Page 4 of Something Borrowed

“Your pocket,” Madeline repeated and motioned toward Vic’s lower hip. “You have, at the very least, a bar of my soap in there.”

“You’re suggesting I stole soap?”

“Not suggesting. Stating. Although technically, it won’t be stolen until you walk out the door—the way you’ve done with several other things the past few months.”

Vic’s mouth fell open. She clamped it shut. She was utterly mortified—and furious. What had she been thinking? How had she done this again? What the heck was wrong with her?

Shame burst out as anger. “So what? Are you going to call the cops? Charge me? Over a bloody bar of five-dollar soap?”

Madeline shocked Vic by smiling, and what’s worse, it seemed genuine. Vic couldn’t spot even a hint of anger or scorn in her face, and her unique, rum-colored eyes were warm and soft.

Even Gwen, who’d been silently witnessing Vic’s humiliation, looking like she’d like to disappear too, seemed surprised by Madeline’s expression—and her next words.

“Nope and nope,” Madeline said cheerily. “Though all three of us know full well it isn’t just a bar of soap you’ve taken. Still, I don’t think calling the police will do a single thing to help you or stop you.”

Vic stared, as did Gwen—clearly as clueless about where Madeline was going with all this as Vic was.

“Keep the soap. You took the Pumpkin Spice, right? It’s lovely. Let yourself enjoy it.”

Vic wished the earth would split open and swallow her up. Anger or outrage would be way easier to handle than whatever this was. She tried to say something, anything, but found she had no voice. Instead of an apology, all that came out was a weird, creepy croaking sound. She was hopeless.

Madeline didn’t seem fazed at all. “Gwen’s getting married in a few hours and will be taking two weeks off. While she’s gone, I’ll need a hand in the shop. You can start Monday. Be here at nine-thirty, so we can go over a few things before we open at ten. You can tell me then how many hours you think you need to put in to cover whatever you’ve taken. Who knows? If it works out and you like the job, maybe you could work part-time—for a paycheck, I mean.”

Vic felt like she was drunk or sedated or something. She had heard Madeline’s words but couldn’t make sense of them. As if sensing tension—and up for a battle—a monster of a cat, deep gray with white feet, trotted into the room. He had an old scar across his nose, a jagged line on his muzzle where no fur grew, and the tip of one of his ears was gone. Vic wished she was gone.

“Why would you do something like that for me?” she said, her voice higher than usual. She had the horrifying feeling she might cry or worse.

The cat stared at Vic, its vivid blue eyes narrowed to slits. Then, tail twitching grouchily, he plunked down beside Madeline like a furry, four-legged enforcer.

Madeline shrugged. “The things you take are relatively inexpensive. You won’t make me go broke, but the fact that they’re small and are nothing you couldn’t survive just as well without . . . Well, it makes it pretty clear that you need something—and it’s not soap.”

Gwen had raised her eyebrows at Madeline’s offer, but now she reached out and lightly touched Victoria’s forearm. “Give it a try. What do you have to lose?”

“And if I don’t? What then?”

Madeline shrugged again. “Then nothing, but I’ll have to ask you not to come back—and that’d be a pity. The Second Chance Shop is pretty great.”

“You two are nuts.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard that a time or two,” Madeline said cheerily. “Don’t paint Gwen with the same brush, though.”

“No, please do,” Gwen corrected.

Again, like the idiot she so often was, Vic could only gape at them, her brain a storm of emotions and incoherent thoughts. Unable to think of what to say, how to respond, she spun on her heel and scuttled to the door, hyper-conscious of how her stilettos slowed her stride.

She was three blocks away when she realized she hadn’t returned the soap. She pulled it out of her pocket, stared at it, then let it drop back into the folds of fabric. That Madeline had told her she could keep it was no consolation. But she would. What choice did she have, after all? She was definitely not taking Madeline up on her crazy offer and showing up to be further humiliated and shamed. Definitely not.

Chapter 3

Cal rubbed the back of his neck and riffled through a stack of sticky notes that Carrie, his little-sister-slash-receptionist-slash-bookkeeper-slash-sanity-saver, had left him. He had been terribly sad for Carrie when her marriage died and she moved back to Greenridge. She’d been the one person he always thought and hoped had gotten it right, was proof you could break family patterns . . . It hurt that her pain had been a saving grace for him and his little company.

In a terrible coincidence—or helpful one, depending on how you looked at it—just before Carrie’s marriage imploded, his latest long-term relationship had too. With Melanie’s departure, the heart went out of him work-wise—and in the rest of life—for a bit. Carrie had kept him and the business from going under when he’d been too down in the dumps to muster the energy to keep it on track himself.

Ah, he didn’t want his brain to take that old side trail again. He forced his concentration back to Carrie’s notes, written in purple pen.

Two messages were from folks he’d already taken care of. They were repeat customers and had his cell phone, so had contacted him directly after leaving messages with Carrie at the office. He gratefully crumpled the completed ones and threw them into the wastepaper bin.

A guy named Vic had apparently called three times. Wait—make that four. There was another one from him stuck beneath a request for a quote from a group home manager. From Carrie’s note, Vic’s issues didn’t sound like a huge emergency. The house had other bathrooms that were working fine. Just one of the “guest” bathrooms had a blocked toilet. Cal rolled his eyes. Poor little rich man. Then he did a double take at the address Carrie had jotted down. Vic lived in a sprawling heritage house on 3rd Ave. that Cal always admired but had never seen the inside of. With three stories, a big old-fashioned front porch, dormer windows, and lots of gingerbread detailing, it had the kind of character that he always found sorely lacking in modern builds.