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CHAPTER TWO
That was Heidi Dowd standing in front of the two-for-nine adult T-shirts at Janet’s Crafts. Carine would have recognized that snatched figure even if she had one eye closed and a fistful of dirt tossed into the other.
She did a hasty backtrack with her cart, cringing at the squeak of the front-left wheel that seemed intent on going whichever way the other three weren’t. “You slumming, Heidi? What are you doing way out here?”
Janet’s wasn’t what the well-heeled connoisseur would call a “Can’t-miss shopping experience.” There were newer, bigger,cleanerarts and crafts stores on the Inner Banks that didn’t boast a persistent old feta aroma in their ductworks. Still, one thing Janet’s did well was buying too much of items most people didn’t think they wanted and then selling them for cheap.
Like the cart full of fabric pom-poms Carine was pushing.
She’d recently learned that her job description as a planned community’s on-site real estate agent had been edited to include party planning. If it weren’t for the fact that the Valerie-designed houses at Shora were basically selling themselves, Carine might have told her boss at Lipton Properties to take the job and shove it where the sun couldn’t kiss. She hated shifting goalposts almost as much as she hated manufactured vibes. And that was what Lipton wanted her to do—make good “vibes” for the visiting investors. There were fifty acres of adjoining property at stake, and Lipton could see a dollar sign on every grass blade growing on it.
“Am I slumming?” Heidi raised her pale eyebrows and lowered her reading glasses. “I should ask you the same thing. What are you doing here? The only people who shop at Janet’s this time of day are the old ladies who ran out of acrylic yarn the previous night while watching their stories.” She rolled her Wedgewood blue eyes toward the ceiling and muttered, “And slightly younger old ladies who’ve been designated the company fun committee.”
“Oh no. What happened?” Carine got her cart out of the way of the end cap and settled in for a story. One of her favorite things was listening to Heidi talk. Not everyone could make an Eastern North Carolina twang sound sultry. Carine needed to take lessons.
Heidi blew some air upward and chased a fall of hair out of her face. “At some point in the past three of four months, the staff at Dowd Wave Cruisers collectively lost the ability to read calendars. Not a single one of us noticed Fisher Fest was coming up. My intern walked into my office this morning and asked what the unassigned calendar items about the parade float and demonstration crew were about. I was so annoyed, I think I floated straight up out of my body for a minute.”
Carine winced. That probably would have triggered an out-of-body experience for her, too, if she’d forgotten such a major perennial task. “The company does Fisher Fest every year. How could you all possibly forget it?”
“I got distracted by micromanaging Valerie’s pregnancy. That’s my excuse. Tim never remembers because he never shows up anymore. He says Fisher Fest is for the rookies who have better knees and don’t care about melanoma yet. Ran the numbers this morning to see how many of our more charming builders we’re gonna have to cut overtime checks to get caught up. Tim said, ‘Screw the budget, Heidi,’ so here I am, scrambling to get T-shirts done up for them and figuring out how to decorate the interior of a new yacht for the tours.”
Heidi sounded absolutely revolted by it all.
Knowing how many people had crawled through Clay’s place begging to be the object of Heidi’s revulsion for an evening, Carine swallowed a snicker. “And…puce is what you’re going to go with?”
“You know what?” Heidi said dourly, holding up one of the shirts. “It stands out. If I’m paying a bunch of guys thirty bucks an hour to wink and smile at people who have more money than sense, they’re going to wear something easy to spot. Besides…” She dumped the entire box into her cart. “That’s the only color there’s any extra-extra-larges left in. And those guys would look good in anything, anyway. Especially Jabari and Clint. Dark skin, crisp white shorts, and murder sneakers. They’ll hypnotize the rich widows.”
“Murder sneakers?”
“A certain kind of black Nike. Have them explain it to you one day. For bonus points, ask why they don’t just wear white ones, then. They’ll get so affronted that Clint might even pull out the slideshow he keeps on his phone.”
“Why does Clint have a sneaker slideshow at the ready?” Carine knew Clint in passing. Like his cousin Jabari, he picked up hours at the boat company whenever his university was on break. What he earned working there full-time covered his tuition, and Carine suspected Tim paid him a little more than industry standard to keep him cycling back.
“Apparently, it was something he’d done for a high school project that he later tweaked because he found himself having the same conversation repeatedly. Personally, I think that’s ingenious.”
“And definitely in character for Clint.” Carine picked up one of the ghastly shirts and scoured her brain for at least one thing of a similar hue that she could positively associate it with. Nothing came to mind. “What are you going to do with them? I didn’t think you were the arts and crafts type.”
“You mean unless rope and feathers are involved?”
Carine scowled as she folded the shirt back into the cart. “Why would you put rope and fea—Heidi!” Because Heidi had a stunning tendency to say unmentionable things in a pulpit volume, Carine had to do a quick and frantic step backward to rescan the nearby corner of the store. There was a lady with a toddler checking out the gallon-sized glitter containers a couple of rows over, but otherwise, no one else was in earshot. That woman was too flustered by the child’s constant pulling of her purse strap to pay attention to Carine and Heidi.
Heidi shrugged. “Couldn’t find a company to screen-print them in time, so we’re resorting to the typical Dowd thing and doing it ourselves.” She hefted a screen-printing starter kit out of the front section of the cart. “Or rather, my intern will be. One color shouldn’t be so tough, right?”
“Depends on how many shirts you have to waste before you get it right,” Carine said in a worried undertone. She could picture the disaster in the making for even a highly competent person like Heidi. Given the time constraints the company was working under, the stress levels all around would go from heightened straight tobatten-down-the-fucking-hatchesin eight hours or less. “Oh, Lord. Do you want me to do it?”
Heidi raised a brow. “You know how to screen-print?”
“I actually do. I was a Girl Scout. We always had to have matching T-shirts for our special outings. I somehow became the troop’s designated shirt cranker.”
“A Girl Scout, hmm?” Heidi said with a warm chuckle. “That explains some things.”
“Things like what? I never thought I managed to fit the archetype as well as I’d hoped. Disappointed my parents when I didn’t get as many badges as the other girls.”
Heidi wore the smile she always wore when she had no intention of answering and every intention of judging.
Carine sighed.
There was no needling Heidi Dowd. She said what she wanted to and never what she didn’t. Carine would be better off going home and doing a Google search on things Girl Scouts were known for than trying to pry words out of a dominatrix.
