Ellen Hartman - Out of Bounds

Wes turned away from his reflection and leaned back on the sink.

“What’d she do, organize a bake sale? It’s not warm enough for a car wash there, is it?”

“She wrote a blog post and put up a donation button. The Kirkland paper said she managed to rake in over sixty-five thousand dollars. In ten days.”

Wes whistled. “That’s not true.”

“Honest to God. She told them she wasn’t expecting that kind of number, but apparently some other local blogger with a much bigger audience got wind of the thing and shared the link to Trish’s fundraising site and it snowballed.”

“Seventy thousand dollars?”

“It’s going to buy a lot of basketballs. Except there’s a little problem.”

“It’s all in pennies?”

“Trish hasn’t answered her phone in the past week.”

“You think she skipped town?”

“She owns a business there,” Deacon said. “I want to believe there’s an innocent explanation, but the other blogger, Chloe Chastain, called us with her concerns. Her reputation is on the line, too. When you get to Kirkland tomorrow, Trish Jones is your number one priority. We need to know where that money is and we need it to be in our bank account, safe and accounted for as soon as possible.”

“Got it.” Wes turned back to the mirror. Gary Krota better hope he never had to make a living as a barber.

* * *

P OSY J ONES SPENT one weekend, every other month, in her mother’s house in Kirkland, New York.

Trish cared what the other women on the Kirkland mom-and-community circuit thought about her and while Posy was often frustrated by her mom, she loved her. So she showed up and did her time and her mom had stories to tell her friends to prove that her relationship with her daughter was just as nice and perfect as she wanted it to be.

Timing the visits also capped the amount of crazy she had to deal with. Her mom had a habit of stepping into trouble and expecting Posy to bail her out, and the problems tended to snowball if she was away from Kirkland too long.

She flicked the button on the steering wheel to turn off the radio, silencing the Kirkland morning show—the same deejay team that had woken Posy up every morning in junior high school.

Before she got out of the car, she turned her phone on. Not a single missed call from her mom during the three-hour trip from Rochester. That never happened. She’d only spoken to her mom briefly the day before, too. When was the last time her mom had kept her on the phone longer than two minutes? Last week?

Main Street in downtown Kirkland was picturesque. As a location scout and quality control inspector for a national hotel chain, Posy was a professional at assessing the up- and downsides to communities. Kirkland was almost all upside—small, but thriving downtown full of locally owned businesses, excellent public schools, a pretty setting tucked on the shore of one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.

The downtown streets were lined with hanging baskets of flowers. Recycled plastic benches were spaced at friendly intervals to encourage visiting and lingering. A decent run of tourists came through in the summer for wine tours and lake camping. Another run in the fall for the foliage. Robinson University was a steady employer, and brought outlets for culture, a decent roster of small, research spin-off companies, as well as a solid but ever-changing population to fill rental units. And that bolstered the bottom line of countless Kirkland family budgets.

If she were assessing her hometown as a possible site for one of the Hotel Marie’s locations, she’d have to give Kirkland excellent marks. The year-round population was too small to support a large hotel like those in her chain, but she wouldn’t be able to fault much else.

That, however, was only the professional assessment. Personally? Posy gave Kirkland a lot more X marks than checks.

Posy’s parents separated when she was nine. Her dad moved to Rochester and her mom used every trick she could think of to drag the separation out and avoid divorce. When the divorce was finally official, Posy was fifteen and the family court judge allowed her to choose the custodial parent. She picked her dad, which precipitated an immediate campaign of guilt-tripping and pity parties from her mom. That campaign was still going strong thirteen years later.

As Trish never failed to mention, her dad hadn’t been willing or able to give Posy the kind of attention she’d been used to receiving from her mom. Which had been the point of Posy’s choice, but Trish would never accept that. It was a true story, but not a pretty one. And Trish would pick fantasy over harsh reality every time.

She found a parking place a few doors down from the Wonders of Christmas Shoppe, the store her mom owned on Main Street. Usually when she visited she did everything in her power to avoid Wonders, but her mom had insisted they meet there. She parked and locked her car, a habit she’d picked up when she moved to Rochester with her dad and that marked her as an outsider in Kirkland. Appropriate, because she’d never really fit in here in the first place.

The day was warm and there was a short line waiting for an outdoor table at the Lemon Drop Café. Wonders, on the other hand, had a Closed sign on the front door and the white lights that twinkled around the window display year-round were off. The brass door handle didn’t turn when she tried it. Posy knocked on the glass. She saw movement in the back of the store and waited while her mom made her way from the office.

Trish Jones turned the lock and pulled the door open with a jingle of brass bells. Posy was caught in a

cinnamon-scented hug, gently patting her mom’s back while trying to ignore the familiar awkwardness she felt whenever they touched. Posy was six feet tall, more than ten inches taller than Trish. Her frame was built on a completely different scale, broad and sturdy, quick to add muscle versus will-o’-the-wisp insubstantial. It was a size difference that, when Posy shot up past her mom early in fifth grade, had only exacerbated their constant conflicts over what Trish termed Posy’s unwillingness to fit in. She’d somehow managed to believe that Posy had willed herself into being a freakishly tall girl in middle school. Because that was exactly the fate every eleven-year-old girl longed for.

“I’m so glad you’re finally here, sweetheart,” Trish said. “I missed you.”

She released Posy, opened the door and quickly glanced up and down the street before closing and locking it again. Posy braced herself to be told that her orange T-shirt was too bright or that her freshly painted nails in their deep eggplant glory were disturbing.

“Did you see anyone out there? Chloe?”

“Anyone besides all the people walking around town on a gorgeous spring afternoon? No.” Posy squinted toward the Lemon Drop. “Chloe Chastain?”

“Never mind,” her mom said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Two “glad you’re heres” in one minute? No critique of her outfit?

“Come back to the office,” Trish said.

Posy’s large leather purse held her iPad, iPhone, travel mug, business cards, emergency travel kit, makeup kit and was basically her life. Rather than risk maneuvering through the store with it on her shoulder, she set it on the tile near the front door.

She was about to follow her mom toward the back of the store when she heard a soft thump behind her.

Her mom’s tiny, white schnoodle, Angel, had jumped from the raised window display and now crouched on the floor near the bag. With fluffy white fur, round black eyes and a perky green plaid bow on her red leather collar, Angel looked the part of the perfect Christmas-shop accessory dog.

She eyed Angel. The dog’s tail twitched—a silent-movie villain’s mustache twirl.