Button Holed (2 page)

Drawer after drawer of them, removed from the cabinets, dumped on the glass-topped display cases over on my right.

And on the two wingback chairs in front of my desk.

And on the floor.

Just like that, my fear was forgotten, and the button-collecting, order-loving, chaos-avoiding side of me kicked in. So did the memory of how much effort it had taken to get all those buttons moved from my apartment here to the shop and how many hours I’d spent getting everything organized and looking just so.

“Damn! Do you have any idea how long it took me to put those buttons away? You can’t just toss them around. Old, remember, I said they were old. Which doesn’t mean they’re worth anything,” I added, reinforcing my earlier assertion that there wasn’t anything there worth stealing. “But buttons are little pieces of art, you know. And little chunks of history. They have to be treated carefully. Bad enough I’ve got to deal with Brina all day long. The girl doesn’t know a glass button from a gumball. And now I’ve got this mess to clean up, too? And today! Today of all days! What gives you the right to—”

“Is there some part of
shut up
you don’t understand?” This came from Giant #2, the same guy who’d told me to keep quiet in the first place. He came up behind me so fast, I didn’t have a chance to try and get out of his way. Once his arm went around my throat, I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. His grip was iron. He yanked me back against a body that felt as if it was made out of poured concrete.

“I said keep quiet.” The touch of his breath against my ear turned my knees to rubber—and not in the good way that kind of thing happened back in the day when Kaz whispered sweet nothin’s and I turned into a puddle of mush. This man’s breath was damp and as chilling as a touch of fog. It smelled like a food I couldn’t identify, and that, mingled with the earthy scent of his black leather jacket, sent shock waves through me.

He took advantage of my helplessness to ratchet up my fear, tightening his hold. “You put up a fight and you’re dead,” he growled, and I guess the way he was holding me, he could feel my feeble attempt at sucking in a breath to inflate my lungs, because he made sure to add, “You scream, and I’m going to snap your little body in half so fast, you won’t know what hit you.”

Oh yeah, right about this time, I was so freakin’ scared, my mind started playing tricks on me. That was the only thing that would explain why I almost thanked him for the “little body” compliment. I mean, it was only natural considering I am a middle-sized, average-looking woman of thirty-three who had been known to be called
cute
but is not, on anybody’s size chart, what might be termed
little
.

I dragged myself out of these crazy thoughts and tried to talk myself—and these two goons—down.

“Not going to scream,” I swore. “If you guys want some help carrying buttons out to the car—”

“Buttons!” The guy who had ahold of me snorted the word and said to his friend, “You take care of everything you were supposed to?”

Giant #1 shook his head, not like he was disagreeing, but more like he couldn’t believe his fellow burglar had the nerve to ask. “You wanna tell me how I’m supposed to know?” Had he been a little less civilized, I’m pretty sure he would have emphasized his point by spitting on my newly refinished hardwood floor. His hands out at his sides, he pivoted to look around the shop. “There’s so much crap here—”

“Watch it, buddy.” I squirmed, because squirming wasn’t screaming, and all I had agreed to do was not scream. I had also not agreed to stand by and listen to my life’s work disparaged by some creep who had to hide behind a ski mask. “Those are my buttons you’re talking about. And my buttons are not crap. In fact, they are—”

Apparently, listening to me was not high on the to-do list of the guy who had ahold of me. At the end of his rope, he lifted me off the floor and shook me. Not such a good thing considering that my head snapped back and forth, and the world skipped and wobbled before my eyes. But, as it turned out, all was not lost. At the exact moment my toes touched the floor, his grip on my throat eased up.

It’s the Boy Scouts who are always prepared, right? Well, I’d obviously never been a Boy Scout. Or a Girl Scout, either, for that matter. But I knew an opportunity when I saw one, and I was as prepared as I would ever be.

The second I slipped just a bit more out of his grasp and my feet hit the floor, I folded like a cheap lawn chair in the closeout aisle. I landed on my knees before Giant #2 realized he’d lost his hold on me, and before he could snatch me up again, I took off as fast as a woman can who’s crawling across a floor strewn with buttons.

I didn’t yelp or yip, not even when I brought a knee down on a metal button. I didn’t complain, either (though I prayed it wasn’t one that was too valuable), when I heard a glass button crunch beneath me. All I did was scramble as fast as I could, trusting that the dark would cover my moves and that I knew the shop better than the two burglars ever could.

While they were shuffling around, banging into each other and the display cases as they tried to catch hold of me, I scurried like a sand crab into the back storage room, jumped to my feet, and slammed the door behind me. There was a lock in the doorknob, and I fumbled for it. No easy thing considering my fingers were slick with sweat.

Even once I’d flicked the lock, I knew it was only a matter of moments—and the inconsiderable width of one door—before I was in big trouble again. I raced to the work table, where I’d imagined never doing anything more strenuous than spending endless quiet hours researching, cleaning, and packing buttons for shipment, and it’s a good thing I wasn’t the kind of little woman the burglar had hinted I was, because I got behind that table and pushed for all I was worth. Once it was against the door, I dared to take a breath and think through my next move.

Light or no lights? In a flash, I decided I’d keep them off to buy some time in case I needed to hide once the burglars burst through the door. Besides, I’d spent plenty of hours in the back room these last weeks since I leased the shop, and I knew the place like the back of my hand. I didn’t need the lights to grab the phone.

GOONS IN SKI masks might be pretty brave when it comes to intimidating a lone woman, but apparently, they aren’t stupid. They were long gone by the time the cops arrived, and the cops were long gone by the time Brina did me the honor of showing up.

I explained what had happened as best—and as quickly—as I could. Then I laid out my plan. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go into the bit about how this was a special day and we had a special client coming in. Brina remembered it all on her own. I knew this the moment I laid eyes on her because she’d added new (and very bright) stripes of red and pink to her inky hair, and she was wearing a black tank and a black mini that—believe it or not—were far more presentable than the holey jeans and rock-band T-shirts she usually wore. The outfit showed to perfection (and oh, how I use that term lightly) the tattooed, multicolored dragon draped over her left shoulder and the blood-red Celtic warrior spike band around her right wrist.

Somehow, even in the face of that much body art, I managed to keep focused. We needed to get the shop cleaned up, I told her. And we needed to do it fast.

“You mean you don’t want me to be careful about sorting out the buttons?”

“Not today.” I said this as I was scooping up moonglow, paperweight, and Bimini buttons all into one pile. This should have been Brina’s first clue that, for once, I was willing to relax my exacting standards when it came to my collection. Moonglow, paperweight, and Bimini buttons are all made of glass, see, but they are all different. In the best of all possible worlds, they’d never get jumbled together.

But then, the best of all possible worlds had lost a little of its luster the moment I stepped through the door and found the Button Box getting burglarized.

“The cops want me to inventory everything so I can tell them what’s missing,” I explained, my voice a little breathy because I was zooming into the back room with handful after handful of buttons, dropping them (carefully, of course) on the table in there, then coming back into the shop for more. This, obviously, should have been Brina’s second clue that it was time to move away from the doorway and get to work. I gave her a look that conveyed exactly that, picked up more buttons, and pointed out, “I can’t tell the police what was taken until I figure out exactly what’s left.”

She thought this over for a minute before her cheeks went pale beneath their coating of purplish blusher. “You mean we’re going to have to go through all the buttons?” she squeaked. “Again?”

I would have sympathized

1. if I saw the prospect of spending long hours with my collection as anything less than a blessing

and

2.
if I had the time.

Instead, I kept scooping and piling. “Think of this as a chance to do a little continuing education,” I told Brina, resisting the urge to add enough sarcasm to make it clear that in Brina’s case,
any
education would be a real plus. “You’ll have another opportunity to go through the buttons so you can learn how to classify and store them correctly.”

“Yeah.” She slipped her oversize hobo bag off her shoulder and plopped it on the floor. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

Maybe it was the shock of my early-morning encounter. Or the fault of the adrenaline still pouring through my body like vodka and Red Bull at a sorority party. Rather than comment on the way she rolled her eyes, I gave Brina a smile and assured her with words that would have certainly brightened my day back when I was her age. “You’ll get to learn more about buttons.”

Her eyes scrunched and her nose wrinkled; she thought this over and sniffed. No easy thing considering there was a silver stud sticking out of the left side of her nose.

“No way there can be that much to know about buttons,” she said, as sure of herself as only a twenty-year-old can be. “They’re just buttons, and I’ve worked here two whole weeks, so I gotta already know everything there is to know about buttons. Shit, Josie, it’s just like my grandma said when she told me about this job and made me apply for it. It’s not like you know anything about real life; buttons are the only thing you ever talk about!”

This time, Brina’s cheeks didn’t just get pale; they turned a sickly green. Who would have guessed the kid actually had a conscience? “Sorry,” she squeaked. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“And I’m not offended, so don’t worry about it.” It was a lie. I was the tiniest bit miffed; I just didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in my miffedness. “We’ve got to get moving, Brina. There’s a lot to clean up. And it’s nearly ten o’clock.”

“Oh my gosh!” Brina took a look at the clock on the wall, and her eyes lit like bottle rockets. “She’s going to be here soon!”

I didn’t need the reminder, but that didn’t stop a splurt of excitement from jumping around my insides. I doubled my pace, and finally, Brina joined in. Within fifteen minutes, things looked better. Not perfect. Just better. Another fifteen minutes and I would have been happy. Another thirty and I would have been thrilled. A couple days, a case of Pledge to remove the black dust left behind by the cops and their fingerprinting powder, a couple bottles of Windex to polish things up, and the luxury of having everything finally back in order . . . it wasn’t until then that I would be a happy camper.

“What about these . . .” I had just come out of the back room, and I found Brina standing at the table near the front door where I kept a basket of tasteful business cards, a bowl filled with those red-and-white striped mints, and a book for guests to sign. She looked even more confused than usual. “These . . .” She pointed. “These thingies.”

“Those
thingies
are buttonhooks,” I told her at the same time I thanked whatever lucky stars shone on antique button dealers. I’d just gotten the hooks in from a collector in St. Louis, and they were old, lovely, and valuable. I was grateful they’d gone unnoticed—and untouched—in the burglary. There were three hooks. The longest featured a silver handle modeled into a gorgeous swan’s head with garnet eyes. The other two were less spectacular and less pricey, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be able to find buyers for them. One was made of mahogany, and the other was tortoiseshell with a gold-inlay monogram. “They were used back in Victorian times,” I told Brina. “That’s when there were lots of buttons on clothing and gloves and shoes. Buttonhooks made it easier and faster to do up all those buttons.”

Eventually, the buttonhooks, too, would need to be cataloged and put away. For now, the little table between the door and front display window was as good a place as any for them. I nudged them so they were straight and equally spaced and stooped to retrieve the couple dozen buttons that had rolled under the table.

“No way we’re going to be ready on time,” I groaned, and as if I needed the reminder, the phone on my desk rang. I was all set to haul myself to my feet and answer it when Brina charged past me. “I’m your assistant, remember. It’s my job to answer the phone.” And she did, with a cheery, “This is the Button Box. Brina, Ms. Giancola’s assistant, speaking.”

Big points for Brina. She sounded efficient and professional.

For exactly the space of three heartbeats.

Then her jaw dropped and her voice went breathy when she squeaked, “Hugh Weaver?
The
Hugh Weaver? The Hollywood producer who made
For Whom the Trolls Troll
? I just saw the movie last week! Again. I mean, like, I saw it again. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. Maybe more. And, of course, I wear a costume like everybody else who goes to see it. I always go as Princess Paula and—what’s that? Oh. OK.” Her face as red as the stripe of hair above her right ear, she waved me over, handed me the phone, and said in a stage whisper, “It’s Hugh Weaver! Oh my God! I saw him on
Entertainment Tonight
last week! I can’t believe you actually know him, just like you said you did. When you said you did, I thought—”