Panic Button
Page 1
More praise for
Button Holed
“Kylie Logan’s Button Holed is absolutely terrific! I love it, and can’t wait for the next installment in the series.”
—Diane Mott Davidson,
New York Times bestselling author
“This is the opening act of an engaging amateur-sleuth mystery series, and if this book is any indication, readers have a special and original new series to enjoy. The protagonist is independent and resolute…She enlists a quirky crew to assist her on her quest. Kylie Logan overcomes the subgenre flaw of why the heroine must investigate with an entertaining plot and a strong cast led by a woman who refuses to be Button Holed.”
—The Mystery Gazette
“[A] unique and fun adventure…Fast-paced…A very different and very fun cozy series.”
—AnnArbor.com
“Lots of action and humor thrown together. First-rate writing and plotting.”
—Once Upon a Romance
“This mystery was fun to read while still educating me about buttons. I also enjoyed Josie’s character—she’s fun, funny, and sharp…It was also nice to see someone embrace their ‘button nerd’ side.”
—Fresh Fiction
“I loved it. The writing is superb…The characters were interesting, the pace was fast, and there were plenty of clues planted.”
—The Mystery Bookshelf
“That’s right, buttons. Who would have thought?…[Button Holed] was a very enjoyable mystery…[Josie is] a very entertaining narrator…And the plot unfolds in expert fashion…I know I’ll never look at a button the same way again.”
—CA Reviews
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Kylie Logan
BUTTON HOLED
HOT BUTTON
PANIC BUTTON
Panic Button
KYLIE LOGAN
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
PANIC BUTTON
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / January 2013
Copyright © 2012 by Connie Laux.
Excerpt from Mayhem at the Orient Express by Kylie Logan copyright © 2012 by Connie Laux.
Cover illustration by Jennifer Taylor.
Cover design by Annette Fiore Defex.
Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61867-7
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
For Kathleen Morrish,
goddaughter and friend
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every author gets asked the question: Where do you get your ideas?
I have to say that for me, the answer to that question is different for every book I write. Sometimes, an idea comes from a bit of conversation I overhear. Sometimes, it can result from something I see online or in a newspaper. For Panic Button, the idea started to form the moment I read about charm strings.
What a wonderful, old-fashioned bit of Americana! Imagine young girls collecting buttons, trading them, getting them as gifts—all so those buttons could be strung and saved. There’s bound to be folklore to accompany a hobby that charming, and of course, with the button strings there is. Collect one thousand buttons and your Prince Charming will come along. What writer could resist a legend that delicious!
There are other legends, too, involved in Panic Button, specifically, the legend of Lake Michigan pirate, Thunderin’ Ben Moran. Thunderin’ Ben is based on a real Great Lakes pirate, Roaring Dan Seavey, who was notorious in the early twentieth century.
As always, my thanks go out to the button collecting community which has welcomed me—and the Button Box Mysteries—with open arms, to my writing friends who are always there with support and encouragement, and to my family who put up with the button magazines that come in the mail and the button museums and exhibits we visit.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN CURSES?”
I was so intent on studying the glorious buttons on the worktable in front of me, I only half heard Angela Morningside’s question. So who can blame me! Naturally, I blinked, looked up, forced the pleasant whirr of button daydreams out of my head so I could focus on my customer, and said, “Huh?”
Angela did not seem to hold my inability to concentrate against me. Then again, we’d been working together on this particular project for about six weeks. No doubt, she already knew that antique buttons are to me what Hershey bars are to a chocoholic.
When she repeated herself, her expression wasn’t exactly as kind as it was patient. And a little pained, too. “I asked you, Josie, do you believe in curses?”
>
Anyone who’s ever met me knows that I am infinitely practical. Which means my first inclination was to laugh. I controlled myself. After all, Angela was the one who’d canceled each of our first three appointments and made no apology about the reason—her horoscope, she told me, informed her that making the one-hour trip south from Ardent Lake to Chicago on those days was not a good idea.
If she took horoscopes that seriously, it wasn’t much of a stretch to think curses might not be far behind.
I flicked off the high-intensity lamp I’d had trained on the string of buttons spread over my worktable and slid off the stool where I’d been perched, the better to walk around to the front of the table and look Angela in the eye. This was not exactly as simple as it sounds since Angela was a full eight inches taller than my bit over five feet and broader by a mile. Still, I am all about making a valiant effort. I lifted my chin, the better to meet her question head-on. “You’re serious?”
Angela’s shoulders dropped. Her chin quivered.
Hey, I might be practical, but I am not heartless. I grabbed her elbow, piloted her to the nearest stool, and eased her onto it.
“You are serious.” Understatement. I knew that as soon as Angela was seated and I got a good look at her eyes—and the fear that shimmered in them, as razor-sharp as sunlight sparking off ice. “Angela, tell me what’s going on.”
“I will. At least, I’ll try.” We were in the back room of my shop, the Button Box, and Angela’s gaze jumped from the antique buttons on the charm string to the floor and stayed there. “No doubt you think I’m nothing but a crazy old lady. Post-menopausal delusions. That’s what some of my friends have told me.” Her gaze snapped to mine. “As if my age has anything to do with it. I’m not imagining any of this, Josie. And I’m not making it up.”
In the six weeks since Angela had first called and told me about the charm string she’d inherited from her great-aunt, I’d come to learn that she was usually as serious as a heart attack and as levelheaded about her successful medical transcription firm back in Ardent Lake as I was about my shop, where I sold antique and collectible buttons to dealers, hobbyists, and discerning sewers and crafters. Sure, the woman not only read her horoscope each day, but actually remembered it and acted on its advice. That didn’t mean she was crazy, did it? Out of the ordinary. Sure, I’d go along with that. But ruddy-cheeked, well-dressed, understated Angela never struck me as crazy.
“Of course you’re not making any of it up,” I said, because really, a woman like me found it impossible to even imagine that a woman like her could. “You’re obviously upset. What’s going on, Angela? And what does it have to do with the charm string?”
She tried for a smile, but it wavered around the edges. “I’m not surprised you figured out it’s all about those damned buttons. I heard you were smart. That’s one of the reasons I chose you when I looked for someone to put a value on that…thing.”
Again, her gaze landed on the charm string. But only for a second. Angela might be trying to put on a brave face, but her body language spoke volumes. She sat up a little straighter and angled back her spine, putting as much distance as possible between herself, my worktable, and the charm string on it. A skitter shook her shoulders. “You knew, and I didn’t even have to tell you. Can you feel the psychic vibrations, too?” Her palm flat, she put a hand over the buttons that, many years ago, her great-great-grandmother had painstakingly slipped onto a heavy piece of string the way so many girls had in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Making charm strings had been something of a fad back then. Girls collected and strung buttons, and the tradition was that each button had to be different. Buttons were traded, given as gifts, and brought back as souvenirs from places like Niagara Falls and New York City, and legend said that when button number one thousand came into a girl’s life, so would her Prince Charming.
I can’t say if that last bit about happily-ever-after held true for every charm string maker, but I do know that strings with all one thousand buttons on them are rare enough to make any button collector salivate.
Angela’s charm string had exactly one thousand buttons on it, and I had been salivating over it since the day she called and asked me to take a look at the photos she’d taken of the buttons so that I could value the charm string for tax purposes before she donated it to her local historical society. Of course, I’d been trying to get her to sell it to me since that day, too.
So far, no dice.
Which, to me, was my own version of a curse.
I snapped out of the thought to find Angela still with her hand poised over the buttons. “I can practically feel the bad luck bubbling off this thing,” she said.
This was the point at which I seriously began reassessing my opinion of Angela.
Not that I could let on. I wasn’t about to honk off a customer who was willing to pay for an appraisal just because she was a little…er…eccentric. Especially not when six weeks after she’d sent my button mania into overdrive by sending me the photos, she’d finally brought me the genuine article to study, admire, and yes, covet anew.
I scraped my palms against the black pants I was wearing with a spring green cotton sweater. “You keep looking at the buttons as if they’re going to ignite and take the whole shop with them.”
Angela glanced from side to side before she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“So you really do think the buttons are going to bring you bad luck?”
“No, no, Josie. They’re not going to bring me bad luck. They have brought me bad luck. Ever since the day I inherited them. And funny you should mention fire. I had a fire at home. Not two weeks after I brought these buttons into my house.”
Before I followed my dream and opened the Button Box, I’d once worked as an administrative assistant at an insurance agency. I knew the statistics. “Home fires are not all that uncommon,” I said, and believe me, I tried to put a kind spin on it. “As a matter of fact, every year—”
“Yes, yes. I know all that.” Angela hopped off the stool and paced the length of my workroom, from the counter where I have one of those mini-refrigerators, a microwave, and a coffeemaker, to the far wall, and back again. “Don’t think other people haven’t tried to tell me things like that. It was an accident, Angela. It was unfortunate. It happens all the time.” Her voice singsonged over the false comfort the way I’m sure her friends’ had when they offered it. “But don’t you see, Josie, this is different!” She pulled to a stop directly in front of me and, fists on hips, looked down her long, slim nose.
“The fire came after the attempted break-in. And the attempted break-in just so happened to come the day after I got the charm string out of Aunt Evelyn’s safety-deposit box and brought it home. That…” She stopped here like she expected me to interrupt and, with a glance, dared me to even think about it. “That was the same day the brakes went on my car. While I was on the freeway.” The way her voice trembled said volumes about how terrifying the incident must have been.
“As far as that fire,” she went on, “maybe the whole thing won’t sound like just another statistic when I tell you that not four months earlier, there was a fire at my great-aunt’s house, too.”
“Aunt Evelyn? You mean the one who—”
“The one who left me the charm string in her will. Yes, that’s the one.” Angela’s smile was gotcha! sleek. But only for a heartbeat. The next second, she was right back to looking upset. And pacing again.
“Don’t you see, Josie, when Aunt Evelyn was still alive and was the one who owned the charm string, there was a fire in her kitchen, and nobody, not even the Ardent Lake Fire Department, has been able to figure out how it started. Luckily, I just happened to stop in that afternoon to drop off some cookies I’d baked for Evelyn. Good gracious, the woman was eighty-three. If she’d been there alone…” Angela didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to. The way her shoulders shook told me she knew exactly what would have happ
ened to Aunt Evelyn if she hadn’t shown up.
“And the fire at your house?” I asked.
“Same scenario.” As if she’d been over it a thousand times and was no closer to finding an answer now than she had been all those other times, Angela shook her head. She had a head of curls that were far too dark for a woman her age, and they gleamed. “A fire in the middle of the kitchen table? Come on, that doesn’t just happen. I certainly didn’t leave a pile of newspapers there, and that’s what caught on fire. And no one else was in the house. I live alone. I can’t even sleep at night, thinking about how bad things might have gotten. At Aunt Evelyn’s, you see, I jumped right into action as if I’d been trained. I grabbed a pitcher of water and put that fire right out. At my own house…” Though we’d only just met, I knew instinctively that Angela was not the kind of person who liked admitting to weakness. No woman who wore a crisp navy business suit and starched white blouse to what was, essentially, a casual meeting, could possibly be. She glanced away. “I smelled the smoke, I raced into the kitchen, and then…I froze.” Her shrug told me she still didn’t understand. “I stood there like a zombie watching my kitchen go up in smoke and I couldn’t move a muscle. Things would have gotten really ugly if not for Larry.”
For the first time since Angela had mentioned the curse, the lines of worry on her face smoothed out, and in the light of the overhead fluorescents, her eyes sparkled. “In fact, Larry is the only good thing that’s happened to me since those buttons came into my life.”
I’m a smart enough businesswoman to know that dealing with a happy customer is far easier than trying to talk one down who’s convinced herself that her life is ruled by button bad luck. I knew this was one safe subject and I decided to stick to it.
“Tell me about him,” I urged.
“Oh, Larry.” Angela shook her shoulders in a way designed to make me think he was no big deal, but the little smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth said otherwise. “He owns the hardware store in Ardent Lake. Has for years. It’s not a very big town, so of course, I’ve always seen him around and bumped into him now and then. His wife died a few years ago, and after that, he kept to himself for a long time. But now…”