Death Under Glass

by Jennifer McAndrews

  “A new speaker? You mean it’s not over?” I asked.

  Craning her head over her shoulder, Grace answered, “They still have to read out the new business. You have to stay for that.”

  “Or you could wait until Friday and read about it in the Town Crier,” Diana muttered.

  “So by staying we’ve got an inside scoop?” I said.

  “Something like that.” Diana folded her arms and sat back in her chair, eyes narrowed appraisingly at the short, rounded woman who ambled to the podium.

  “As you are no doubt aware,” the speaker began, her voice shrill and certainly not in need of a microphone, “the state has awarded licenses for four casinos to be built in the areas surrounding Pace County. Your town council has been meeting with representatives from neighboring towns to discuss the implication and repercussions these resorts may have on our local economies.”

  The woman continued to speak, providing highlights from meetings that seemed to have resolved nothing, and reinforcing the importance of the success of the proposed Spring and Hamilton promenade.

  “That’s what they’re banking on?” I whispered to Diana. “They’re hoping with successful retail they can get a cut of the tourist money headed for the casinos?”

  Diana shook her head. “They’re hoping to get retail in place, so when the next round of licenses are issued there aren’t casino resort developers eyeing our waterfront.”

  I nearly asked why they wouldn’t want a casino nearby but then recalled the crowded streets of Atlantic City, the neon lights of tower hotels, the weed-like increase of fast-food establishments. A town like Wenwood, with its quiet riverside charm and air of a simpler time, would lose its identity entirely were the sleek lines and hotel towers of a casino resort to cast their shadow.

  I listened intently to the rest of the speaker’s presentation and cheered and stomped my feet with the remaining attendees when she concluded.

  If I were to make a home in Wenwood, my vote would fall cleanly in favor of kitschy gift shops and waterfront restaurants over roulette wheels and all-you-can-eat buffets.

  All I needed to decide was if this was home.

  8

  Carrie had threatened to pick me up at nine forty-five so together we could open Aggie’s Antiques at ten. Carrie was never on time. Nonetheless, I set my alarm as if she would be early, and by eight I was dressed and downstairs in the space I used as my glass workshop, making use of both the early light and the time I would normally spend waiting for Carrie to arrive.

  When my grandmother was still alive and she used the room as an art studio, she set up her still lifes in the light from the windows. Now my stained glass worktable sat where those vases of flowers and bowls of fruit had once sat.

  At the end of the table opposite the stack of outdated newspapers, pieces of my latest personal project—the sailboat on the blue-green sea—lay safe beneath an old floral sheet I had unearthed in the basement. Reclaimed Wenwood bricks weighed down the cloth, preventing curious paws from lifting corners—or worse.

  I left the covering in place and opened my sketchbook in the center of the table. The covers had barely hit the surface before Friday attempted to leap onto the table by jumping for a corner of the sheet. The same sunlight that made this the perfect place to work lit her bright white fur with an angelic glow while her devil claws dug in and made me doubly grateful for the bricks.

  I pried her narrow, fur-too-soft-for-words body off the sheet and placed her atop the table. She was only four months old, and I was new to owning a cat, but it seemed to me the fuzz I had taken for kitten fur truly was an indicator of long hair to come. A long-haired white cat. I could hear Grandy grumbling about it already.

  Wide blue-green eyes fixed on the notebook, and she took a tentative step forward. I knew I had limited time before she plunked herself in the center of the paper, and for once, that was best.

  Keeping one eye on Friday, I reached beneath the table and withdrew the old crafters’ storage box—another basement find—from the shelf below and brought it up to the tabletop.

  With the latch undone, the cover lifted to expose rows of square cubbies within. Bits of broken glass gleamed from inside each cubby, some larger than the others but none too terribly small. They were remainder bits from older projects, and I had taken to storing them so I had my own mini-library of colors and textures.

  I had done my best to sort the pieces by color—moss with sage, sunflower with buttercup—though some were such a gorgeous conflagration of color variety that they had no single color place. But for this piece, for Trudy Villiers’s window, I suspected she would prefer the simpler blends.

  “Magnolias,” I murmured.

  Friday mewed back.

  “Magnolias,” I said, louder, smiling at her little white face. “They come in different colors.”

  The trick was to find a white with enough pink or a pink with enough white that the subtle color variation of the magnolia blossom would shine.

  Again reaching below the tabletop, I blindly sought the box of latex gloves I kept below and pulled one free. I tugged the glove onto my hand as my eyes scanned the box of color. An assortment of pale pinks nestled in the upper left corner of the box. I stuck a gloved finger into the cubby and flicked past pieces one by one.

  “Hmmm.”

  Mew.

  I reached absently for her and scratched under her chin.

  “Magnolia Bed and Breakfast,” I mused. “She’s got all those roses in the back. Maybe she’d rather have roses?”

  I lifted a broken corner of milk-white glass streaked with pink and held it up to the light. “But she wants magnolias.” I looked to Friday as though we were having a true conversation. “And I have a feeling Trudy gets what Trudy wants, always.”

  She had brand new sidewalks in a town that clung to its old brick walks with the tenacity of a cat on a mouse and she had someone keeping the lawn trim and the bushes shaped. I peered past the glass in my fingers, out the window onto Grandy’s yard. There was some trimming and shaping to be done there as well. If only I had the money to hire someone to snip the boxwoods into shape.

  “Some day,” I said to Friday, giving her a final pat on the head.

  She rubbed her soft cheek against my palm, emitted an uncertain purr.

  “Yeah,” I said on a sigh. “I don’t know how long either.”

  * * *

  There was a storm in the forecast for the afternoon, which was nice in its promise for a cool evening to follow, but bad news for people like me, who planned on walking home from the village shops with a fresh supply of bananas. Figuring with my luck I’d be walking when the storm was due to begin, I grabbed a compact umbrella on my way out the door and ran through ominously humid air to jump into Carrie’s car.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Carrie said as I pulled closed the door behind me.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. Worked out fine. I was all caught up picking colors for Trudy Villiers’s window.”

  “Speaking of Trudy . . .” She smiled a little. “I got an e-mail from her last night. She wants to know if you can stop by tomorrow with sketches for the window.”

  The urge to squirm in my seat was so strong I nearly twitched from the fight. “Just me? What about you? Wouldn’t she rather work with you?”

  Carrie let out a light bark of a laugh. “Georgia, you’re the one designing the window. That makes you the one Trudy has to work with.”

  “No. No. You could just bring her the designs and let me know what she thinks. I’m fine with that.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. “Wait, are you . . . You’re not afraid of Trudy are you?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m not afraid of her. I just . . . don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “Why would you say that?” Carrie asked over a
barely contained giggle.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the way she kept squinting at me and saying ‘Georgia Kelly’ for starters.”

  Carrie chuckled as she turned onto Center Street. “You’re sounding a little paranoid.”

  “Paranoid? She said flat out there’s something wrong with me, which is exactly the sort of thing someone who doesn’t like a person says.”

  “I wouldn’t say she doesn’t like you. More like she doesn’t trust you.”

  While I wrestled with the quick-rising indignation—I was perfectly trustworthy, thank you very much—Carrie steered the car past the grocer’s and turned into the access alleyway leading to the parking area. A turn to the right at the end of the alley would put us in the lot behind the market, but a turn to the left took us to the limited strip of spaces behind the smaller shops, Aggie’s Antiques among them.

  “All the more reason, then,” I said. “You’ll have to come with me or Trudy may not let me in.”

  Sighing, she parked the car and cut the ignition. “You’re still acting like this is a personal affront. To people like Trudy who have lived here their whole lives, you’re still an outsider—no matter how many years of your childhood you lived with Pete.”

  Those years weren’t even consecutive. On and off my mother would move us back to her hometown, typically when she was between husbands. I’m hard-pressed to remember spending winters anywhere other than Wenwood.

  “It’s the adult Georgia they don’t know,” Carrie continued as we made our way across the thin strip of tarmac.

  I huffed. “You didn’t know the adult Georgia and yet we’re friends.”

  She slid her key into the lock set in the steel door. “Yes, but I—” Before she had turned the key, the door creaked open.

  It was only a fraction, but no locked door should pop open unless its lock had been released. Which could only mean one thing.

  Carrie and I gaped at one another, jaws slackening.

  “Did you forget to lock that?”

  She shook her head. “I never forget. Not ever.” Tentatively, she curled her fingers around the handle and tugged.

  “Carrie, I don’t think you should—”

  “Oh, Georgia, I’m sure it’s fine.”

  The door swung open and Carrie ducked inside. Maybe I did have a bit of paranoia going on. All those years living in the city might have made me somewhat overcautious. This was Wenwood for Pete’s sake. It was more realistic for me to expect her to shut off the store alarm and shout to me it was safe to enter.

  I did not expect a scream.

  9

  A half a second’s hesitation was enough time for Carrie to come back out of the shop before I had a chance to go in. I grabbed her arm just above the elbow. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  Carrie backed away from the door, pulling me along with her. “Someone was in the shop.”

  I sucked in a breath. “What? How—”

  “Or maybe someone’s still in there.”

  The sun blazed down on us, baked the tarmac beneath our feet. I managed to break into a sweat at the same time my blood ran cold. “Okay,” I said, quietly. “Okay.”

  Carrie struggled to get her free hand into the purse hung from her shoulder but the strap was a few inches too short to make the movement possible. She knocked the bag behind her repeatedly in her attempts. “Nine-one-one,” she muttered. “Need to call nine-one-one.”

  I nodded frantically and turned her away from the door to her shop. “Pharmacy,” I said. “We’ll call from there.”

  “Right,” she said. “Safe there.”

  “Right.” I agreed.

  The idea that someone had gotten into her store was disturbing enough. The possibility that someone hadn’t left the store made us move with an unstoppable urgency.

  Little more than twenty feet separated the back door of Aggie’s Antiques from the back door of Bing’s Pharmacy, but the distance felt three-times farther. Maybe it was to do with the heat or the humid weight of the air. More likely it had to do with a sudden surge of adrenaline that made time seem to slow and brought the world into crisp focus.

  At the pharmacy door—the same steel style as the antiques shop, with a buzzer placed to the left below a sign directing visitors to ring for deliveries—I finally let go of Carrie. With a murmured prayer of “please be open please be open” she tugged on the door, and we tumbled over the threshold and into a narrow passageway. We passed a series of colorful posters advertising diapers, vitamins, and support hose before the passage opened up onto the sales floor.

  “Not open yet,” a man called. A glass display case sat center store, while the walls were lined with over-the-counter remedies.

  “Fred, it’s me,” Carrie called in return, her voice none too steady. “Carrie? From—from next door?”

  “Carrie, is everything all right?” Fred’s voice drew closer with each word. “You sound shook.”

  He appeared from a recessed doorway behind the register and hurried along the length of the sales counter, a small man with gray hair as thin as his frame. His bushy brows crinkled with concern.

  “Someone broke into my shop,” Carrie said.

  “We’re afraid they may still be in there,” I added.

  “I have to call the police.”

  Fred’s chin fell. He looked from Carrie to me and back again. “Of course. Of course. Use my phone.”

  “I have my cell,” I offered. I shoved a hand into my purse and surprised myself by locating the phone immediately. I passed it to Carrie, my own distress manifesting in the belief that only Carrie was capable of dialing the emergency operator.

  “Good. Good.” Fred dashed past us, down the passage to the back door. As Carrie dialed, a thunk reverberated through the quiet store. Fred was locking his barn after the neighbor’s horses had got out.

  Standing close beside Carrie as she made the call, it was easy to hear the emergency operator come on the line. Together we listened to the operator announce that nine-one-one was for emergencies only and a break-in is not an emergency. Carrie would have to call the precinct.

  She told the operator, “I don’t know the number for the precinct.”

  The operator rattled off the number. Before Carrie could go into a panic looking for pen and paper, I said, “It’s in my contacts. Don’t worry.”

  Carrie thanked the operator and disconnected the call. She handed me back the phone. “You call,” she said. “They know you there.”

  I really wish that wasn’t true.

  Fred joined us as I scrolled through the contacts. “How did someone get into your shop? Didn’t you lock up?”

  “Well, yes, of course I locked up.” Her voice broke on “yes” and deteriorated as she went along.

  I placed my phone on the counter and put an arm around her shoulder. A continuing tremor ran through her. She wrapped her arms around her belly and curled into herself.

  “What about your alarm?” Fred asked. “Did you remember to set it?”

  Carrie let out the smallest possible peep of affront, and I glowered at Fred. “Maybe leave the questions for the police and instead tell me where she can sit down until they get here.”

  “Oh, well, I . . .” He rubbed his hands together like he was applying lotion and glanced back toward the doorway from which he had appeared. “I can’t let just anyone in the dispensary. There are controlled substances back there. Why don’t you go have a seat at Grace’s?”

  I clenched my jaw for a slow count of three. The luncheonette Grace owned and managed was a fine place to grab a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. It was also the ideal location for catching up on every morsel of gossip Wenwood had to offer, or, you know, becoming gossip. “Maybe you could bring a chair out here?” I suggested.

  Fred raised two fingers to his chin and gazed at the ceiling in classic
thinker’s pose.

  “Maybe now?” I snapped.

  “Georgia, it’s okay,” Carrie said on a sigh.

  “No, it’s not okay.” There was no reason for Pharmacy Fred to think twice about helping Carrie. I was pretty sure his hesitation violated some chiseled-in-stone law of small-town compassion.

  Still, it was a small town. I had to remind myself that things were done differently in Wenwood than they were in New York City.

  I took a breath, smiled softly, and said in a much calmer voice, “Fred, it would really be a kindness if Carrie could sit while we wait for the police. She’s had quite an upset.”

  Whether it was my approach or whether Fred had reached his own generous conclusion, he scampered off to fetch a stool, then held Carrie’s elbow as she lowered herself onto the seat.

  Grabbing my phone from the countertop, I scrolled through the contacts until I reached the entry for Pace County Police Department. Hoping Diana was on the desk, I put the phone to my ear and listened to the ringing.

  The grumbling voice on the other end of the line sounded unfamiliar to me and most definitely wasn’t Diana’s. I gave my name and provided the details of the break-in as I knew them—open door, disrupted interior, nonfunctioning alarm—while beside me Carrie muttered about the disruption in her back room. Smashed picture frames, toppled vases, shattered cheval mirror. I informed the desk sergeant we had no knowledge of whether the thief remained in the store, that we had not entered and were holed up in Bing’s Pharmacy.

  “They said you did the right thing by not going into the store,” I said, dropping the phone into my bag. “And we should wait here until an officer arrives.”

  “Oh, dear. Oh.” Fred set to wringing his hands again. “I have orders to fill before I open and . . .” He glanced behind him to the dispensary.

  “And we can’t be here?” I guessed.

  He lifted his shoulders, offered an apologetic smile. “I don’t mind Carrie waiting. I’ve known her since she needed all her medicine in bubble gum flavor.”