Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) Page 2

  “Nancie sprung the project on me last night. And there’s a new guy, too. I can already tell he’s the competitive type. I want to get a jump start and make sure he doesn’t try to railroad me into taking the crap jobs.”

  “How long were you at the office? Your car was still in the lot when I left Tradava.”

  “I left a little after eleven.” I yawned. “I only got about five and a half hours of sleep. Drop me off and then go to the coffee drive thru in the parking lot behind Bowl-O-Rama.” I yawned again.

  He put the car into gear and backed up, sighing heavily. Eddie, like the rest of the world, relied heavily on Starbucks and Keurig to provide him with caffeine on demand. Somewhere along the line he’d become enamored of my Mr. Coffee, left behind by my parents when I bought the house from them. He swore it made the best coffee in Ribbon. Under normal circumstances when I took an extra ten minutes deciding on my accessories, it worked out well, as I came downstairs to a freshly brewed pot.

  Eddie drove the less-than-a-mile distance to the strip mall. I’d often considered walking to work (not in these shoes) but the distance between thought and action seemed particularly far when it came to anything resembling exercise. While Eddie drove, I filled him in on the assignment.

  “I get it now,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The velvet suit. You don’t wear anything without the proper motivation.”

  “I’ll have you know this amber velvet suit is brand new and it’s fabulous.”

  “Brand new to you, but more like three years old from a designer discount store,” he said. “You know as well as I do how long it takes designer merchandise to go from the runway to off-price, and I saw that very same suit hanging in Cat’s store last week.”

  “I cut the tags off this morning and that should count for something.”

  He laughed. “Seventies, huh? Dude, if you don’t watch it you’re going to be knee deep in Evil Knievel jumpsuits and Indian princess headdresses.”

  “Not that we’re going to go that direction, but I believe every look from the Seventies had its place. You can make fun of feathers if you want, but you can’t deny that Cher rocked them during the Half Breed years.”

  “You don’t get to use Cher to defend every trend of the Seventies. She’s rocked everything she’s ever worn. She’s Cher.” He tore open the package to a cheese Danish with his teeth and made a puh sound with his mouth to blow away the piece of plastic wrapper that stuck to his lip. With the hand not driving, he squeezed the bottom of the package to make the Danish pop out the top. “But find me a modern day interpretation of an Evil Knievel studded jumpsuit and I’ll give up coffee for a week.”

  I love a challenge as much as the next girl, but nobody wanted to see that.

  Eddie pulled up to the curb in front of Retrofit and bit into his pastry. At the rate he was going, his cargo pants were going to be tight by the end of the week.

  “I’m working on a major installation in the denim department. Probably going to take all night. Do you want to call me when you’re done?”

  “Sure. Later.” I hopped out of the Bug and strode inside, ready to start my plan of acing Pritchard Smith.

  To the rest of the world, Retrofit was like any other storefront in the Ribbon East Shopping Center. We were sandwiched between a vitamin supply store and a Hallmark. The office was narrow and deep. Individual offices had been formed using ten-foot-tall wooden walls on castors. The results were glorified cubicles, glorified because the ten-foot-tall height made it impossible to spy on anybody who occupied the space next to yours. For the past four months, it had been Nancie, myself, and a rotating assortment of interns from the local college, and any curiosity about what someone else was doing was satisfied by a holler into the hallway.

  The lobby of Retrofit was a makeshift desk where our intern-of-the-month sat across from a low sofa and coffee table where visitors waited. I passed through the doors, down the hall to my desk, mentally prepared to start my new challenge of showing my coworker the meaning of dedication and commitment.

  Only, even at 7:15 in the morning, Pritchard had beaten me to the punch.

  SK- I’m in the field. See what you can dig up on the internet and we’ll compare notes.—PS

  He was “in the field” at seven fifteen in the morning? Doing what? Fashion doesn’t wake up at seven fifteen. Fashion barely rolls out of bed by ten.

  “Sam!” Nancie said behind me. “Wow. You and Pritchard must be as excited about this project as I am. Both of you up and at ’em before eight o’clock. Perfection.”

  “Where is Pritchard?” I asked. “We were supposed to meet this morning but he’s not here.”

  “He didn’t say anything about waiting for you.” She shrugged. “He’s at a private residence in Amity. About a half a mile past the old doll museum. He said something about having a rare chance to talk to the owner of a massive vintage wardrobe. I don’t think he mentioned the name. Did he tell you more than that?”

  “No, that’s just about all he told me too,” I lied. “I must have misunderstood him when he said where to meet. I better not waste any more time. Don’t want to be the slacker on your Dream Team!” I said, and raced out the front door.

  The heels slowed me down, but I caught up with Eddie at the Coffee Drive Thru behind the bowling alley. I yanked the passenger side door open, shifted the massive pile of mini donuts and individually packaged cheese Danishes to my lap, and got in.

  “I need a ride to a house in Amity,” I said. “Like, immediately.”

  “Dude, I think you sat on my Pop Tarts.”

  I felt around under my bottom and pulled out a squashed package. He snatched it from my hand and tossed it onto the back seat. “That was blueberry. My favorite.”

  “I’ll buy you a whole box if you step on it.”

  He collected his change and his large coffee from the Drive Thru attendant and peeled out of the lot onto Perkiomen Avenue heading east. We’d gone two miles before he asked the obvious question.

  “Do I want to know what happened in the past five minutes?”

  “This Pritchard Smith guy is trying to make me look bad. We just got the assignment last night—last night! I walked into the office at seven fifteen and he was already gone. And there was a note on my desk. ‘SK—’”

  “He addressed the note to ‘SK’?”

  “Yes. It’s bad enough that Nancie calls me ‘Sam,’ but SK is worse. I met this guy yesterday. How do you go from, ‘Hi, I’m Samantha Kidd, nice to meet you, happy that we’ll be working together,’ to ‘SK—stay here and work while I visit rich people and peruse their closets’?”

  “That’s what the note said?”

  “Close enough.”

  He laughed. “So, you’re hopped up on the Seventies. What does that have to do with your new best friend?”

  “Nancie revealed this big project last night right before we left. We’re going to produce a semi-annual print magazine to accompany the content we feature on the website. The first issue is dedicated to the Seventies.”

  “That’s a huge undertaking. Does Nancie know what she’s in for? Once she goes from internet content to print, her expenses are going to go through the roof. Our print catalog at Tradava is about a hundred pages long and it costs us about a thousand dollars a page to produce.”

  “That’s how Bentley’s was, too.” Bentley’s New York was the luxury department store where I’d built my career until I’d decided that my life, while glamorous on the surface, wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t miss the long hours or the life-in-a-carry-on during fashion week, but I’d learned to appreciate the industry education I’d received over the nine years I worked there. “We co-opted the page expenses with the designers.”

  “If your magalog is dedicated to the Seventies, most of your designers are dead.”

  He had a point. “I figured Pritchard, Nancie, and I would brainstorm today and come up with a plan of attack. But noooo. He’s already at some private co
llector’s house looking at clothes. And he expects me to sit around the office pulling background info. Pull over.”

  “What?”

  I grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it toward the side of the road. Eddie slammed on the brakes. The air filled with the scent of rubber that melted into the road. “Never grab the driver,” he said.

  “Yes, dad.” I pointed to the driveway entrance on the opposite side of the street. “That’s the address.” He waited for an opening in traffic and then pulled into the long gravel driveway. “Do me a favor? Stick around for a couple of minutes. I’m not sure how well my showing up is going to go over, and truthfully, I don’t even know the person who lives here. There’s a very good chance that I’m not going to be as welcome as I should be.”

  “I was going to have a solid hour of alone time in the office before my staff came to work,” he said to himself. “I was going to have a chance to figure out exactly how to design a wall of denim before the phone started ringing. I was going to—”

  “Gorge yourself on Danishes and Pop Tarts and donuts without anybody knowing.” I picked up a package of chocolate covered mini donuts and shook it at him. “There’s something up with you because you don’t eat like this. I do. Don’t think we aren’t going to talk about that when we have more time.” I tossed the donuts onto the back seat.

  “You make a compelling argument for me wanting to stick around and wait for you.”

  “Please?”

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

  I blew him a kiss and got out.

  The private residence in question was a three story colonial, red brick. I rang the bell twice to no answer. I knocked and the door eased open without the help of someone on the other side.

  Curious.

  “Pritchard?” I called inside. “Pritchard, it’s Samantha Kidd. Nancie told me where to find you. Are you here?”

  The door had opened far enough for me to see the interior of the house. Two cats, a white Persian and a gray and white Scottish fold, sat on the otherwise empty divan in front of me. The Persian jumped down and headed toward me. I blocked the door with my foot. “Hello?” I called again.

  No answer.

  I turned around and held up a just a minute finger to Eddie, and then stepped inside and shut the front door behind me. The fluffy white cat buzzed against my velvet pant leg, leaving behind a coating of cat hair.

  The interior layout was remarkably similar to my own house, although the decorating style was more big budget/discerning eye vs. my own visual sale/whimsical-yet-frugal-fashion-person aesthetic. I followed the scent of cigarettes and coffee through the living room, turned to my right and climbed the first two steps of the staircase.

  “Pritchard?” I called up. A calico cat poked her head around the corner, and then scampered across the landing above me. Slowly, I scaled the stairs and looked side to side at the various doors that opened onto the landing. No one appeared to be here. I opened the door to my immediate left and climbed a second flight of stairs. In my own house, those stairs led to the third floor attic that my parents had converted into my childhood bedroom. Aside from the creepy factor that came after I’d read Flowers in the Attic, I loved it.

  But not as much as I loved this room.

  The room was about twenty by twenty feet but felt much smaller because it was filled with chrome racks like the kind department stores use to deliver new merchandise to the selling floor every morning. Each rack was packed full of clothing, some partially removed from plastic garment bags. On the floor between the racks were large black trunks with brass hinges and corners. Two trunks were closed but one lay open, exposing a fluffy interior of ecru lace scarves, paisley shawls, and at least four satin dusters trimmed with long piano fringe not unlike the trim on my shawl. Two maple dressers were propped along the wall on either side of a four-foot-tall window that opened out onto what appeared to be a balcony.

  What the heck was this place?

  I crept closer. Feathers, velvet, beads. Shades of amber like my suit. Mustard yellow, avocado green, chocolate, and teal side by side with paisley prints and batik prints. I recognized a few pieces that I’d seen in the old fashion magazines Nancie kept in the offices for our reference and a quick peek at the labels confirmed that these weren’t knockoffs. They weren’t a few years old. This was the real deal—flared, fringed, and funky. Judging from the condition of the garments and the photos hanging around the top of each hanger, these were samples from fashion shows that had taken place decades earlier. This was what Pritchard Smith had come to see without me.

  I fingered the silk of a yellow and blue paisley caftan, then ran my open palm over a suede blazer and matching tiered skirt. I’d never gone in much for western, but this was exquisite. I slipped off my shawl and velvet blazer, dropped them on top of the open trunk of scarves, had my right arm halfway into the sleeve of a turquoise silk peasant blouse with hand-painted feathers and Indian beadwork at the neckline and hem when I heard a voice.

  “I’m telling you, I heard her call my name.” The voice was unmistakably Pritchard Smith. I froze in place. The turquoise silk peasant blouse slipped from my fingers and landed on the floor. My brain scrambled to find a cover story for why I was there but came up empty. There was a stretch of silence, and then Pritchard spoke again. “I don’t know. But she can’t find out what we know. I risked enough to get here. If she ruins this, I’ll take her out of the equation. ”

  Suddenly, I was a whole lot less concerned with finding Prichard Smith. But I was trapped in a room filled with clothes. A fashion time capsule. Hiding in the closet wasn’t an option because the whole room was a closet.

  Pritchard’s voice grew nearer. “I’ll know in a minute. Hold on.” The one-sided conversation indicated that he was on the phone, but his choice of words didn’t inspire me to stick around.

  In the past two years, I have hidden behind a scrim, behind library shelves, and even—once—in a tree outside of a fashion industry event. But never have I gone out a window, three floors up from the ground.

  “All I can tell you is that if she finds out, it’s over.” The hinges on the door below creaked and I sprung into action.

  There’s a first time for everything.

  Chapter 3

  WEDNESDAY, MID-MORNING

  I scooped my clothes and shoved them into my oversized hobo bag, threw the strap over my shoulder, and ran for the window. Truth be told, I’d hoped for a balcony. What I got was barely a ledge. I went through the open window. By the time Pritchard had reached the room, I was dangling by a shutter. Which brings us to reason #1 why spying on my coworker was a bad idea: Spying leads to impulsive exit strategies, and impulsive exit strategies rarely work out well.

  My fingers curled through the bottom slats of the shutter and I strained to hear the voices in the room. “She’s not here.” Pause. “No, I’m not going to calm down. Do you not realize what’s at stake?” Pritchard cursed. From my spot outside of the window, I heard what sounded like hangers moving along a rack and trunks being slammed shut. Whatever Pritchard didn’t want me to find was in that room, and I must have practically stumbled onto it. First chance I got—

  The screws that attached the upper hinge of the shutter to the brick exterior broke.

  As if in slow motion, the rectangular panel of slatted wood slowly pulled away from the building. The shutter moved diagonally, my weight pulling it off-center. Which would have been fine if the particular screech that comes from a metal hinge scraping a brick building hadn’t coincided with the movement.

  “Who’s there?” Pritchard asked. I pictured him charging to the window and looking down at me, dangling from a shutter in my amber velvet suit. Despite the fact that I didn’t want to get caught, I couldn’t jump. The ground was three stories down and the fear of broken bones was high, as was acute humiliation. My heart raced and adrenaline coursed through my arms and legs. This can’t be it, I thought. I hadn’t been particularly eager to turn another year
older, but the reality of not turning another year older seemed a trifle worse.

  I braced myself and looked up, hoping a plausible story would spring to mind. Instead of the angry face of Pritchard, the window casing slammed shut and the latch clicked into the locked position.

  His voice became muffled and barely understandable. Even if I could climb my way back to the frame, there would be no way in without breaking the glass.

  I positioned the toe of my chocolate brown shoe into the mortar joint of the exterior brick and pressed ever so slightly, seeking leverage. I barely succeeded, but barely was good enough. I grabbed the ledge under the window, shifted my weight, and inched my feet along the brick. Underneath me, a car horn beeped. I turned my head and saw Eddie’s VW Bug idling next to the house.

  Reason #2 spying on my coworker was a bad idea: The need to develop a cover story.

  “You can’t tell Nick,” I said to Eddie.

  “Tell him what? That you told me to give you fifteen minutes, and right before I drove away you popped out the third floor window and scaled the side of a building? Not that I’m not impressed by your mad Spiderman skills, but I’m not sure that story could work in Hollywood, let alone Ribbon, Pennsylvania. Do you want to tell me again what happened?

  “The front door was open. I went through the house looking for Pritchard. I ended up in the attic. I heard him tell someone that he thought I was there, and I got the feeling it would be a very bad idea for me to be in the room when he entered. I went out the window because I thought I could get your attention from the balcony. There wasn’t a balcony. End of story.”

  Eddie shook his head. “There are so many things wrong with that scenario that I don’t know where to start.”

  “Well I do. Promise me you won’t tell Nick. He’s been worried about his dad since the heart attack, and I don’t need to be another thing for him to worry about. My role as his potential girlfriend is to be a calming presence in his life.”