A Dress to Die For Read online

  It was still dark outside, but the street lamps highlighted a woman who had backed up a white van to the shop’s front door and was quickly unloading and dumping small furniture, boxes, and bags in the front door entry and on the sidewalk in front of the shop’s window. The scene looked to be in fast forward motion. Laura almost spilled her coffee as she ran to set the cup on the table and pull on a pair of jeans and sweatshirt. She dashed down the stairs and got there just as the woman was hauling the last load from her truck and dumping it on the sidewalk. The piles were beginning to topple over into the street.

  Laura unlocked and opened the door.

  “What are you doing?” she called to the woman.

  The woman looked up, startled she was caught. In the dim light, Laura tried to make out her features.

  “Oh, I’m just…donating…my old roommate’s things from our apartment. She moved to Europe and said she wasn’t coming back, and I could get rid of her stuff.” The woman flipped the lock shut on the back of the van.

  “You should have called Purple Heart, Disabled American Veterans, or Goodwill. You can’t just leave all this stuff on the sidewalk.”

  “Well, I did,” the woman snapped back in a nasally voice. “Call the cops if you want.”

  With that, she jumped in her van and took off, leaving Laura with what looked like half an apartment of belongings blocking the front door of her shop and public sidewalk access. She didn’t have her iPhone with her, but she did get a look at the license plate and memorized the tag number.

  • • •

  “She looked about my age, maybe a couple of years older with brown hair with blonde highlights. No makeup that I could see; her hair was falling in her face. She had a few inches on me and a few more pounds, but that’s up in the air because everything she wore looked padded. She was wearing a dark, quilted jacket. Dark boots. Dark everything. All her clothes were dark. Dark gloves on long fingers. That’s all I saw. That and how annoyed she was that I caught her dumping everything.”

  Officer Sam Larsen of the Raging Ford Police Department took down all of Laura’s information.

  “What are you going to do with all this stuff?” he called to her, spotting the fuzzy slippers on his former babysitter’s feet inside the shop’s door on the other side of the heap on the sidewalk. Neither could climb over the piles and boxes as access in and out of the store was blocked.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m tempted to rent a truck and haul it all off to the dump. I can’t even open today until it’s gone.”

  “No problem,” Larsen said and sent a text to someone. “The cavalry should be here soon.”

  He wrote more details in his pocket notebook, and they chatted a few minutes more about the incident. Then lights went on in both the barbershop on one side of Second Treasures and Rollins Florist on the other. It wasn’t long before the owners showed up outside in heavy coats and slippers, both minus socks. The men looked sleepy, their hair tousled.

  Harry Kovacs gave Laura a questioning look. Harry owned the barbershop, as well as the adjoining building that housed both Laura’s shop and the upstairs apartment she rented from him. He was the creator of “Harry’s Rules,” the standard of logic and ethics rolled into one by which he lived, and unofficial head of the town council. He was also the middle child of triplets, who were heading past middle age, though no one could tell by their lifestyles.

  “Some woman just drove up and dumped all this stuff in front of the shop.”

  Kovacs greeted both the officer and Devin Rollins, the flower shop owner and father of Laura’s friend, Erica. Devin’s red hair, matching his daughter’s, glowed in the street lamp despite the early, pre-dawn gloom.

  “Well, we can help you get it inside if that’s what you want,” Rollins offered.

  “Did you just text Mr. Kovacs and Mr. Rollins?” Laura asked Larsen.

  “No. Them,” he said, tilting his head toward the headlights from two long-bed pickups turning onto Taylor Street that pulled into parking spaces along the sidewalk behind the flashing police car and the heaps.

  Laura recognized Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick’s two long-time friends, Nicky Rayles and Max Downey. They helped her out whenever she needed heavy work done and always acted as if they didn’t mind. Connor said they did it because they both owed him big time for something forever, but he wouldn’t leak the details as to why it needed to go on through eternity.

  “Yikes!” Nicky said, his eyes growing big. “What’s all this stuff?”

  “Not sure. Some woman just dumped it here.” Laura turned to Harry. “Trash? Dumpster?”

  He looked thoughtful.

  “You always told me you encouraged people from the town to donate things to your shop because you never knew when there might be a treasure hidden in all the trash. You said that was why you named your thrift shop Second Treasures.”

  “I hate when people feed my words back to me. Okay, guys, into the carport. It’s not going through the shop to get there, though. I have no idea what’s in these boxes. Around the corner and down the alley.”

  On cue, it started to rain.

  “Okay, through the shop, gentlemen. Just give me a minute,” she conceded, and turned on all the lights, opened the door to the back room and pushed some of the boxes that just came in with the spring and Easter-themed items off to the side. Then she went out the back door and moved her car to the unprotected part of the carport so the trash-that-might-be-treasure could reside under cover until Laura decided what to do with it.

  Officer Larsen followed Laura into the shop once Max had cleared a narrow path.

  “I’m glad you got the tag number. I’d also like you to sit down with our sketch artist.”

  “We have a real sketch artist in our small town of Raging Ford?”

  “Yes, well—no, but sort of. We borrow him from the community college up the road, just beyond the hardware store. He teaches art there, and he’s very good at this kind of thing. I’ll let you know when he’s available so you can make some time to tell him what this woman looked like.”

  “Can you get prints off any of these items?”

  “Probably not after all the handling. And the rain. But maybe from some of the things inside the bags and boxes. We’ll send a team over.”

  Laura could hear her friend Erica’s translation of “team” in her head: Rookies fresh out of the academy.

  “Hey, Laura, do you have a rug or something so we don’t track a lot of dirt through your shop?” Max called out as he hefted a box with a bulging bag on top and took a step into her shop. Nicky had cleared a wider swath through the jumble of stuff.

  “For you guys, anything!” she called from the back room, returning with a thin, rolled-up red carpet. She grasped one end next to the counter and heaved the carpet tube forward so it unrolled and ran almost to the front door, stopping just short of Max.

  Everyone laughed.

  “I have so wanted to do this,” she declared, thankful it actually worked and didn’t end up twisting itself all over the shop.

  “Where did you get this thing?” Nicky asked.

  Laura had known Max and Nicky almost as long as her boyfriend Connor had. They were present on the day when fifteen-year-old Laura Keene had taken it upon herself to fill a bushel basket with water balloons to pitch at Connor Fitzpatrick over the fence between their two homes. Connor had answered her with a volley back and picked up the garden hose to soak her down. Max and Nicky booked it out of Connor’s yard the instant they glimpsed her father, Lieutenant Frank Keene of the Raging Ford Police Department, unexpectedly home for lunch and coming out the door to see what was happening to his daughter and why she was shrieking. It was the last time they ever saw her father, about two weeks before he and Laura’s mother were murdered.

  “It was in an estate lot. I ha
dn’t the heart to sell it, and I knew it would come in handy one day. And don’t worry about any drips or spatters. I have one of those easy mop things you see on all the TV channels.”

  Outside, Devin Rollins and Harry Kovacs had finished their early morning chat under the awnings and gone back inside their respective shops. The chilly rain beat down steadily now, and once all the boxes and bags were loaded into the carport, Laura invited Sam, Max, and Nicky into the kitchenette behind her store for hot coffee and brownies from last night’s fresh-baked batch.

  Sam had a hard time declining, but he had to get back to the station and left with a small plastic container of six brownies. He cautioned Laura not to go through any of the materials in her carport until a couple of officers had checked everything first.

  Connor’s two friends accepted Laura’s offer without hesitation and shamelessly polished off the coffee and most of the remaining brownies.

  It was lightening a bit outside after Max and Nicky left, and the rain had let up a little, but Laura was left with the puzzlement of what the strange woman had done this morning. What was that all about? Who dumps half an apartment load of “things” on someone’s doorstep? The woman hadn’t seemed angry, like someone who had been cheated or robbed, but rather, someone who was simply in a hurry to get rid of it all and not get caught doing it—someone who quite possibly knew that there were cameras at the county trash dump and likely at charity receptacles. But why?

  Laura wasn’t very anxious to go through any of the boxes and bags. She could wait to hear back from the police on fingerprints and other things, such as comparing the items with lists of stolen property. There were so many other, more important things to do.

  It was time to switch to bunny ears and cotton tails and bags of orange jelly beans. It was spring…the time of the year to celebrate the season and new life and to figure out a contest or some other kind of fun thing to get people into her shop.

  Oh yes, and time to think more about the prom in six weeks.

  three

  Erica Rollins arrived at her father’s florist shop, got the latest news, and went straight to Laura’s front door. Her face lit when she spotted the gigantic, over-stuffed, white bunny in the window that held a sign promising “Spring Surprises” coming soon. She wondered what those might be.

  When Laura opened the door, Erica went right to the point, as usual.

  “Okay, so what did I miss this morning at the crack o’ dawn? When I got here, Dad said the cops showed up after some chick dumped a load of trash on the sidewalk in front of your shop. Out with it.”

  “Come on back for some coffee and we’ll talk,” Laura said. “I’m still upset about it and not ready to open to the public yet.”

  Laura closed the door behind her friend, locked it, finished mopping the floors, and put the mop away.

  They sat sipping coffee and munching the last of the brownies. Laura figured she would have to bake more this evening. Some of her treats were turning into a daily baking task; perhaps she should pick a different profession than accounting and running a thrift shop?

  “Did your dad really tell you that?”

  “Well, he said it nicer, but you know my dad. He’s a nice man. I had to translate it. So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. Early this morning I heard noises out front like someone was hitting the front door or throwing something at it, like a fight was going on. I ran downstairs and caught this woman unloading the last of a huge pile of small furniture, boxes, and bags against my front door and window. She was literally throwing them at the store as fast as she could. I’m lucky the window didn’t break. The heap went all the way off the sidewalk and into the street.”

  Laura left off the part about the cat waking her or she might not have heard any noises at all. Her normally sound sleep carried her unknowingly through events such as thunderstorms, so she owed the feline. Too bad it didn’t eat treats or anything at all. Erica didn’t know about the cat for good reason.

  “Yikes! Sounds like she’s a loony! Umm, these brownies are soooo good.”

  “Yeah, well, I tend to agree with you on both the brownies and the loony woman. I told her she couldn’t just dump the stuff on the sidewalk, and she pretty much told me to bite it.”

  “Ooh,” Erica responded. “That’s a scary loony. Where did you put the stuff? The dumpster?”

  “No, Max and Nicky loaded it all in the carport so I could go through it after the police determine if anything is stolen or dangerous.”

  Erica stared at her.

  “You’re kidding, right? There could be a dead cat or a dead person in one of the boxes. Remember what happened with the St. Patrick’s Day floats?”

  Laura almost choked on her coffee. She tried to imagine a dead cat and wondered about Empress Isabella and where she was hiding after waking Laura this morning.

  “I don’t think so. The bags and boxes looked okay and nothing smelled. It looks like she really did just what she said, which was empty half an apartment. Come see.”

  Erica stared at the huge mound of castoffs for so long that Laura had to poke her arm to break the spell.

  “Well, be thankful there are no mattresses. I’ll help you go through this junk, Laura. I’ve done this for my parents…lots of times. Multiple times in the same closets. I love them dearly, but they don’t understand the concept of not keeping everything, especially when they’ll never use something again and other people need stuff. I’m free after work every day this week while Torrey is working on a research project.”

  Torrey Culver was Erica’s boyfriend. They had been together for months, while he was finishing up his graduate degree at the University of Minnesota in international economics. He was also helping Erica with her business plan for a start-up hair styling salon.

  “What are those rookie cops looking for?” Erica asked, watching two blue-gloved, young policemen carefully rooting through the mounds.

  “Checking for anything that might have fingerprints or if any items are on a stolen goods’ list. How could you tell they were rookies?” Laura knew, but she didn’t think it was evident to other non-cop families.

  “Crisp, new uniforms, young and hopeful faces. They always give the newbies the trash jobs, don’t they? At least they don’t have to climb into a dumpster. Okay, I’ll help when they’re done. Just make sure you have thick rubber gloves and masks handy, Laura, okay?”

  • • •

  After Laura and Erica both closed up their shops on Tuesday, they spent about a half hour sorting through some of the boxes in the carport. The cops were done, had found nothing—not even a single fingerprint—and that begged a question. Why had the items been wiped clean? When you toss unwanted items on a sidewalk, they become trash, so why would anyone bother to wipe off fingerprints?

  In any event, the officers’ findings of no fingerprints would go into the official report. Laura set aside her concerns and went to work. It quickly became obvious to the women that this was not all just junk. Some items looked almost new. Laura might actually be able to sell a lot of it.

  The big gray cat named Empress Isabella had made herself scarce during the day but showed up to oversee this new and interesting activity. She poked her nose into some of the bags, possibly of clothing, while Erica was in the carport. Laura had had the dickens of a time not reacting while her florist friend was there, because Erica—like everyone else, so far—could not see the cat. Only Laura could.

  The ladies had to put off more working this evening because Connor was coming over for dinner. Erica promised to return on Wednesday after work for more fun searching and sorting, after setting her heavy rubber gloves on the top of one bag whose contents she hadn’t finished pulling apart. No sooner did Erica let go of the gloves than the cat perched itself on that very bag and gave her human a steady stare.

 
; Tomorrow, Laura thought. Tomorrow I will deal with this.

  Now Laura and Connor sat, as they often did, at the table in the kitchenette behind the shop.

  And Isabella sat atop the fridge within Connor Fitzpatrick’s line of sight if he could have seen her, with her gray tail slowly flowing back and forth high in the air, like a soft and gentle metronome. Left-right-left-right-left-right. Laura had trouble keeping her focus on eating as that tail continued to brush perilously against a tall bottle of olive oil.

  “What did you call this?” Connor asked. “It’s really good. But everything you cook is really good.”

  “Thank you. It’s called ‘spoon bread’ and is a Colonial American and southern recipe. This is the version that Aunt Rose liked best, and I like it, too. The chicken is just baked chicken, and the green beans are steamed, French-cut with roasted almonds. The beets are…heated, canned beet slices. I didn’t have time to do anything else with them today.”

  They ate in silence a few minutes, and then Connor pulled on his beer and changed direction.

  “Tell me about this morning,” he said, wiping his mouth on a napkin and sitting back.

  “Oh, the usual,” she replied, scooping together the last of her almond green beans and shoving them in her mouth. “Sun tried to come up, but somebody somewhere did a rain dance that worked.”

  She noticed he was no longer wearing the medicinal white glove on his right hand…a good sign that his hand was healing nicely from their recent tussle with a drug-crazed lunatic. Either that or he was tired of being likened to Mickey Mouse.