by Amy Vansant
“That’s good. Are you going to be there a while?”
“Couple of hours. Why?”
“I’m going to swing over. I could bring you some dinner. Maybe something nice for you and Blade? I’m downtown. I could grab—”
Declan interrupted her. “Hold on. I know when I’m being set up. What are you up to?”
“Me? Nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I just need to talk you into hanging out with your crazy ex-girlfriend for a bit.
Declan sounded dubious. “Hm. Well, I’ll be here. If you want to bring us something to eat, that’s up to you. But food will in no way indenture me to you.”
“Of course not. I’ll surprise you.”
He laughed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Charlotte hung up and entered Jimmy’s.
Like all the local businesses, Jimmy had his air conditioning at full blast. Nothing kept customers in a shop longer than hiding from the Florida heat.
She wrapped her arms around her body and rubbed her shoulders.
“Can I help you?” asked an elegant-looking older woman in a canary-yellow suit from her position behind the counter.
“Is Jimmy in?”
“Mr. Novak is in the back. I’ll see if he’s available.”
The woman walked to the back of the shop and Charlotte strolled along the glass cases. Most of the jewelry proved a little large and gaudy for her tastes, but she spotted an adorable pair of silver pineapple earrings she didn’t hate the idea of owning.
She glanced up in time to spot a dark-haired man pop his head into the front of the shop. His eyes locked on her and she waved, unsure how to respond. The man’s expression relaxed and he walked out to greet her, his hand extended.
“Hello, miss, I’m Jimmy the Jeweler. How can I help you today? Engagement ring shopping perhaps?”
Charlotte chuckled. “No. I wanted to ask you a few questions about Kristopher Rudolph.”
Jimmy blanched. He took a step back, as if the urge to run had struck him so hard he had to fight it.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Deputy Morgan.” She searched in her bag for the badge Frank had given her and held it up for him to see.
I’ll have to think of another way to carry this thing.
Pulling the badge from the clutter of her purse didn’t have the cool she’d hoped to evoke.
Jimmy eyeballed her from head to toe. “Since when do deputies wear shorts?”
Charlotte didn’t want to tell him Frank refused to give her a uniform. “Plain clothes division.”
Jimmy nodded. Apparently, he believed plain clothed deputies were a thing. Maybe she hadn’t made it up after all. Maybe they were a thing. Or maybe she was the first. They could make a television program about her...Charlotte Morgan: Plain Clothes Deputy. She could almost hear the intro music...
“Did you find it?” asked Jimmy, his voice a whisper.
Charlotte snapped back to the issue at hand. “What?”
Jimmy glanced at the woman behind the counter and maneuvered so his back would be to her. The woman took a step back and pretended to straighten a display. She’d been leaning forward to better hear their conversation.
“Did you find it?” he asked again.
Charlotte’s brow knit. “Find what?”
“The ring. The ruby and emerald ring.”
Charlotte decided to pretend Frank hadn’t already told her about the ring. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking?”
Jimmy grimaced and touched Charlotte’s triceps, the pressure of his fingertips coming just short of grabbing her arm. He eased her towards the front door, leaving her unsure if he wanted to speak outside, away from the prying ears of his sales associate, or if he’d decided to kick her out for invoking his costly and possibly misguided trust in Kris.
She was about to object to being manhandled when he mumbled, “We’ll talk outside.”
Charlotte pulled her arm from his touch and led the way through the front door and on to the sidewalk.
Jimmy squinted in the sun, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his glasses. The quick shift from arctic air conditioning to Florida sunshine had caused condensation to build behind them.
“Kris has a ring of mine.”
“You mean he had it when he died?” asked Charlotte.
Jimmy finished cleaning his lenses and put his glasses back on his face. He looked up and down the street to be sure no one could overhear them.
“Yes, he had the ring when he died. I need you to find it.”
“Mr. Novak, it’s been a week. Why didn’t you mention something sooner?”
Jimmy huffed. “I told Frank about it today. I didn’t hear he’d died until a few days after. And, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to do. If my insurance finds out I loaned him the ring, they won’t pay out.”
“So you want me to help you commit insurance fraud? Did you not see the badge?” Charlotte hadn’t had the badge for fifteen minutes and someone was already asking her to disrespect it. She pulled it from her purse and held it up again, giggly at the chance to do so.
Novak hissed his answer. “No, I don’t want you to help me commit fraud. I just want you to find the damn ring.”
“But what if we don’t find it?”
“What do you mean? I’m telling you he has it.”
“If we don’t find it, you’ll need to claim the insurance on it, right?”
Jimmy wiped his upper lip with his handkerchief. “Well, of course—” He stopped, his features wilting. “Oh. I get it. I just told you they can’t know I lent out the ring.”
“Right.”
“That puts you in an awkward position.”
Charlotte shook her head. “Not really. It puts you in an awkward position.”
“Well, they won’t know to ask you—” Jimmy thrust his hand in his pocket to find his handkerchief for the third time in a minute. The sweat poured from the top of his thinning hairline, splitting to run in rivulets across his left and right temples. Some of the moisture decided it didn’t have time to pick a direction and instead dripped straight down, swan-diving onto the tip of his nose. He wiped it all away and Charlotte watched it ooze back into existence.
“Can we just start over and pretend I didn’t say any of this?”
Charlotte smiled. “Just tell me what you know about Kris. Is there any reason for you to think he’d done something with the ring?”
“No, I mean, not really... It’s just—” He groaned. “I’ve handled this all wrong. I didn’t realize he died until...” Jimmy trailed off. “Are you trying to tell me it’s already too late?”
“No. I don’t know. I know we weren’t looking for a ring before. I know his wife has already sold the contents of his home—”
“What? Did she take the ring, thinking it was his?”
“I don’t know.”
Jimmy buried his face in his handkerchief and made another sweep of his skull with it. “Stupid. Stupid.” He stared at Charlotte, and she imagined she could see the gears in his mind grinding.
“Is it possible he faked his death?” he asked.
Charlotte laughed and then caught herself. She sobered and cleared her throat. “No. That’s definitely not possible.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw his body and believe me, he wasn’t faking.”
“What was it? Heart attack?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Jimmy wrung his hands together and peered up into the sky, squinting. “Why did I bring you out here to talk? We should have gone back into the office.”
“When I asked you if you had any reason to believe Mr. Rudolph had done something with the ring, you didn’t seem sure about your answer.”
“I’m not. He seemed like a great guy but—”
“But?”
“But I got an email.”
“From who?”
“I don’t
know. It was anonymous. It said he was up to no good. I called him but I couldn’t get a hold of him. It worried me, but he already had the ring to show off at the parade and there wasn’t much I could do. I figured I’d get it back from him as soon as the parade was over. But I sort of lost track of time for a couple days and then I heard he was dead—”
“Do you still have it? The email?”
He nodded. “I can show you in the office. Thank god.” He opened the door and strode through the showroom.
The woman behind the counter smiled at them as they passed but Jimmy didn’t acknowledge her. Charlotte smiled back before breaking into a trot to keep up with him.
“If the ring is so valuable, why did you give it to him in the first place?” Charlotte asked as they entered the office.
Jimmy sat down at his desk and hit his shift key several times to wake his laptop.
“You don’t think I ask myself that every day?”
“I mean, you were donating it to the raffle, right?”
“Yes. I mean, no. Not exactly. He was going to pay me for it with money from the raffle right after Christmas. Wholesale cost, but I wouldn’t be out any cash.”
Charlotte scowled. “That isn’t how donated raffle items usually work, is it?”
Jimmy shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But that’s what made this a win-win for everyone. That’s what he said.”
“So, you trusted him?”
Jimmy sighed. “I did. That’s the worst part. He said the money was going to testicular cancer research and I lost my father to testicular cancer...”
Jimmy turned back to his screen and clicked to his email.
“Here you go.”
Charlotte leaned down to read. The note was short, but warned doing business with Kristopher Rudolph would end badly. The author, ‘Anonymous Christmas Elf,’ promised to get back Jimmy’s ring in exchange for a thousand dollars. If Jimmy waited to take advantage of the deal until after Christmas, the price jumped to two thousand.
Jimmy motioned to the screen. “See? This email sounds more suspect than anything Kris ever said, so I don’t know who to believe.”
Charlotte frowned. “Do you mind if I forward this to myself?”
Jimmy pushed his rolling chair away from the desk to make room for her. “No, go ahead.”
“I might need to talk to you again.” She sent the email to her personal account. It didn’t feel right but she didn’t have an official deputy account.
Yet.
“And the ring?” asked Jimmy.
She straightened. We’ll keep an eye out for the ring.”
The jeweler took a deep breath. “Thank you. I appreciate it. Hey, did Arnie get his car back?”
“What’s that?”
“Arnie Burke. Did he get his car back from Kris?”
Charlotte recognized the name of a local car dealer. She’d grown up listening to him hawk his vehicles on local commercials.
“You’re saying Arnie Burke gave Kris a car?”
He nodded. “Same deal as me. We offer our stuff to charity and he pays us wholesale for it through the money raised by the raffle. Everyone’s a winner.”
“I haven’t talked to Arnie.”
Jimmy thrust his hands in his pockets. “I’d been meaning to ask him, but I was embarrassed for him to find out the predicament I put myself in.”
Charlotte put out a hand to shake. “I’ll look into it. Thank you for your cooperation.”
“No problem. So I should just sit tight?”
“Give us a little time. I’ll see if we can find your property.”
Jimmy nodded and looked away. He muttered something Charlotte couldn’t hear but she could read his lips.
“Stupid.”
Chapter Twelve
The Previous Evening
The four gingerbread men sat in the truck as the driver slammed the vehicle into gear. He’d gotten pretty good at driving with puffy foam hands, but the way their heads wedged against the ceiling sometimes made things difficult.
“This is all your fault.”
Gingerbread Two, sitting in the passenger seat, turned his head as far as he could before the cheek of his round face bumped into his headrest. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes, I’m talking to you. You’re the one who put the elf in his mouth,” said Four.
“You said to shut him up. What was I supposed to do?”
“I dunno, maybe not choke him to death.”
“How was I supposed to know he’d inhale the thing?”
“If I asked you turn down the television, would you chuck it out the window?”
Two raised a mitt, straining against his seat belt to reach for Four. “I swear I’m gonna—”
“You two cut it out,” said Gingerbread Three, sitting behind Two in the backseat of the truck’s double cab. “None of this bickering is going to help anything.”
Four slapped at his own head. “Couldn’t we have gotten better disguises for this? I can’t breathe in this thing.”
Two scoffed. “You’d rather a stocking, I guess? Maybe a nice ski mask?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it, I would prefer a stocking to a freaking gingerbread man. I’d have mentioned it to you sooner but I was afraid you’d kill me.”
Two turned his head so hard and fast his foam face ricocheted against his seat and nearly bounced him into the dash.
“I didn’t mean to kill him!”
“Stop it!” screamed Three, again trying to keep the two of them from lunging for each other.
One made a hard left turn and everyone had to stop fighting to keep their balance. “Look, I know the costumes are dumb but they made sense at the time. It made it easy to sneak into the parade.”
“A lot of good that did us,” said Four. “We didn’t get him there like we planned.”
“No. And no, it didn’t make a ton of sense to show up at his house wearing these, but they’re all we got. We didn’t think everything would take this long.”
“We didn’t think everything would go so wrong,” said Four.
“It’s not like we can get something else now,” muttered One.
“Why not?” asked Two, sounding more curious than annoyed.
One huffed. “Do you not watch Dateline? How many times do you have to watch a guy on a closed-circuit television buying rope and shovels and plastic bags and gloves before you realize you cannot go shopping for things like that.”
“But all we need is a ski mask.”
“In Florida? Could we buy anything more suspicious?”
“I don’t think they even sell ski masks in Florida,” said Three.
Four shrugged. “People down here go up north sometimes, don’t they? They have to be able to dress for other weather.”
“Who would leave Florida to go somewhere where you have to wear a ski mask?”
“I would,” muttered Two. “I would leave Florida where you have to wear these stupid costumes twenty-four hours a day. As long as I can get away from this place and never come back.”
Three made a little yipping noise. “Ooh, what about pantyhose? Everyone buys pantyhose.”
One shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what we buy. If someone sees us and reports we were all wearing pantyhose on our heads, what’s the first thing they’re going to look for on all the local stores’ cameras to prove it was us?”
Three grunted. “People buying pantyhose.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah, come on, Karen, use your head, everyone knows that,” chimed in Four.
“I told you, don’t use our names,” snapped One.
“We’re the only people in the car.”
“Get used to it or you’ll slip.”
Four snorted. “Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to end up in jail thanks to Randy.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” muttered Two.
One pulled into Pineapple Port and crept through the neighborhood until they were
a few houses away from Kristopher Rudolph’s. He pulled over to the curb in front of a house with a “for sale” sign on its lawn. They’d parked in the same spot the night everything had gone so wrong. Feeling superstitious, One crept forward another spot to take the curse off them.
Three reached for the door.
One held out a foam paw. “Hold it. We don’t all have to go in. You two stay in the back.”
“What do we do if we see someone?”
“Just sit tight.”
“Don’t you think we look a little weird back here in these costumes?” asked Four.
“Just hold really still. They’ll think you’re a lawn decoration,” said Two.
Three grunted her approval. “That’s a good idea. But what if they don’t see us? What if someone sees you? What if you get arrested?”
Gingerbread One adjusted his head. “No one’s going to arrest me.”
“Hurry up,” said Four.
“Be careful,” added Three.
One and Two let themselves out of the car and eased the doors shut. They scurried as fast as their thick foam legs would allow to the front of Kris’s house and slipped into the screened porch.
Two peered out the way they had come. “I don’t think anyone saw us.”
“If they did, they’re probably making a note to talk to their doctor about their medication.”
Two chuckled. “They never mention giant gingerbread man hallucinations on the drug commercials.”
“Try the door.”
Two put a foam paw on either side of the doorknob and tried to turn it.
“I think it’s locked.”
“Is it locked or can you just not grab it?”
“A little of both. But no, it’s definitely locked.”
One tottered in a circle until he faced the window facing the porch. He pushed up on the sash, only to have his covered hands slide across the glass. He took off one mitt and tried again. The window moved.
“This is open.”
One pushed open the window and stood staring at it, mentally calculating his inflated size against the width of the window. Using his mitt, he rubbed the greasy handprint off the glass and then slipped back into the glove. He didn’t move.