right.”

  3

  “What on earth happened at your crop?” asked Sheila Lowenstein, the mother of my late husband, George.

  Dressed in tailored pants and a white sleeveless silk blouse, my mother-in-law knelt on a foam pad in the middle of her lawn, a box of moth balls within easy reach and a trowel in her hand. “I’m sick of these moles making a mess of my yard.”

  My daughter was nowhere in sight. Anya probably didn’t appreciate her grandmother’s efforts to scare off the intruders taking over her pristine lawn. My kid was a budding animal rights activist. She was rooting for the critters.

  “It’s been all over the news,” Sheila continued. “There couldn’t possibly have been two large scrapbook meetings in a neighborhood adjacent to the Botanical Garden.”

  On my drive to Sheila’s house, I’d punched one button after another, searching for a station that wasn’t buzzing with reports of a woman dying at a scrapbook event. I finally gave up and turned off the car radio rather than listen to more speculation about Yvonne Gaynor.

  “Our guest went into allergic shock. Anaphylaxis. It happened so quickly.” I watched Sheila jabbing her trowel into a clump of grass. “Can I help?”

  My mother-in-law bashed the green leaves with her tool. “Drat, drat, and double drat. I hate these moles. Mr. Sanchez would know what to do, but he’s in Mexico for his granddaughter’s quinceañera.”

  Sounded like Mr. Sanchez had plotted a great escape. I wasn’t at all surprised. Sheila could be notoriously hard to please. I retrieved a screwdriver from my car, used a stack of old newspapers headed for recycling as a kneeling pad, and knelt down beside her. My tool formed a hole in the soil. I shoved mothballs down the dirt tube. Finally, I pressed the parted grass together to lock in the aromatic critter-chaser.

  “That’s right. Mothballs every foot or so ought to stink these nasty varmints out of house and home.” Sheila paused to wipe her brow with an embroidered linen handkerchief. “That woman didn’t have one of those pens with her? The kind where you give yourself a shot? If she didn’t, she was a fool.”

  “She did, but it was empty.” I turned my face to hide any wry twist of my mouth. Good old Sheila. She certainly didn’t bother to censor herself or think twice about sounding cruel. Despite the color all around us—or perhaps to counterbalance it—Sheila’s world was black and white. Fortunately, these days I was on her good side. I’d been on the other end of her sliding scale, and believe me, it wasn’t much fun.

  “How stupid! People with severe allergies generally know what to avoid. For an anaphylactic reaction to occur, you must have been exposed in the past to the substance that causes the reaction, the antigen. The process is called sensitization.”

  I didn’t know she was so knowledgeable about severe allergic reactions. In many ways, Sheila and I were just getting acquainted with each other even though I’d been married to her only child, George, for nearly thirteen years before he died. “Right. That’s what the medic said. Yvonne carried a kit with a pre-measured dose of epinephrine, to rapidly reverse the most serious symptoms. She reached for it while she was flailing around. Managed to grab the Epi-Pen and inject herself, too, but it was empty. By the time help arrived, it was too late.”

  Sheila shook her head and waved away any compassion lingering in the air. “She was asking for it. What sort of dope would run around with an empty Epi-Pen kit?”

  “Beats me.” I winced. “All I can say is her death sure put a damper on our special event. It was awful. Afterward, we were questioned by the police—”

  “The police!” Sheila punctuated her statement with a stomp, mashing down the hillock the moles had built.

  “It’s procedure when there’s an unexpected death outside of a hospital. The officers were pretty nice about the whole thing, really. You know, the cops weren’t much of a problem. The real crisis came as the scrapbookers realized their day had been ruined. Ellen Harmon made sure to complain long and loud. Not only had she lost her ‘star’ scrapbooker, but to hear her tell it, we were to blame for Yvonne’s death.”

  Again, Sheila waved away the problem. “That’s ridiculous. How could you be responsible for a woman dying unexpectedly? Honestly, some people don’t have the brains God gave a flea.” She paused to study me. “You can’t concern yourself about this. For goodness sake, even if one troublemaker whines about this inconvenience. How could it possibly reflect poorly on you? Or on Dodie Goldfader?”

  Inconvenience? I bit my lower lip hard rather than burst into incredulous laughter. A person going into spasms as she fought for oxygen was much more than inconvenient.

  “Kiki?” Sheila demanded an answer. “How could this reflect poorly on you?”

  “It shouldn’t. You are right; we weren’t to blame. It’s just that the whole thing happened on our watch, at our event. It’s kind of like shooting the messenger. The fact that these potential new customers will link our name with Yvonne’s death is more than just unfortunate. It’s exactly the opposite of what we’d planned to have happen. We wanted them to think of Time in a Bottle and remember what a great experience they’d had. I worry that our name will conjure up horrible images.”

  Sheila’s turn to sigh. “People can be so petty.”

  Oh golly. Coming from her, that was almost too much to take. Given her past behavior, Sheila was a great one to talk. Other people had prayer lis
ts; Sheila had a grudge list.

  But we were getting along now, I reminded myself. Now was all we had, wasn’t it? Like Mert said, “This is a present.” Being able to chat with Sheila was a new source of pleasure in my life, even if we didn’t agree, and even if she didn’t see herself the way I saw her, I was happy we were being cordial. While I often didn’t like what she said, I found her thought-provoking and interesting. Each time we conversed, I walked away a little smarter, a bit more educated, and much more worldly.

  Still, I couldn’t let her remark go unchallenged. “I know what you mean about their attitude being petty, but Sheila, if you’d have seen it, it was really upsetting. I guess when we’re helpless, we want to blame someone. In this case, Dodie, Bama, Mert and I were in charge.”

  I couldn’t even describe to Sheila the pandemonium that took place as the EMTs loaded Yvonne onto a stretcher and the police arrived. The technicians were working valiantly to bring her back, but the light faded from her eyes as if on a dimmer switch. A small, calm voice inside me knew that she was gone. Even as I prayed for a miracle on the way to the hospital, I didn’t hold out much hope.

  The police officers took cursory statements from all of us.

  “For heaven’s sake,” fumed Sheila. “We’re not talking about murder, after all.”

  “Of course not. But the cops had to respond to the 911 call and whenever someone dies unexpectedly, they have to poke around a bit.”

  Sheila considered this. “What do they think caused her reaction?”

  “Maybe a bee or bug stung her and she didn’t notice. Who knows? Until the authorities talk to her doctor, they can’t generate an accurate list of possibilities. Or totally rule out foul play. You know they say in forensics, better to have and not need than to need and not have. They videotaped the room, asked a few questions, took names, collected samples of the food, and so on.”