Killed With a Kiss

by Fiona Grace

  “But you did. Unconsciously,” Gina replied. “Which meant you were willfully flirting.”

  “Willfully flirting?” Lacey echoed. “You make it sound like a crime. I love Tom. I’d never do anything to hurt him. Do you think I should tell him about it?”

  “I think that would be for the best,” her confidante replied with a sympathetic smile.

  Lacey nodded her agreement. “If only I could pin him down for five seconds to do it,” she added.

  “Good point,” Gina replied. “He’s going to be far too busy today for a social call. As will we.” She gestured to all the people on the beach to illustrate her point. There really were a lot of them!

  “It was busy yesterday, I take it?” Lacey asked.

  “It was,” Gina replied. “We’re going to need to do some restocking this morning. It’s looking rather bare.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Lacey said. “We don’t want a half-empty store. It’ll make us look like a pair of asses.”

  Gina squinted her eyes. “I take it you saw the poster.”

  “Yes, I saw the poster! A donkey? Gina, I think you need new glasses.”

  “I told you, it was so busy. I must’ve clicked on the wrong picture and emailed it to the printers without double checking. Goodness knows why they didn’t think to ask me if I really want an ass on my poster for a horse show, but there you go.”

  Lacey started chuckling. “At least it’s just one poster. I’m sure it will give the locals a good giggle.”

  “About that…” Gina said.

  Lacey looked over at her. “What now?”

  “The printers sort of talked me into a promotional deal. I got enough for the high street.”

  Lacey sighed. “Don’t you remember me saying to get one poster? And how many did you buy? Fifteen? Twenty?”

  “Fifty.”

  Lacey couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. Only Gina could make a little mistake fifty times worse.

  “They were very persuasive!” Gina said defensively.

  The two women veered off the beach and onto the promenade. They reached their favorite coffee shop, where a queue was stretching right out the door.

  “I haven’t had to get in line for coffee since my New York days,” Lacey commented.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Gina said. “Wilfordshire’s the hip new place to be these days. Or at least for the next week.”

  They took their place at the back of the queue, behind a smartly dressed middle-aged couple. Gina nudged Lacey, pointed at their backs, and mouthed, “Rich horsey people!”

  Lacey nodded her agreement. It was obvious just from their clothes they were out-of-towners. None of the women in Wilfordshire would wear stilettos at breakfast, and the men wore their shirts tucked into jeans, not suit pants. Added to that, the woman was complaining about the uneven cobblestones hurting her feet (hence the unspoken no stilettos before breakfast rule, Lacey thought) and the man was complaining that he was too hot because there wasn’t enough shade in the town (so why not take off your waistcoat?).

  The queue took ages to go down, forcing Lacey and Gina to endure the couple’s constant whining, but finally they were served and left with their coffees. As they headed up the high street, Lacey noticed that a lot of the stores seemed to have jacked up their prices from yesterday. Jane’s toy store, which usually sold wooden kids toys, now had a row of beautiful, handcrafted rocking horses lined up outside with very big price tags to match. The shoe shop now seemed to entirely stock leather riding boots, and Taryn’s boutique mannequins were dressed in jockey-inspired couture.

  As Lacey waited for the shutters to rise, she glanced over at Tom’s patisserie. He’d opened early to catch the breakfast crowd, and it was already packed inside.

  “Looks like he was inspired by our donkey,” Gina said, pointing at the macaron display.

  Tom clearly hadn’t found enough time to fix his macaron horse properly. The head he’d made to replace the last one was made with lavender macarons, which looked gray from where they were standing. It was also too big for the body, and to put it bluntly, was quite ugly. Not that it had put off the customers.

  Lacey laughed, then laughed again when she turned back to the store window, the shutters now rolled all the way up, and saw the donkey poster on proud display. “We should probably take that down.”

  “Absolutely not,” Gina said. “It’s charming. Besides, I was reading the website last night and you can actually donate to the horses and donkeys there. We could donate some of the proceeds from the auction to them. Then if anyone laughs about the poster, we can guilt trip them into donating too!”

  Lacey gave her a peculiar look. “Your mind works in strange ways,” she said, as she unlocked the front door. “I’ll definitely make a donation, though. It’s awful that some of the racehorses get abandoned when they’re old.”

  She pushed the door open and entered the distinctly empty-looking store. She hadn’t noticed in the darkness of yesterday evening, what with a head full of ruminations, but it had clearly been a very successful day.

  “I see what you mean,” Lacey said, surveying the bare shelves. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  They immediately began carrying stock through from the backroom onto the main floor. The retro window display was looking particularly depleted.

  “I didn’t think they’d be the type to like lava lamps,” Lacey said to Gina, as they maneuvered a paisley orange armchair into the gap that had been left.

  “They seem to like anything that costs money,” Gina commented.

  “We’d better hurry,” Lacey added, looking at the queues forming outside various stores on the street. “That bell’s going to start tinkling off the hook soon enough.”

  She spoke too late. The door opened, the bell jangled, and in walked Mr. and Mrs. Rich Horsey. Or should that be Monsieur and Mademoiselle Cheval? The couple were French; the argument they were having with one another as they walked through the door immediately gave them away.

  Lacey and Gina exchanged a glance. It was as if the couple didn’t even care that they were there. They just kept on arguing, right in the middle of the store.

  The woman went over to the crockery section and took down a plate. The man looked over his shoulder and found Gina and Lacey in the window.

  “My wife wants this thing,” he said brusquely. “God knows why. How much is it?”

  Lacey steeled herself. She went over to the man and checked the ticket. “Forty pounds.”

  “How much is that in euros?” he asked, not even looking at her.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” Lacey said.

  “You don’t know?” he spat, incredulously. “Why don’t you know? Isn’t it your job to know? All the other big stores put their prices in pounds and euros. Why don’t you?”

  “Because we’re not a big store,” Lacey told him simply. “We’re a small independent, and we write all our labels by hand.”

  He rolled his eyes like this was the biggest inconvenience, then turned to his wife and spoke rapidly in French. By his hand gestures, Lacey deduced that he was telling her he wasn’t going to buy the plate because he didn’t know how much it cost. Then to Lacey’s surprise, the woman began bawling, right in the middle of the store.

  Eyebrows raised, Lacey looked over at Gina. Gina was quite clearly trying to stifle her laughter at the sight of a grown woman sobbing over a plate.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” the man barked at Lacey.

  Lacey’s capacity for speech completely failed her. Which was probably for the best, because her instinct was to ask how on earth his wife’s childish tantrum was in any way her fault.

  As Mademoiselle Cheval continued weeping, the main door opened with a tinkle and a woman in a purple velvet gown entered. But she took one look at the crying French woman before promptly turning around again and walking away.

  Lacey had to get these two out of her store quick; they were driving away the customers!

&nb
sp; She quickly made the conversion calculation in her head. “Forty pounds works out at about forty-three euros.”

  “Fine,” the man said, slapping his credit card down on the counter. “Ring it up. She’ll never stop otherwise.”

  “Great,” Lacey said. “But I have to put it through in pounds, you understand.”

  “Yes, yes, whatever. Just hurry up.”

  Lacey bit her tongue to stifle her frustration. She went around behind the counter and rang up the sale. As soon as the wife realized what was happening, she stopped crying.

  Lacey couldn’t believe the behavior of these people. If the rest of the horsey people were like these two, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep her cool.

  She handed them their purchase and watched them leave before turning to Gina.

  “Please don’t tell me that’s an indication of things to come,” she said.

  Gina flashed her a pitying smile. “I’m afraid that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Great,” Lacey muttered.

  Her week ahead seemed suddenly intimidating. Had she bitten off more than she could chew when it came to the rich horsey folk?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lacey’s muscles strained as she tugged the fold-out chairs through the storage room door. There was a lot she needed to get ready for the auction—from deciding the order of items she’d be selling, typing up the itinerary, and physically setting up the room—and time seemed to be in short supply.

  “Lacey?” came Gina’s voice from the shop floor. “How much is the Chinoiserie mantel clock? The red one with the pagoda roof?”

  “Two hundred!” Lacey called back, before getting back to the task at hand.

  “Will you take one fifty?” Gina called.

  Lacey sighed and abandoned her task. This had been happening all day—her being interrupted mid-task by queries. But despite the busyness, she was still grateful for the custom.

  She headed for the shop floor to deal with the situation herself. As worried as she was about how she’d find time to fit everything in before D-day, she still had a shop of customers to attend to. Or rather, a shop stuffed full of customers, she realized as she reached the main floor.

  She shimmied her way through the browsers, finding Gina standing with an older gentleman who had bushy mutton-chop sideburns. His brown corduroy trousers and purple silk shirt immediately gave him away as one of the horsey people because only someone with no money worries could get away with dressing so eccentrically.

  “Lacey can help you with your query,” Gina said, gesturing to her with a hand.

  The man turned to her. “Two hundred is a bit steep, don’t you think?”

  “Steep?” Lacey replied, jovially. “I think you mean a steal!” She took the clock from him, turning it around in her hands. It was a spectacular specimen, its peculiar design inspired by the architecture of pagodas, with a distinctive sakura flower pattern in red and gold. “I take a lot of pride in my mantel clocks, sir,” she continued. “They’re among my top selling items.” She gestured to the busy shop floor. “And I’ve no need to drop the price, since I know someone else will be more than happy to pay for it in full.”

  The man smirked, one of his bushy eyebrows inching upward. “You drive a hard bargain,” he said.

  “I like to think I drive an honest one,” Lacey said, meeting his expression with a cheeky grin.

  He chuckled. “Fine. I’ll take it! Two hundred it is.”

  Lacey felt triumphant. She pressed a hand to Gina’s arm. “Could you ring this up for the gentleman?” she said, before flashing her a that’s-how-it’s-done look.

  She was about to return to her chair-tugging task, when a familiar voice stopped her.

  “I see you’re holding another auction.”

  Lacey looked over. It was Taryn, her neighbor and nemesis.

  For the first time ever, Taryn wasn’t dressed all in black. Instead, she was wearing a silk, nip-waisted jacket in red over a ruffled white shirt, tight jeans, and high-heeled riding boots. She looked less like a walking corpse and more like a Victorian-era vampire. The only thing missing from the ensemble was a top hat and whip.

  From her stern expression, Lacey guessed Taryn was here to complain about something. She braced herself.

  “How can I help you, Taryn?” she asked, adopting the impassive, polite tone she always did when dealing with the petulant boutique owner from next door.

  “I just want to remind you to keep the noise down during your auction,” Taryn said. “You know our walls are paper thin, and the sound drives me and my customers nuts. All that rapid talking and banging. ‘Sold!’” she mimicked, using an offensively bad American accent. “You know these stores aren’t meant for hundreds of people to sit in them for hours on end.”

  She would say that, Lacey thought. Her minimalist boutique only ever had a few customers inside it at any one time.

  “I’ll try my best,” Lacey said, though she knew it would be impossible to meet Taryn’s terms. Auctions were noisy by nature. “Anyway, I’m only expecting about a dozen participants, not hundreds.”

  Taryn pulled a face. “Don’t be absurd. Your auction is just the sort of thing these horsey people love. You’ll be over capacity, trust me. If there’s anything to worry about, it’ll be people getting annoyed for not being able to attend. Which reminds me, I’m not having my boutique entrance blocked by people queueing to get in, either. If my front door gets blocked for even a minute, I’ll be forced to get the chain-link fences out of storage, and I’ll charge you for the privilege.”

  “I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Lacey said, wondering what scenarios had presented themselves to Taryn in the past that she even owned steel crowd control fences.

  “It better not,” Taryn snapped. Then she turned and marched away.

  Lacey watched her go, the cogs of her mind beginning to whirr. Was Taryn right? Would hundreds of people really want to come to her auction? Would there really be lines out the door?

  Obviously, Taryn had a tendency for overexaggeration, but if she was correct on this occasion and there really were hundreds of people interested in Lacey’s auction, where was she going to put them all?

  Suddenly, a moment of inspiration struck Lacey. In her old job as an interior design assistant, she’d often attended auctions on behalf of Saskia. But of course her control-freak boss never let her bid on anything without checking with her first, so Lacey would end up having her on a conference call and relaying the proceedings to her like some kind of sports commentator. Saskia always said auction houses needed to modernize and set up some kind of live online interactive system. Well, what if Lacey did just that?

  Feeling a surge of inspiration, Lacey thought it through. If attendees could watch the auction proceedings through a live feed, and have some kind of way to place their bids, then it would solve the problem of her not having enough space. Maybe once the system was in place and had been tried out this time, she could make her future auctions international, opening up her auction house to the whole world!

  She was dreaming big, she knew that. But why not dream big? It was dreaming big that had brought her to Wilfordshire in the first place. Why couldn’t she be the one to modernize the industry?

  Lacey became more and more excited as her idea started to crystalize in her mind. She’d need someone tech savvy to help her, of course, since she was basically technologically incompetent. The app she shared with her mom and sister was really the most she could handle. It might not even be possible to set up an online system, especially in the short time frame, but perhaps someone more tech-literate than herself would be able to tell her how doable it really was. Gina, of course, would be no help. Tom had a more techy brain than Lacey did, but he was far too busy to ask.

  “Suzy!” Lacey cried.

  Her friend Suzy ran the Lodge B&B, and was her junior by seventeen years. Seventeen years made all the difference when it came to technological competence!

  Itching
with excitement, Lacey grabbed the old dial-up phone from the counter and punched in her friend’s digits. But the call just rang and rang, before going unanswered.

  Now what? Lacey thought. She really wanted to run with this idea before her self-saboteur talked her out of it. She could call the Lodge directly, of course, but her chances of actually getting hold of Suzy through the busy reception desk were slim to none. She’d stand more of a chance if she just turned up in person.

  Lacey paused. There was still so much to do here, and so many customers in need of assistance. But if she didn’t grab this moment now, she might never.

  She snatched up her car keys and hurried around the counter, whistling to Chester.

  He lifted his head, looking as excited as Lacey now felt about her online auction idea. He jumped to his feet and followed her as she beelined for the exit in an attempt to get away before anyone stopped her and asked any questions.

  “Hey! Lacey?” Gina cried as she streaked past. “Where are you going?”

  “Ummm… lunch break!” Lacey called back.

  She hurried out the door before Gina could protest.

  Out on the street, the effects of the Summer Equestrian Festival were becoming more and more evident. The streets looked like someone had blown up a fancy liquor store, with debris and bottles of expensive wine lying in the gutters. The poor street cleaners were working overtime to try and keep the town neat and tidy, but they were evidently losing the battle against the sheer number of festival attendees.

  Lacey had never seen anything quite like it, outside of an actual music festival in a muddy field, that was. And she thought the English were meant to be genteel! Hadn’t anyone told that to the drunk women in the fascinators dancing on the benches?

  She reached her car and got inside, relieved for the sanctity. But her peace was short lived. When she turned on to the main road, she found it nearly impossible to actually drive. People were spilling over the sidewalks into the road, treating it like it was pedestrianized. Lacey realized her quick trip to the Lodge was going to take far longer than she’d anticipated. She’d definitely feel the wrath of Gina once she returned.