In-Laws & Outlaws (4 page)

“Our witness said it was a large, white cardboard box, approximately yay-high,” the detective read out loud, gesturing with her hand flat at waist height to show how large the package was. “It might have writing on it in large gold script, but he couldn’t make out what it said.”

The entire fleet of officers jumped when they heard the sound of fifty people groaning, some of them dropping back to rest their rear ends on their heels in exasperation. They all started grumbling with their neighbors at once, some becoming so loud and animated that the detective had to clap her hands for silence.

“Excuse me?” Stacy began. “The package you’re describing is a box from a bridal shop, one right here in town—”

“Detective! We found it! It was hidden in a closet!” a blue-uniformed policeman called from the front door. The entire line of officers raced up the front steps and across the wide porch, nearly shoving each other to get inside. Their suspects were momentarily forgotten as they watched the officers’ frantic movement in disbelief from where they still knelt in a line across the front yard.

“Please tell me they’re not talking about the box that contains Priscilla Hardy’s wedding dress,” Tori called out. The grumbling resumed and the staff members looked around nervously, watching the house for any signs of activity from the police. When the door finally opened nearly fifteen tense minutes later and the detective emerged, she walked straight towards Stacy, wielding a box cutter.

After slicing through the zip tie binding Stacy’s hands, the detective went down the row, cutting each person loose. They were afraid to move until they were finally told they could stand up, which they did, cautiously looking at the detective for answers.

“It seems there might have been a mistake. I just received a phone call from the person who gave us the tip. He didn’t have much to say, just some kind of crazy laughter. Considering the package didn’t contain any contraband, I’d say this was some kind of sick prank. And to think, he used his one phone call to make sure I’d found this alleged contraband.”

“A prank? How did you come to that conclusion?” Stacy asked, confused. The detective ignored her question.

“We conducted a very thorough search and didn’t come up with anything out of the ordinary. We tried to keep the damage contained, and considering this incident appears to be a malicious attempt at revenge for having the individuals arrested, you can submit a requisition to my department for any costs you incurred as a result.”

“Damages? You mean, other than the antique door that your people destroyed? Or did you mean any of the sundry items inside the offices that were damaged when you roughed up my employees?” Stacy watched the woman’s face without backing down, glaring at her in a showdown of unfathomable importance.

“There might be a… considerable amount… of damage. You’ll be a better judge of the value and the scope of things when you get a look inside.”

It was a really bad sign that the officer wasn’t making eye contact, as Stacy worked daily with contractors of all kinds. Years of business dealings had taught her that anyone who wouldn’t make eye contact had something to hide.

“You don’t mean…” Stacy asked, realization dawning on her before she gasped, pressing a hand to her mouth. She felt lightheaded for a second as the detective’s meaning finally washed over her. The officer looked away, then nodded. “The dress?”

“Remember, you can file a requisition form to cover most of the damage. I’ll leave you to that. We’re… sorry about all this.”

The detective walked back towards her unmarked car with her head down, and the rest of the officers quickly followed suit, ducking into their vehicles without looking around at anyone. Stacy ran into the house and headed straight for the back fitting room. Jeremiah jumped up from where he leaned against a wall. Having reached the site of the destruction first, he put his hands out to stop her.

“You don’t want to go in there,” he cautioned. “It’s not pretty.”

“How bad is it?” she asked, wilting against his shoulder for a moment. She couldn’t deal with another dress being defaced in her offices, and having to tell another bride that her wedding dress was a goner. The memories of that first incident a year ago were still the stuff of her nightmares.

“It’s bad. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Can it be saved? You know, Anderson’s does amazing work, it was their highest quality to begin with, and maybe with a little bit of time and a whole lot of work they can—”

“It’s… shredded. Priscilla can dye it green and go as the Swamp Thing for Halloween.”

Stacy reached behind her for a chair to collapse in, and instinctively checked it for police slash marks before sitting in it. Once she decided it was safe, she fell back against it. “I’ve got to call Priscilla. Someone has to tell her.”

“Come on, we’ll get a head start on the necessary drinking to be in the right frame of mind to tell her.”

“
G
ood
, you’re here,” Tori called out the next morning when Stacy pulled her car into her parking space and stepped out. She ducked back in the sedan for the coffees she’d picked up for everyone and her briefcase, then turned around and gave her team members a winning, encouraging smile. One look at their faces, though, melted the smile right off her face.

“What’s wrong? I know that look, what have those circus sideshow freaks done now?” she demanded, looking around frantically for signs of some kind of horror.

“I don’t know how they did it from jail, but someone’s been practicing their lock smithing skills,” Mr. Giudice said, pointing to the front door. “Somebody came by during the night and put hasps and padlocks on all the entrances, even the old unused cellar door. We don’t have any way in.”

“But why would they…” Stacy began, but she left the rest of her sentence hanging. She knew exactly why they did it, it was because they’re spiteful morons. She looked helplessly up at her offices, painfully aware that everything necessary for not only the Lancaster wedding but also three other pending events was locked up tightly inside.

“Can we call someone to come open the front door?” she offered, but her security chief shook his head.

“Not unless you want to go and pay off-duty hours prices. There’s not a lock smith in town that’ll be open for another three hours.”

“I don’t see any other way except to pay for a service call, unless anyone can get in through a window and find a way to let the rest of us in. Can’t any of your guys just break the lock?”

“Miss East, I’m real grateful you think my guys are a bunch of muscle heads who can just go pummel a door down, but—” He was interrupted by a loud shout from the front porch.

“Got the lock offa there, boss!” one of the so-called muscle heads announced, holding up the hasp in one hand and a crow bar in the other. Stacy covered her eyes when she saw a palm-sized piece of the door frame still screwed to the hasp, dangling from the large man’s fist.

“Oh, good. We’ll just deduct that damage from the security deposit. That’s what they get for locking me out of my own business. I mean, us. Locking us out,” she said quickly, looking around and certain that everyone could see Nathan’s half-proposal brandished across her chest like a scarlet letter. No one seemed to have noticed her slip, or at least no one said anything if they did. “Let’s all get to work. Mr. Giudice, please be sure to thank your guard for his help, it was really important that we get inside.”

They scattered, eager to get to their assigned departments and tasks, as most of them were already a couple of hours behind thanks to the lockout. Stacy announced that the coffee would be in the kitchen and welcomed everyone to help themselves, then she got to work. Everything had to be in place by that afternoon if she could expect their other events to go off without a hitch, or with a hitch, if the wedding lingo was correct.

A short time later, the sound of scraping wood nearby brought Stacy back to her senses. It was an ominous sound, one that meant an even larger chunk of the company’s antique house was being destroyed. She whipped her head around to find the source of the noise, and was relieved to see her increasingly long-time friend, Rod Sims. Detective Rod Sims, to be precise. It was the first time she’d had a moment to think about the fact that her friend was a member of the very same police force who’d only the night before been trashing her office building.

“Rod! What are you doing here?” Stacy demanded, smiling with relief from knowing the source of the horrible damage sound wasn’t another SWAT team raid.

“An anonymous tipster called me and told me there was trouble here.”

“Anonymous? Who could have called you, we were all man-handled and handcuffed! There was no one within reach of a phone!”

“Oh, it wasn’t one of your guys,” Rod answered, nodding in acknowledgment at the reporter who had returned to the property to take notes and snap more pictures.

“Remind me to thank him, even if he did get you here a little too late. In fact, I know the perfect way to thank him. Her name’s Mandy, and she was giving me grief just yesterday for still being single. Tell him to ask her out… I’m her boss and I’m requiring her to agree.” Stacy turned her attention away from the reporter and back to Rod. “But what’s going on? Someone called the police about drugs in my office, and it was all a big joke?”

“Yeah, that’s how it looks. I spoke to Amy about it, she’s the detective on the case—”

“Amy?” Stacy asked, cocking an eyebrow suggestively and switching to her most sarcastic tone. “I don’t recall anyone named Amy barging onto my property and putting me in a headlock. There was a very smartly dressed but unfortunately masculine looking woman named ‘Detective Something or Other,’ but definitely no Amys on the premises today.”

“One in the same,” Rod admitted, looking away sheepishly at having called his colleague by her name, giving away the fledgling relationship between the two of them. Stacy smiled knowingly while Rod surveyed the damage to the company’s once ornate Tiffany windowed front door. “You’re gonna put in a claim for all this, right?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get to it.” Stacy flicked a hand in the building’s direction. “For now, I’ve got work to do. There’s the little matter of a bride without a dress to deal with.”

“This is becoming a thing with you guys, isn’t it? First the beauty queen’s dress gets defaced while in your care, and now this? It’s like you’re in cahoots with the dress people. You might as well start telling your clients to go ahead and order a backup, just to be safe.”

“Excuse me? Are you seriously implying that it wasn’t your officers who destroyed that dress in there? A dress that my client saved up for an entire year to buy? How dare you!” Stacy whirled around and glared at Rod furiously, anger burning in her eyes. Rod put his hands up, both apologetically and somewhat defensively.

“You’re right, I was only teasing. But what are you gonna do now? Shouldn’t you give your traumatized staff the rest of the day off, or something?”

“Are you kidding? Besides the other events on the calendar, we’re still aiming for a wedding in the near future. They have too much work to do to let a little thing like near-incarceration stand in their way. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got plenty of things myself that I need to be doing right now, and standing around talking to Benedict Arnold isn’t high on my list! And you can tell Detective ‘Amy’ to get her skinny tail over here and start cleaning up some of this mess!”

Since decorated police detectives weren’t in the habit of repairing structural damage, Stacy’s security men got to work at least making the offices usable again, much to Mandy and Tori’s delight. Stacy had to remind them more than once to stop ogling the men as they lifted heavy objects, and she actually caught the two of them trying to overturn an armoire just to watch the men hoist it back up into place.

She’d stalled long enough, even though the events of that morning gave her plenty of excuses to be occupied, but now it was time to make the dreaded phone call to the bride with the horrible news about the crime scene that was now her dress. Stacy had flashbacks to having to call another bride with the devastating news, but she hoped—no, she knew—that Priscilla was one level-headed girl. It would hurt, but she would understand, especially when she learned that this was most likely just another attempt by her in-laws to ruin her special day.

Understanding didn’t begin to cover it.

“
I
know
you couldn’t have done anything to stop it, Miss East,” the girl said in the most pitiful little voice Stacy had heard in a long time. “They think they’re getting back at each other over something or other, but nobody’s stopping to think about Porter and me. Your hands were tied…literally!” Priscilla laughed lightly at her last comment, amazing Stacy to no end. She was taking this far better than anyone else would have in her shoes, and it sparked quite a revelation.

This poor girl—and her poor groom, too, most likely—had been putting up with this their whole lives. No one should be this jaded at their ages, Stacy thought somberly, but for these two, watching their families’ heart-breaking capers and over the top behavior was just par for the course. It was horribly unfair, and she vowed (again) to do anything she could to stop it.

It was too bad that Stacy’s vow would be put to the test—and receive a miserably failing grade—only a few short hours later.

A
fter fielding
phone calls from angry relatives for a solid three hours, each filled with more spit, venom, and accusation than the last, Stacy was ready to call it quits and go into the birthday clown business. No client’s case had ever made her feel more desperate, more like a fraud, or made her miss Abigail more.
Abigail would have known exactly how to handle these people
, Stacy thought miserably, brushing at a tear in the corner of her eye.

“These morons haven’t even posted bail! How are they allowed to call me and complain?” she demanded before realizing she was talking to herself. “It’s like they’ve got nothing better to do than yell at me. I’m not the one who killed the old lady!”

The sound of a truck backing up outside Stacy’s office brought her out of her unhappy thoughts. Truck deliveries were as common as dirt at her business, but not in front of the building when there was clearly a large, professionally-lettered sign that indicated deliveries were made in the rear of the building. She got up and walked over to the window, brushing back the damask draperies with the back of her hand. The sight of four identical mid-sized dump trucks from Doran’s Manure & Fertilizer, stationed at various points on the property and already hoisting up to drop their loads—the thought of that wording almost made her throw up—did manage to cause her to scream out loud.

“STOOOOOOOOOOPPP!” Stacy continued to scream as she ran across the yard, waving frantically to the drivers whom she knew couldn’t hear her over the mechanism on each vehicle lifting the truck bed. The stench hit her before she reached the first truck, before the first clod of poo rolled off the truck and landed unceremoniously on the lawn.

She didn’t wait for an acknowledgment or an explanation, but instead raced to the closest truck and threw open the door of the cab. She climbed the three steps up to the driver’s seat, shoved the driver aside and blared the horn with all her might, holding the horn down for several long seconds before tapping out a rhythmic pattern on the horn to signal to the other drivers.

“Lady, what are you doing?” the crew manager called up to her, his hands on his hips and a confused expression on his face. He signaled to the other confused drivers, and Stacy leaned back against the seat with an exhausted sigh when she heard the grinding noise of the trucks fizzle to a halt.

Stacy turned and held out her hand to be helped down from the truck, a classic Abigail move if there ever was one. Once someone has had to help you steady yourself, they were putty in your hands—even if those hands were now greasy and smelled oddly of…
what?
So far from being a weak, pitiful-me move, it was more like a cold, calculated, controlling move to put your adversaries in their place. And a man about to dump a truckload of pig manure on her property was an adversary if she’d ever seen one.

The driver looked at her hand with contempt, but Stacy stared him down until he begrudgingly reached up and took it—another lesson learned at the feet of Abigail, the master. Stacy put more pressure than was probably necessary on his hand as she stepped daintily to the ground, nothing like the thundering behemoth in stilettos that she’d been while racing out there. She stood up tall, smoothed out her pencil skirt, and squared her shoulders before giving him a frosty smile.

“Now, will you please explain how I may help you today?”

“Help me? You can help me by staying out of a company vehicle. Insurance doesn’t cover people jumping up in the cab and smashing the horn.”

“I see. Trust me, I’ll do my best to make sure I am never, ever,
ever
in one of your vehicles again. Of course, that would be so much easier to accomplish if your vehicle wasn’t parked in front of my place of business.”
Take that
, she thought.
Don’t dish it out if you don’t plan to take a bite yourself.

“We got orders to deliver four loads of premium grade in this spot,” he answered without the least bit of remorse, pointing with an outstretched arm to the grassy area under the swooping crepe myrtle trees. “The owner said a guy came by today and paid in full, and gave us clear directions on where it was all supposed to go.”

“Let me see the order.” Stacy took the driver’s outstretched clipboard and flipped through the paperwork, looking for a miscalculated address. Once she confirmed the correct address and realized that this could easily be the handiwork of the demons that Priscilla’s wedding had loosed upon the earth, she switched to looking for an incriminating name. Instead, she saw a scrawling, looping signature that had been crafted with flourish. “Seriously? You delivered something on the say-so of a Mr. Harold B. Utts?”

The driver looked dazed, failing to see the problem. Stacy pointed, then realized she’d have to spell it out for him. “Harold? Harry? Harry Butts? You took delivery instructions from a man who called himself Harry Butts?”

“Hey, I don’t care what people say their names are. I’m delivering waste from farm animals, not uncut cocaine. I go where my boss says go.”

“Well, I promise you, it wasn’t supposed to be delivered to this… wait a minute. Paid in cash? As in, non-refundable, non-traceable?” The driver shrugged, but looked like he agreed. “Can you describe this person? And who exactly is your boss, maybe he can get to the bottom of this? You know, never mind, they all look alike in that family anyway.”

Stacy looked around at the trucks before inspiration hit. She tore a sheet of paper off her own ever present clipboard and pulled a pen out of her skirt pocket before scribbling furiously.

“I want you to take all four truckloads to this address, and inquire in the office
before
simply dumping them on the ground, please.”

“Where’s this place?” he asked, turning the paper she gave him around so he could read it.

“It’s the community gardens over by the old train depot. Less fortunate members of town are given garden plots to plant fresh produce, and they’re taught nutrition classes, organic and sustainable agriculture, there’s even a farmer’s market where they can earn some money. They even have to give a portion of their harvests to the soup kitchen. I have a good idea who’s behind this—well, a short list of names, actually—and I think the donation of their hard-earned pig poo is in order. Please remember to check in with the office staff and find out where they’d like it placed, I’m sure they have a compost pile already that you can unload this near. Oh, and be sure to tell them the name of the generous donor who paid you in full, just so the staff of the organization can enjoy a good laugh when they try to send a thank you card.”

She turned on her heel and marched back into the old house, seething and smiling at the same time. There was a long overdue meeting coming, and she would see to it that it happened by the close of business today.