The first thing I thought about was my dogs and how grateful I was that they were at Rocky and Marcus’s apartment. Then, I panicked—full-blown, outright panic, sit down on the sidewalk with a paper bag that someone had pulled from a trash can panic.
Mart came running when she saw me and dropped beside me instantly. “Harvey?”
I tried to acknowledge her presence with a nod, but I couldn’t do anything but hold the bag, which smelled like Lu’s tortilla chips, and force myself to fill it and then breathe it in again like I’d seen people do on TV.
Eventually, as Mart held me against her on one side, my mom cuddled from behind with her head on my back and whispered, and Henri took my other side and pressed her body against mine. I started to feel a calming in my chest. Cate and Elle sat in front of me on the sidewalk, each holding my free hand. Together, we breathed until I finally lifted my head from the bag and sighed.
Cate leaned forward and put her hands on my face. “We’ve got you, Harvey. We’ve got you.”
Around me, my friends’ bodies pushed closer, and something about their warmth and energy let me relax enough to speak. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I couldn’t say more, but I knew they knew I meant that they had all of my gratitude in the world.
Symeon leaned over and whispered something in Mart’s ear.
“Glass repair is on the way,” Mart said to me. “They’ll be here all night to help everyone.”
I paused a moment. “Everyone?”
Henri tugged me tighter to her. “Four other businesses, including Max’s, were vandalized tonight. All of them had their front windows broken.”
Inside my body, a swirl of relief and sadness moved through me. I wasn’t the only one targeted, yet more damage was done to my lovely town. I couldn’t revel in that.
“Who else?” I said as I forced myself to a squat, then stood up with help.
“The salon and the pet spa,” Jared said as he made his way between my friends and wrapped an arm around my waist. “All had their front windows broken.”
“But not yours?” I said, turning to Elle. “Your store is safe?”
Elle nodded. “It seemed like they were focused only on your side of the street. Nothing over my way was touched.”
I nodded, and even that small movement made me feel a little woozy. I looked up at Jared. “Is it okay if we go inside?”
“Yes, we’ll just stay over in the café while the team finishes processing.” He met my eyes and then led me to the door. “It’s all going to be okay, Harvey,” he whispered before pressing a kiss to my forehead.
I nodded because I believed him, but nothing in my body was ready to affirm that idea yet.
Rocky emerged from the back room of the café with two carafes and set them on the counter. “Free coffee for everyone,” she said. “Cinnamon rolls are on the way.”
I heard a few groans from around the room as people took in that Rocky’s mom was bringing her absolutely amazing, home-baked rolls. They alone would make this whole night better, at least for some people.
“Do we know anything?” Mom said as she slid a mug of coffee that was mostly cream and so light in front of me.
Jared shook his head. “As far as we can tell, the rocks used were just regular field stones, something anyone could pick up from almost any yard around here. No notes. No other damage.”
After a brief silence where we all presumably let the randomness of everything sink in, Marcus said, “So we are thinking that having the dogs kidnapped was a distraction from having someone here on Main Street, right?”
“Exactly our theory, Marcus,” Tuck said as he and Lu made their way over. “There is a method to this madness. Someone wanted to do this”—he gestured to my shattered front window—“without being seen. The question is, why.”
I slumped back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment as I tried to slow my thoughts enough to seize on one. But when that didn’t happen, I did what I probably needed to do more; I just listened to myself. As I took some deep breaths, I let my thoughts swirl, noting each one as it came by but not trying to weave anything into something bigger. I immediately felt calmer and had an idea when I opened my eyes.
“Can I look around?” I said as I stood up slowly. “See if anything was taken?”
“Please,” Tuck said. “That is what we’re asking all the shop owners to do.”
“Who’s doing it for the pet spa?” Cate asked as we made our way into the main part of the store. “I mean, Penelope is dead.”
Tuck nodded. “We called in Sheila and Caro. They’re with one of the Easton deputies looking now.”
I made my way toward the front window and took a deep breath when I saw the huge shards of glass on my dogs’ beds. But before I could think about the worst-case scenario, I moved on, looking carefully at all the cat books in the window to see if anything was missing. But nothing was.
“You refilled the display?” I asked Marcus as the amoeba of people followed my lead as I began to walk through the store.
“Yep, before we closed on Thursday. I wanted it to look fresh and good for the weekend.”
I smiled at him. “Thanks.”
For several minutes, we wandered through the store en masse and studied the shelves and racks to see if we noticed anything missing. But the truth was, if someone had stolen a book, we probably wouldn’t notice until inventory.
Fortunately, that was the next day, so we’d know sooner than usual. “You see anything?” I asked Marcus and Rocky as we stopped in front of the bookstore’s register.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Marcus said, and Rocky agreed. “Inventory will tell, though.”
“Right.” I stared around my store. “I’m going to stay and help with that.”
Jared looked at me, and momentarily, I thought he would object, but instead, he smiled. “I’ll be on duty all night myself, so I’d rather you be here than home alone.”
“That settles it,” Bear said as he headed toward the café. “It’s an inventory slumber party.”
“Can I join in?” a woman’s voice said, and I turned to see Rocky’s mom coming through the door, her hair perfectly styled and her attire impeccable, even at one in the morning.
“Of course, you can,” I said as I hugged her neck and deftly swooped the platter of cinnamon rolls from her hand. “As long as I can have one of these.”
She grinned. “Of course. Boys,” she said as she turned to Walter, Luke, and Marcus. “There are two more trays in the car. Please fetch them.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the three said in unison.
“Let’s set up right here,” Rocky said after giving her mother a kiss on the cheek.
Soon enough, we had a banquet of coffee, coffee fixings, and cinnamon rolls before us, and despite the ache in my joints that always appeared when I was sleep-deprived, I felt pretty alert. And the truth was, I couldn’t imagine any of us being able to sleep that night, not after this much excitement in one day. “Might as well make the most of it?” I said, mostly to myself.
My dad heard me, though, and said, “That’s the spirit, Harvey.” He kissed my cheek. “Do you want me to go get the dogs?”
I glanced toward the front window, where a team of people held a sheet of glass on suction cups as they moved it toward my store.
“Looks like things will be safe for them soon, so yeah. Do you mind?” I asked.
“Not at all. I’ll take your mother. Let you have a few minutes to organize everyone without her help.” He winked at me.
My stress eased just a bit with that wink. There was something simply safe and open about knowing people so well that you could love them and save them—and others—from someone without having to think too hard about it. “Thanks, Dad,” I said before taking a huge bite of a cinnamon roll.
While Mom and Dad took Rocky’s key to get our pups, Luke ran to their house to get Sasquatch, saying, “He absolutely cannot miss this.”
And so it was that a half-hour later, Marcus and I had gridded off the store and assigned pairs to take inventory. Marcus had already printed out the stock lists, so he divided those by section and handed them out. Now, all everyone had to do was go through the shelves and check off each book that was there.
“If you feel like you can alphabetize as you go, please do,” Marcus said. “But if that gets confusing, remember our main purpose here is inventory. We need to know what we have and what we don’t.”
Heads around the store bobbed, and after another fortifying cup of coffee and, for many, a second cinnamon roll, everyone buddied up and headed to their section to start tracking books.
In a typical store, people counted the number of items, and that happened in a bookstore as well, but because we only had one or two copies of most books, the most important thing was to track what titles we actually had and which had been misplaced or perhaps stolen. This made the process even more tedious than at a pharmacy, say because you weren’t getting massive numbers of shampoo bottles to count. Here, you were simply looking for one copy of a book.
That was a particular challenge in the children’s section, so I had assigned Walter and Stephen to work there. In almost every way, they bucked the stereotype of white, cis, gay men, but in this one—attention to detail and appearance—they typified it. The space would be thoroughly organized, tidy, and counted by the time they were done with the children’s books.
Marcus and I had partnered to do the front-end inventory since it required us to have the master list of books and find single titles in various sections. That task was much easier for us since we knew the inventory most intimately. Plus, it had the added advantage of putting us near the front of the store so that I could keep an eye on the window replacement and the dogs.
“Looks like they’ve got it in,” Marcus said, holding the spines of Jesmyn Ward’s new book out so I could count them.
After my total was written down, I made my note on the book list and turned toward the window. “It does. How anyone can do that job without having a nervous breakdown, I don’t understand.” Just the idea of potentially breaking a piece of glass worth hundreds of dollars was enough to get my heart racing again, and adding in that you could really hurt yourself or someone else, I couldn’t even imagine.
“Agreed,” Marcus said as he took the list and pointed to the next table we needed to count. “But the dogs are thoroughly entertained.”
After Pickle, Elle, and Henri had carefully cleaned all the glass out of the window and the dog beds, they put the pooches’ beds back in their window and laid a treat on each of them. So, when Mom, Dad, and Lucas returned with all four pups, the pups immediately went to the beds and lay down with their noses pointed toward the work crew. “Why do I think those four might have mastered the art of sleeping and watching at the same time?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Marcus said. “So, here’s a question,” he paused to count the stack of Somehow by Anne Lamott that I held out to him, “I know we think that the dogs were kidnapped as a distraction so that someone could do this.” He waved the booklist toward the street outside. “But what if they also wanted the dogs away? Wanted to be sure Mayhem and Taco weren’t in the store?”
“Why would they care? Someone who would do this doesn’t care about whether a couple of animals get hurt,” I said, my anger welling up again.
Marcus took the books from my hands and put them back on the table beside me. “Are we sure?” He studied my face.
“So you think someone dognapped Mayhme and Taco to protect them?” I was finding this far-fetched, but then another thought came to me. “Or maybe they didn’t want them barking?”
“That’s possible, too. And maybe it’s all three things—the person wanted everyone gone from the street, the dogs safe, and the potential for the dogs to bark removed.” Marcus’s eyebrows were near his hairline, the way they always were when he got really excited about something.
I took a deep breath and thought about his theory. “I suppose it’s possible,” I said, and even as I spoke, I felt that familiar squiggle of an idea coming together. “Next?” I said, now determined to finish the inventory and make something good come of tonight’s mess.
We inventoried the entire store within four hours, so with only a few hours before daylight, Stephen issued everyone a challenge. “If you’ve got it in you, let’s clean the store completely before we close up. That way, Harvey and Marcus can come into a sparkling and ready store on Monday.”
I smiled at him. “That’s really nice, Stephen, but you all don’t have to do that.”
“Are you kidding me?” Bear said. “I have all day to sleep and watch football, and this gives me the perfect excuse. If you send me home now, Harvey, Henri will have me weeding by afternoon.”
“It’s true,” Henri said. “Give us an excuse to laze an entire Sunday away, Harvey.”
I laughed and had to admit the idea sounded pretty amazing. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“You and I are not cleaning, though,” Marcus said. “We are updating the inventory.” When I raised one eyebrow at him, he said, “Might as well make the backend as clean as the front?”
“And you don’t think we’ll make mistakes, given that we’ve been up all night?” I asked.
“Are you sluggish or sleepy?”
I thought a minute and realized I was the opposite—totally wired. “No, you’re right. Let’s do this.”
I wasn’t normally a “details” person, but the ordering of things and correcting our list was always something I enjoyed. Putting something right, I guess.
I was just about to tell Marcus I was really glad he suggested we finish this when that squiggle of something became a full-blown thought, and I blurted out, “You’re totally right. I know who did it.”
Marcus stared at me for a long minute, and then, probably because he’d worked with me and my wild brain long enough, he made the lateral leap and said, “You know who broke the windows?”
I nodded. “And who killed Penelope. Get Jared.”
He didn’t hesitate, and before I could say another word, he was out the front door and sprinting up the street, awash in the colors of dawn, to find my husband.
So it was that, as the sun climbed up over my building and turned Main Street in St. Marin’s a glowing orange, I solved the murder of Penelope Fisker. This was my poetic thought as I drank my ninth cup of coffee and finished the inventory update while I waited for Jared to arrive.
It didn’t take long, and in the way that things can only happen occasionally, Marcus returned with Tuck and Jared at the same time I finished inventorying and my friends finished cleaning. That kind of serendipity feels portentous, at least when you’ve gotten married, rescued your dogs, and had your store vandalized all in a twenty-four-hour period. Add in sleep deprivation, and the synchronicity of that sort of begins to feel like magic.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t hem or haw or second-guess myself when I told Jared that I knew who had killed Penelope, kidnapped our dogs, and broken the storefront windows. “I know I’m right,” I said.
My husband stared at me for a long minute before looking at his boss and then back at me. “How do you know?” he asked.
It was only at this moment that my brain fully understood both the intensity of my caffeine high and the depths of my exhaustion and locked itself up in a temporary stall that must have looked to everyone watching me like I had gone into a catatonic seizure for a minute.
Fortunately, the adrenaline of having some answers kicked my neurons into gear for a last burst of insight, and I said, “Well, I don’t know, except that I do know. I mean, I think I know. No, I’m sure I know.”
Mart stepped forward and put her hands on my arms. “Breathe.”
I took a deep breath.
“Now, tell us,” she said, stepping back into the huddle of my friends that had gathered around me at the register’s counter.
“Okay, it’s something that Marcus said about the person who broke my window wanting to be sure the dogs were safe that got me thinking. What if that was true? What if the people who did this really cared about animals?”
Jared nodded at me and smiled. “Go on.”
“So, what if all of tonight’s events—the dog napping, the window breaking—what if they were all staged so that someone could break into the dog spa and take something without it looking like that store was the focus?”
Tuck cleared his throat. “So you think someone did all this just to get something from a pet grooming place?”
I could hear the skepticism in his voice, but he wasn’t dismissing me, so I went on. “Not just a pet grooming place, but a murder scene.”
I tried not to gloat as I saw a flash of recognition cross the sheriff’s face. “You think the murderer left something behind and needed to go back and get it?”
I nodded. “I do, and I think I know who it was.”
If you had been driving through St. Marin’s, Maryland, on that Sunday morning around five thirty, you would have seen a full entourage of bedraggled people in wedding attire heading down Main Street like some sort of strange music video flash mob thing.
Most of the police presence was gone by then, so we probably looked like some sort of vigilante group on our way to proclaim justice, but with cell phones and dog leashes, not pitchforks and torches. And if we hadn’t all been so tired and strung out from a really wild few days, we might have thought better of our procession because the people who usually processed this way were usually intent on harm and oppression.
But this morning, we were overcaffeinated, hopped up on cinnamon roll sugar, and excited that maybe we had an answer to what was now two murders in our town. So, we marched, albeit slowly, up to the pet spa, where Tuck ceremoniously and gently removed the crime scene tape and let us file into the tiny lobby of the building.
“All right, Harvey,” he said, “we’ve already carefully gone over the building, but if you promise to keep your hands to yourself, you can look around.”
I nodded and dutifully shoved my hands into my pockets. Then I began walking through the front of the spa, stepping over shards of broken glass that were yet to be cleaned up and moving slowly toward the front register.
“The money was gone out of the register, right?” I said even as I looked into the empty open drawer.
“Right,” Jared said. “There wasn’t any money in the register at the time of the murder.”
“None at all,” Cate said. “That’s weird.”
“Not really,” Mart added. “We only keep a few bills in the register at the winery because most people pay by card now.” She thought for a minute. “But there wasn’t any at all?”
Tuck shook his head. “Nope, we made a note because a business with no cash did seem very strange.”
I sighed. “So, let’s assume”—I looked over at Jared and Tuck—“just go with me for a minute. Let’s assume that the murderer took any cash in the register with them at the time of the murder. Whatever was there—a lot or a little.”
Mart and Cate were nodding, so I gathered that made sense to them.
“So, if that was the case, it wasn’t the money they came back for.” I felt a little bit like one of those mystery detectives who strung the audience along while she worked her theory, but in this case, I was just working out my theory, not trying to prove my prowess. “There must have been something else here that was worth stealing then, something they wouldn’t have thought of at the time.”
I bent over and looked under the counter. Extra register tape, one of those zipper bank envelopes everyone used for deposits, a pen, and some paper clips. Nothing else. I stood up and thought about our register and what we kept nearby. Much of the same stuff, but we also had bags, which wouldn’t be necessary here since they didn’t sell any products.
I closed my eyes and let the image of our register form behind them. I could see the cubbies to the left with all our various bags in them, the lower shelf with register tape, the stapler, a roll of transparent tape, and a stapler. My mental eye scanned up, and I saw the clipboard with our mailing list sign-up on it. My eyes flew open.
“Their appointment book.” I glanced down again. “Where is the appointment book?”
Jared took a few steps toward me. “What appointment book? They have software to manage their appointments.” He closed the distance between us and powered on the computer. With a few keystrokes, he had a calendar app open on the screen. “See?”
I looked carefully at what he had pulled up. “I do, but when I was here booking my appointment for Taco and Mayhem, Sheila used an actual appointment book.” I held my hands up to show something the size of a sheet of paper. “Covered in some red leather-like fabric.”
Tuck nodded. “All right, that we have not seen.” He wrote something in his small notebook. “Anything else?”
I bent down to look under the register again. “Not that I notice,” I finally said. “But that appointment book—”
Jared interrupted me. “We’ll find it, Harvey. Thank you,” he said and held out his hand. “Now, I think we all need to get some sleep.” He turned to his boss. “You got this?”
“Yes, everyone”—Tuck turned to face the group of people still gathered in the lobby—“let’s go home and rest. We’ll regroup tonight at six at Harvey and Jared’s place.” He turned to us. “If that’s okay.”
“Totally okay,” I said. “Potluck. Bring whatever you want,” I announced as I stifled a huge yawn. “But first, everyone gets some sleep.”