Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) Page 12

  For the first time since I’d been back in Ribbon, I made the hike from my house to Tradava by foot. It was less than a mile, and whether it was the cigarette company slogan stitched to my arm or the emotional journey I’d traveled in the past few days, I felt like I’d accomplished something significant in addition to burning off a handful of calories.

  Nick’s white pick-up truck was already in the parking lot, most likely because I was forty minutes late. I stood by the front of Tradava next to a bench that had been bolted into the sidewalk. The parking lot and store entrance were busy with shoppers, people headed to a matinee at the movie theater, and the late lunch crowd. To me, they were witnesses. Nick got out of his truck and came toward me. A stray shopping cart from the grocery store nearby rolled into his path. He stepped around it and met me by the front facing display windows. His eyes flicked from my face to my sweat suit to my hair extensions and back to my face.

  I stepped back and put my hand up. “Don’t,” I said.

  “What?”

  I launched into what I’d rehearsed in my head. “I can’t do this, Nick.” I waved my hand back and forth between us. “You want me to be somebody that I’m not. We’ve been over this and over this too many times. It’s not going to work. It’s never going to work.”

  “Kidd, I never said I wanted you to be somebody else. I want you to be you.” His eyes jumped to my unnaturally long hair again. “Who are you trying to be today?”

  “I’m me. That’s just it. You think you know me because you’ve seen some of my clothes. Well, you don’t know me. You know some of me. You know the me that wears heels and dresses and menswear—”

  He cut me off. “And you know some of me too. That’s all. I know you could rattle off five things about me if you needed to, but how well do we know each other? That’s the point of a relationship. We have to get past what’s on the surface before we’ll ever really know anything of substance.”

  Was that true? Did I only know who Nick was on the surface?

  I couldn’t let his logic distract me from the fight. I straightened up. “I know everything I need to know about you, Nick. You’ll never be able to commit to me the way you’ve committed to your company.” I cast a glance at the people closest to us to see if they were watching. So far, we hadn’t attracted much attention.

  “Where is this coming from? You’ve never had a problem with my being a shoe designer before. And having a job doesn’t mean I can’t have a personal life, too.”

  “That’s right.” I raised my voice. “All of your traveling to Europe and back, spending time with models and rich Italian women. How am ever supposed to trust you?”

  My throat hitched and my sight blurred with tears. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to drive him away. I didn’t want to alienate him; I wanted to ask about his dad and tell him about the shooting. I wanted to feel like part of a team instead of trying to do everything myself. Last night had been a huge step forward in terms of trust, but if I confided in him now, I could be risking his life. The tears spilled onto my cheeks and dripped onto the rust cotton sweatshirt. I couldn’t say anything I wanted to say, but I could barely stand behind the words I’d rehearsed in the car.

  People were staring at us. Among them was Eddie. He pulled away from the crowd in front of Tradava and advanced toward us, but then stopped. He was the only one who had an inkling about what had been going on with me, and I was afraid to look at him, afraid that I’d give in to the truth, confess that the entire scene was fake.

  Nick’s face had turned red. “How are you supposed to trust me? The same way I’m supposed to trust that you don’t call Dante Lestes to keep you company while I’m away.”

  “Dante? There’s nothing between me and Dante. The last time I saw him was after I saved your ex-girlfriend’s life!” Whatever I’d hoped to accomplish had gone from pretend fight to a public airing of our issues. I’d been surprised when Nick mentioned Dante at the motel, and now here it was again. Was he really that jealous? Was I? Pent up nerves from everything that had been happening exploded in anger and I was too far gone to rein myself in. “This is never going to work, Nick. We want different things.”

  He took a couple of steps back and turned away, but then turned back and faced me. “I know you’re under a lot of stress, Kidd. I thought I knew you well enough—I thought I knew you. But right now?” He glanced down at my sweat suit again. “I don’t have a clue who you are.”

  “Don’t judge me. If I want to wear sweats in public, then I’m going to wear sweats in public.” I needed to make this seem convincing. I turned around and walked away.

  Nick didn’t follow.

  Behind Tradava was a field. Around the back of the field was a trail. At the end of the trail was a Stop Sign. And four blocks past the Stop Sign was my house. It wasn’t the route I’d taken to get to the department store, but I sought the cover of overgrown weeds while I got my emotions in check.

  There were no cars—taxi or otherwise—in the driveway. I couldn’t see in the garage because I’d blacked out the windows with spray paint, but I assumed that my Honda del Sol was still there. I grabbed a rock and threw it through a pane of glass on the garage door.

  I’d been right about my car. The rock landed on the hood, leaving a dent.

  In spite of the challenges that having hair straight off the cover of Crystal Gayle’s Greatest Hits came with, I moved quickly. I packed an overnight kit, grabbed fresh underwear, and snatched my spare set of car keys from the junk drawer in the kitchen. Five minutes after I’d broken in, I drove away. I trusted that Loncar would know what to do about the window.

  Sooner or later I’d have to come up with a plan for where to spend the night. If I played my cards right, that problem would solve itself. I drove to where the drama had all started in the hopes of figuring something out. I headed to Jennie Mae Tome’s house. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.

  “Ms. Kidd, please, come in. Mr. Charles just prepared my afternoon tea. Would you care to join me?”

  “I’d love to join you, but not for tea,” I said, remembering the last cup of tea I’d had at her place. “Jennie, in the past week, I’ve been drugged, threatened, and shot at. The only job that I’ve managed to hold on to since moving to Ribbon is gone and the only connecting thread to all of this is the assignment from Retrofit and the collection of clothes that were in your attic. So, I’m curious. What can you tell me about them?”

  She looked at the mug of tea that sat in front of her, picked it up and raised it to her lips, but didn’t drink. Moments later, she set it back down and leaned back in her chair.

  “You know a thing or two about fashion, don’t you?” she asked. “Not about what the kids wear today, but the history of fashion. That’s how you found the job at Retrofit.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I read about your history with designers and their runway shows in the Seventies. I know that you were instrumental in changing the way women dressed and that the clothes in your attic were payment for your work back stage.”

  “Then it should come as no surprise to you to hear that those clothes are worth, shall we say, more than one might expect from a couple of trunks of old clothing.”

  “No, I don’t suppose that it does.”

  “Mr. Charles convinced me that I wasn’t getting any younger and that, in order to care for my cats, I should have the clothes appraised. I contacted Bethany House and an appointment was made. The executive director seemed to think my collection of samples would be valued in the millions. He said there were private collectors, designers, and museums that would be interested in buying should I ever want to sell.”

  “Did Mr. Charles tell this to Detective Loncar?” I asked.

  “I don’t suppose he would have thought it pertinent. The appointment never happened.”

  Interesting, I thought. Tahoma was the Bethany House executive director. Bethany House would have the contacts to sell off Jennie Mae’s wardrobe and make a lot of money, and a
dishonest director could have done it on the side.

  “Why didn’t you wear the clothes?” I asked. “I’m sure that’s what most of the designers had hoped for when they gifted them to you.”

  She went quiet for a moment, seemingly distracted by memories, not all good. “I had the body and the face for fashion, but not the lifestyle. I grew up in a small town and married young. My husband ran off and left me with nothing. At the time that I was given many of those items, I would have gladly turned them down and taken money instead.”

  Jennie Mae lifted her china cup and sipped her tea. She rested the saucer on her lap, covered in a burgundy afghan with harvest gold edging. The color palette was not dissimilar to my Virginia Slims jog suit. Behind her, a collection of frog ceramics covered the surface of her piano and a series of shelves on either side of the windows.

  She moved the china cup from her lap to the tray. “Months later, Retrofit called me. The managing editor said they were doing an article on Seventies fashion and she had tracked me down.”

  “That was my boss, Nancie,” I interjected.

  She nodded. “She asked if I would be interested in a feature story, a spotlight about my contribution to the look of the Seventies. I am not one to sit around hoping for attention. My modeling days are behind me but I find that old garments are far more interesting than old people. I politely suggested that to her and mentioned the samples in the attic. She said she was going to send someone to the house for an interview, and would I mind if she took a few photos of the clothes for reference?”

  “She?” I asked.

  “Yes. Nancie said she would send her fashion editor. I got the impression that that person would be a woman.”

  I kept my immediate thoughts to myself so as not to interrupt her. Jennie Mae might not be aware, but I was Nancie’s fashion editor. If Nancie had been planning on sending me out to examine the clothes, when had Pritchard come into play? Or had that been a convenient line on Nancie’s part to put Jennie Mae at ease? If Nancie was Pritchard’s partner, she wouldn’t be overly concerned with job titles if using them could gain her access to something valuable.

  “Being interviewed about my archives was a way for me to relive my past,” she continued. “Once the clothes were featured in Retrofit, their value would increase. Bethany House would be able to get far more for them than if they’d remained in my attic, and that would allow me to provide for my cats should anything happen to me.”

  But now that the clothes had been stolen before any official appraisal had taken place, their value was unknown. Besides that, what channels could someone go through in order to make any kind of money off the clothes? The theft was public knowledge. It was the kind of story that could go viral once word got out. I doubted the motivation behind the theft had to do with shortchanging Jennie Mae Tome’s feline companions of their inheritance, but unless Pritchard had a contact list of black market wardrobe collectors in the back pocket of his three piece suit, I couldn’t figure out his angle.

  “Where you surprised when that person turned out to be a man?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

  “Was it a man? I never met him. I was,” she looked at her tea service, “napping at the time. I assumed we missed the appointment. The next day, the woman—your boss—called, very excited. She said the magazine wanted to move forward with a feature and asked if I would grant exclusive access to my wardrobe to use in the editorial. She was very persuasive. She said that the exposure would validate the worth of my collection. I mentioned it only in passing to Mr. Charles and he seemed to agree that it was a good idea.”

  “What day was this?” I asked.

  “This past Wednesday.”

  Otherwise known as hanging off a building day. Heat climbed my face. “So you never saw anyone from Retrofit?”

  “No. Does that matter?”

  “I don’t know. Nancie never asked me to come to your house, so I can only think that she changed her mind and asked Pritchard Smith to view your clothes instead.”

  She dropped her tea cup. The calico cat by her feet jumped up and ran away. The teacup landed on the Oriental rug and the liquid disappeared into the thick pile. Jennie Mae reached for the empty cup and her hands shook. She balled both fists up and buried them into the fabric of her skirt.

  “What was his name?” she asked.

  “Pritchard Smith. Do you know him? Do you recognize the name?”

  “I wish that I didn’t,” she said. “Pritchard Smith was my husband.”

  Chapter 18

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON (LATER)

  If I’d been holding a china tea cup, I would have dropped it too. “I don’t understand,” I asked. Pritchard Smith was twenty years younger than Jennie Mae. The ages didn’t fit, but I already knew from the fake ID that “Pritchard Smith” probably wasn’t my coworker’s real name.

  She gripped her hands hard enough that the skin on her fingers turned white. “I was barely legal,” she said. “I was a small town girl suddenly living a very big life. My parents died four days after my eighteenth birthday. Pritchard and I had grown up as neighbors. He was a few years older than me, but in a small town, you get to know most everybody. We married in a quiet ceremony.”

  “Did you have children?”

  “No. My lifestyle was such that children didn’t enter into the equation.” She looked at the cats and I immediately understood how she felt. They weren’t just pets to her; they were her children.

  “How long were the two of you married?”

  “Officially, we still are. I was on the road working and he couldn’t take that. He left me before our first anniversary. It took me months before I could acknowledge that he wasn’t coming back. I threw myself into work. It was 1972. That’s when I was the busiest. As long as I wasn’t at home, I wouldn’t know that he wasn’t there either.”

  “Did you ever hear from him again?”

  “No,” she said. She reached a hand up and wiped tears from her cheeks “For a long time I waited for him to return. I didn’t want to believe that he’d left me. But as the years went by, the memories faded and I learned to accept that he wasn’t coming back.”

  I held myself very still. The story that Jennie Mae recounted to me was more than a story to her. It wasn’t just a collection of facts that she’d learned from an episode of TV; it was her life. I wanted her to continue, but had to separate my own morbid curiosity from the human need to protect her from reliving painful memories.

  I reached out and put my hand on top of hers. “Jennie Mae, I’m so sorry to have brought this up. Is there anything I can get you?

  She squeezed my hand and looked at me. Her clear green eyes were shot through with red, belying the efforts she’d made not to cry. “You said the man who came here was named Pritchard Smith. Could it be my husband? Could he have tracked me down to Pennsylvania?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I didn’t want to offer conjecture, but the ages didn’t match the story. “I’m trying to understand how it all fits. Would you mind if I looked in your attic again?”

  “There’s nothing there,” she said. “The trunks, the samples, the clothes. It’s all gone.”

  “And you don’t suspect Mr. Charles?”

  She shook her head. “He was just as stunned by the theft as I was. He notified all of the auction houses to be on the lookout for any garments that might come to them via off-channels, and has been spending his spare time combing the internet and news, hoping the thief will show his hand.”

  I didn’t like how often the butler’s name kept coming up in relation to the clothes in the attic. It wasn’t the first time that I’d wondered if he and Pritchard were in cahoots. If he’d been involved in the theft, he could have given Pritchard access, helped move the merchandise off the property, and claimed to be managing the loss. He’d have the same motivation to watch the news for mention of the clothes if he were guilty as if he were innocent.

  At that moment, he rounded the corner from t
he kitchen and noticed the tea cup on the carpet. He picked it up and placed it on the tray, and then picked up the tray and carried it into the kitchen. How much had he heard?

  “Does Mr. Charles live here with you?” I asked in a lower voice.

  “He stays in the guest house out back. We learned a long time ago that we were only compatible when we didn’t try to live under the same roof.”

  “Compatible? I thought he was your butler.”

  “How very Sunset Boulevard.” She laughed a full, throaty laugh. “We met years after Pritchard left me, but a relationship was doomed because without answers about my past, I couldn’t commit to a future. Do you have a gentleman friend?” she asked.

  “Sort of.” I thought of the words that Nick and I had shouted at each other in the middle of the Tradava parking lot. Even though I knew I’d picked the fight in order to protect him, the things we’d said still hurt. They erased the memory of him kissing me last night and of waking up next to him on his side of the bed.

  “How well do you know this man?” she asked.

  “I’ve known him for over a decade.”

  “It’s not about how long you’ve known him, it’s about how well you know him. You have to be vulnerable and open to the unknown. If you want the relationship to work, you’re going to have to put yourself aside and learn about him. That’s the only way you’ll ever know if you’re compatible.”