A Fairfield Romance Box Set 1

by Lydia Reeves

  It was true enough that I’d been the rude one that first night, and it had been no fault of hers that she’d picked such a bad time to introduce herself to a neighbor. But it hadn’t taken too long for me to see that I’d likely dodged a bullet. Because the girl was strange. Honestly, what kind of a person hid behind a tree, shopping bags crinkling and plainly visible to anyone with eyes. Had she really thought I wouldn’t see her there? And even if I had, what the hell did she think I was going to do?

  I shook my head, flinging water droplets around the tiny cubicle, and made quick work of rinsing the soap off my body before shutting off the spray and stepping out of the shower.

  Whatever.

  I toweled off quickly and made my way into my bedroom, carefully ignoring the overgrown geranium on my windowsill—the only plant in my apartment—as I pulled on my uniform. I didn’t need to waste more time on some crazy person’s motivation. I needed to get to work.

  * * *

  “Oh, good, you’re here.”

  I’d barely made it halfway through the door before the chief pulled me into his office.

  “There’s been another robbery, at Royal’s Dry Cleaners,” my boss informed me, glancing up over the top of his computer monitor with only half his attention. His bushy grey eyebrows were pulled down over deep-set hazel eyes, and with his thick greying beard, he looked like nothing more than a harried, overworked Santa Claus. “We just got the call. I know you just walked in, but Murphy’s doing a presentation down at the middle school and Brady and Jansen are out on another call. Can you take it?”

  “Of course, sir,” I said, shrugging my arm back into the coat I’d just started taking off. One of the downsides of working in a department this small—it was either dead quiet, or we didn’t have enough people. There was never any middle ground.

  He filled me in on the little he knew, but I was halfway back to my car before I realized where I was headed. Royal’s Dry Cleaners was three doors down from my jiu-jitsu gym, where I’d been not an hour earlier, and only a few blocks from my apartment. Had I been at the gym when the robbery was taking place?

  I broke into a jog, ducking into my car and backing out of the parking lot. This was the second robbery in as many weeks. The first place that was hit had been the bank on the corner, just a few blocks away from where I was headed now. I hadn’t been the one who responded to the alarm, but I remembered what I’d read in the file—the crime had occurred in the early morning just after the bank had opened, when only the bank manager and one teller had been there. The perpetrator had been wearing grey sweats and a mask, and despite two eye-witness accounts and a bunch of surveillance footage, we hadn’t even been able to determine if the robber had been a man or a woman. I wondered idly if the same person was at fault for this new break-in as well.

  The door to the dry cleaners flew open before I’d even crossed the sidewalk and I was ushered inside by a frantic looking older woman of indeterminate Eastern European heritage with a long white braid framing a lined face. She closed and locked the door behind me and led me around the counter to a small office where a girl in her late teens was huddled in a plastic chair, wiping tears from her face.

  “Sit,” the woman ordered me, then followed up her command with a hand on my shoulder, pushing me down into the second matching plastic chair. I managed not to raise an eyebrow and let her push me down, then retrieved the small notepad I kept in my pocket and flipped it open.

  “Okay, I’m Officer Mathes, and I—”

  “Ana, tell him what happened,” the older woman cut me off, turning her stern expression on the young woman across from me, then barreled on before the girl had a chance to open her mouth.

  “Lots of people drop off clothes around noon, when they are on their lunch break, but it was only about ten-thirty, and we had no customers. Andras—that’s my son, the girl’s uncle—had told me there was a delivery coming today, and I…”

  I listened to the increasingly convoluted story, taking notes and trying to sort out names and details, and it was probably more than five minutes into the old woman’s rant before I realized—

  “Ma’am, were you here when the robbery took place?”

  She paused mid-sentence and stared at me in confusion. “No, I—”

  “Was…” I consulted my notepad, “Andras here?”

  She glared. “No, but—”

  I reigned in my irritation at the flustered and increasingly belligerent woman. “Who was here at ten-thirty this morning when the robbery took place?”

  “Well…if you—”

  Finally, the young woman across from me spoke up, her voice soft and scratchy. “I was.”

  I shot the older woman my best quelling look and turned my attention to the girl. “Ana, right? Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  Once Ana got her turn to speak, the story came out quickly and with an unfortunate lack of detail. She’d been alone in the store when one person had come in, wearing dark clothes and a face mask that covered his—her?—face. No, the person hadn’t spoken, just handed a note across the counter, which had instructed her to hand over any cash she had in the register, and threatened that the robber would use a gun if she didn’t comply. No, she couldn’t provide the note, as the criminal had snatched it back after she read it. No, she hadn’t actually seen a weapon. Yes, she had handed over the money from the register, which had amounted to two-hundred and forty-seven dollars.

  I couldn’t get anything else useful out of either of them, despite the old woman’s attempt to chime in with everything from the history of the store to the family’s genealogy to whether rain was expected that afternoon and how that might affect me should I need to chase down any potential criminals on foot. I left the pair with a case number and a promise to follow up as soon as I knew anything.

  The rest of the day was spent running in circles without more than a minute to sit and catch my breath. I responded to a fender bender out in front of the high school and dealt with a child custody dispute, followed up on a complaint from a lady whose neighbor’s dog kept digging under her fence, and then ended my day with a noise complaint from the neighbors of a family whose teenaged son had started a band in his garage. In such a small department as ours, everyone specialized in everything, and calls generally got assigned to whomever was free. And while I always preferred busy days to those spent sitting around with nothing to do—I’d never dealt well with being idle—by the time I arrived home that evening I was tired and hungry and more than ready to be away from other people, especially after a day when it seemed like all anyone was capable of was yelling at each other.

  When I stepped through the front door of my apartment building and heard voices, my first reaction was to cringe. The last thing I needed was more people on the way to the solitude I desperately wanted. My apartment was down at the end of the hallway, with the strange plant woman Marian next door. On her other side was a young couple, and directly across the hall from me was an elderly lady who didn’t seem to be home very often. A vacant apartment next to her rounded out our floor.

  The elderly lady—Mrs. Linsey, I believed—was home now though, her door propped open, and Marian leaned against the frame, the two of them laughing together. A glance their way revealed the woman had a hand pressed against her mouth, and Marian was practically doubled over, tears streaming down her face.

  A wave of vague irritation passed through me at the sight, and the knowledge that the noise of their laughter would be clearly audible through my door, cutting into my much-desired silence. Hopefully they wouldn’t be long; one of the things I appreciated most about this building was how it was relatively peaceful for an apartment complex—no children, no loud pets.

  As I drew closer to the pair, the sound of Marian’s laughter filled my ears. Her laugh was low and husky, as if it came from deep inside her and bubbled up uncontrollably. It was an infectious sound, the sort that made you want to smile along, and seemed out of place coming from such a slight figu
re. The form of my irritation abruptly changed shape.

  I couldn’t help but notice how friendly she was with the neighbors. I often found her leaving small gifts—homemade cookies, small crafts, who knew what else—for the young couple down the hall, and checking in on Mrs. Linsey when she was home. And not just the neighbors—everyone. I’d see her in the grocery store chatting up the cashiers, or stopping people walking by on the sidewalk to exclaim over their pets. A smile and a friendly word for everyone she passed.

  Everyone, that was, except me.

  As I passed the women their laughter faded, and they both straightened.

  “Evening, officer,” said Mrs. Linsey, casting a friendly smile my way, but my eyes were on Marian. There was no smile there, no greeting, just wide eyes watching me out of a face flushed with recent laughter but turned suddenly serious.

  I grunted in response and gave a short nod, then let myself into my apartment and firmly shut the door behind me.

  The laughter didn’t resume; only silence followed me through the door. And yet it wasn’t relief that I felt. My longing for solitude had seemingly evaporated, leaving behind only irritation and resentment, maybe something a little like envy, and perhaps some other feelings I didn’t care to identify.

  Chapter 3

  MARIAN

  I waited until Mrs. Linsey’s door was firmly closed before I let myself back into my own apartment. The action wasn’t even intentional, just an ingrained habit after years of keeping my space completely private. Even the landlord had never set foot in my apartment since I’d moved in. I did all my own repairs and he knew and respected that my space was off-limits. I assume he chalked it up to one of my quirks. God knew I had enough of them.

  This wasn’t exactly a quirk, though, I thought to myself as I picked my way across the living room floor. The path was narrow, piles of junk towering high on both sides, hiding the furniture that lurked somewhere beneath the clutter. It was a mess of shopping bags, cardboard boxes, plastic containers and tote bags, loose supplies, papers and…anything. Everything. I wasn’t even sure what all was lost in there anymore. Bags full of stained glass supplies, I knew, from a shopping trip two years ago, hidden dangerously somewhere under the window I thought. The remains of craft projects both large and small, half-finished and barely started and never out of their bags. Unopened junk mail and magazines. Books and fabric.

  It had started out so small, so manageable—a row of plastic totes next to the couch and a tall cabinet in the corner, bought to contain the collection of scrapbooking supplies I’d bought when I’d finally escaped my aunt’s house and moved into my own place for the first time. Had that really only been five years ago? It seemed a lifetime.

  My mother had been big into scrapbooking, with a row of albums on the shelf documenting my childhood and teenage years. I still had those books, lined up in the back of my closet, well away from the mess of my living room, but untouched going on nine years now. Mom had made all her own greeting cards too—beautiful, colorful things with buttons and ribbons attached, that she sent out for every birthday, anniversary, or pretty much any other life event of anyone she’d ever known.

  We hadn’t had a lot of money growing up—my clothes had all come from thrift stores and our apartment had always been tiny and cramped, though clean. Birthdays and vacations had never been extravagant, and bills were always paid, if sometimes after a couple of threatening reminders, but one thing my mother never skimped on was scrapbooking supplies. She’d had a tall cabinet in the corner of the dining room, and I remembered standing in front of the open doors as a child, marveling over the beautiful array of colored cardstock and patterned papers, the multitude of carefully organized stamps and scissors and pens and markers.

  So when I’d turned eighteen and my aunt had informed me—to my utter shock—that my mother, who, contrary to anything I’d ever known growing up, had actually left me a sizable sum of money, the first thing I did was move into my own place, and the second was to buy Fairfield Hobby and Craft out of most of their scrapbooking supplies.

  Two days later, I’d remembered the time my mom had tried to teach me origami. I’d been probably no more than six or seven, and driven to tears when I couldn’t fold the lines as cleanly as she could, and my paper elephant came out looking like it had been trampled. The next morning, I went out and stocked up on origami supplies—whisper-thin paper in colorful patterns, and delicate folding tools made out of bone and bamboo.

  Calligraphy had come next, then weaving, then beading, and by that point I was running out of space, so I piled it all on the couch, determined to find a way to organize it all later. Later had never come.

  It had taken about a year for the disaster to spread into my dining room. Then it consumed my spare bedroom, and then spilled down the hall, everything stacked precariously to one side so I could still navigate the narrow space.

  My kitchen was still decently presentable though, and down at the end of the hall, a person in my bedroom or bathroom might never know the state of the rest of my apartment. In my bedroom, I could almost pretend I was a normal person. Not that anyone had ever been in there besides me.

  Navigating the mess, I made my way into the bedroom and stripped out of my clothes, throwing them into the hamper before pulling on a tank top. I was tired, and it didn’t take long to brush my teeth, flip off the lights, and slide under the covers. But when I closed my eyes, a frowning face with messy sandy hair filled my vision.

  Levi.

  I blinked my eyes open, but in the darkness of the room, the memory didn’t fade. Why did he hate me so much? What had I ever done to him?

  The memory sneered at me, grunted in the barest acknowledgment, just as the man in the hallway had done, not just now, but every time I’d crossed his path in the past two years. But above the frown, and beneath the creased brow, his eyes glittered with an expression I couldn’t quite interpret, and when I finally fell asleep, those glittering eyes followed me into my dreams.

  * * *

  Regardless of the mess that was my personal life, working at Sam’s Books was a dream job. It was part-time, which gave me plenty of time to myself every day, though that was about to change. I didn’t need the money, so it didn’t matter that the pay was low. And the people there were wonderful.

  Sam, the owner, was a big teddy bear of a man, easygoing and a great boss. His girlfriend, Ellen, was sweet and friendly, and despite having her own apartment nearby, seemed to spend more time than not at Sam’s place right above the store. Rachel, the other part-time cashier, was a college student with sparkling eyes and a wicked sense of humor, and we got along well. And Geoff, who manned the cafe, was a culinary wizard. He was in the process of opening his own bakery just down the road, and while I was sure I would still see plenty of him—not to mention the fact that he would still be supplying pastries for our cafe—I was sad to see him go. Sam had offered me the chance to go up to full-time, rather than just hiring a new replacement for Geoff, and I had tentatively agreed. The change made me nervous though. It wasn’t that I had anything better to do with my time, and I did love the job, but…it would be different. All change made me nervous.

  I was still part-time through the end of the week though, so when I showed up for my shift, it was shortly after noon and the store was quiet. Just regulars at this time of day, and I smiled as I hung up my jacket in Sam’s office and went out to shelve a cart full of new inventory.

  “Hi Marian!” The greeting came from Mrs. Semmler, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties with her two young girls. They came in at least once a week, and were currently looking at chapter books in the children’s section. I smiled warmly before bending down.

  “And how are you two today?” I greeted the girls, then paused and dug through the box of books I was currently shelving. It took a minute, but I found what I was looking for and handed the book over. The older girl’s face lit at the bright red cover.

  “Book four. It just came in. I haven’t even
put them out on the shelf yet.” It was the latest in a series of children’s fantasy stories I knew the girl had been waiting for, and she hugged it to her chest before turning to show the book to her mother.

  After a few more pleasantries I left them there, moving across with my cart to the mysteries section, where two men were browsing the shelves. One was a man I didn’t know, and I gave him a warm smile and instructed him to let me know if he needed any help. He nodded and I moved around him, filling the shelves and straightening the spines until I reached the other man, who was balancing four books precariously in one hand as he attempted to flip through the pages of a fifth with the other.

  “Need some help, Gary?” I asked with a smile. Gary was another regular, in his mid-fifties at a guess, with thinning hair and a somewhat hooked nose over a slight frame. He looked up in surprise at my voice, as if he hadn’t noticed I was there, but when he saw me, his eyes creased and he waved the book he was thumbing through in consternation.

  “Well now, Marian, I can’t remember if I’ve read this one before or not.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think there are many in this section that you haven’t read. But if you want to come over to the computer, I can at least see if you’ve bought it before.”

  He gave me a sheepish look and followed me up to the computer at the register. A few keystrokes later, and I had to laugh.

  “Not only did you buy that same book about three months ago, but you already have two of those as well,” I said, gesturing toward the stack he held in his other hand.

  He looked in surprise down at his books, then gave a rueful chuckle and handed the stack over. “I guess I’ll take the other two then. What would I do without you, Marian?”

  I smiled and rolled my eyes, then scanned his books and sent him on his way. Gary would be back in a couple of days. I wasn’t sure if he worked, or was married, or anything else about the man, but he would be in here buying mysteries twice a week like clockwork.