The Finest Hour

by Anina Collins

  “So you weren’t upset when he put that big sign up in front of his store that blocks yours?”

  Ralph chuckled and waved away even the suggestion of his being angry at Samuel. “No. You should have seen his face when the sign company came to put it up. His eyes practically bugged right out of his head as he stood there and watched them hang that sign. I didn’t even get a chance to come out and see it before he came running into the store to tell me how it was all a big mistake and he’d fix it. The replacement sign was scheduled to come at the beginning of June.”

  He began to choke up on his words and sighed. “I can’t believe someone could do that to him, Poppy. I know you’ve been working with the police. Do they have any idea who did it?”

  Not wanting to share any details I knew weren’t for public consumption yet, I simply shook my head and frowned. “It’s early yet, but I know they’re working very hard to solve this case. Samuel was loved by everyone in town.”

  “That he was. As I told the officer who came by that day, I have a hard time imagining anyone from Sunset Ridge could have done that to him,” Ralph said sadly.

  “We spoke to his wife this morning. I can’t imagine how hard it is to lose your husband after twenty-five years.”

  For a moment, he just nodded without saying a word, but I had a feeling there something was behind his silence. I waited a few moments more for him to continue the conversation and watched as he opened his mouth to speak and then closed his lips tightly, as if to stop the words from accidentally flying out.

  Wanting to encourage him to say what was on his mind, I said, “She seems very strong, at least from what I saw when we spoke to her today. I can only hope that I’d be that strong if something happened to Alex.”

  That loosened Ralph’s tongue, and after he twisted his face into an expression of distaste, he quietly said, “There’s strength, and then there’s strength. Some is better than others.”

  I wanted to hear more about his ideas about strength, specifically Eliza Morrow’s brand of strength, but a customer interrupted us with a question about a prescription she held in her hand for a cream to help her eczema. The painfully thin woman stared at Ralph with wide eyes like he was the savior she’d been waiting all her life for to solve her problem, so I figured I wouldn’t be able to get any more from him and excused myself so she could have his complete attention. She elbowed me out of the way once she got the signal that our conversation had come to an end, and I turned and left the store still wondering what Ralph had meant by that comment about strength.

  “Hey, Poppy! How are you?” a man’s voice called out as I started on my way back to report what I’d found out to Alex.

  I turned around to see Nate Cardow standing outside his shoe store smiling at me. A sweet man of around fifty, he’d known my father for years and always treated me like the daughter he never had. He liked to wear sweater vests that only served to accentuate the roundness of his middle-aged belly years of drinking beer at McGuire’s has created.

  “Hi Nate! How are you today?”

  He began to walk toward me, still smiling like seeing me made his day. “I’m better now. It’s so nice to see you. Were you getting a prescription filled at Ralph’s?”

  “No. I was just taking a walk on this beautiful May day. I’m just heading back to the station.”

  “You’re still working with the police on cases? I know your father worries himself sick about that. Maybe you should take a break from it for a while.”

  Clearly, my father had been doing some talking behind the bar. I knew he worried, but did he have to tell all his buddies about it? They were worse than the town gossips sometimes.

  I patted Nate on the shoulder and chuckled. “I love it, though, so my father is going to have to keep worrying and trust that Alex won’t let anything happen to his soon-to-be bride. Nice seeing you again! Have a great one!”

  I left him standing there in front of his store and made my way back down Main Street toward the police station feeling like I’d accomplished something in my time with Ralph. Mrs. Scanlon had seemed to misconstrue how he’d felt about that oversized sign of Samuel’s. That didn’t really surprise me, though. She was always trying to stir up trouble wherever she could, and creating problems between a dead man and a fellow businessman certainly wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done with her gossip.

  By the time I reached Alex’s office, I had rehearsed my report on what had transpired at Martin’s Pharmacy at least three times. I knew it wasn’t a big deal or anything like that, but for the first time speaking to a person on a case alone, I wanted to get it right.

  Alex sat typing on his laptop when I walked in, and he looked up with anticipation in his eyes when he saw I’d returned. “Back so soon? Did you find out anything?”

  “You doubt me?” I joked as I sat down in front of his desk.

  Shaking his head, he smiled. “Never. I’ve seen your talent in getting people to talk, Poppy. It’s practically supernatural. You could go into a room with ten perfect strangers and come out an hour later with all their deepest, darkest secrets.”

  “Oh, stop,” I said, outwardly dismissing his compliments while inside I loved hearing them.

  When he didn’t say anything more, I joked, “Well, I guess you took me seriously. But feel free any time to stroke my ego like that again. So I found out that Ralph wasn’t bothered in the least about that sign of Samuel’s.”

  Alex looked disappointed by my announcement. Frowning, he said, “Oh. Okay. I guess Mrs. Scanlon was wrong.”

  “She sure was. Ralph told me that he never even had a chance to say anything to Samuel before he apologized for the sign’s size. I guess it was a mistake, and a new one is being made to replace it. It’s supposed to be switched out early next month. Or at least it was supposed to. So the whole sign thing was a dead end.”

  “I had a feeling it might be. Oh well. Thanks for checking that out.”

  He began to tap away on his laptop again, but I cleared my throat and he looked across the desk at me, clearly confused. “Something else you want to talk about?”

  I’d practiced this whole report the whole way down Main Street, and now he’d pretty much ruined all I’d planned. Disappointed, I said, “Yes. I didn’t spend my entire time talking about that silly giant sign, you know.”

  Alex swiveled in his office chair so he faced me directly and gave me his undivided attention. “I’m sorry. I’m a little distracted. What else did you find out?”

  “Well, I let Ralph know that we had spoken to Eliza Morrow earlier today, and he said something very interesting when I told him that I thought she was strong in how she was handling the death of her husband.”

  Leaning forward, he asked, “Something interesting? Like what?”

  I smiled and repeated Ralph’s words exactly as he’d said them to me. “He said, ‘There’s strength, and then there’s strength. Some is better than others.’”

  Alex’s eyebrows slowly raised up into his forehead. “He said that about Eliza Morrow?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Alex asked, clearly interested in what I had to report.

  I shook my head, wishing I had more to tell him. If only that pencil thin woman hadn’t interrupted us, I might have kept him talking a bit longer.

  “No. One of his customers needed him to help her with her eczema prescription, so I didn’t have a chance to get any more out of him. But I thought that comment all on its own was pretty interesting.”

  “It certainly isn’t a ringing endorsement of Eliza Morrow as a sympathetic figure,” Alex said, sitting back in his chair.

  “I have the feeling very few people would say a lot nice about her. Being standoffish in a small town usually puts people off, and Eliza Morrow is the definition of standoffish.”

  “I wonder what he meant,” Alex said, echoing the very thought in my mind at that moment.

  “No idea, but I thought you’d find it interesting. D
id you find out anything from the financial and phone records yet?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. We got the judge to sign off on us getting them, but it’s Sunday so it might take a little longer.”

  Surprised to hear he’d made so much progress in the short time I’d been gone, I said, “You got Judge Harlow to do work on a Sunday? I’m impressed.”

  Alex threw his head back and laughed. “You’d be amazed how helpful he is on Sundays. I think it’s the only day he doesn’t drink, so other than the hangover early in the morning, he’s pretty useful. Thank God, right, or we wouldn’t get anything on those records until tomorrow.”

  “Speaking of tomorrow, we have the cake tasting,” I reminded him. “You didn’t forget, did you?”

  He cringed, narrowing his eyes to slits. “No, but I’m still confused as to why we have to taste anything. It’s wedding cake. I’ve been to dozens of weddings, and every single piece of wedding cake has tasted the same. Tasteless cake with too sweet icing. It’s like there’s a universal recipe every baker knows.”

  Alex had given me a hassle about this cake tasting idea ever since I first brought it up. He simply didn’t understand that a wedding cake didn’t have to be that awful dessert that tasted like sawdust and pure sugar topping.

  “We have to taste samples so we know what we want our cake to taste like so it doesn’t taste like that typical wedding cake. I made sure to tell the lady at Charming that your favorite cake flavor is chocolate and mine is spice, so I expect those two will be part of the tasting. And I’ve told her that neither one of us like that stiff icing that makes you feel like your teeth are rotting out of your head, so there won’t be any of that.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “And I want fresh flowers on the cake, so she knows that.”

  He squinted again, but this time he looked confused. “Fresh flowers? Are people going to be eating real flowers? I’m not sure I’m up for that, although my grandmother made dandelion wine years ago that my friend and I got into when we were teenagers and got pretty smashed off of.”

  I had to laugh. Even when he was being difficult, he could still be quite cute. “Well, I’m not planning on having the flowers get anyone smashed, but don’t worry. I’m sure my father will make sure the alcohol is flowing just fine. This is a half Irish wedding, after all.”

  “With the other half Italian, which adds to the celebrating. We’ll be lucky if Sunset Ridge is the same ever again after this wedding.”

  I winked at him and chuckled. “I suspect it won’t be, in fact. One of this town’s old maids is marrying one of the most eligible bachelors in Sunset Ridge. The place is going to be forever changed after our wedding.”

  Alex rolled his eyes. “I leave the most eligible bachelor in town thing to Derek. He’s had a lot of practice in the role. And you’ve never been an old maid.”

  Before I could say I was worried about Derek after his breakup months ago from Solange, Alex’s computer made a sound to let him know he had a new email. Clicking on it, he smiled at me.

  “Time to check out the bank records and see what Samuel knew or didn’t know.”

  Chapter Nine

  Stopping him, I stood up and said, “Let me go get Craig. Give me a minute.”

  “Okay. I’m going to print these out, so take your time.”

  I took an easy stroll down the hallway to Craig’s desk and found him reading the Sunset Ridge Officer’s Handbook. Engrossed in whatever it had to say, he didn’t notice me standing in front of him, so I softly tapped on his desk.

  “Hey, I didn’t know you were standing there,” he said, quickly closing the handbook and shoving it into his side desk drawer. “What’s up?”

  “Alex has Samuel’s bank records, so I figured we should all be there when we start reading through them,” I said with a smile as I motioned back toward his office.

  Craig frowned but nodded. The effect seemed strange and awkward. “Oh. Okay. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.” He stopped for a second before he stood up and said, “Forget it. I’ll come right now.”

  I wanted to ask if something was wrong, but he walked away toward Alex’s office without another word, so I followed him, wondering what was bothering him. I couldn’t catch up to Craig before he walked in and began talking to Alex, but I made a mental note to be sure to find out what was on Craig’s mind.

  “Harlow is on a roll today,” Craig said as he sat down in his usual seat in front of Alex’s desk. “Josh said he got him to sign an order already today too.”

  “If only every day could be Sunday,” I mused as I sat down next to him. “Or if we lived in a dry town. That would work too.”

  Alex laughed, but Craig remained stone-faced after my joke. I wasn’t a comedienne by any stretch of the imagination, but my humorous comments usually at least got a smirk from most people ever since Stephen quit the force. Had something changed between Craig and me that I didn’t know about? Had I offended him in some way?

  I definitely needed to talk to him at some point so I could straighten out whatever was going on. What had happened with Stephen wasn’t going to happen again.

  Alex handed us each copies of the bank records. “I’ve skimmed through these already and some things jumped out at me, but I want to know what you guys think.”

  “You know, you could have just sent the file to the two of us and saved all this paper and ink,” I teased him.

  He smirked and pointed at the stack of papers in my hand. “I’m old fashioned. It’s something you’re supposed to love about me. Take a look and tell me what you see in them.”

  Surprised he’d said anything about how we felt about one another at work, I made a silly face at him and then focused my attention on the information the bank had provided. Samuel banked at Third National Bank of Maryland, but had a number of accounts with them. The commercial account for Morrow Jewelers seemed to be pretty much straightforward with deposits each day and withdrawals for bill payments and salary payments for Samuel, the only person who worked at the store.

  As I scanned the numbers, for the first time it dawned on me that Samuel ran that entire business by himself. He was the only sales employee while at the same time being the only buyer for the store.

  The numbers surprised me somewhat, though. Eliza Morrow hadn’t exaggerated by much when she said her husband was worth more alive than dead. Although Morrow Jewelers rarely had more than one or two customers in the store at any time I’d noticed, the business made a substantial income each month, surpassing one hundred thousand a month.

  “How on earth did that business make that kind of money in this town?” I asked as I continued to peruse the bank records for the store.

  “Online sales,” Alex said, making me look up in surprise. “He had a website and even sold on Amazon.”

  “Really? I’d pegged Samuel for some small town, old fashioned shopkeeper, and here he was selling thousands each month online. Good for him.”

  The level of insensitivity in my words hit me as both Alex and Craig stared at me. “Well, it was good until some monster took his life. That’s all I meant. I’m going to close my mouth and read through these records now.”

  I returned to scanning the numbers in front of me, feeling awkward about how I’d put my foot into my mouth. After a few minutes of silence, Craig spoke up and said, “What is the payment to someone named Jefferson Sterling? It’s on page eighteen from the personal account that had only his name on it. It’s for five grand in January of this year. That’s a lot of money, don’t you think?”

  As I shuffled the stack of papers I held to get to page eighteen, Alex said, “What name did you say? Jefferson Sterling? I know that name. How, though? Give me a minute. It will come to me.”

  I read the information on the page about this Sterling man and then flipped the page to see if any other payments were made to him from that same account. I read back as far as the records went and saw nothing more mentioned about him, so I continued into
the personal account Samuel and his wife shared and saw no other entry about any payment to Sterling.

  “That’s the only one I can see,” I said to Alex and Craig.

  “One payment of five grand to him from a private account only Samuel drew on. Any chance it had something to do with the jewelry business but he just needed to use money from his personal account?” Craig asked, directing his question more toward Alex than me.

  “I don’t know. What I do want to know is who Jefferson Sterling is. I know that name. It’s from something…” Alex said, letting his sentence trail off into silence.

  “Maybe he has a website,” I suggested, growing more curious by the second who this man was and why Samuel had paid him five thousand dollars at the beginning of the year.

  Alex pointed at me, nodding his head enthusiastically. “That’s a good idea. I might as well Google his name and see what comes up.”

  While he typed away to search for information on Jefferson Sterling, I walked around the desk to see what came up. As soon as Alex read the first listing—a headline from a Baltimore newspaper article—he clapped his hands together in excitement.

  “I knew it! I knew I’d heard his name before and in a case too. He’s a private eye in the Baltimore area.”

  Scanning the page, I read through the entries until his website came up near the bottom. I pointed at it. “Click on that. I want to see this guy’s website. What exactly do you put on a private eye’s website? Hoping to catch your significant other cheating on you with some beefcake? You’ve come to the right place. We’ll prove she’s unfaithful or your money back.”

  Alex looked up at me and rolled his eyes as the page loaded. “You’re in rare form today, Poppy.”

  Before we could examine Jefferson Sterling P.I.’s site, Craig announced, “I need to go talk to Derek about something. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  We looked at him, the two of us surprised as he walked out without saying another word, and then at each other. “Was it something I said?” I asked, half-joking but still worried about what could be bothering Craig.