Panic Button

by Kylie Logan

  Because she wouldn’t say it, I figured I would. “He’s your boyfriend.”

  Her cheeks turned the color of a Chicago sunset. “That sounds so silly, doesn’t it? Like we’re in high school or something. Larry and I, we’re…friends. Well, I guess we’re more than friends at this point. And you know, Josie, it’s really wonderful. It’s nice to have someone to go to the movies with and to cook dinner for. What with Aunt Evelyn dying and all I’ve had to do to settle her estate, Larry’s been a real rock.” Her cheeks still flaming, she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “He’s cute, too.”

  It was impossible not to smile. Then again, I’d always been a believer when it came to happily-ever-afters. That was the only thing that could possibly explain how I’d been suckered by Kaz, my ex, into thinking that true love is as unalienable a right as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  But I digress. Thinking of how my marriage had gone sour wasn’t exactly appropriate, what with Angela glowing like the spring sunshine outside the Button Box’s front display window.

  “I’m glad,” I told her, and it was true. “But doesn’t the fact that you’ve met Larry tell you something? You’ve got the charm string and it’s got one thousand buttons on it. Prince Charming has come into your life!”

  She twinkled like a beauty queen. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. It’s one of the reasons I want to get this charm string out of my life as soon as possible. I can’t take the chance that anything will go wrong. Not when it comes to Larry.”

  Talk about the perfect opening!

  I whispered a prayer at the same time I said, “You could profit very nicely from the charm string, Angela. If you’re interested in selling it rather than donating it—”

  “Absolutely not.” Her words were as firm as the way she held her jaw. “I don’t mean to be difficult, but you’ve got to understand, Josie. This charm string is most definitely cursed. That means any money I made from selling it would bring bad luck, too. No. The only thing I can do is donate the charm string to the Ardent Lake Historical Society. Everything’s arranged. I’ll pick up the charm string from you tomorrow, and the next day, the historical society is having a tea in my honor. That’s when I’ll present them the charm string. They’ve got the display all ready and they’re going to set the charm string into it in front of everyone at the tea.” She brushed her hands together. “That will get it out of my life, once and for all.”

  “Of course, that’s up to you.” Big points for me, I managed to say this without weeping. “But before you make your final decision, there are a couple things you should know.” I went over to the worktable and turned on the high-intensity lamp. “Most of the buttons on your charm string aren’t all that remarkable,” I told Angela. “They’re all very old, which makes sense since the string was made by your great-great-grandmother. But old doesn’t always mean valuable. Most of these were fairly common buttons at the time she made the charm string. There are some mother of pearl shirt buttons…” I found one and pointed it out, and Angela looked all right, but she refused to get too close. “There are brass buttons.” I showed her some of those, too. “There are lots of black glass buttons. Individually, at a button show, most of these buttons wouldn’t sell for more than a couple dollars each. But…” I swept a hand over the entire length of the charm string. “It’s rare to even find partial charm strings these days. To find one that’s complete…well, honestly, it’s enough to take a button collector’s breath away!”

  Angela clutched her hands at her waist. “All the more reason to get the thing displayed at the historical society. Then lots of people can see it and admire it.”

  “That’s true. But there are collectors—and not just me, Angela, so don’t think I’m saying this for my own selfish purposes—there are collectors who would pay you a bundle for this charm string.”

  Her chin came up a fraction of an inch. “I told you. I don’t want the money. I don’t care how much we’re talking about.”

  “And you should also know…” I looked down the length of the string, and the button I was looking for wasn’t hard to find. I tilted the light so that it glimmered against the button’s enameled surface. “Like I said, most of the buttons here are common, but this one…” Every time I looked at this particular button, my breath caught in my throat. “It was made in China,” I told Angela. “Sometime around 1850. It’s enameled and the details are exquisite.” The button was about an inch across and right in the center of it was a shimmering red fish set on a background that featured green aquatic plants and turquoise water. “I know collectors who would pay thousands for this button,” I told her. I controlled myself; I didn’t add that I was one of them.

  Angela’s lips clamped tight. “Don’t care,” she mumbled. “Don’t want the money.”

  “That’s fine.” It wasn’t. Not to me. To me, the charm string was the embodiment of every button fantasy I’d ever had. At least I was lucky enough to have it to myself for a while so I could compare the actual buttons to the photos Angela had sent and make my final decisions regarding values. I took comfort (not much) in the thought. “I figured it was only fair to tell you.”

  “And I appreciate it.” Angela backed toward the door. “I hope you can appreciate how I feel about the whole thing.”

  I did. Even if I didn’t understand it.

  It was clear Angela was anxious to get out of the Button Box and away from the charm string, and I didn’t try to stop her. After all, the sooner she left, the sooner I could immerse myself in studying the buttons. Two days weren’t nearly enough, but they were all I had, and I was anxious to get to work.

  “You’ll be back tomorrow evening?” I walked to the front of the shop with Angela. “I’m usually open until six, but I can stay late if that works better for you.” I prayed it did. That meant extra hours with the charm string.

  “I’ll call,” Angela assured me, pulling open the front door of the shop and stepping out into the bustle of my Old Town neighborhood. When she looked down at the sidewalk, there was a hitch in her step, and she hopped on one foot, then turned around and gave me a sheepish smile. “Step on a crack,” she said, pointing down at the fracture in the sidewalk, “and break your mother’s back.”

  I smiled, too, like I knew she was kidding. Even though I was pretty sure she wasn’t.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I’d already said, when I realized Angela wasn’t listening. Her gaze was riveted to a park bench a few storefronts down where a whole bunch of crows were digging into what looked to be the last of a hamburger and an order of fries that had been left on the sidewalk.

  I grimaced. “Sorry,” I said, “not exactly the ambiance the merchants around here want. I bet somebody left it for LaSalle. He’s a stray dog we’ve all sort of adopted,” I explained, looking up and down the street. “I’m surprised he hasn’t been by for his breakfast. He usually is by now. It’s tacky leaving food around, I know. We’re not really a garbage dump, and the crows, they’re not usually anywhere around here. They must have come over from one of the parks near the lake.”

  “Crows.” Angela’s face was as pale as ashes. “Don’t you know what it means, Josie? Haven’t you counted them? Don’t you know the old saying about crows?”

  I didn’t have to ask what she was talking about, because Angela filled me in. “One’s bad,” she said. “Two’s luck. Three’s health. Four’s wealth. Five’s sickness. And six…” Her lips moving, she counted wordlessly, then swallowed hard. “Six is death.”

  Chapter Two

  BY THE TIME EIGHT O’CLOCK that evening rolled around, I was all but ready to throw in the towel and admit that I believed in Angela’s curse.

  After all, the more time I spent with the charm string, the more I realized the curse applied to me. I was cursed to have only a few more hours with the fabulous buttons, cursed to be lured in by their beauty and their history and the amazing fact that the charm string had remained intact all these years
—only to have to surrender it the next day when Angela showed up.

  If that wasn’t a button lover’s curse, I didn’t know what was.

  The thought swirling in my head, I sighed and told myself to get a grip.

  “OK, yeah, so you’re cursed,” I mumbled, snapping a picture of a hard rubber button embossed with a geometrical pattern. “But you’re blessed, too, and don’t you forget it.” I angled the button so that I could get a photo of the backmark on the underside that said it was a “Goodyear.”

  “You’ve got a few more hours tomorrow to play with these buttons until your heart’s content,” I reminded myself, and that cheered me right up. Still smiling, I slid the charm string a few inches farther down the table and trained the light on the last of the buttons I had to photograph. Technically, I had begun photographing from the wrong end, starting with the buttons that had been strung last and working my way to those Angela’s great-great-grandmother had used to begin her charm string.

  How did I know?

  There was no mystery there.

  Each girl who made a charm string started with what was called a “touch button,” one button that was a little larger than the others. This touch button, curiously, was just about the same size as the hard rubber Goodyear button, and at the same time I wondered why Angela’s great-great-grandmother had started her string with two buttons that were so similar in size, I told myself it really didn’t matter. Like the beautiful enameled button with the red fish on it, these two buttons had probably been gifts, or just too interesting for her to resist. In a way, the fact that she was willing to flaunt traditional charm string convention told me a lot about Angela’s great-great-grandmother.

  And that only made me even fonder of her buttons.

  As I had done with all the other buttons, I took measurements and made notes about this last button. It was metal and there was a picture on it that showed a small, squat building on the left and another, taller brick building behind it. I grabbed my magnifying glass and took a closer look. A schoolhouse, complete with a chunky tower and a bell. Quaint. Not very valuable. And all the more charming because of it.

  Satisfied I’d done all I could for the moment, I turned off the light and rolled my neck, banishing the kinks that had settled between my shoulder blades in the hours I’d been busy. There were still a couple buttons I wanted to know more about, but my research would have to wait until morning. I’d promised to meet Nevin Riley for a drink at eight thirty at a new place that had just opened down the street, and I still had to close up the shop and tally the day’s sales. Two picky knitters looking for the perfect buttons for the sweaters they were making, a collector from Des Moines who had heard good things about the shop (hurray!) and made a special trip to Chicago to visit, a local artist who wasn’t as interested in the history of buttons as he was in the shapes, a mother and daughter working on scrapbooks. And the charm string.

  All things considered, it had been a really good day at the Button Box.

  And on top of all that, it would be just a little while and I’d get to see Nev.

  Were we a couple?

  Interesting question, and honestly, I’m not sure I knew the answer, at least not at that moment. Nev and I had been seeing each other semisteadily since that fateful day I opened the Button Box and found burglars, then a murder victim, inside. Over the last few months, we’d discovered we liked lots of the same things: quiet dinners, walks along the lakeshore, Cubs baseball. Nev was smart, and he was cute. He was sweet and considerate, and though he had a sort of teddy-bear exterior that hid it well, he was one heck of a tough cop.

  I liked him.

  He liked me.

  And at this point, neither one of us was anxious or ready for the relationship to go any further.

  All in all, what I had with Nev was ideal.

  And so unlike everything I’d had with Kaz (which was more like grand opera than a Hallmark Channel movie), that I thanked my lucky stars every single day.

  In spite of the hours I’d spent hunched over my worktable, there was a spring to my step when I zipped to the front of the store to lock the door, collected the day’s receipts from the rosewood desk where my computer sat next to an array of button research books, and finished the day’s paperwork in the back room.

  I gave the charm string one last look before I turned out the workroom lights and grabbed my purse and jacket, and yes, I admit it, I mumbled a quick “good-night” to it, too. Blame it on the buttons. Any button collector would understand.

  I slipped on my jacket and headed outside. I hadn’t even finished locking the shop door when I felt a wet nose nuzzle my hand.

  “Hey, LaSalle!” I took my key out of the lock of the robin’s egg blue front door of the brownstone and dropped my key ring in my purse before I turned to give the dog a pat on the head. LaSalle was what would charitably be termed a “mix.” In other words, he was a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of things that didn’t exactly match each other. He had the floppy ears of a hound, the broad muzzle and big nose of a terrier, and the short legs of a corgi. As for color, well, it was already after dark and the streetlight a couple shops down needed to be replaced, but that hardly mattered. I’d known LaSalle since he first showed up in the neighborhood a month or so earlier, and I knew he was a mottled mixture of white, black, and brown. Classic mutt, and as lovable as any dog I’d ever met. So lovable, in fact, that a couple of the local merchants (yes, including me) had actually thought about taking him home.

  LaSalle would have none of it. He was a scrapper, a street dog, as happy to patrol our Old Town neighborhood as he was to greet us as we came and went. Between those of us who fed him, and the florist across the street who’d taken him in to the nearest vet to be neutered, we made sure he was safe and warm.

  “You missed out on your breakfast.” At the same time I took a look down the street to where the crows had polished off the burger and fries, I bent to scratch a hand over LaSalle’s head. I was rewarded by a thumping tail and a sound from deep in LaSalle’s throat not unlike the one I make when a particularly interesting button catches my eye. “Not to worry. I knew you’d be by eventually.”

  I’d tucked a bit of the turkey sandwich I’d brought for dinner into my jacket pocket, and I set my purse down on the sidewalk to fish it out.

  That’s when it happened.

  No sooner had purse touched pavement than, like a shot, a person raced out of the alley between my brownstone and the one next door. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell. I registered only a few quick details: dark pants, a hoodie pulled over his (or her) head and down low over her (or his) brow.

  Before I could do anything more than flinch and step back, that person snatched my purse off the sidewalk and kept on running.

  “Hey!” Not exactly the greatest deterrent to purse snatching, but the only thing I could think to say at the moment.

  Have no fear. Turns out, LaSalle did my talking for me.

  Before the thief had gone three steps, the dog had him by the back of the pant leg.

  Startled, the thief yelped and dropped my purse, and once he did, the dog let go. LaSalle actually might have gone back for a real bite if the thief didn’t dart into the street directly in front of a tour bus.

  I screeched, clapped my hands over my mouth, and held my breath. That is, until the tour bus rolled by, and when it was gone, I saw my attacker safe, sound, and unsquished on the other side of the street. He took one look in my direction, and since LaSalle was sitting at my side, growling louder than any dog his size should have been able to, the thief apparently decided my purse wasn’t worth the effort. He scurried around the corner and disappeared.

  “Thanks, buddy. If it wasn’t for you…” I didn’t want to think about it, so I just scratched one hand behind the dog’s ears. It was the first I realized I was shaking.

  Apparently, LaSalle didn’t hold that against me. He licked my hand and I rewarded him with the turkey sandwich, picked up my purse, and heade
d off to meet Nev.

  Was I thinking about curses at the time?

  Maybe I should have been. Then everything that happened the next day wouldn’t have surprised me.

  IT STARTED BRIGHT and early the next morning when I went to put the pictures of the buttons onto my computer and realized the download mojo wasn’t working.

  Not the best way to start a Wednesday, but hey, as far as curses went, this one wasn’t so bad. I’d gotten to the Button Box just as the sun was coming up somewhere behind an elephant gray layer of dark storm clouds (the better to have more time with the charm string) so I wasn’t feeling pressured. Plus, the folks in India were still awake and answering the camera company’s service calls. It took a couple tries, and a second pot of coffee, but by the time nine o’clock rolled around and I was ready to turn around the sign in the window and declare the shop open, the pictures were downloaded and I was filling in the information on each button in the computer database I’d established for the charm string.

  I had a couple more buttons to research, a couple more calls to make to ask friends their opinions about history and value, but other than that, I’d be ready whenever Angela showed up.

  It was shallow of me, but I hoped her horoscope would tell her to keep close to home that day. Sure, I was nearly done with the research I had to do on her behalf, but I wouldn’t have minded a couple more days alone with the wonderful charm string.

  “Well, you’re probably not going to get it, so you better use the time you have,” I reminded myself, and went into the back workroom to do just that.

  The rest of the morning went by in blessed, curse-free peace and quiet. Well, except for a couple grumbles of thunder. The mail arrived and, along with it, my monthly royalty check for the costumes I’d once designed for a movie that had recently become a campy cult classic. Royalty checks, I reminded myself with a grin, are just the opposite of curses. In fact, this one arriving when it had was a spot of good luck. I’d been thinking about getting another glass-topped display case for the shop and had recently seen one that was just the right size at an antique shop near my apartment. I’d stop on the way home, first at the bank to deposit the check, then to buy the display case, and I made a quick phone call to the nice folks at the antique store to tell them to have the case ready for me.