by S. E. Rose
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Garrett
Four thirty. I see the numbers on my phone but I’m still processing their meaning. I had my friend, Roger, check on our stuff last night before he closed up at the high school. He’s their maintenance guy, so he’ll be there now opening it all back up for us.
I shower and throw on one of the volunteer t-shirts we ordered before heading over to the school. I’m there by five. Roger and two of his staff are pulling out tables and setting up tents.
“Thanks for getting a head start,” I say to them as I set a coffee down at the registration table. I decide to keep the money box in my car until closer to registration time. We have a tablet to do online transactions, but we are also accepting cash registration payments, too.
“Sure. No problem. A couple of the high school kids showed up early, so I have them working on getting the finish line set up. The police department sent over a few officers and the town crew has the cones out to block off the roads. I think we are pretty good for now.”
I busy myself with setting up the registration table and getting out t-shirts. At some point, the local farm comes and starts setting out their leftover pumpkins for the kids and also some squashes. The coffee shop is next and just in time for my refill. I don’t notice that Di is here until she’s practically standing next to me.
“Do we have everything we need for the registration table?” she asks as though nothing weird has been going on between us. I glance over at her. There are bags under her eyes. I wonder if she’s been sleeping.
“Yes. Everything is set. I just tried out the tablet and the Wi-Fi is working great out here.”
“Good. I got a handful of volunteers to set up the water tables at the halfway marker. And our line judges for the finish line are set as well.
“We really lucked out with the weather and all our great volunteer leaders,” Di says.
“Yes. We did. Thanks for meeting with them this week to go over everything,” I say to her, referring to a meeting I missed on Tuesday because the boys had their final regional game. We lost but came in second in the county.
“Sure. No problem.”
A volunteer comes up to ask a question and then both of us get sucked into tasks. Being near her becomes less awkward, the more people arrive and surround us. I hardly have time to think about it as we scramble to get tables set up and communicate with various volunteers.
And then people start arriving. We don’t speak again until about halfway through the registration time period.
“How’s it looking?” Di asks nervously, eyeing the money box.
“Well, we’ve gotten about one hundred more people. Most are families, so they get the family rate. I think we may get close to five thousand, but I’m not sure we’ll reach the goal.”
“Oh,” she says, her eyes dropping in disappointment.
“Hey, even if we get forty-seven hundred, that’s still great.”
She shrugs. “I know. I was just really hoping we’d meet our goal.”
I bump her shoulder with mine, and she looks back up at me. It literally takes every ounce of my self-control not to kiss her. “We did good.”
She gives me a small smile. “I know,” she whispers. We turn to the next registrant walking up when her eyes widen and I follow her gaze.
“Holy fucking shit,” she murmurs. “Kent said he was bringing some friends, but, uh…”
Kent Moore is walking over with at least a dozen members of his former baseball team, including Bishop Henson and Ward Snare. And everyone, I mean everyone, is going crazy. Little kids are flocking over to them, asking for autographs and pictures.
They finally make their way to our table.
“Sorry for the late notice, but we weren’t sure who could be here. I think there are ten of us who haven’t registered yet,” Kent says with a giant grin.
Di laughs. “I don’t know if I want to punch you or hug you?”
Kent laughs. “What? Too much celebrity for you?”
She groans as she starts registering them. Suddenly, there’s a wave of people showing up to register with twenty minutes to spare.
“What’s going on?” I whisper to Di.
She shrugs. “I have no idea, but I’ll take it.”
I start scanning credit cards, but the device is suddenly being slow.
“Fudge,” I groan.
“What’s wrong?” Di asks.
“Can we start asking for cash? The tablet isn’t working.”
“Oh, uh, sure.”
We continue on for twenty more minutes. At some point, Di leaves me to go get the 1k started. I hear a foghorn and lift my head to watch my students start the race with their families. I grin as a few kids wave at me. Those little buggers drive me nuts, but they are pretty cool sometimes.
Lanie and Tabby join Ashton and Di’s parents for the 1k, and they all wave at me as well. I’m actually a little surprised that her whole family is talking to me. I wonder if they know we aren’t dating right now.
As I hurry to get the last few people registered, I push aside my thoughts and get down to business. When the last person is registered, I shut down the booth and start putting things away. I grab the money box to put it away just as the first of the 1k kids start to arrive back at the finish line.
I hold it under my arm as I give some students high fives. I’m about to head to my car to put away the money until I can get to the bank, when one of my students trips and falls just shy of the finish line.
I run over and place the box down next to me as I check him over. A few other adults surround us to make sure he’s OK.
“You OK, Ian?”
He sniffles and looks down at the scrape on his knee.
“Uh-huh.”
His mom comes up carrying his little brother.
“Oh dear, what happened?” she asks, bending down.
“I tripped,” he says. I can see his eyes start to get teary.
“Let’s get you up and over the finish line,” I say to him. I help him up, and we walk the last ten feet. I let him go and give him a high five before walking over to grab the money box and continue to my car.
I start to hand out pumpkins to the kids as they finish the race. I can’t wait to count the money when the 5k ends, because whatever happened earlier, might have helped us to meet our fundraising goal.
Di
“Well, this is fucking awkward,” I mutter to Bailey who just walked over to me.
“Did you talk to him?” she asks as we start cleaning up the tables at the halfway point.
“Yeah. I mean, it was fine, just weird.”
Bailey turns to me, pausing with a trash bag full of paper cups in her hands. “Di, I still don’t get it. I mean, you two were good together. It could have worked.”
I shake my head. “No, it couldn’t. He doesn’t do romance. I can’t change him. And he can’t change me. I’d just be setting myself up for another failed relationship. I think that’s been my problem all along. I just keep dating guys that I can’t ever be truly compatible with and yet I would keep trying to change them into the men I read about in stories. It’s irrational. I know that, but I want the epic romance story. I want the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ moment.”
Bailey holds up a hand. “Dude, Romeo and Juliet were hormonal teenagers who killed themselves. You don’t fucking want that.”
I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean, beotch. I want a man who will make a grand gesture and sweep me off my feet.”
“Fuck, I’ll take a guy who knows where my G-spot and clit are,” Bailey mutters.
I shake my head and give her a pointed look. “I want more than sex, Bai. I want it all. I want someone who will go to book signings with me and hold my books. I want someone who will curl up and watch a cheesy romantic comedy on a rainy day. I want someone who will make me breakfast in bed for no reason other than he wants to do it.”
“OK, so, you want Garrett.”
I throw an empty paper cup at he
r and groan again. “Stop. It’s not happening.”
“Oh, it’s happening. You just need a good shove toward your epiphany moment.”
I roll my eyes. “Whatever. Let’s get this done, so we can get back over to the high school for the awards ceremony.”
We get the trash bags packed up in the back of Bailey’s car along with the two folding tables. Thank God she has a giant SUV.
I pull my phone out of my pocket after feeling vibrations for the last minute. I see three missed calls from Garrett. One from Caris and one from Chrissy.
Garrett: Where are you? Money is missing!
Garrett: Please call me. I know things are weird with us right now, but please call me!!
Garrett: I’m about to call Bailey.
As if on cue, my phone rings before I can finish reading the text messages. It’s Garrett again.
“What’s going on?” I ask as Bailey starts driving us back to the high school.
“I put the money box in my car. I just went to get it and count it, so we could announce how much we raised. And the money is almost all gone. Based on my last count, I swear it was going to be close to a thousand dollars in cash, and now we have a hundred and twenty.”
“What!” I cry out as Bailey glances over at me.
“Yeah, I’m freaking out. I don’t know what to do. If we had at least one thousand in there, then we would be at five thousand five hundred and eighty dollars including the credit card registrations. Which is amazing, but now we are at like four thousand nine hundred and twenty dollars.”
“Damn it! Any chance it fell out of the box?” I ask, biting my lip from anxiety.
“No, I pulled everything out of the car. Fuck! I should have counted it at the end of registration and had Caris run it to the bank, but things got busy and I figured it was safely hidden in my car.”
“OK, calm down. Oh, just hold on, Bailey and I are pulling into the parking lot now.” I disconnect.
“What the hell is happening?” Bailey asks.
“Someone stole over a thousand dollars from the money box,” I say to her.
“Holy fucksauce! That’s not good.”
“No shit. What are we going to do?” My lip quivers and I try to pull myself together.
“Well, how close are you without the money?” she asks.
“Seventy dollars short of the goal,” I say.
She opens her purse and hands me eighty. “There. Now you can announce you made your goal. We can keep the stolen money on the down-low as we figure out what happened. We’ll need to get the police involved as soon as the ceremony is over.”
I nod. “Thanks, Bailey.”
“Of course!”
I run up to Garrett after Bailey parks. “Bailey gave me eighty bucks. So, let’s just announce we met our goal and we can chat with the police as soon as we give out the ribbons to the top three runners from both events.”
“OK. Fuck, I’m so sorry. I feel like this is all my fault.”
I touch his arm, and it takes all my self-control to not hug him because I’m a hugger and regardless of what has gone on between us, it’s my natural instinct to hug the man. “It’s not your fault. We’ll figure it out, OK?”
He nods and sighs. “Let’s go. We need to wrap this event up.”
I give him a nod, and we go to the clearing by the finish line to hand out the ribbons to the winners and announce that we met our goal, now only if we could say we exceeded it by a thousand-plus dollars.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Garrett
As soon as the awards are presented, Di and I beeline for the police chief, a man named Tucker Beckley.
“Tucker,” I say to him as he’s about to get in his police car.
He turns around. “What’s up?”
Di and I look at each other and then him.
His eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”
“Most of the money we collected today is missing,” I announce.
“Have you checked everywhere it may have been today? And have you talked to the other volunteers and people that had proximity to it?” he asks.
I nod. “No one saw anything unusual. The only time it wasn’t physically in my hand or in my direct line of sight was when I was helping a student at the finish line who fell.”
“Hold on,” Tucker says as he reaches into his car and grabs the mic of his police radio. “Sally, hey, I need a ten forty-three on any suspicious activity that was reported this morning.”
“Copy that, Chief,” a woman, who I presume is Sally, says.
A minute later she comes back on. “A patron at the coffee shop heard some strange noises in the bathroom this morning. That was resolved by Officer Fitzpatrick. Officer Nickles reported to the scene of a vandalized car on Market Street. That turned out to be the owner’s son’s fault. Officer Franks saw a kid running down Tulip Drive without any guardian. Officer Franks questioned the kid. He lives there and was coming home from the race. That’s it, Chief.”
“Thanks, Sally. Ten four.”
Tucker turns to us. “OK. Well, that wasn’t helpful. Let me go grab Charlie and Stan and see if either of them has seen anything. Hang out here, I’ll be right back.” He walks away from us, speaking quietly into a receiver on his uniform.
“Damn it,” I mutter as I kick a non-existent pebble.
I feel Di’s hand on my arm, and I freeze as I look down at her.
“It’s going to be alright. Far worse things have happened,” she says. “Now, I need to go let Caris and Chrissy know, OK?”
I nod. “Yeah, I’ll wait here for Tucker.”
I watch as Di meanders over to Caris and Chrissy and speaks with them. A minute later, they are all heading back to me as is Tucker.
“Well, no one has seen anything suspicious around here. Do you all want to file a theft report?” he asks us.
“What does that mean exactly?” Caris asks.
“Well, it means that when we find the person, they are going to get arrested for theft and it might also be something you can claim under insurance, although I don’t know how it works with the school’s insurance,” Tucker explains.
“Do we have to decide right now?” she asks.
“No, not right now, but I wouldn’t want you to wait on it,” he says. “Why?”
“If it’s a student, I want to give them a chance to do the right thing, that’s all.”
I raise an eyebrow at her.
“Come on, you know we have a few kids that are going through some things, and between our kids and the middle and high school kids that were here, well, I just want to give them a chance to fix their mistake.”
“OK, Caris. If it doesn’t turn up soon and you want to file a report, you know where to find me,” he says as he heads back to his car.
“Caris,” I start.
She holds up her hand. “Garrett, it’s not your fault. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
I nod.
“OK, well, I think everything is wrapped up now. We can present the check to the charity at our winter awards ceremony in a few weeks. That’ll give us time to sort this out.” She says it as though solving a theft of one thousand dollars is no big deal. But the fact that we had a few hundred people between the two races doesn’t make me warm and fuzzy about finding the thief.
I turn to head home and I see Chrissy head to her car with Di in tow. I sigh as I was hoping to walk at least the next block with her, maybe really talk with her. My mind is a jumble of things as I walk home. Diana. The money. My house renovation project I need to finish.
By the time I get home, I’ve decided to give Di till after Thanksgiving before I talk with her. The next two weeks are going to be crazy with the fall play and chorus performance, teacher-parent conferences, and the end-of-quarter grades due. I decide to keep sending her gifts and giving her space. I just hope I don’t blow this.
Di
“Wow, a thousand dollars?” Kent asks as we hover around the kitchen island at our parents’ ho
me. He’s just told me that the team had posted a bunch of social media about the event which caused the last-minute storm of registrants. Sometimes I really do love that guy.
“Yep.” I sigh and pick up a carrot to eat.
“What’s that, dear?” Gran Tilly asks.
I explain the story for the thousandth time since I arrived over here tonight. I’m tired from the long day, and I sort of want to go home.
“That’s awful, but I’m sure you’ll find it. Things like that tend not to stay well-hidden in places like Banneker, my dear.”
“I hope you’re right, Gran,” I say.
I go to grab a drink from the cooler and, as I head back inside, I hear Kent yelling at our family to settle down. Today, other than my parents’ next-door neighbors who are practically family, it is just our immediate family, which is a strange and unusual circumstance for a Saturday.
“Hey, guys, Tabby and I have an announcement,” he yells.
I freeze and stare at my little brother who now towers over me.
He pulls Tabby into his side. “Tabby and I are going to have a baby!”
The room bursts with “congratulations” and tears from my mom and clapping and hugs. I wait till everyone has given their hugs, and I walk up and hug both Kent and Tabby.
“Congrats, guys! Tabby, you’ll make a wonderful mother and that will make up for Kent,” I say with as straight a face as I can muster.
Tabby starts laughing. “Thank you, Di.”
Kent play punches my arm.
I pretend to rub it.
“You’re a jackass, but I love you,” he mutters. I lean up like I’m going to kiss his cheek, but instead, I lick it and run away. Yeah, it’s gross. Yeah, it’s immature. But of all my siblings, I love messing with Kent the most, always have.
“Oh, hell no!” he yells as he runs after me. I only make it into the family room before I’m lifted off the ground and tossed onto a sofa.