Panic Button (3 page)

“I’ll call,” Angela assured me, pulling open the front door of the shop and stepping
out into the bustle of my Old Town neighborhood. When she looked down at the sidewalk,
there was a hitch in her step, and she hopped on one foot, then turned around and
gave me a sheepish smile. “Step on a crack,” she said, pointing down at the fracture
in the sidewalk, “and break your mother’s back.”

I smiled, too, like I knew she was kidding. Even though I was pretty sure she wasn’t.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I’d already said, when I realized Angela wasn’t listening.
Her gaze was riveted to a park bench a few storefronts down where a whole bunch of
crows were digging into what looked to be the
last of a hamburger and an order of fries that had been left on the sidewalk.

I grimaced. “Sorry,” I said, “not exactly the ambiance the merchants around here want.
I bet somebody left it for LaSalle. He’s a stray dog we’ve all sort of adopted,” I
explained, looking up and down the street. “I’m surprised he hasn’t been by for his
breakfast. He usually is by now. It’s tacky leaving food around, I know. We’re not
really a garbage dump, and the crows, they’re not usually anywhere around here. They
must have come over from one of the parks near the lake.”

“Crows.” Angela’s face was as pale as ashes. “Don’t you know what it means, Josie?
Haven’t you counted them? Don’t you know the old saying about crows?”

I didn’t have to ask what she was talking about, because Angela filled me in. “One’s
bad,” she said. “Two’s luck. Three’s health. Four’s wealth. Five’s sickness. And six…”
Her lips moving, she counted wordlessly, then swallowed hard. “Six is death.”

B
Y THE TIME EIGHT O’CLOCK
that evening rolled around, I was all but ready to throw in the towel and admit that
I believed in Angela’s curse.

After all, the more time I spent with the charm string, the more I realized the curse
applied to me. I was cursed to have only a few more hours with the fabulous buttons,
cursed to be lured in by their beauty and their history and the amazing fact that
the charm string had remained intact all these years—only to have to surrender it
the next day when Angela showed up.

If that wasn’t a button lover’s curse, I didn’t know what was.

The thought swirling in my head, I sighed and told myself to get a grip.

“OK, yeah, so you’re cursed,” I mumbled, snapping a
picture of a hard rubber button embossed with a geometrical pattern. “But you’re blessed,
too, and don’t you forget it.” I angled the button so that I could get a photo of
the backmark on the underside that said it was a “Goodyear.”

“You’ve got a few more hours tomorrow to play with these buttons until your heart’s
content,” I reminded myself, and that cheered me right up. Still smiling, I slid the
charm string a few inches farther down the table and trained the light on the last
of the buttons I had to photograph. Technically, I had begun photographing from the
wrong end, starting with the buttons that had been strung last and working my way
to those Angela’s great-great-grandmother had used to begin her charm string.

How did I know?

There was no mystery there.

Each girl who made a charm string started with what was called a “touch button,” one
button that was a little larger than the others. This touch button, curiously, was
just about the same size as the hard rubber Goodyear button, and at the same time
I wondered why Angela’s great-great-grandmother had started her string with two buttons
that were so similar in size, I told myself it really didn’t matter. Like the beautiful
enameled button with the red fish on it, these two buttons had probably been gifts,
or just too interesting for her to resist. In a way, the fact that she was willing
to flaunt traditional charm string convention told me a lot about Angela’s great-great-grandmother.

And that only made me even fonder of her buttons.

As I had done with all the other buttons, I took
measurements and made notes about this last button. It was metal and there was a picture
on it that showed a small, squat building on the left and another, taller brick building
behind it. I grabbed my magnifying glass and took a closer look. A schoolhouse, complete
with a chunky tower and a bell. Quaint. Not very valuable. And all the more charming
because of it.

Satisfied I’d done all I could for the moment, I turned off the light and rolled my
neck, banishing the kinks that had settled between my shoulder blades in the hours
I’d been busy. There were still a couple buttons I wanted to know more about, but
my research would have to wait until morning. I’d promised to meet Nevin Riley for
a drink at eight thirty at a new place that had just opened down the street, and I
still had to close up the shop and tally the day’s sales. Two picky knitters looking
for the perfect buttons for the sweaters they were making, a collector from Des Moines
who had heard good things about the shop (hurray!) and made a special trip to Chicago
to visit, a local artist who wasn’t as interested in the history of buttons as he
was in the shapes, a mother and daughter working on scrapbooks. And the charm string.

All things considered, it had been a really good day at the Button Box.

And on top of all that, it would be just a little while and I’d get to see Nev.

Were we a couple?

Interesting question, and honestly, I’m not sure I knew the answer, at least not at
that moment. Nev and I had been seeing each other semisteadily since that fateful
day I opened the Button Box and found burglars, then a
murder victim, inside. Over the last few months, we’d discovered we liked lots of
the same things: quiet dinners, walks along the lakeshore, Cubs baseball. Nev was
smart, and he was cute. He was sweet and considerate, and though he had a sort of
teddy-bear exterior that hid it well, he was one heck of a tough cop.

I liked him.

He liked me.

And at this point, neither one of us was anxious or ready for the relationship to
go any further.

All in all, what I had with Nev was ideal.

And so unlike everything I’d had with Kaz (which was more like grand opera than a
Hallmark Channel movie), that I thanked my lucky stars every single day.

In spite of the hours I’d spent hunched over my worktable, there was a spring to my
step when I zipped to the front of the store to lock the door, collected the day’s
receipts from the rosewood desk where my computer sat next to an array of button research
books, and finished the day’s paperwork in the back room.

I gave the charm string one last look before I turned out the workroom lights and
grabbed my purse and jacket, and yes, I admit it, I mumbled a quick “good-night” to
it, too. Blame it on the buttons. Any button collector would understand.

I slipped on my jacket and headed outside. I hadn’t even finished locking the shop
door when I felt a wet nose nuzzle my hand.

“Hey, LaSalle!” I took my key out of the lock of the robin’s egg blue front door of
the brownstone and dropped my key ring in my purse before I turned to give the dog
a pat on the head. LaSalle was what would charitably be termed a “mix.” In other words,
he was a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of things that didn’t exactly
match each other. He had the floppy ears of a hound, the broad muzzle and big nose
of a terrier, and the short legs of a corgi. As for color, well, it was already after
dark and the streetlight a couple shops down needed to be replaced, but that hardly
mattered. I’d known LaSalle since he first showed up in the neighborhood a month or
so earlier, and I knew he was a mottled mixture of white, black, and brown. Classic
mutt, and as lovable as any dog I’d ever met. So lovable, in fact, that a couple of
the local merchants (yes, including me) had actually thought about taking him home.

LaSalle would have none of it. He was a scrapper, a street dog, as happy to patrol
our Old Town neighborhood as he was to greet us as we came and went. Between those
of us who fed him, and the florist across the street who’d taken him in to the nearest
vet to be neutered, we made sure he was safe and warm.

“You missed out on your breakfast.” At the same time I took a look down the street
to where the crows had polished off the burger and fries, I bent to scratch a hand
over LaSalle’s head. I was rewarded by a thumping tail and a sound from deep in LaSalle’s
throat not unlike the one I make when a particularly interesting button catches my
eye. “Not to worry. I knew you’d be by eventually.”

I’d tucked a bit of the turkey sandwich I’d brought for dinner into my jacket pocket,
and I set my purse down on the sidewalk to fish it out.

That’s when it happened.

No sooner had purse touched pavement than, like a shot, a person raced out of the
alley between my brownstone and the one next door. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell.
I registered only a few quick details: dark pants, a hoodie pulled over his (or her)
head and down low over her (or his) brow.

Before I could do anything more than flinch and step back, that person snatched my
purse off the sidewalk and kept on running.

“Hey!” Not exactly the greatest deterrent to purse snatching, but the only thing I
could think to say at the moment.

Have no fear. Turns out, LaSalle did my talking for me.

Before the thief had gone three steps, the dog had him by the back of the pant leg.

Startled, the thief yelped and dropped my purse, and once he did, the dog let go.
LaSalle actually might have gone back for a real bite if the thief didn’t dart into
the street directly in front of a tour bus.

I screeched, clapped my hands over my mouth, and held my breath. That is, until the
tour bus rolled by, and when it was gone, I saw my attacker safe, sound, and unsquished
on the other side of the street. He took one look in my direction, and since LaSalle
was sitting at my side, growling louder than any dog his size should have been able
to, the thief apparently decided my purse wasn’t worth the effort. He scurried around
the corner and disappeared.

“Thanks, buddy. If it wasn’t for you…” I didn’t want to think about it, so I just
scratched one hand behind the dog’s ears. It was the first I realized I was shaking.

Apparently, LaSalle didn’t hold that against me. He licked my hand and I rewarded
him with the turkey sandwich, picked up my purse, and headed off to meet Nev.

Was I thinking about curses at the time?

Maybe I should have been. Then everything that happened the next day wouldn’t have
surprised me.

I
T STARTED BRIGHT
and early the next morning when I went to put the pictures of the buttons onto my
computer and realized the download mojo wasn’t working.

Not the best way to start a Wednesday, but hey, as far as curses went, this one wasn’t
so bad. I’d gotten to the Button Box just as the sun was coming up somewhere behind
an elephant gray layer of dark storm clouds (the better to have more time with the
charm string) so I wasn’t feeling pressured. Plus, the folks in India were still awake
and answering the camera company’s service calls. It took a couple tries, and a second
pot of coffee, but by the time nine o’clock rolled around and I was ready to turn
around the sign in the window and declare the shop open, the pictures were downloaded
and I was filling in the information on each button in the computer database I’d established
for the charm string.

I had a couple more buttons to research, a couple more calls to make to ask friends
their opinions about history and value, but other than that, I’d be ready whenever
Angela showed up.

It was shallow of me, but I hoped her horoscope would tell her to keep close to home
that day. Sure, I was nearly done with the research I had to do on her behalf, but
I wouldn’t have minded a couple more days alone with the wonderful charm string.

“Well, you’re probably not going to get it, so you better use the time you have,”
I reminded myself, and went into the back workroom to do just that.

The rest of the morning went by in blessed, curse-free peace and quiet. Well, except
for a couple grumbles of thunder. The mail arrived and, along with it, my monthly
royalty check for the costumes I’d once designed for a movie that had recently become
a campy cult classic. Royalty checks, I reminded myself with a grin, are just the
opposite of curses. In fact, this one arriving when it had was a spot of good luck.
I’d been thinking about getting another glass-topped display case for the shop and
had recently seen one that was just the right size at an antique shop near my apartment.
I’d stop on the way home, first at the bank to deposit the check, then to buy the
display case, and I made a quick phone call to the nice folks at the antique store
to tell them to have the case ready for me.

That’s when I was told someone had just come into the shop out of nowhere, didn’t
quibble about price the way I’d planned to, and walked out with the display case.