The mirrored tray was empty. Where did the brooches go? “Hold on, Jillian.” I glanced around at Lottie, who was rearranging the flowers in the glass case. “Did you sell any brooches today?”
“No, why?”
“I can’t find them.”
“You gotta be kidding me.” Lottie took a look for herself, then headed toward the parlor. At the doorway, she asked, “Gracie, did you put the brooches somewhere?”
“On the mirrored tray.”
“They’re not on the tray now,” Lottie said.
Grace came out of the parlor to help us search the shop; then the three of us stood in front of the armoire, staring at the empty tray as if somehow the brooches would magically reappear.
“I’ll be doggone,” Lottie said. “Someone swiped ’em again.”
“Do we have a thief with an anthurium fetish?” Grace asked.
“Abby!” the phone squawked.
“Jillian, I’ll have to call you back.” I hit the END button and set the cell phone on the armoire.
“What the hell is going on with these brooches?” Lottie asked.
Marco came through the curtain. “Something wrong?”
“The damn brooches are gone,” Lottie said. “All twelve of ’em. Now, how could someone get a dozen brooches out of here without us seeing a thing?”
“Remember when you thought you heard the bell jingle?” Grace asked Lottie. “Is it possible someone slipped in and nicked them?”
“But I looked twice and didn’t see anybody,” Lottie said.
“Still,” Grace said, “it’s odd you heard the jingle twice, isn’t it?”
“Did you just discover they were gone?” Marco asked.
“Jillian called about them,” I said. “Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have noticed until tomorrow.”
“Perhaps,” Grace said, “our thief slipped in while we were preoccupied with the Harding matter, hid behind the counter, emptied the brooches into a bag, and slipped out again.”
“Sneaky devil,” Lottie said. “I’d sure like to get my hands on him.”
“Or her,” Marco said.
We all turned to gaze at him, but I guessed at once what he was going to say. “Honey B. Haven?”
He shook his head. “Jillian.”
“It wasn’t Jillian!” I cried.
“Then why is it,” he posed, “that each time your cousin inquires about a brooch, you can’t find it? You search all over the shop, then decide it’s been stolen. Next step is for Jillian to come in and raise a stink over it, so that you’re tripping all over yourself trying to make it up to her.”
“I do not trip all over myself. I just feel bad when she comes down here for nothing, not to mention that someone is stealing my merchandise.”
“Maybe that’s the idea,” Marco said. “She wants to make you feel bad.”
“Surely Abby’s cousin wouldn’t be so cruel as to steal as a practical joke,” Grace said.
“And it’s not like she can’t afford to buy the brooch,” Lottie added.
“Marco’s theory is that Jillian is playing with my mind,” I explained with an eye roll.
“Mind games?” Grace asked. “For what purpose?”
“I get what Marco means,” Lottie said. “Jillian wants to be like big cousin Abby, and at the same time she resents Abby for it because she sees herself as superior. So this is her way of getting back-playing little mind games.”
“Jillian isn’t that clever,” Grace said flatly.
“That would be a pretty sick joke, even for her,” I said.
Marco lifted an eyebrow. I was always amazed how much he could convey with that tiny gesture. “It’s worth investigating before we file a police report, isn’t it?”
“How do you plan to investigate?” I asked warily.
“To start with, I’ll have a little talk with her.”
“Talk,” I asked, feeling a sliver of panic in my gut, “as in interrogate?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Marco said, “unless I have to.”
“Oh, Lordy,” Lottie said, rolling her eyes.
“Questioning Jillian would be a very bad idea, Marco,” I said. “She’s a lot shrewder than she looks… or acts… or talks. If you start quizzing her about the brooch, she’ll know right away you suspect her of stealing it.”
“She has that animal cunning,” Grace added.
Marco sighed impatiently. “I know how to do my job.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s not Jillian who concerns me as much as what this could do to my already tarnished reputation in the family. I mean, they’re still trying to figure out how I got booted from law school. Then to have the man to whom they are expecting me to become engaged treating my own cousin as a suspect in a robbery?”
“Wouldn’t be good,” Lottie said, shaking her head.
“Do you have any idea what they’ll do if they find out you interrogated Jillian about the brooches?” I asked him. “Picture a school of hungry piranhas-”
“Calm down, Sunshine,” Marco said. “Wouldn’t you rather have me talk to Jillian than have the police pick her up for questioning?”
“Why? It’d be off our shoulders.”
“Maybe so, but what if the police find out that Jillian’s the culprit?” Marco asked.
“Again, Marco. Off. Our. Shoulders.”
He took the phone from the shelf and hit REDIAL, then held it up high when I tried to get it from him. He turned his back on me to say, “Jillian. Hey, it’s Marco. Would you come down to Bloomers? It won’t take long. Yep, it’s about the brooch. Thank you.”
He hit END and gave me the phone.
I blinked rapidly, trying to fire up my stunned brain cells. “You asked Jillian to come here?”
“It’s always better to confront in person.”
“But here? Where I am?”
“And where I am.”
Where I wished he wasn’t at that moment.
I sank onto the wicker settee next to the armoire and leaned my head back with a groan. Marco was going to confront drama queen Jillian Ophelia Knight-Osborne. In my shop. I would pay for this forever.
When Jillian breezed in fifteen minutes later, Lottie came to let us know, then said, “Grace is cleaning the coffeepots in the parlor and I’ll be in the kitchen… hiding.”
Marco got up. “Let me handle it.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’ll just retire to the cooler until the furor dies down.”
“There’s not going to be a furor. I know how to deal with your cousin.”
“Right. Thaw me gently.”
Marco shook his head and stepped through the curtain into the shop. I eyed the cooler, then sighed and followed him. It wasn’t often I got to witness someone self-destruct.
Jillian was standing in front of the counter, arms folded, wearing a short black-and-white leopard print swing coat, red cashmere beret, shiny red tote bag, and black patent boots. She glanced from Marco to me. “Where’s the brooch? Do you have it wrapped yet? I’m in a hurry.”
“Nice beret,” Marco said, leaning his hip against the counter.
I stared at him, trying to get him to see the pleading look in my eyes: Don’t do this, Marco. He ignored me.
Unable to resist a compliment, Jillian took off her beret and patted it. “Thanks. I got it to replace the one that was stolen.”
“Reminds me of Abby’s,” Marco said.
She glanced at me. “You have a beret?”
There was my opening to firm up our cousin bond and possibly salvage Marco’s standing with my family. I gave her a playful punch. “Come on, Jilly,” I said, using the nickname I’d given her when we were little. “You remember my Kelly green wool beret that we got last St. Patrick’s Day at Target.”
“Stop,” she cried, looking horrified. She hated to admit to shopping anywhere but on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. “I remember, okay?”
“Abby was wearing the brooch on her beret before her mom borrowed it to make copies,” Marco added, watching her closely. “Remember now?”
Jillian studied my head. “S.O.R’ing.”
Wonderful. She was making up words again. “Translate,” I snapped, then quickly added with a smile, “please?”
She huffed. “S.O.R. Sort of remembering. Don’t you text?”
“Sort of remember more,” I said.
She pressed her fingertips to her temples and closed her eyes. “Okay, I think I remember seeing you wearing your green beret when you were on the news after someone hurled that brick through the door. And yes, I do remember seeing the brooch on it. You were standing outside the shop, right? Holding a press conference or something?”
Marco gave me a scowl. “Yeah, an impromptu press conference just after she was told to keep a low profile.”
Jillian’s eyes opened. “There. Satisfied?”
“That certainly does it for me,” I said. “Thank you for being so helpful!”
“I have a question,” Marco said.
“Can’t you save that for another time?” I asked him. “Sweetheart?”
“Can you describe the beret that was stolen from you?” Marco asked.
“Why?” Jillian asked skeptically. “Don’t tell me the cops actually found it.”
“This is for my own investigation,” he replied.
“Oh. Well, it’s hand-stitched black Italian leather, and I hope you have better luck than the police, because my dad brought it back from Naples, Italy, for my twenty-first birthday, and I’m very attached to it.”
“Your twenty-first birthday,” I said, “which was five years ago, whereas I bought my beret last year.” I gave Marco a pointed look. “So Jillian had hers first.”
He tipped his head, acknowledging my point.
Jillian glanced at her watch. “Okay, it’s been fun reminiscing, but I really need to pay for the brooch and go.”
“Just one more question,” he said, giving her a hint of a smile.
I groaned inwardly. Couldn’t Marco let well enough alone? “Who are you buying the brooch for today?” he asked.
“Me,” she said. “The way Abby’s mom has been raving about them, I decided I should have one. Why? Does it matter?”
“If the brooch is for you,” Marco asked, neatly sidestepping her question, “why do you want it wrapped?”
Jillian sighed, as if the answer was obvious. “Because Claymore is giving it to me as a surprise.”
I smiled at Marco. From the bemused look on his face, I could tell he was ready to call it quits. I was vindicated!
“Now, can I have my brooch, please?” Jillian said. “I want to open my present at dinner.” She pulled a credit card from her wallet and held it out. “Use this. I just paid it off.”
Marco moved aside. “That’s Abby’s department.”
What? Leave me to clean up his mess? I scowled at him. Some bodyguard he was.
Trying to portray abject wretchedness, I said to my cousin, “I am so sorry to tell you this, Jilly, but it seems we don’t have any brooches after all. They were stolen.”
All sounds from the coffee-and-tea parlor ceased. Obviously Grace was eavesdropping. Only the ticking of an anniversary clock on the shelf behind me could be heard as my cousin absorbed the news, as if the shop itself were holding its breath.
Suddenly, Jillian’s nostrils flared, her hands curled at her sides, and her lips pressed into a hard line. “Then what am I doing here?”
“Well,” I said slowly, trying to think of how to pacify her, “you’re here because…”
“I asked you here,” Marco said, fixing her with his most sincere gaze.
What was he doing? He wasn’t going to tell her his real reason, was he? Never mind; I couldn’t take any chances. “That’s right-Marco asked you here because I need your help.”
Jillian’s lips plumped into a perplexed pout. “Let me see if I understand this. Marco asked me to come over because you need my help?”
“Yes! Knowing how enlightened you are about fashion,” I continued, “and how socially connected you are, we-I mean I-thought you’d be the perfect person to keep an eye out for someone wearing one of the stolen brooches.”
Jillian tapped the toe of her high-heeled boot on the floor. “Is that so? And you couldn’t tell me this on the phone? I had to drive here through snowdrifts, in this subarctic cold?”
Three inches of snow did not constitute a drift, and the temperature was thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Still, I was in no position to debate it. I shrugged. “But then we wouldn’t have had this chance to visit.”
Jillian drew in a deep breath. She let it out slowly, as though composing herself. Or maybe she was sending me up in a balloon. Whatever it was, she managed to say in a civil tone, “While it may be true about my fashion expertise and well-fixed social position, if you will remember, except for that one blurry image of your beret on the news, I have yet to seeany of the missing brooches! Every time I’ve come here, they’ve been gone.
“But wait,” she cried dramatically, “not just gone. Stolen! Filched! Purloined! Right out from under your nose! And not once but three-count them-three times. I mean, come on, people. Buy a security camera. This is getting tiresome!”
Huffing indignantly, she whipped out her cell phone, gave me one last dirty look, and headed for the door. “Hi, Claymore? You won’t believe what Abby did this time.”
The bell jingled behind her.
Marco’s eyebrows were higher than I’d ever seen them. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t warned him. “I’ve never seen her turn on you before,” he said in wonder.
“That could have been you, dear,” Grace said to Marco, as she and Lottie came back into the room from different doorways.
“You should be grateful, Marco,” Lottie said, winking discreetly at me. “Abby took the bullet for you.”
“The main thing is that Jillian doesn’t know you suspect her,” I told Marco. “I think we’re safe as far as the family goes.”
“Boy oh boy, Jillian was madder than a wet hen,” Lottie said with a chuckle. “I could feel it through the curtain. Woo-ee!”
“But we’re still missing the brooches,” I said, “so we’d better file another police report. I’ll call Reilly and see if he’s around to take the report.” I glanced at Marco to see if he was in agreement, but he was headed for the workroom like a man on a mission.
I made the call, then went to tell Marco. He was working at the computer, typing words into a search box, while Lottie finished a silk flower arrangement at the worktable behind him.
“I left a message for Reilly. What are you searching?” I asked, leaning over his shoulder.
Marco was concentrating, so his answer came out in bursts. “Jillian mentioned the brooch-news conference-checking something.”
He had typed flower brooch into the box, and was resting his chin on his hand, reading through the links, so I prompted him to fill in the blanks. “Jillian mentioned seeing the brooch on my beret at the news conference and you’re researching flower brooches because…?”
“It got me to thinking about who else might have seen it.”
“What do you mean? Like a professional brooch thief?”
“Where did you say you got it?”
“It was lying loose in a box of orchids, but I called our supplier in Hawaii and he didn’t know anything about it. He said to keep it unless I heard otherwise.”
Marco scrolled through the links on the first page. “Two and a half million results. We have to narrow the search.”
“Try anthurium brooch,” I said.
He typed it in, glanced down the list of links, then clicked on Hawaiian collectibles: Antiques and Hawaiiana. Up popped a page full of photos of flower pins, pendants, and brooches in a variety of materials. I watched over Marco’s shoulder as he scrolled down the page.
“There’s an ivory anthurium brooch,” I said, pointing to the image on the screen. “That looks a lot like the one I found.”
Marco clicked on the photo, but all it did was enlarge it. “I’ll have to get in touch with the dealer to find out more about their brooches. The pieces on this site are all collectors’ items.”
“Maybe the one you found is a collector’s item, too,” Lottie said.
“If it were valuable,” I said, “you’d think it would be packaged in a cushioned box.”
“Maybe a woman packed the flowers and didn’t realize her brooch fell into the box,” Lottie offered.
Marco dialed the phone number on the Web site’s home page, then held his hand over the receiver. “It’s an automated menu. I have to leave contact information.” He removed his hand and gave his name and cell phone number, then left a brief description of the brooch.
“Here’s a thought,” Lottie said. “Remember when the phony delivery man came by for a package he claimed was delivered to us by mistake, and that man turned out to be Hudge? Maybe we did get someone else’s package and he came to pick it up.”
“So you’re saying Hudge pulled off those kidnappings to get the brooch?” I asked.
Marco turned to look at Lottie. “When did Hudge come here?”
“Right after the flower shop was trashed,” Lottie said.
“Why don’t I remember that?” Marco asked.
“You were checking out the other rooms for damage when we discussed it,” Lottie said. “Sergeant Reilly was making out a report, and I said I wondered whether the damage was the result of a plain ol’ robbery instead of Uniworld trying to retaliate.”
The phone rang and Grace caught it out front, then came back to say that Reilly was on the line. Marco picked it up at my desk. “Hey, Sean. Yes, Abby did call. Right, and this time twelve brooches were taken. Three brooch-related thefts. We’ve definitely got something going on here, so we’ll need to file a police report. Sure. I’ll hold.”
“Abby,” Lottie said, “Gracie and I are going to close up shop now.”
“Okay,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
Marco glanced at the clock. “Five o’clock? Damn. I haven’t been down to the bar yet.”
Reilly came back on the line, so Marco turned away to talk to him while I cleaned up the worktable. As I brushed bits of leaves and blossoms into the plastic-lined trash can, I started thinking back over the times my mom’s brooches had turned up missing. The first theft happened after I appeared on our local cable TV news station. Was that a coincidence or, as Marco mentioned, had someone with a reason to care spotted the anthurium on my hat? Was it possible Dwayne Hudge was working for a jewelry thief?
Marco ended his call and got up. “Reilly said no viable fingerprints were collected when Bloomers was trashed, and right now they don’t have any leads.”
“You mentioned that someone might have spotted me wearing the brooch. What if Hudge and Charlotte were hired to get it back?”
Marco’s eyebrows pulled together. “I guess it would explain the theft of the brooches, although I still think Jillian should be a suspect.”
“It would also explain why Jillian’s beret was snatched.”
“But it doesn’t explain why they kidnapped Tara. She wasn’t wearing a beret.”
“We were dressed alike. Maybe they were planning to hold me until I gave up the brooch.”
“That would be risky.”
“They were bunglers, Marco. And I just remembered something else. When Jillian was nabbed, she said the kidnapper told her to give it up. Do you remember that? The brooch has to be what they were after.”
“We could speculate all evening, and I wish I had time for that, but Reilly is sending officers to take the report and dust for prints, so while they’re here, I’ve got to run down to the bar to check on things and get my accounting done, or there won’t be any paychecks to hand out this week. I’ll be back afterward to take you home, pick up Rafe, and drop him at your place so I can squeeze in a couple of hours of work at the bar before I start on my PI case.”
I was exhausted just thinking about all he had to do. Poor Marco, dealing with stolen brooches, kidnapping attempts, wayward younger brothers, his bar, my crazy family, and me, in addition to his private investigator work. He really was my hero.
But we absolutely did have to discuss the issue about our conflicting work hours. Soon.
As he stood there in his fitted shirt, tight jeans, and worn boots, his dark hair curling around his ears, a five-o’clock shadow on his handsome face, I couldn’t resist slipping my arms around his waist. “You go to a lot of trouble for me, Salvare.”
That was all it took to get his juices flowing. His eyes darkened in that seductive way of his and one corner of his mouth quirked. “You know what I always say about pay-backs.” Then he dipped his head down for a deep, smoldering kiss-that was interrupted a moment later by a sharp rap on the front door.
Marco gave me one more quick kiss, then strode through the curtain to let in the cops.