For Sale On Display

by Hollie Hutchins

  For Sale On Display

  Hollie Hutchins

  Contents

  1. Big City Detective

  2. Welcome to Idle Waters

  3. Small Town Ways

  4. Deputy For A Day

  5. Stakeout

  6. A Child’s Intuition

  7. Master Manipulators

  8. Professional Differences

  9. First Date Blues

  10. The Virgin Behind the Glass

  11. Glass Box Not Included

  12. The Woman with Stormy Eyes

  13. Building Trust

  14. New Lovers, Old Friends

  15. Letting Go

  More By Hollie

  Sold To The Master

  Sold To The Prince Of The Meldanians

  Two Fathers One Secret

  Let’s Be Friends!

  Copyright

  Big City Detective

  There were days, they were few and far apart, but they existed, in which Anna’s initiation was not perfect. Today, unfortunately, was one of those days. She had a pretty good feeling when she woke up this morning that she would be receiving a call from the Idle Waters, Michigan sheriff sometime today, but now it was nearly five o’clock Central Standard Time and her phone had not rung once.

  She had been staring down that the cheap, plastic receiver for nearly twenty minutes now, having finished all other work for the day but not yet ready to pack it in. At 4:48 her boss walked down the hallway passed her office and, like always, he poked his head in to say goodnight.

  “You staying late?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” Anna did not much enjoy small talk, especially with Mr. Barris. He somehow always found a way to steer the conversation towards an ‘ask out’, in which he would blatantly and inappropriately tell Anna how attracted he was to her and basically beg her to go get a drink with him.

  “You work so hard, you know that?” He smirked. “Way harder than me. If you keep this up, you’ll be fast tracked to lead detective. I’ll even write you a glowing letter of recommendation if you’d like.”

  “No thanks,” said Anna. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Oh c’mon.” He stepped fully into her office and leaned against the door frame. “I would be honored to tell them how talented and smart you are. Really, it would be hard not to gush about you. Although, the hardest part for me would probably be trying to sound objective and to not mention how drop dead gorgeous you are.”

  Anna sighed and reached into the top right drawer of her desk. Inside, next to her organized by color ballpoint pens and a pad of paper, lay a small recording device. She pressed the red button and closed the drawer before Mr. Barris had an opportunity to ask what she was doing.

  “Mr. Barris,” she said. “We’ve talked about this. I would really appreciate it if you would treat me like a colleague, and speak to me with the same respect and consideration you do the male employees.”

  Her boss scoffed. “What are you insinuating?” His eyes widened, as if he was truly shocked by what she was saying, as if it had never occurred to him that he was behaving inappropriately, even though Anna had told him as much on multiple occasions. “I have nothing but respect for you! I’m sorry if you think my comments crossed some sort of line—”

  “Ha!” Anna yelled, no longer able to contain herself. “If I think your comments may have crossed a line! Are you insane?” She stood and slammed her hands down on her desk. “Ever since I started working here, you have taken every opportunity to cross the line. You make comments about how much you want to date, you go way too far and you’re way to vulgar when you compliment my looks, and don’t even get me started on the staff holiday party last month!”

  Mr. Barris grinned. “If I remember correctly, it was you who got too drunk at the party and made a complete idiot of yourself. I was only trying to help!”

  “I only got drunk because you were spiking my drinks when I wasn’t looking! I only ever drank from the non-alcoholic punch bowl but—” Suddenly, Anna realized how crazy she must appear, her face red, sweaty, pointing a finger across the room and yelling at a man who would not listen to word she said. This had been going on for years, and she record all the inappropriate conversations she’d like, it wasn’t like HR was going to do anything. They were all buddies with the boss and Anna was just a lowly detective.

  “You know what?” she said, smoothing down the front of her black pencil skirt and smiling. “This just isn’t worth it anymore. I quit.”

  “What?” Mr. Barris’s grin melted off his face. He frowned at her and dropped his voice, possibly in an attempt to intimidate her, but it made him sound more cartoonish than aggressive. “You can’t quit.” He laughed. “Where are you going to go? This is the only reputable detective agency in the city!”

  “I’m leaving the city all together,” said Anna. “In fact, I already have another job lined up with a sheriff’s department in a different town.” This was not exactly true. Anna had applied for a job in the sheriff’s department of Idle Waters, but of course had not yet heard back. It didn’t matter. If she didn’t get that job, she’d go out for another. Anything to get her out of this place. She had enough in savings to last her a few months, six maybe if she was thrifty.

  “Consider this my two weeks’ notice,” she said, throwing a few documents into her open briefcase on her desk and snapping it shut. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  She offered Mr. Barris a sarcastic smile as she passed him in the doorway and started down the hall.

  “You can keep your two weeks!” he yelled after her. “Because you’re fired! Effective immediately!”

  Anna pushed the button to call the elevator and waited until she was inside and the doors were fully closed before throwing her arms up in a victorious gesture.

  “Yes!” she said.

  Not only did she never have to set food in that horrible place again, but not she was going to get a lovely severance package from the company, which she was planning on using for a down payment on a big, heavy duty Jeep with four wheel drive. Wherever she may end up, she knew she was going north, where the towns were small and the snowfall is measured in yards, not feet.

  There was a message waiting for Anna on her home phone. The red light on the monitor was flashing when she walked into her sparsely furnished studio apartment. Anna didn’t like cellphones. It made her uncomfortable, the idea that someone could contact her anytime, anywhere. Not to mention all the talk about the government using the phone to track people and listen to their conversations. She listened to the message as she removed her coat, scarf, and gloves, throwing them haphazardly in a pile on her mattress in the corner of the room.

  “Hello, I am calling for a Ms. Anna Arndold.” It was the new Sheriff of Idle Waters, Anna recognized his voice from when they had spoken on the phone briefly the day prior. She had called to make sure her application was received by them, having never heard a confirmation. “This is Sheriff Wells. I tried you at your office, like you asked, just a few minutes ago. It appears you had already left.” The man let out a quiet chuckle. “You’re boss actually answered your phone, which I thought was a little odd, but I decided not to read too much into it. Er, uh, anyway, he told me you went home. He asked who I was, but I figured you didn’t want your boss knowing you were applying to a new job, so I, uh, lied and said I was your brother. Hopefully you actually have a brother.” He sounded a little nervous and Anna couldn’t help but smile a little at the man’s rambling. “Anyway, I am calling to let you know that the job of Deputy Sheriff of Idle Waters is yours if you’d like it. Please give me a call back as soon as you can to let me know what you want to do. You have my number. Okay, buh-bye now.”

  Anna nearly jumped on the receiver a
nd hit redial, knowing for a fact his was the last number she had called. She didn’t have many friends or family, and nobody ever called. She sat down on her mattress, which sat on the floor. The phone she had on a small bedside table.

  “Hello?” said Sheriff Wells.

  “Sheriff, it’s Anna. Arnold. Anna Arnold.”

  “Oh yes, Ms. Arnold, thank you for calling me back.”

  “Of course, I’m glad you’re still in the office.”

  “I’ve been staying late a lot these days, trying to get everything in order after the last Sheriff um, well, you know.”

  Anna bit her lip, unsure whether or not to offer her condolences or change the subject. “I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “It all sounds very stressful.”

  “It is, but nothing we can’t handle. We Idle Waters folks is strong, and we can get through just about anything. Including this.” The ‘this’ Sheriff Wells was referring too was a string of gruesome murders that had recently rocked the small Northern Michigan town. The latest one involving the former sheriff, hence Sheriff Wells taking over and advertising for a new deputy. “To get back to the subject at hand, however.” He cleared his throat. “Please tell me you are accepting my offer, because if I have to look at another resume I think I’m going to totally snow crazy.”

  Anna laughed. “Snow crazy?”

  “It’s a saying we have up here,” Wells explained. “Snow crazy is a special type of crazy people get in the middle of the winter, when everything is quiet and your bones ache all the time from the bitterness of it all. Anyway, we use snow crazy when we want to say someone is really losing it. Or, in my case, when we want to be overly dramatic.”

  “I see,” said Anna. “I have good news for you then, Sheriff. I am accepting your offer. How soon do you need me to start?”

  “That’s fantastic! But the real question is, how soon can you start?”

  Anna frowned and looked around at her apartment. She guessed would take her all of about two hours to pack up all her stuff and make the necessary move-out arrangements with her landlord. All the loose ends with her old job she could probably take care of over the phone and they should be willing to provide her severance through a direct deposit, like her paychecks. Really, the only thing left would be to sell her old car and get herself a new one.

  “I can leave here as early as Thursday, be in the office first thing Friday morning,” she said. That gave her a full two days to box up her life and prepare herself for a fresh start, which was more than enough time.

  “That would be amazing,” said Sheriff Wells. “I thought for sure you would need to work at least another two weeks at your current job, but hey, we will take you as soon as we can get you. Things are getting really hairy out here and we could really use someone with your…” He paused and Anna waited on the other line, curious to know what words he would use to describe her abilities. “Unique skill set.”

  Unique skill set? Sure. That about covers it.

  “You can fill out all the new-employee paperwork when you get here,” said Sheriff Wells. “And of course I’ll have to run a background check, but I can’t imagine that should be a problem?”

  Anna smirked. In her early twenties, when she was working as a freelance private eye, she had done a lot of shady things, some of which were illegal, but she’d never gotten caught. One of, if not the, greatest benefit to being and Intuit was that Anna knew, instinctively, when shit was about to hit the fan, and therefore, she knew when to run, when to hide, and when to standby and think of a way to talk herself out of a situation.

  “I can’t imagine there should be any trouble with the background check,” she said sweetly. “I lead a pretty quiet life.”

  “Then you’ll probably feel right at home up here in Idle Waters,” said Wells. “We are a pretty quiet town, aside from this current business,” he quickly added. “Of course, the whole point in hiring you is the hope that you’ll be able to get this all cleaned up right quick.”

  “I will do my best.”

  “Great, then I will see you Friday.”

  “See you then. Bye!”

  “Buh-bye.”

  Anna hung the phone up and laid back onto her bed and thought about how everything in her life was going to change.

  Finally.

  Welcome to Idle Waters

  The northern woods of Michigan reminded Anna of her childhood. Her paternal grandparents used to have a cabin near Lake Superior when she was growing up. Of course, that was before the price of land in that area began to skyrocket as a result of the economic crash. Soon after that, her grandparents had to sell the cabin in order to afford to pay the rent on the small home they had purchased near the city.

  As she drove through the snow frosted pine forests, in her new—well, new to her—dark green Jeep Wrangler, Anna tried not to think too hard about her family, but the nostalgia was overwhelming, and she soon found herself thinking of her late father and wondering where her mother might be.

  Out of all of her extended family, however, it was Anna’s parents who suffered the worst from the crash. They weren’t exactly financially stable to begin with, and after the crash, when Anna was thirteen, her dad was laid off and her mother’s bakery went out of business. They were poor for most of Anna’s high school career, her dad picking up jobs here and there, but nothing permanent, and nothing that paid well. When Anna got a scholarship to go to the police academy, her parents insisted she go, even though the academy was a three hour bus drive away. A few months after she enrolled, her father fell ill. She was not able to make it home in time to say goodbye.

  After that, her mother fell into a deep depression. She started to sell her body in order to pay the rent, and she started using drugs. After Anna graduated from the academy, she had two options, work as a desk jockey for the local police department, making shit money and having to wait years before getting into the field. Or, she could start up as a freelance private investigator. Her parents had always encouraged her to hone her Intuit powers when she was younger, and by the time she was ready to strike out on her own, she was really really good. She found immediate success as a private eye, and she loved the work, but her mother needed addiction treatment, and Anna needed insurance to pay for that. She got a job working for Mr. Barris’s detective agency and paid for a six-month stint in the local rehabilitation facility. Two months later, she got a call saying her mother snuck out and didn’t leave a single thing behind. Not a note, not forwarding address. Nothing.

  Anna had fallen so deep into thought, she almost missed her turn. She slammed on the brakes, thankfully there was no one behind her, and took a sharp right off of Highway 51 onto a smaller highway labeled just as M.

  She could have paid to have a GPS system installed into her car, but she didn’t see the point. Once she got up to Idle Waters, she imagined it would be pretty easy to navigate such a small town. So for the journey North, she instead bought a map of the state, and decided that, combined with her heightened intuition, would be all she needed to get where she was headed.

  The speed limit dropped from sixty five to fifty and Anna shifted down into a different gear, although she didn’t slow all the way down to fifty. Firstly, she thought the odds of there being a cop this far from civilization to be pretty slim, and secondly, she was the new Deputy Sheriff of the area. If the perks of that job didn’t include getting out a speeding ticket or two, what was even the point?

  She drove down the road at a steady fifty-eight miles per hour, keeping a lookout for any slick looking spots on the road, knowing roads like these were prone to having patches of black ice. She had to shift gears again as the road started to incline. On the way down, she noticed a car in front of her. It was the first car she had seen on the road in some time. She came up on it pretty quick, seeing as the person in the car was driving below the speed limit.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Anna said. She checked her speedometer as she inched dangerously close to the back bumper of the sleek
, jet black SUV. “You’re going forty five!? For real?”

  She glanced at the lines painted on the road to her left, even though she already knew instinctively she was in a no-passing section. In other words, she was stuck behind this loser.

  She rode as close as she dared to SUV, hoping she could pressure the driver into speeding up, even just a little, but to no avail. The driver kept up the slow pace and didn’t make any move to get onto the shoulder and let her go in front. Anna laughed softly to herself as she noticed the last two letters of the license plate were FU, but the amusement was short lived and quickly turned to anger as she waited and waited for there to be a passing section.

  It was another ten miles before the two cars entered a passing section, and the moment the solid yellow line turned into short yellow dashes, Anna put her blinker on and whizzed around the SUV. She resisted the urge to look over and flash a mean look to the other driver as she drove passed.

  A few miles up from there, she took a second right turn. A short while afterward, she spotted the black SUV in her rear view mirror again. According to Anna’s map, this road dead ended into the town of Idle Waters, which meant unless that was this person’s destination, there was really no other reason to be on it. She was grateful that she’d shown restraint while passing the guy, realizing now that he was likely a citizen of the very, very small town she was moving to. Even though she hadn’t ever lived in a small town, she had heard enough stories from her grandparents and parents growing up to know that in towns like Idle Waters, news travels faster than sound.

  The endless line of trees on either side of the road started to be interrupted by different hand painted signs, advertising things like diners and bait shops which were coming up in a couple of miles. She passed a run-down gas station and a small market, and then the road forked and Anna came upon the first stop sign she’d encountered for nearly a hundred miles.