Siri Mitchell

by Unrivaled

  “But, Evelyn!”

  “And when you’ve figured it out, then we can talk.”

  31

  “I can’t do it anymore, Lucy. It doesn’t seem right.” Sam was pacing on the back porch Friday evening as I stood watching, clasping my arms around my chest to keep warm. The sun was lingering in the darkening sky as though dreading the plunge into the cold, dark oblivion beyond the horizon.

  I peered at him through the gloom. “It’s not as if we’re the first to ever do it. What’s the harm?”

  “The harm is, what if somebody sees me? And the other harm is, I have actual work to do. Down at the confectionery! My father’s counting on me.”

  And so was mine! . . . Even if he didn’t quite know it. “Think of it as a . . . a chance for more people to try Fancy Crunch. The reason it hasn’t been selling is that people have forgotten they can buy it. We don’t have the money to put up new posters, and Standard has been taking all of our business.”

  He paused and sent me a dubious look.

  “Really, Sam. You’re doing everyone in St. Louis a favor. You’re giving them the chance to remember how much they like Fancy Crunch.” And if everything went like I planned, then sales would go up and we’d have enough money to stay in business . . . though I’d still have to marry Mr. Arthur. I put that thought aside for the moment. I’d been doing quite a bit of putting that thought aside recently.

  “I guess . . .”

  “It’s not like you’re taking their candy from the shelves. You’re just putting ours in front of theirs. You’re rearranging things.”

  “I suppose . . .”

  “You know they’d do the same if they’d thought of it.” In fact, they probably already had. I wouldn’t put it past that Charlie Clarke! “Just one more day. Please?”

  His face was tense with indecision but finally he nodded, patted his hat down around his ears, and headed toward the porch’s screen door.

  “Can’t you stay? I was thinking of making some fudge. I know how much you like it.”

  “Can’t. I have plans.”

  Plans that were better than fudge? He’d never turned down fudge before. What was wrong with him?

  It was hard to sleep that night. It wasn’t because I’d eaten too much fudge and it definitely wasn’t because I was feeling guilty. The Clarkes deserved whatever they got. It’s just that hiding their taffy behind our Fancy Crunch was only a temporary solution. What City Confectionery needed was a permanent way to make more money.

  We could sell more candy. That would bring in more money.

  We could spend less to make the candy. That would bring in more money too.

  Or . . . we could charge more for the candy. But we’d already tried that and it had just caused more people to buy Royal Taffy.

  There had to be a way! I had to think harder. I had to think smarter. But first I had to suffer through Christmas Eve. And Christmas Day.

  Christmas Eve wasn’t too terrible. I had to share the church with Charlie Clarke, but the Clarkes always sat behind us, so most of the time I was able to pretend he wasn’t there. When I walked past their pew after service ended, I looked the other direction. Mother wanted to hurry home to make sure we could have supper while Father was still awake, so we didn’t even linger in the foyer.

  The maid delivered the food upstairs on Chinese lacquer trays so we could all eat together, but Father quit halfway through. He said all the chewing tired him.

  Mother nodded toward the bed, and I went to cut the rest of his meat up for him, but he waved it away, so I put the tray aside. We finished soon after, Mother and I, but before leaving, I gave him the last of my Mozartkugels as a present. His eyes gleamed, and for a moment it seemed like old times. But he only set it on the nightstand before lying back on his pillow and saying good-night.

  Father had always been the chief enthusiast of holidays, so without him, Christmas Eve was simply another frigid winter’s night. And Christmas morning was just another case of the sun rising, tardy and pale, to survey a bleak winter morning.

  I gave Mother the tablecloth I bought her in Brussels, and she gave me a set of monogrammed napkins. Large A’s had been embroidered upon them in satin stitch with shiny white silk thread. I put them in my hope chest, laying them on top of the newspaper-wrapped pillow tops, lace doilies, linens, and my rapidly dwindling collection of uneaten candy. As I closed the lid I thought about the dreams and wishes I had placed inside that chest over the years. How simple they now seemed. How happy I had once imagined I would be. But life hadn’t turned out the way I’d expected.

  I hadn’t planned on Mr. Arthur, and I hadn’t known there would be a Charlie Clarke.

  It felt as if I’d wasted all my dreams. It seemed as if I ought to have hoped for other things. But I didn’t know what they were. And, for better or worse, it was too late now.

  32

  My father did nothing by halves. Even Christmas was celebrated with a lot of fuss. There was a big scramble by the staff the week before to get everything decorated, along with a continual mouthwatering mixture of smells drifting out from the kitchen. It all led up to a big dinner on Christmas Day, after church. We probably could have fed the whole orphanage downtown with all the food that was set in front of us.

  My father gave Augusta a sparkling necklace and matching earrings. She gave him a cigar cutter decorated with diamonds. And then my father handed me a large envelope.

  “Open it, open it!” I could hear echoes of my sisters in my father’s impatience and excitement.

  I drew out a sheaf of papers, turning them over so I could read them.

  But my father couldn’t wait any longer. “It’s a deed!”

  “A deed.” What was a deed?

  “So you can build a house.”

  “A . . . what?”

  “A house! I bought you a lot across the street.”

  “A lot . . .” A lot of what?

  “I set up a meeting with our architect on Tuesday afternoon. You can start building just as soon as you want.”

  “You bought me . . . you want me to build a house? Right here? Next to you?”

  “Can’t live with us forever. I doubt you’d even want to.” He sat back in his chair, his smile as large as any I’d ever seen. “So what do you think?”

  I didn’t know what I thought. I didn’t know what to say. It was hard to hate a man who wasn’t doing anything hateful. Who wasn’t doing anything at all but trying to make up for the past. Trying to make me happy. I could feel my anger slipping away.

  And the problem was, I didn’t know what to do without it.

  If my father celebrated with enthusiasm, he also worked with enthusiasm. The day after Christmas, he went right back to the factory. And me along with him; I’d recently been given an office down at the end of the top floor. I started the morning by reviewing the sales figures for the first two weeks of the month, but had hardly finished reading the report when Mr. Mundt summoned me to my father’s office.

  My father waved me in. “I’ve had word from our customers that their stock has disappeared. And though I would like to believe it’s due entirely to strong Christmas sales, I’m being told their receipts don’t match their inventory.”

  “Their stock has disappeared? You mean . . . their candy?”

  “Yes. From the shelves.” He was staring at me as if I understood what he was talking about, but I didn’t.

  “Shelves? You mean the ones in the stores?”

  “The very ones.”

  Candy disappearing from shelves? “That’s impossible.”

  “Possible or not, it’s happening. And I want you to put a stop to it.”

  If someone was stealing, it wasn’t our fault, was it? Wouldn’t that be the stores’ responsibility? I figured someone was swiping the candy as it was delivered and then claiming they’d never seen it. Happened all the time in Chicago. One of the clerks was probably smuggling it out of the store and then reselling it to someone and pocketing all the mo
ney. Could be these St. Louis people weren’t as wise to goings-on as folks up in Chicago.

  I started out at Vandervoort’s, asking to see the manager.

  He appeared, tall and spiffy, though he kept having to push his glasses back up his nose. I introduced myself and got directly to the point. “I wanted to speak to you about the Royal Taffy disappearing from your shelves.”

  Blinking rapidly, he pulled his chin in toward his neck as if he weren’t quite sure what to think of me. “They haven’t been disappearing from the shelves.”

  Exactly as I’d thought.

  He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I assume you’ve fixed the problem, then?”

  It was my turn to blink. “I only just started investigating. It’s been happening all over the city, but your store is the first I’ve visited.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you to come.” He was looking at me as if I should say something.

  “Haven’t you done any investigating yourself?” It wasn’t my fault they’d employed a thief.

  “I hardly think that’s my place!”

  “If Royal Taffy has been disappearing, I’d think you’d want to find out why.”

  “I wouldn’t call it disappearing, but I already know why.”

  “You do?”

  “Don’t you?” Now he was glaring at me.

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “Suspicions! I hope you have more than suspicions. Just how long am I supposed to wait?”

  I didn’t quite understand. “Wait for . . . for what?”

  “For you to take the extra taffy off our hands.”

  “Extra? But . . . I thought taffy was being stolen from your stock room, and if that’s the case—”

  “No one stole any.”

  Nothing he was saying made any sense. “But if no one’s stolen any and it’s disappeared from your shelves, then . . . what’s going on?”

  “That’s what I want to know!”

  I felt my brow crumple as I tried to figure out what he was saying. “I don’t—I can’t—”

  “Someone pushed all the Royal Taffy to the back of our shelves and then put packages of Fancy Crunch up in their place.”

  “They . . . what?”

  “Which made us think that we’d sold out of it. So we placed another order. And then we discovered the taffy at the back of the shelves and now we have twice as much taffy as we can possibly sell.” He said it as if it were all my fault.

  “Now, wait just a minute! Are you accusing us of—”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m simply saying that the only person who profits from us buying twice as much taffy as normal is you.”

  “But—!”

  “I don’t mind telling you that I’m grieved, Mr. Clarke. I’m a long-standing customer of your father’s, and this is the way I’m treated?”

  “We don’t—we haven’t—it wasn’t us!”

  The same story played out all across the city.

  The week before, someone had spent a lot of time pushing Royal Taffy to the backs of store shelves and placing Fancy Crunch in front of it.

  Most of the stock clerks just assumed they’d sold out of taffy and had placed orders for more. And now they were all raising Cain about it.

  As soon as I returned to the factory, I went to have a talk with Mr. Gillespie.

  “They’re saying what?” His eyes had gone wide, and he was swallowing as if he had something stuck in his throat.

  “They’re all saying they double ordered and that it’s our fault.”

  “But why?”

  I shrugged. “Because who else profits, besides us, if they buy more than they need?”

  “Uh . . . ?” He was looking around the factory as if desperately searching for someone else to blame.

  “Do we do things like that?”

  “No!”

  I hadn’t thought so—I had hoped not—but it did me good to hear him say it all the same. “So you didn’t send a man out to hide our taffy.”

  He threw up his hands. “We don’t do things like that! For goodness’ sake! I’ll tell you what it sounds like: It sounds like Mr. Kendall, the way he used to spread rumors about Mr. Clarke and such. But I promise you: We’ve never done anything like that.”

  Maybe we hadn’t, but someone else had.

  Who would benefit the most from the disappearance of Royal Taffy? I didn’t have to think very hard to come up with an answer.

  It was easy to know where to find Lucy. Her activities were published in the newspaper. Queen of Love and Beauty to open this event and Queen of Love and Beauty to preside over this gathering or that banquet. And so when I found out she was going to be at the new zoological club’s meeting the next day, I made sure I was there. And when she glared at me, I smiled right back.

  “I didn’t know you had an interest in zoology, Mr. Clarke.”

  “I have a keen interest in females, Miss Kendall. And they all seem to adore animals.” I shrugged. “So I figured this was as good a place as any to meet some.”

  Her eyes seemed to spit fire.

  “You know, a funny thing happened this week. All the Royal Taffy in the city disappeared.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes. And when I went to investigate, guess what I discovered?”

  That pretty mouth of hers clamped right up. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I think you might.”

  “Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Clarke?”

  “No. I’m calling you a cheat.”

  Her cheeks burned red.

  “Maybe not you, exactly, but that man you always seem to be with. ‘Your Sam’ I believe you once called him. I’m trying to decide whether or not to ask the police to make out an arrest warrant.” I wasn’t. Not really. I’d spent enough time already at police stations.

  She went pale. “He didn’t! I mean—”

  “The good news is that all those stores thought they’d sold out of Royal Taffy, so they all re-ordered. Our sales in St. Louis doubled last week.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You just have to ruin everything, don’t you?”

  “I ruin everything? I really don’t think that’s fair!”

  “Oh? And was it fair to cover up all our advertising in the city? And then to take over all the streetcars too?”

  She had me there. But I hadn’t known her back then. “Business is no place for a lady.”

  “And apparently it’s no place for a gentleman either.”

  Somewhere deep inside, her arrow hit its mark. “You should stop playing with candy and start working on growing up. Alfred Arthur wouldn’t marry you if he knew you were just a common criminal.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  She lifted her chin, though her gaze had dropped to the floor. “I should go.”

  “Listen. You’re involving yourself in things you shouldn’t. You don’t know what you’re doing. If you keep on like this, someone’s going to get hurt.”

  She lifted her foot and brought her sharp-heeled shoe down on my instep. “I agree. And it’s not going to be me!”

  I managed not to react until she passed me and walked out the door. And then I sat down, cradling my foot in my hands.

  33

  The day after the zoological club meeting, I helped deliver food to the city’s orphanage on behalf of the butchers’ association. And afterward, I stopped in at Winnie’s. It seemed like the polite thing to do, since she’d come to call on me on Tuesday afternoon. And besides, there was no one else to talk to about Charlie Clarke. Sam was avoiding me, Mother wouldn’t understand, and how could I even mention to Father that I had talked to a Clarke?

  There was no one else visiting, but when I took a seat on her sofa, far away from her parakeet, she sat down right next to me, nattering on about the weather and the Christmas holiday and all the other pleasantries that one expects to hear on at-home days.

  But I wasn’t feeling very plea
sant. “I can’t stand that Charlie Clarke!”

  She handed me a cup of tea. “Why not? I always thought him very agreeable . . . although I have to say that he doesn’t seem to listen very well.”

  Listen well? He didn’t do anything well! He was always messing everything up. “He’s very disagreeable, Winnie. He’s the height of—of—disagreeableness! He even had the nerve to call me a common criminal!”

  “Why?” She took the lid off the sugar bowl and held it out to me.

  I dumped two spoonfuls into my cup and then chased the sugar around with a teaspoon. “Because . . . because he’s a Clarke, that’s why!”

  She blinked. “The Clarkes aren’t common criminals.”

  “They ought to be! I arranged for Fancy Crunch to be reshelved in front of Royal Taffy in some of the stores in the city . . .” In most of the stores in the city. “And he accused me of—of—that.”

  “It sounds like . . . maybe you are a common criminal.”

  “Are you taking his side in this?”

  “I’m not taking anyone’s side.” She passed me a plate of ginger snaps.

  I took one and bit down on it. Hard.

  “I’m just saying that it seems like he might be right. About this one thing. And maybe not about anything else. Although he could be. Maybe.” She shrugged. “It’s possible. He seems nice.”

  “He is not nice!”

  “He is to me.”

  Then she was the only one. “He’s pretending. Trying to make a good impression in order to hide his true self from everyone. Besides, he started it.”

  “He reshelved Royal Taffy to hide Fancy Crunch?”

  “No. But he got that picture in the newspaper with Baby Jesus holding a Royal Taffy.”

  “That was so sweet.” She clasped a hand to her bosom. “That chubby little fist holding on to the—”

  I didn’t need to be reminded. “And before that, he covered up all of our advertising posters in the city and—”