Rocky Start

CHAPTER 23

B ack in the shop, I put the pharmacy bag of my future—but not likely—sin on the counter and looked around, trying to make a plan to convince whoever inherited the shop to keep it going with me as manager. It looked pretty bad, just a jumble of junk on old miscellaneous tables and bookshelves that I’d tried to keep dusted, but there was so much . . . stuff. I had tried to convince Ozzie to let me make displays, but he had been against increasing store traffic. I’d told him, “If we had more interesting windows, better displays, I know we could do better, and Poppy wants to put things up on the internet—” and he’d just said, “ No .”

He was even sterner with Poppy last year when she said she could put up a website for the shop. It was one of the few times in her life that he’d yelled at her, told her not to put anything about the shop on the internet ever if she wanted a place to live, and then stormed out. She’d looked at me, shocked, and I’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” He’d apologized to her later and treated us to dinner at the Wok Inn, a major concession for him to take us to the most crowded place in town, but that had also just confirmed my long suspicion that he was on the run from the law or hiding from somebody or maybe starting to lose it. “He’s in witness protection, maybe,” Poppy’d said, but that didn’t seem like Ozzie. Ozzie didn’t need protection from people, people needed protection from Ozzie.

Now, of course, I knew why he had been lying low. But it didn’t matter because now he was dead. And I only had about twenty-four hours before that damn envelope would be open and we’d probably be out on our asses.