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In the meantime, I needed to figure out my next step. I’d called my mother but only got her voicemail. Rather than leave a message — I hadn’t even really known why I was calling, except that I’d hoped she might have decided what to do about the house — I just hung up and told myself I’d call again later.
That trip to the Verde Valley was sounding better and better. Too bad it wasn’t going to happen for another two months.
But I told myself that just because Troy Latimer had shut me down, it didn’t mean I should give up. I pushed the call button for Josie’s number on my contacts list.
To my relief, she picked up right away. “Hi, Selena. What can I do for you?”
“Do you know the name of the trust that wanted to buy the Bigelow house?” I asked.
“Not off the top of my head, but I can look it up. Do you mind if I call you back in a few? I have a client in the office with me.”
“Sure,” I replied immediately, vaguely shame-faced that I’d interrupted an important meeting with one of my wild goose chases. “Whenever you have a chance.”
I set the phone down in the little cubby under the cash register where I kept it during the day, and wondered if I should embark on my project to redo the clothing display in the front window, just to keep myself from climbing the walls. However, before I could even begin to summon the energy for that particular task, the bells hanging from the front door jangled as Miriam Jacobsen came sailing into the shop.
Although I thought I maintained a neutral expression, my stomach dropped somewhere around my feet. With the week I’d been having, she was about the last person I wanted to see.
I didn’t even have a chance to say hello, because she approached the counter and fixed me with a gimlet stare. “Are you really planning on meddling with our Festival of Lights, Ms. Marx?” she demanded.
Oh, boy. Josie must have mentioned something about my offer to help costume the carolers and kick up the celebration a notch. I summoned a smile and said, “Oh, it was just something I was thinking about. It seems to me that the more we can do to make the event festive, the more people we’ll get to attend.”
Her nostrils flared. She’d probably been quite beautiful in her youth, with the elegant bones of her face and her ice-blonde hair — now given a peroxide boost, I was certain — and her pale blue eyes. No doubt she’d used her looks to her advantage, and even now, there was something intimidating about the way she was always perfectly put together, hair pulled up into a French twist, always with a matching bag and shoes and outfits that would have worked better for lunch in Beverly Hills than someplace like Globe, where cowboy boots far outnumbered spectator pumps.
“It is already quite festive, I can assure you,” she told me. “There is absolutely no need to go to any extra expense for an event that has done perfectly fine all these years without any outside intervention.”
My own nostrils wanted to flare at that remark, but I somehow kept my cool. Still, I knew she was implying that I was the outsider here, no matter how long I lived in Globe and how much I contributed to the local economy.
“Sometimes it’s good to mix things up a bit,” I said sweetly. “You wouldn’t want to get stagnant, would you?”
Her eyes narrowed. She always wore perfectly applied false eyelashes, a skill I’d never been able to acquire. “The Festival of Lights is in no danger of becoming stagnant,” she replied, mouth thinning. “Stay out of it. After all, a heathen like you has no right to be giving advice about a Christmas festival.”
And before I could even think of how best to respond to her “heathen” remark, she’d stalked out, letting the door slam behind her with a discordant jangle of the string of bells hanging from the handle.
Of all the….
I told myself to count to ten. Or maybe a hundred.
Who gave her the right to talk to me like that?
Absolutely no one, but since she was already gone, I decided to do my best to calm down and let it go. However, I couldn’t help thinking that people like Miriam Jacobsen made it extremely hard to maintain a Zen attitude.
While I was fuming, a man walked into the shop.
He was older, probably in his middle sixties, with iron-gray hair and a firm jaw. The really striking thing about him, however, was the dark suit and white clerical collar he wore.
“Selena Marx?” he asked. His voice was a pleasant tenor.
“Yes,” I replied. I knew I sounded a bit hostile, mostly because I couldn’t help wondering if some do-gooder citizen of Globe had dispatched him to convert me from my heathen state. Maybe Miriam Jacobsen had already set the dogs on me.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Neil Halloran.”
“Brant’s friend?” I blurted, recognizing the first name if nothing else. So much for jumping to conclusions. I had to hope he wouldn’t hold my earlier dubious tone against me.
“Colleague,” he corrected me, but gently. “We worked together on several cases. Sasha Young called me and told me what happened.”
It might have been nice if Sasha had mentioned that she’d gotten in touch with Brant’s priest friend. Then again, the girl had a lot on her mind…and maybe she’d had no idea that Neil Halloran would show up in Globe out of the blue like this.
“Yes, it was awful,” I said. “But….”
