Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ruby spotted me the second I walked through the door of Java Jolt.
She had that gift that great coffee shop managers develop—the ability to track every person in a room while appearing to be focused only on the espresso machine in front of her.
She caught my eye, raised her eyebrows approximately three inches, and then jerked her head toward the corner table where Angelica was already seated with two lattes and what appeared to be a croissant she hadn't waited for me to arrive in order to start eating.
I wound my way through the morning crowd, dropped into the chair across from Angelica, and picked up my drink.
Ruby materialized beside us approximately thirty seconds later, still holding a cleaning cloth, looking at me with laser-focused attention.
"Don't say anything," she said, pointing between the two of us.
"I want to know why Zoe has that shit-eating grin on her face.
" Then a customer called her name from across the room and she held up one finger. "Hold that thought." She was gone.
"I don't have a shit-eating grin on my face," I said to Angelica.
Angelica looked at me over her latte. “You so do.”
"Do not."
"Then why is your smile so wide?”
I took a sip of my latte. "I'm just happy it's not raining."
"You're in love," she said, as if this was a simple weather report. "It's adorable. You're glowing. It's slightly annoying because you never glow and now you're glowing and I can't even be mad about it."
I grumbled something into my cup.
"How was it?"
I looked up. "How was what?"
"Zoe."
"I don't kiss and tell."
She leaned forward. "We have been best friends since you spilled an entire pitcher of apple cider on me at the Jasper Creek Fall Festival and then laughed about it.
I pulled back your hair when you had food poisoning from that gas station sushi incident that you still deny happened. I have earned this information."
"The gas station sushi incident is a fabrication."
"How was it?" Angelica enunciated each word carefully.
"Not answering."
She opened her mouth to push further, but Ruby reappeared, pulling up a third chair and dropping into it like she'd been waiting for this moment all morning.
"Okay. How is Adam in bed?"
I turned red. I could feel it happening and I could not stop it, which was infuriating.
Ruby and Angelica looked at each other.
"That," Ruby said, pointing at my face, "is all the information I need."
"If she's blushing that much," Angelica agreed, "Adam must be exceptional."
"I hate both of you."
"You love us," Ruby said cheerfully. "And clearly you love somebody else too, based on the grin you were wearing when you walked in. Don't look at me like that, I see everything in this shop. It's my gift and my burden."
"You know what I think?" I said, pointing at Angelica. "I think you're only this interested because you haven't gotten any in so long. You're too busy playing Hollywood Spreadsheet Bingo."
Ruby frowned. "What's Hollywood Spreadsheet Bingo?"
Angelica sighed with well-earned weariness.
Her career had become a running joke among her closest friends.
"It's when Code Drakos puts you and seven other high-profile types on a spreadsheet, and schedules you to either hook-up or break-up according to the calendar, and don’t forget the make-ups and the fake brawls.”
“Huh?"
“There were eight of us who got so sick of the paparazzi invading our lives and making up shit about us all the time, and not being able to live ordinary lives, that Code got the idea of all of us pretending to get-together and/or break-up at different times, just to keep the paparazzi off the scent of our real lives. There’s an actual calendar that he’s made up, that we all follow.
It’s been working like a dream. I pop up in places like Hollywood, Manhattan, Cannes, or Aspen with one of the guys on the list every so often, get everybody following that trail, and then I can come here and kick back. ”
“That’s brilliant,” Ruby breathed.
“That’s my cousin.” Angelica lifted her latte in salute. “He’s brilliant.”
"When's the last time you went on a real date?" I asked.
"That's not the topic we're discussing."
"It could be."
"The topic," Angelica said firmly, "is how Adam Beckett is in bed, and you are going to tell us something."
"I'm going to tell you nothing." I stood up, picked up my latte. "And Ruby, after this level of harassment, you're comping my next three lattes." I pointed at her. "Don't think I won't remember."
Ruby waved a hand. "Already done. Go be disgustingly happy, it's good for business. People tip better when there's romance in the room."
I was still smiling when I pushed out the door into the cool morning air.
I called Adam before I'd made it half a block.
He picked up on the second ring, and just the sound of his voice saying my name rearranged something in my chest.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi yourself." I could hear the smile in it. "How's your morning?"
"Ruby and Angelica just spent fifteen minutes trying to get me to discuss our sex life."
A pause. "How'd that go?"
"I maintained my dignity. Mostly."
He laughed, low and easy, and I felt it all the way down to my toes.
He told me about James's morning, which had involved a detailed argument about whether a Triceratops could defeat an Ankylosaurus in a fair fight. I told him about Ruby’s look of incredulity when Angelica explained Hollywood Spreadsheet Bingo.
"James wants to know when there's going to be another sleepover," Adam said.
"Tell James not until I've practiced enough to beat him at Mario Kart."
"That could take years."
"Then he should've gone easier on me."
Adam laughed again. I was collecting the sound of it. I didn't examine that too closely.
We said goodbye at the corner of Main and Elm, and I walked the last block to Gathered feeling like the morning was doing me a personal favor.
I was in the process of unlocking the door, when a woman walked up beside me. It was a woman I recognized by face without being able to immediately place the name—mid-sixties, bright eyes, the kind of careful-nice clothes that said she'd gotten dressed with intention this morning.
"I was hoping if I got here early, I’d be able to see you," she said.
"Come on in.” I ushered her in front of me.
"I'm Darline Laske." She said it like it should ring a bell, and then, reading my expression, added helpfully, "My son Dane bought me the beautiful sculpture for my birthday? You sent a birthday card."
“I remember.” Well, I remember now, that is.
“My son is a doll, isn’t he?”
“He sure is something,” I said. I couldn’t very well tell his mother that his son was a creep, now could I? “I hope you liked what he picked out.”
“Oh, it was wonderful. I was wondering if I could get the contact information for the sculptor. I want to send him a card to let him know how much I prize his piece.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Laske—”
“Call me Darline.”
“I’m sorry, Darline. We don’t give out the contact information of our artisans, but you’re welcome to give me a card and I’ll pass it along.”
“That would be wonderful. I’ve already written it.
” She opened her purse and pulled out a stamped card with Henry Sharp’s name on it.
"I just wanted to tell you in person," she said.
"It's in my sitting room where I can see it every morning.
I think it's the most beautiful thing anyone has ever given me.
" Her eyes were bright. "Dane said you helped him choose it. I wanted to thank you."
"That's entirely Henry’s doing," I said. "I just pointed your son in the right direction."
"Well." She squeezed my hand. "You pointed him well."
She stayed for another ten minutes, looking at the new pieces from Miss Laughton, asking questions about the pressed wildflower process with the genuine curiosity of someone who actually wanted to know.
By the time she left, I'd wrapped up two smaller prints and she'd promised to come back in December.
Three more customers came through the door before I'd finished entering Mrs. Laske’s sale into the register.
I glanced at my iWatch. Eight forty-seven. Ernie had a dentist appointment and wouldn't be in until eleven. It was just me.
I tied on my apron and got to work.
This was the part of owning Gathered that nobody saw in the spreadsheets—the part where a woman drove across town because her son had listened, where three strangers wandered in and one of them stood in front of Bertha Conners' strawberry rhubarb preserves for so long I knew she was going to buy two jars.
The part where I got to tell the story of every maker behind every piece, where the shop was full and warm and doing exactly what I'd imagined it doing when I was sixteen on a mountain watching Judy pull a rug off a loom.
I loved this. Even on the spreadsheet days. Even when I was cross-eyed with reconciliation errors and mismatched weights.
Weights.
I paused mid-transaction, the thought surfacing from wherever I'd filed it.
The cashmere throw. Six pounds, but the shipping weight had been six pounds, eight ounces.
I'd written it off as a scale calibration issue, because that was the simplest explanation, and then the Pacific Rim situation had taken up so much space in my head that I'd let it sit.
But I'd never actually checked the scale.
I'd never looked at any of the other recent shipments to see if there were other anomalies.
Tonight. I'd go to the warehouse and look tonight. I didn’t want to be spending more on shipping than I needed to. That sort of thing added up.
I finished the transaction and turned to the next customer with a smile.
Ernie arrived at eleven with a numb jaw but a determined expression. He wanted to prove the Novocaine wasn't slowing him down so I handed him the register and retreated to the back to check weights versus shipping costs but then Adam called.
"Hey." Something in his voice was off.
"Hey. What's going on?"
"I have to cancel tonight."
"Okay." I waited.
"I can't talk about it right now. I'll explain the next time we see each other."
"Adam." I kept my voice even. "Are you okay? Is James okay?"
"We're both fine." A breath. "It's the site."
"Okay." I thought about what he'd told me on the couch—the car accident, the septic markers, Code pulling camera feeds. "Will you have time to talk tonight? Even if not a date—just a call?"
Another pause, longer this time. I could almost hear him rethinking things.
"Yeah," he said finally. The word came out a little softer than the ones before it. "Yeah, it would be good to talk to you. I'll call after James is down."
I disconnected in time for Ernie to call me back up front.
Adam called at nine forty-three.
I was in bed with my laptop, the shipping anomaly spreadsheet open in one tab and a half-eaten bowl of popcorn beside me, when his name came up on my phone.
"Tell me," I said, without preamble.
He did.
Two pieces of equipment—he named them, I didn't know what they were, but from the way he said the dollar amounts I understood they were significant—destroyed, not damaged. The kind of destruction that was deliberate and meant to do more than send a message. It was meant to stop the whole operation.
“But you have insurance,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s going to take a little while to pay out, and in the meantime, we’re losing money.
But, there is an upside. The cameras caught two figures, hooded and masked.
They moved like they’d done something like this before.
The gas cans were close to the construction trailer," he said.
"Someone was working late in there. Gus, one of Harvey's guys. "
I was quiet for a moment. "They didn't care that someone was inside."
"No." His voice was flat. "They didn't."
Onyx had been on scene fast—faster than the saboteurs had anticipated, from what Code could tell.
The SUV had gone north on Route 9. The plate wasn’t caught on the cameras from the construction site, but Code was working backward through every ATM camera, every grocery store parking lot feed, every traffic intersection along the likely route.
"He'll find something," Adam said. It sounded like something he was telling himself as much as me.
"And Harvey?"
A long silence.
"Harvey wants to sell."
I closed the spreadsheet. "Can you blame him?"
"No." A rough exhale. "No, I can't blame him.
He's got a wife. A daughter. He doesn't want to be the reason someone gets hurt.
" He paused. "But if Harvey sells, the project is in trouble.
Ford and Walker lose their contracts. The families in Jasper Creek who were counting on this development lose their housing options.
Pacific Rim wins by making decent people too scared to fight back. "
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet. We're meeting tomorrow." Another pause, quieter. "I'm glad I called you."
"I told you," I said. "Lean."
I heard the small sound he made. Not quite a laugh. Something warmer.
We stayed on the phone for another twenty minutes without talking about anything important at all.