Accessories & Alibis (The Presley Thurman Mystery Series Book 10)

by Laina Turner

  “Welcome ladies,” I said with a big smile as I let them in. I propped one of the doors open and put a sidewalk sign out advertising our sale and cranked the heat, so the store didn’t get too chilly since it was barely thirty out. I figured what was a heating bill in light of all the other money I owed.

  The morning got consistently busier. Many of the customers who were personally invited showed up and we even got some walk by traffic. Even more exciting was people were buying things. There was a semi-steady line at the cash register. Poor Brenda got flustered any time the line got too long. I'm sure she wasn’t used to it, but it was a good problem to have. The deals were so good our, usually, picky customers were snapping things up. I couldn’t have been happier with how things were going, and helping customers put together outfits. My fun was short lived, however, when Katy came over and whispered in my ear that we had a bit of an issue.

  “What?” I said, not believing what she was telling me.

  “There’s a customer in the fitting room who is adamant the Halston dress we have out isn’t really a Halston.”

  “You’re kidding?” I said, but Katy shook her head. “OK, who is she.” Katy led me back to the fitting room.

  “Vivian, this is Presley, the owner,” Katy said.

  “Hi Vivian,” I said, holding out my hand which she completely ignored, telling me this wasn’t going to be an easy customer. “What can I help you with?"

  “This isn’t a Halston dress. To try and pass it off as one at this price is unethical. I’ve bought many things here and wonder how many other items I’ve purchased that were fake. What kind of business are you running here?” She said angrily.

  “I assure you we do not sell knock-offs here." Trying not to get defensive, but I had to admit it was hard. I was pissed she was accusing my store of this.

  “You’re lying,” she interrupted me. “Look at this stitching. The thread is cheap and already starting to loosen. This is not a Halston stitch,” she said, shoving the dress in my face. My shock at seeing she was right, the stitching was loose, and that was an odd thing for any designer dress, outweighed my surprise she would have such an eye for quality. I was no longer defensive, now I was worried.

  “Vivian, I see the stitching is pulling, but I promise you we don’t sell knock off merchandise here. It’s probably one that slipped through quality assurance at the manufacturer and for that I apologize. We should have noticed when we put it out.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not sticking around and spending my money on this, this garbage. Come on ladies,” she said to two other women in the fitting room. “Let’s head over to Miss Rose’s where they will have quality dresses and aren’t trying to scam their customers.”

  She made her way out of the store, her friends following her, and I sat down on one of the chairs, putting my head in my hands.

  “Just when I think we are making progress. It’s one step forward, twenty-five steps back,” I said to Katy, lifting my head backup to look at her. “What else could happen?”

  Katy hesitated.

  “What?” I said, knowing she had something to say.

  “When you were talking to her, I went and checked the other dresses on the rack. I don’t know anything about designer stitching, but all the seams are loose.”

  “All the dresses?” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Wow!” This wasn’t good.

  ”I take it that’s unusual?”

  I nodded. “Outlet malls exist for a reason, but it’s rare for a high-end product like this to produce imperfections that wouldn’t be caught prior to filling orders. They have impeccable quality standards. I doubt I saw more than one flawed piece of merchandise the entire year I worked here before. To have the entire shipment damaged is unthinkable.”

  “Should we pull them off the floor?”

  “Absolutely. We can’t afford one more person to think we are selling substandard merchandise, and I’m going to call the company we bought these from right now.” Except as I, got to my office I realized I didn’t have a number for the vendor who sent this merchandise or an invoice. We still hadn’t been able to find it. It hadn’t bothered me before, I thought it was misplaced, but now I had a bad feeling about this. Maybe these knock offs. Did that mean Silk had carried other merchandise that wasn’t the real thing. I couldn’t bear to think of something like that happening.

  I glanced up to see Joyce walk through the front door of Silk with a strange look on her face and hoped she wasn’t going to tell me she quit or something. I couldn’t handle any more bad news right now. She was the one sales associate, besides Roxanne, who seemed to care. And Joyce wasn’t an alleged murderer, so that gave her bonus points. I gave a small laugh at thinking my new employee standard was just not having a felony charge.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, bracing myself for bad news.

  “You have to see this,” she said and shoved a piece of paper in my face.

  “What is it?”

  “Just read it.”

  Ok, whatever it was seemed very important to Joyce. I scanned the document that was a print out of a news article, and my eyes grew wide as I read down the few short paragraphs. I then read it again to make sure I understood what I was reading.

  “I don’t believe it? How did you find this?” I finally said.

  “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I was doing some mindless surfing on the web. I thought I would Google Roxanne for kicks. This is what I found.”

  “What’s going on,” Katy said walking up to see us huddled over the article.

  “Look at this,” I said handing her the paper and wondering what else could happen today.

  She quickly scanned it and looked back up to us. “Roxanne was accused of murder in Iowa?” She said in a surprised tone, just as shocked as I was.

  “No wonder she didn’t want me to call back home when she was arrested. Though I’m sure, the police here know this. Damn that Willie for holding out on me,” I said, wondering what else he knew that I didn’t. But it would be nice information to have before I continued to help her. Obviously that’s why he kept telling me to be careful. One of several reasons as I was coming to find out.

  “It said the charges were dropped so maybe she’s innocent,” said Katy.

  “I thought that too,” said Joyce, “but doesn’t being accused of murder twice in a lifetime seem more than coincidental? I looked it up. The odds are like three million to one.”

  “Really. You looked that up?” I said.

  Joyce nodded. “Everything is on Google.”

  “I agree it does seem like way too much of a coincidence. Plus if it were just a coincidence, then don’t you think she would have mentioned it?” I said. “There wouldn’t be a reason to hide it.”

  “She was only seventeen at the time,” said Katy. “Maybe she did do something impulsively and now she regrets it. Kids do stupid things.”

  “She’s only twenty-three now. That’s not very long ago,” Joyce pointed out.

  “But what could she have to gain?” Katy said. That’s what I loved about her. She always wanted to see the good in people. Sometimes though it just wasn’t there, and I was beginning to think I had made a serious error in judgment with Roxanne. Every time I turned around I discovered something else she hadn’t been forthcoming with. I was feeling stupid for believing her without doing more research.

  “It says her boyfriend had broken up with her and started seeing another girl. She was angry and allegedly ran him off the road into a ravine, and he died on impact. She was later cleared because she had an alibi for the time this happened. There was speculation her friend was lying for her, but the police couldn’t prove it, so all charges were dropped. The reporter says that public pressure pushed the police to drop the matter and rule it an accident. I guess they didn’t want to believe that a teenage girl could do such a thing,” I said thinking it interesting she had an alibi. As she supposedly did for Drew’s murde
r. Though in this case her alibi had disappeared.

  “It is hard to believe,” Katy said. “But I’m sure that would be the same sentiment in our home town. People don’t want to believe it can happen in their community.”

  “True, but it does happen. There are quite a few Lifetime movies out there on this very same topic,” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t this have come up when you Googled her?” Katy asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, wondering the same thing myself. “I just Googled her name and Drew’s name and Chicago so maybe I just didn’t look deep enough.”

  “It was on the fourth page of Google, and I used Iowa as a search term, since I knew that’s where she was from,” said Joyce. “Are you going to ask her about it?”

  “I should. This information certainly doesn’t look good for her.”

  “Does that mean you think she’s guilty now?” Katy asked.

  “I don’t know, Katy. I just don’t know.”

  “Listen, I’m not due into work for a few more hours. I just came in because I wanted you to see this right away I’m heading out to take some pictures and then I’ll be back,” said Joyce.

  “Sounds good, Joyce.” As she walked out something hit me. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t come to me before. Though with everything going on lately it’s a wonder, I could even think at all.

  Come on,” I said to Katy and dragged her back to the office where my laptop was.

  “What are you doing? There still is a sales floor full of people.”

  “I know. This will only take a minute.”

  I had been online the other night when I wasn’t able to sleep, making some tweaks to the eBay store when one of the boxes at the bottom that showed the similar things you might be interested in caught my eye. Ebay and Amazon always sucked me in that way. Leading me down a rabbit hole of cool clothes and merchandise I just couldn’t resist and would find a way to justify the purchase because of course it was always a good deal. This time, although the dress was beautiful, that’s not what caught my eye. It was the label. It was a Threads Abound dress. Interesting coincidence.

  I had clicked through to the items and then saw the link on the side to take you to this seller page for more items like this and clicked on that. It opened up a page, a couple pages it looked like by the tabs at the bottom, of high-end ladies’ merchandise, much like we carried at Silk. I started reading some of the brands and then stopped to grab a notebook to write it all down in for later reference. That’s what I wanted to show Katy.

  Katy and I reached the office, and I walked over to the other side of the room where my bag was sitting and pulled out a notebook.

  I grabbed the file off my desk that had the list of vendors from Gary and double-checked them against my notebook.

  “You aren’t going to believe this.”

  “What,” she said.

  “I was checking our eBay site the other night and came across another seller on there who has all the same brands that we sell including the one we have no record of any merchandise for, yet have been somehow getting paid. I just cross-referenced them with the other vendors we carry and there are pieces from each one on there,” I said. I then opened my laptop and pulled up the site and handed her my notebook to show her.

  “Are you thinking whoever that site belongs to stole our merchandise?”

  “I know it seems like a long shot but what are the odds that it’s just a coincidence. Yes, maybe one or two pieces but not ninety percent of the collection. It would stand to reason that a few pieces would be sold so of course it’s not 100%, and the records here aren’t the best, but it sure makes me wonder. It’s a duplicate of the eBay store we just put up. Except ours has older merchandise,” I said wryly.

  “Does it say whose store it is?” Katy said.

  “No, the seller name Aperture 26, with an eBay-generated email. The kind everyone gets when they sign up.”

  Katy frowned. “Yeah, it would have been more helpful if it were Anne Smith 555-1212.”

  I laughed. “You know it’s never that easy and until just now I had no idea what could be done to find out who it was.”

  “Until now? What do you mean?”

  “Something clicked when Joyce mentioned photography. I think it’s her.”

  “Who’s her?”

  “The eBay store. I think it’s Joyce.”

  “Why would you think that? I thought you liked Joyce?”

  “I do like Joyce. But it fits. Aperture. The eBay screen name. It’s a photography term. It’s a circular opening inside the lens that can change in diameter to control the amount of light reaching the camera's sensor or film. The diameter is expressed in numbers called f/stops; the lower the number, the larger the aperture opening,” I said. “It makes sense. She’s a photography buff so that would be a related screen name.”

  “How did you even know what aperture means?”

  “Hey, I know things,” I said, pretending to be defensive. Katy just gave me a look. “OK, fine. I looked it up.”

  I hated thinking that Joyce could be stealing from Silk; I did like her, but it would be a relief to know who was behind the missing merchandise. It meant I could bring closure to one bad thing that was happening lately.

  “Do you really think Joyce has been stealing from you?”

  “I hate to think so because I thought she cared about Silk and seeing it succeed, but you know as well as I do that even nice people do stupid things. And we don’t know her that well. Maybe I’ve jumped to the wrong conclusions about her and Roxanne. The way this place has been run it wouldn’t have been all that hard to steal. She’s probably been ordering the stuff with Silk’s account numbers and then when it’s going to arrive she makes sure to work that day so she can intercept the boxes. I doubt Roxanne even noticed.”

  “No, I doubt she would. But why would Joyce do such a thing?” Katy said.

  “Why does anyone steal? To pad their income because they feel entitled, because they feel someone owes them, because they’re mad.” I said, listing the reasons that came immediately to my head.

  “Those came to you quick,” Katy said.

  “It’s a holdover from the HR days. Most people who steal have justified it in their mind. You know she wants to focus on her photography business. Selling stolen merchandise on eBay leaves her a lot more free time than working more hours at Silk.”

  “It sounds feasible, more than feasible, but you can’t exactly come right out and accuse her without more proof.”

  “I know and I’m not sure how to get that.” Ebony was twirling around my feet, so I picked her up. “What about you Eb. How can we get more proof that Joyce is stealing?"

  Ebony just purred and then jumped out of my arms onto the desk where she crawled up on my computer and lay down on the keyboard. It was a good thing she was cute because she was absolutely no help.

  Chapter 18

  I wasn’t able to focus the rest of the day. Between the news that Roxanne had been accused of murder before and that Joyce might be stealing, the routine at Silk wasn’t keeping my attention. Even though, it was still fairly busy and that I was grateful for. Brenda and Debbie had even stepped it up and were proving to be good at sales, if nothing else.

  “What’s wrong,” said Katy. “You seem very distracted.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about everything going on and why people seem so untrustworthy. I can’t believe all Roxanne’s hiding and that I was dumb enough to believe in her.”

  “You’re not dumb. You’re kind and wanted to believe in her and help. Naïve maybe, but not dumb. And even with all this information she may still be innocent.”

  “I don’t know, all this looks bad.”

  “Normal people don’t get accused of murder twice in a lifetime. Joyce was right about that. So there has to be something she’s said or done that should have tipped me off. She clearly isn’t as innocent as she might seem.”

  “You can’t read people’s minds, Presley. You never
know what’s going on in their head. Though she seems like a regular down to earth gal for someone who has been accused of this.”

  “She has good motivation, the other woman in Drew’s life. Which is alleged is what riled her up when she was seventeen. That to me almost seems like a pattern of behavior.”

  “I wish Willie would call me back. I’ve left him two messages telling him what we found out about Roxanne’s past, after Joyce dropped that bomb. I just don’t know!” It was so frustrating, and I was mad at myself for not digging deeper in her past and being so blindly trusting. “Maybe I should try to talk to Patricia Fielding.”

  “Drew’s fiancée? Are you sure you want to open that can of worms?”

  “I realize she doesn’t seem like the most approachable woman but maybe she knows something about Roxanne. I know it would probably be skewed since she wasn’t Roxanne’s biggest fan, but I might learn something helpful.”

  “It’s sunny outside. Why don’t you go get us some coffee from the corner? The walk might clear your head, and you can decide if you want to contact her. Maybe you should just remove yourself from this situation all together,” Katy suggested.

  “Good idea about going for a walk,” I said, going to get my coat and to head out. It was still in the thirties outside, but sunshine made all the difference, and I was sure it would help my mood. I was frustrated and wished I hadn’t got involved but even though Katy was right, and I should remove myself from the whole mess, there was no way I could at this point. I wanted to figure this out.

  The minute I walked out the door the alarm on my phone went off. I looked at it, and it was the reminder to call Gary with my decision. I stared at my phone as I walked down the street, knowing what it was I needed to do, but scared to make the call. I wanted to make this work so badly, but I needed to make the best decision for my future not just what I wanted at the moment. I had to be careful so as to not jeopardize everything I had built up so far in my adult life. To lose it all would be unthinkable. I needed to do this and just get it over with. Rip off the Band-Aid. I would survive. I somehow always did.