by Josie Belle
“Here you go, ladies,” Gwen Morgan said. She carried a tray with four coffees on it: two lattes, one espresso and a chai tea. “Your punch card is full, Maggie, so next time you get a freebie.”
“Excellent,” Maggie said. She took the card from Gwen and put it in her wallet.
The ladies were basking in their post-sale success, sitting on the front patio of the Perk Up, surrounded by their bags from Stegner’s. The drive back from the store had taken an hour. It was midday now, and they had a nice view of the goings-on in town from their spot on Main Street.
Gwen and her husband, Jay Morgan, owned the Perk Up, which they had opened five years before, during the coffee boom. They had a small bakery case in there as well and offered an assortment of baked goods to go with the coffee. A glance at the mostly empty coffeehouse made Maggie wonder how business was going. It was so close to lunch, she would have expected the tables to be full. Then again, it was the end of summer and people were trying to get in the last of their vacations and prepare for back-to-school, so maybe the slowness was just temporary.
Gwen served their coffee and tea, and said, “If you need anything else, let me know.”
“Think she knows where we can hire a hit on Summer Phillips?” Joanne whispered.
“I’m pretty sure husband number two tried that,” Ginger said. “The woman is like a cat with nine lives.”
“A feral cat,” Maggie said.
“Still, you got her good with the size eights,” Claire said. “She outed herself. That was classic.”
“Yeah, but what I can’t figure is why she was even at Stegner’s,” Maggie said. “I mean she’s loaded. Why is she bargain hunting, and why do I get the feeling it was mostly to mess with me?”
“I don’t know, but if I were you, I’d watch my back,” Ginger said. “And we’ll help.”
“Absolutely,” Claire said.
Joanne lifted her espresso and said, “To the Good Buy Girls. We came, we saw, we scored.”
Chapter 2
“Maggie!” Ginger Lancaster burst through Maggie Gerber’s front door like a bargain hunter on Black Friday. “Maggie, did you hear the news?”
Maggie met Ginger in the living room and stared at her wild-eyed friend. She held up her hand and said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”
Ginger looked like she would burst with the news, but she nodded for Maggie to go ahead while she caught her breath.
“Summer Phillips’s Spanx gave out from exhaustion, and she busted out all over the country club?” Maggie asked.
“No! Did they?” Ginger asked, her eyes getting even wider.
“Nah, but that would be great, wouldn’t it?” Maggie asked.
“Oh, girlfriend, you had me going!” Ginger waved a hand at her.
“Sorry,” Maggie said. “I have a rich fantasy life.”
Ginger shook her head, and said, “If Summer packs on much more baggage in her caboose, you may be forecasting the future.”
“Well, then I hope they send out a warning to all low-lying areas,” Maggie said.
Maggie hadn’t seen Summer since the incident at Stegner’s the week before. Still, it did not change the fact that Summer seemed to have decided to don her mean-girl mantle and go out of her way to make Maggie’s life difficult—again.
Ginger chuckled. She had a contagious heh-heh-heh sort of laugh that reached out and tickled Maggie’s ribs, making it impossible not to laugh in return.
“Nice shoes,” Maggie said, stepping around her longtime friend to close the front door behind her.
“I saw them in the window of My Sister’s Closet, you know, the thrift store on Main Street, and had to have them,” Ginger said. “Eight dollars, and I got Trudi to throw in the matching handbag.”
Maggie tucked her shoulder-length auburn hair, inherited along with her pale skin and freckles from the strong O’Brien gene pool of her father’s side of the family, behind her ears as she bent down to get a closer look. The short heeled, brown Ferragamo pumps were exquisite. “Eight dollars and the handbag? You managed to score a handbag? Are you kidding me?”
“Excuse me, I am one of the original Good Buy Girls,” Ginger said with her hands on her hips. “If there is one thing I do not kid about, it’s a bargain.”
Maggie grinned and hugged her oldest friend. The two women had grown up over on Hardy Street near the center of St. Stanley, a small town in southern Virginia. Both had come from large families in which getting by meant doing without or being creative with the spending. Now that they were older and had families of their own to care for, being creative had become their social outlet as well as a method of survival.
They had formed the Good Buy Girls, a club that shared coupons, discounts and bargain tips, twenty years before, when they were both newly married with babies on board.
The club membership had shifted and changed over the years except for Ginger and Maggie. Maggie liked to think they were lifers in the Good Buy Girls.
Ginger was the same age as Maggie, and they shared the same dress and shoe sizes, both being on the tall side of medium in height, but somehow Maggie always felt washed out when she stood next to Ginger, with her latte-colored skin, velvet brown eyes and boisterous laugh. Ginger was outspoken and funny and never engaged in a conversation in which she did not have the last word.
But then, maybe that was why they’d remained close friends all these years. Maggie was more of a watcher, quietly studying the world around her, while Ginger was more a doer. They balanced each other.
“So, what’s your news?” Maggie asked.
“Oh, you got me so distracted, I forgot,” Ginger said. “You may want to sit down.”
“Why? Is it bad?” Maggie settled onto the armrest of the couch, feeling a nervous flutter in her chest. She hated—absolutely hated—bad news.
“Well, I suppose that depends upon your perspective,” Ginger said. She watched Maggie’s face closely when she added, “Sam Collins is back in town.”
“What?” Maggie slid off of the armrest onto the couch with a thump.
“I thought that might get your attention,” Ginger said. “They’ve hired him for the vacant sheriff post.”
“He’s the sheriff?” Maggie felt her chest get tight, and the room lurched a bit to the side. She wasn’t positive, but she feared either her head or her heart might implode.
“Well, he retired from the Richmond force as a detective,” Ginger said. “The mayor and the town council thought, given that he grew up here in St. Stanley, he’d be a good fit.”
If a meteor had landed in the center of the town square and little green men had climbed out of it, Maggie could not have been more shocked.
“When does he start?” she asked.
“He already has,” Ginger said. “As of yesterday.”
Maggie could feel her pulse pound in her ears. This meant she could be in Santana’s grocery store buying rhubarb or she could be at the Perk Up grabbing a cappuccino or at the library returning books and smack right into him. Oh, horror!
“Are you all right?” Ginger asked.
“Me? Yeah, I’m fine,” Maggie lied. “It’s just a surprise, that’s all. I mean, I never thought Sam Collins would come back to St. Stanley. He’s been gone for a long time.”
“Twenty-four years,” Ginger said. “Can you believe it?”
“Have you seen him?” Maggie asked. “Please tell me he is bald and fat.”
Ginger laughed. “Okay, he’s bald and fat.”
Maggie grinned, and then Ginger shook her head.
“I’m just kidding,” Ginger said. “I haven’t seen him.”
“Way to dash my hopes,” Maggie said. She felt as if her equilibrium was returning. “So, we don’t know for sure, but he could be bald and fat.”
“Cling to that life raft,” Ginger said. “Nice to know you still hate him as much as you did when we were kids.”
Maggie glowered. “He deserved it. He nicknamed me ‘Carrots’—I hated that!”
“Because of your hair,” Ginger said. “Well, it doesn’t look like that anymore. It’s a much darker shade of red now. Who knows? Maybe you two will even become friends.”
“I seriously doubt it,” Maggie said.
Ginger tipped her head to the side, and Maggie realized she was giving away too much. Ginger knew her too well and would guess that it was more than just childhood teasing that made her dislike Sam Collins.
Maggie forced her mouth into a smile that felt more like a grimace as she rose from the couch. She would have to shove aside all thought of the new sheriff and wait to process this information later when she was alone, with no one to bear witness to the panic coursing through her.
“So, what did you bring for coupons?” she asked.
She looped her arm through Ginger’s and steered her toward the kitchen. It was their weekly GBG meeting, where they coupon-swapped and shared bargain info. Because Maggie’s house wasn’t overrun by men like Ginger’s, it had become their base of operations years ago, and no one had ever thought to change it.
“I brought the circulars from Sunday’s paper,” Ginger said. “Is Sandy here? There are a bunch of diaper coupons in this pile that, thank heavens, I no longer need.”
Ginger was the mother of four teenage boys. Even with her husband’s corporate sales job and her own private accounting business, the enormity of the Lancaster family grocery bill was mythic.
“She’s in the kitchen, giving Josh a snack,” Maggie said. “I have some diaper coupons for her, too.”
The two women passed through the cozy living room and into the kitchen. Sandy, Maggie’s niece, who had her same auburn hair, fair skin and pale green eyes, and Josh, Sandy’s two-year-old son, were seated at the tiny table Maggie had picked up at a yard sale just for him. He was snacking on Cheerios and banana chunks and clutching his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine toy in his chubby little fist.
“Well, hi there, handsome,” Ginger said as she buzzed the boy’s blond head with a smacking kiss. He looked up at her with merry blue eyes and cheeks stuffed with bananas.
“Auntie Gingy,” the boy said. “Nanas?”
Ginger grinned and said, “Thanks anyway, pumpkin, I think those ‘nanas’ are for you.” Then she sighed. “I miss the days when I could make my boys happy with cereal and fruit. Do you know I made four trays of corn bread yesterday and a Crock-Pot full of beans, and it was gone in half an hour? Not even a crumb was left.”
“Oh my.” Sandy’s eyes went wide. Obviously, the thought of growing boys and their appetites was the stuff of nightmares for the young mother.
Maggie put a reassuring hand on Sandy’s head. She reminded her so much of herself. Maggie’s husband, Charlie, had been a deputy for the St. Stanley Sheriff’s Department. He’d been killed in the line of duty when she was just twenty-five years old and their daughter, Laura, had not been much older than young Josh. Maggie had survived, but it had been a struggle. Now Laura was a sophomore at Penn State, and Maggie couldn’t be more proud, even though the tuition made her go a little lightheaded and see spots.
Sandy’s husband had shipped out to fight in Afghanistan two years ago, barely getting to meet his young son before he was gone. When Laura left for college, Maggie had been afraid she’d be lonely, so she invited Sandy and Josh to move in while they waited for her husband to return. It worked for both of them as Sandy didn’t want to relocate to Florida to live with her mother but wanted to stay in St. Stanley to finish nursing school. While Sandy studied, Maggie helped watch Josh.
“When Jake finally gets deployed home, I’d like one more baby,” Sandy said. “But then I think I’m done. Two hands, two kids.”
“You’re a wise young woman,” Ginger said. “I’d take a bullet for any one of my boys; I love them so, but ooh, if someone had shown me my future grocery bill back then, well, let’s just say it would be unlikely that Roger would ever have seen me naked again after baby number one.”
The women laughed and Joanne poked her head in from the sun porch at the back of the house.
“What did I miss?” Joanne asked.
“Naked Ginger,” Sandy teased.
“Do tell,” Joanne said with a grin. Her long dark hair was in its usual ponytail, making her look younger than she was.
Joanne was the newest member of the Good Buy Girls. Maggie had invited Joanne to join the club when they had gotten into a tussle over a pair of half-price bed sheets at the linen shop in the mall over in Dumontville. Maggie had won, naturally, but a friendship had been forged.
Joanne was married to Michael Claramotta, and together they owned the butcher shop–deli More than Meats in the center of town that was the place to buy lunch. They had relocated to St. Stanley from Brooklyn ten years before, and although they had opened the deli and invested their money in several apartment buildings in town, they had both grown up poor, and thrift was a way of life for them. No one in the Good Buy Girls club got a bigger charge out of getting a good deal than Joanne.
“I was just saying that if I had known what my grocery bill would be, it would be unlikely that Roger would have had the opportunity to make any more babies with me,” Ginger said softly.
It was well known in the group that the one thing thirty-seven-year-old Joanne wanted more than even a good deal was a baby, but so far she and Michael hadn’t gotten lucky.
“As if!” Joanne busted out with a laugh, reassuring them that she was fine. “I’ve seen you two together. You are the most lovey-dovey couple on the planet. It’s positively disgusting. Now, come on, I’ve got the tables ready.”
The ladies filed out through the French doors to the sun porch on the back of the house. The glassed-in room with its hanging plants and cushy wicker furniture and freestanding air conditioner was their weekly base of operations. This week was particularly important, as Labor Day was rapidly approaching, and they needed to finalize their battle plans.
Fliers, mailers and circulars littered the card table that had been set up, and they each took a seat in a folding chair.
“Wait, where’s Claire?” Ginger asked. “She’s bringing the eats, isn’t she?”
“She’ll be here,” Maggie said. “She may have gotten held up at the library.”
“All right then, do we all have our diaper coupons for Sandy?”
Maggie pulled out her coupon pouch, blue and mauve paisley; it had been her constant companion since starting her own household when she was newly married twenty-two years before. She called it “Old Blue” and its well-thumbed tabs were as familiar to her as her own smile. Old Blue was divided by sections, and Maggie went right to the baby products one and pulled out the clippings she had gathered for her niece.
The others all pulled out their coupon pouches as well, and a small pile accumulated in the center for Sandy. Being a solo parent and a full-time student, she didn’t have the time to be an official member of the Good Buy Girls, but they considered her one of their own and always kept an eye out for bargains for her.
“Aunt Maggie, I’m taking Josh to the park. Back in an hour,” Sandy called, poking her head into the room.
“I go park!” Josh cried, and he waddled into the sun room to Maggie to give her a banana-scented hug.
“Have fun, sweetie,” Maggie said, and she squeezed him back, enjoying the petal-soft feel of his mop of blond hair against her cheek.
Sandy held out her hand, and Josh grabbed it. As they left the room, the doorbell rang and Sandy called, “I’ll get it.”
They heard the door open and the murmur of voices. Then the door shut and Claire raced into the room with her coupon pouch in one hand and a boxed cake in the other.
“Sorry, I’m late,” she cried. “It was murder getting here.”
Chapter 3
“How so?” Maggie asked, taking in Claire’s disheveled appearance.
“I hit every red light going across town,” Claire said. She shook her short blonde bob, and drew in a long breath before continuing. “Then I st
opped in at the Perk Up to see what they had on sale, but their bakery case was wiped out. Gwen had just taken all the day-old baked goods down to Spring Gardens, the assisted-care living facility for seniors.”
“Well, it looks like you brought us something yummy.” Ginger sat up straighter in her chair, trying to peek inside the mangled box that Claire still clutched.
“Oh yeah, so then I ran over to Santana’s to see if the grocery store had anything in their bakery worth buying.” Claire set the box down on the table. “And look what I got for half off.”
The rest of the Good Buy Girls peered into the box. It was a quarter sheet cake with “Happy Birthday Ralph” written on it, circled by big blue roses.
“Who is Ralph?” Joanne asked.
“I don’t know, but he never picked up his cake,” Claire said. “So we get to have it.”
“Why is there a piece missing?” Ginger asked. “Did you feel the need to taste test it for us?”
Her brown eyes were teasing, and Claire gave an unsteady laugh. “Yeah, that’s it.” She glanced around her as if looking for something. “Oh, shoot, I forgot my cake knife!”
“No worries,” Maggie said. “I have one.”
She studied Claire’s flushed face. Her small, rectangular glasses were askew, and she must have fastened her jacket in a hurry, because the buttons and holes were misaligned, leaving one corner of the front of her jacket hanging lower than the other.
She handed Claire some plates and forks with the knife and asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” Claire said, not meeting her gaze. “It was just a very busy morning.”
“I’ll go get some iced tea,” Maggie said. She watched as Claire held the cake knife with shaky fingers.
Maggie frowned. She didn’t think for one second that Claire was fine. But she had to respect the other woman’s privacy. If Claire wanted to talk, she would.