Blackberry Summer

“Sorry, ma’am.” Riley offered an apologetic smile, even as he held his crossed fingers behind his back so that only Claire could see. “Claire’s an old friend and I’m afraid I spoke without thinking.”

Holly didn’t seem to know how to respond, whether to defend her spouse or let the awkwardness of the moment pass. She looked ruffled and insecure and terribly young, even though Riley at thirty-three would only be eight years older.

Finally she must have decided to ignore him completely. Instead, she spoke in a stiff voice to Claire. “I guess you don’t need me to stick around, then?”

“I think I’ll be okay.” Now she was ashamed of that brief moment of small-minded amusement. “Thanks, though. It was really, uh, great of you to offer your moral support, Holly. I’ll let you know when the store opens again and we can start working on those accessories for your new maternity wardrobe.”

“Don’t worry. We can do it another day. I guess I’ll see you tonight at Owen’s play, then? Jeff and I can save you and Macy a seat if you want.”

She supposed she deserved that little dig, intentional or not, the reminder that Claire would be arriving at the annual Spring Fling pageant at Hope’s Crossing Elementary with her twelve-year-old daughter as her date while Holly would be comfortably ensconced next to her handsome and successful orthopedic surgeon husband.

“Thanks, but I don’t know what time I’ll get there.”

“We’ll save a seat for you guys anyway. I’m sure Macy will want to see me wearing one of the new sweaters we bought.”

“No doubt,” Claire answered calmly. “I’ll see you later, then.”

As soon as Holly left the store, Claire managed to shrug out from under Riley’s arm, trying not to notice how much colder she felt away from him. Her store had been robbed, for heaven’s sake. This wasn’t exactly the time for a warm, fuzzy happy reunion.

“Donna Mazell told me when I phoned dispatch that String Fever wasn’t the only store that was hit during the night.”

He nodded, even as he reached down to scratch Chester’s jowls. “Apparently the town’s criminal element had itself a busy Sunday night. At last count, four businesses were burglarized.”

“I have a security system. Why wasn’t the alarm tripped? The security company should have responded.”

“That’s a good question. I’m going to take a guess here that you’re with Topflight Security.”

“Yes.”

“I’m thinking it might not be a coincidence that every other business that was hit in the night also happens to be with Topflight Security. That’s just one of the angles we’re going to be working in our investigation.”

She frowned. “Surely you don’t think someone there had anything to do with this?” The owner of the security company was a friend and she couldn’t even contemplate that he or any of his employees might have been involved.

“One of the good things about being away from town all these years, I guess, is that I can come back without a lot of preconceptions. Right now I don’t know what to think. We’re looking into the possibility that their computer system had been hacked to allow someone access to the businesses without alerting Topflight, but we don’t know yet. At this point, we’re just adding everything to the pot and we’ll sort through it later. What time did your store close yesterday?”

“During the shoulder seasons in the spring and fall, we stay closed on Sundays. It could have been robbed at any time from Saturday night to this morning.”

“Let’s take a look at the damage. Have you figured out what’s missing yet?”

“My office computer is gone. It was a fairly new iMac I bought only about six months ago. The drawer for the cash register was emptied, but I only keep about fifty dollars in change there overnight. I took care of the night deposit myself Saturday before I went home.”

She was grateful for that at least. The weekend had been crazy, between running Owen to his dress rehearsal and her mother asking her at the last minute to pick up a couple of prescriptions for her, but she clearly remembered going to the drive-up at the bank and dropping off the deposit.

“Did they take anything else?”

“To be honest with you, I haven’t looked very carefully. I didn’t want to mess up the evidence.”

“Go ahead and walk through, see what else might be missing.”

The thieves hadn’t touched the locked glass-fronted cabinet where she kept the pricier Czech crystals Donna had been talking about and some of the handcrafted Venetian glass, or some of more valuable finished jewelry pieces either she or Evie had made or she sold on consignment for her customers. It was still intact. She did see three empty hooks on the wall where she had hung a few of the less valuable custom necklaces she had created. One good thing about that—she would instantly recognize her own pieces if the thieves were stupid enough to flaunt their loot around town.

She walked through the retail section of the store and the workroom where she kept beading equipment for her customers to use on-site—bead boards and looms, reamers, cutters. Nothing else appeared to be missing.

She headed into her office last and suddenly gasped.

Riley was there in an instant. “Whoa.” His gaze sharpened on the wedding dress still hanging in the protective bag, both slashed to tatters with what looked like a pair of her own scissors from the workroom. “Now that’s interesting.”

Interesting? She could come up with a hundred different adjectives and that particular one wasn’t among them.

“That’s a designer wedding dress,” she moaned. “I’ve had it for only two days so I could customize the beadwork on the bodice. It was a huge commission.”

A commission she could now see imploding—along with possibly the store’s entire future. “Who would be so destructive?”

“Wild guess here, but maybe somebody who’s not too crazy about the bride. Who did the gown belong to?” he asked.

“Genevieve Beaumont. The mayor’s daughter.”

Her grand society wedding to the son of one of the region’s richest bachelors was still eight months away. Maybe Gen would have time to order a replacement gown between now and then and Claire could still have time to finish the beadwork.

Or maybe the somewhat spoiled bride-to-be would decide to sue Claire for every penny she eked out of the store, for whatever breach in security had potentially ruined Genevieve’s big day.

Chester nudged her leg with his head and she wanted to sink to the floor in the middle of all those spilled beads, gather him in her arms and indulge in a big, soggy pity party. The emotions clogged her throat and burned behind her eyes, but she blinked them back and swallowed hard. She had no time to indulge in tears, not now when she had such a mess to clean up—and especially not in front of the new chief of police, for heaven’s sake.

“This is a nightmare. It makes no sense. Why just destroy the dress when they didn’t even bother to take the crystals? They’re worth a fortune.”

“I don’t know the answer to that yet. But I promise you, Claire, I’ll find out.”

Riley might have been an annoying little pest when he was younger and a hell-on-wheels troublemaker when he hit his teen years, but all she had heard over the years from Alex and the rest of his family indicated he had shaped up from his wayward youth and truly found his calling with police work.

Most people in Hope’s Crossing seemed to think the town was lucky he had agreed to give up his life as an undercover detective in the Bay Area to come back, although she had heard rumors there was discontent in the police department over his hiring.

“Tell me what else I can do to help you, then.”

“Just sit tight while I finish processing the scene. Maybe you and your dog here could head over to Maura’s place for coffee or something. I might be here a while.”

“I’d rather stay, if you don’t mind. We’ll do our best to keep out of your way.”

“Not a problem. I’m glad to have the company, I only wish it were under better circumstances.”

For the next hour, she had a front-row seat as Riley worked the scene—collecting evidence, lifting fingerprints, taking photos.

It was a bit of a jarring dichotomy trying to reconcile the pain in the neck she remembered with this wholly competent officer of the law. Mixed in there was the wild, angry teenager he’d been after his parents’ divorce, but by then she’d been living in Boulder for college and had only heard everything secondhand about his drinking, smoking and more.

The Riley she remembered was the one who had hidden a voice-activated tape recorder in his sister’s room during one of Claire’s frequent sleepovers at the McKnight home so he could overhear what she and Alex talked and giggled about.

Their conversation had inevitably centered around boys, of course, because they were probably twelve or thirteen at the time and beginning to be obsessed with the opposite sex. Claire had just started to notice the smartest, cutest boy in the grade ahead of her, Jeff Bradford. Alexandra at the time had been enamored with the quarterback on the freshman football team, Jason Kolpecki.

They had talked long into the night about their current crushes with no clue that Riley, the sneak, had recorded all of it—and then threatened to share the tape recording with the boys in question if they didn’t meet his demands, a mortifying prospect.