Acts of Violets (4 page)

“Sorry, I’m on a diet,” Nikki replied instantly; then, realizing she’d contradicted herself, she added, “The elephant ear diet.” She glanced at me with a shrug, as if to say,
Hey, I tried.

Suddenly, a police car sped up Indiana Street, behind the courthouse, and screeched to a stop in front of the police station. The cops hopped out, opened the rear door on the passenger side, and pulled out a snarling clown with orange hair, a red nose, and an armful of cucumbers.

“Hey, that’s Snuggles,” Nikki exclaimed, causing Lottie and her customers to crane their necks for a look.

It seemed there
was
justice in this world, after all.

“
I
s Snuggles a friend of yours?” Morgan asked Nikki with a snicker.

She gave him a glance that was at once sultry and withering. “I’m not into evil clowns this week,
Greg.
For your information, Snuggles threatened Abby this morning during the parade.”

Morgan’s blue eyes widened as he—and Lottie’s customers—turned to stare at me. “He threatened you? Why?”

“Because I was bumped off the curb into his path, knocking him off his unicycle,” I explained.

“What did he say to you?” Morgan asked.

“That he knew I did it on purpose, that he had my number, and that paybacks are murder.” I left out the part about Snuggles calling me shorty. It was a sore spot.

Morgan’s shocked expression gave me a possible way to escape having lunch with him—the pity party. “Yes,” I said, heaving a tremulous sigh, “the whole scene was upsetting, which is why I don’t have much of an appetite, so maybe we can do lun—”

Throwing back his shoulders to look important, Morgan strode toward the police station, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll find out what happened and be right back; then we can grab some food.”

“Great. You do that.” I stepped into the shop and motioned for Nikki to follow. “When Morgan comes back, get the scoop for me.”

“Where will you be?” she asked as I started toward the curtain to the workroom.

“Hiding.”

“So I’m your sacrificial lamb? No way. If you don’t want to have lunch with Morgan, just tell him straight out.”

“I can’t do that. Morgan is my contact at the courthouse. If I tick him off, the next time I need information I’ll be out of luck. Besides, I want to phone Marco. I have a feeling he was somehow involved in Snuggles’s arrest. Just get the story from Morgan, then tell him I had to go to the . . .” What could I use as an excuse? The bathroom? He’d wait. The ER for a broken ankle? Hard to pull that off unless I wore a cast for the next six weeks.

I glanced over to the doorway of the coffee parlor to see my other assistant, Grace Bingham, watching me with the sage expression and statesmanlike pose that signaled she was on the verge of delivering a lecture, which usually began with a quotation. Grace was a trim, active, sixty-year-old widowed Brit who’d had many careers, including librarian and legal secretary. She spoke with a lovely, crisp accent and operated under the assumption that she could mold me into the perfect human being by bombarding me with insightful sayings. So far, it hadn’t helped, but she wasn’t the type to give up without a fight.

Working with Grace was one of the joys of owning Bloomers. How lucky for me that just when I’d needed someone to run the coffee and tea parlor, Grace had retired from her job as legal secretary for Dave Hammond (the lawyer for whom I had clerked one summer) and was looking for something to do. Since she was an expert tea brewer, a whiz on the coffee machines, and a top-notch scone baker, it had been a perfect fit. In Grace and Lottie, I had the best assistants in town.

“Abby, dear,” she began, “I realize Mr. Morgan is not your favorite person, but do bear in mind Sir Walter Scott’s immortal words, ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.’ ”

“You tell her, Grace,” Nikki said.

“If I may say something in my own defense,” I replied, trying to sound astute, “sometimes telling a tiny cobweb of a lie is the kindest thing to do. Otherwise, Morgan would want to know why I don’t want to have lunch with him, and I’d have to say it’s because he’s an egotistical jerk, and then his feelings would be hurt.
You
try getting information from him after that.”

Grace pondered it a moment. “You do have a valid argument. Heaven knows you’re not the most politic person in the world. So perhaps it would be best if you departed by the back door and left Mr. Morgan to me. I’ll get the
scoop,
as you phrase it, then ring your mobile.”

“Works for me,” Nikki said, heading for the curtain.

“I’m right behind you, Nikki. Just one more thing, Grace. When you said I wasn’t the most politic person in the world, did you mean—”

“Come on, Abby!” Nikki latched onto my arm and dragged me through the curtain.

“I think Grace just accused me of being tactless.”

Nikki and I dashed through the curtain into the workroom, sidestepping the long slate-covered worktable in the center, passing the stainless steel walk-in cooler on the right, and my desk and long counter space on the left. We hurried through the tiny kitchen and out the back door into the alley, where I put in a call to Marco.

“Come on, Marco. Pick up,” I muttered as we hurried toward the street. But the phone continued to ring. “Where are you? Why aren’t you answering?” I finally got his voice mail and left a message for him to contact me. As soon as I put my phone back in my purse, it rang.

“There he is,” Nikki said with as much relief as I felt.

My relief lasted until I heard my mother’s voice on the line. “Bring Nikki and come across the street to booth twenty-four. I have a surprise for you.”

I relayed the message to Nikki, and she groaned. Anyone close to my mother knew the word
surprise
was the term she used for her latest artistic endeavor. Unfortunately, this kind of surprise wasn’t the pleasant feeling you got when you ripped open a brightly wrapped gift and found your favorite perfume inside. It was more like
expecting
to find your favorite perfume and getting an onion.

“Mom, I’m kind of lying low for the time being, so . . . Hold on. I’m being beeped.”

“
There’s
Marco,” Nikki said.

Wrong again. It was Grace. “Mr. Morgan just rang to say he wouldn’t be able to make it after all. He sends his apologies and says he will phone in a bit to let you know about Snuggles.”

“Thank you, Grace. That’s great news. See? No webs woven.”

“Don’t jump for joy just yet. Your mother phoned here and it appears that she has art to show you.”

“She found me. I guess we’ll head that way now.”

“Stiff upper lip, dear,” Grace said.

I put away the phone and we continued up the alley. But as we passed Down the Hatch’s back door I came to a quick stop. “Let’s see if Marco is back.”

Nikki sucked in her breath as if I’d just belched loudly in public. “Are you sure you want to do that? You’ve already left a message. You don’t want him to think you’re worried.”

“I
am
worried.”

“But you don’t want him to know it. It makes you look—I don’t know—controlling.”

“Will it look controlling if I simply ask if Marco is there—or has been there—or has at least phoned in to say where the
hell
he is?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll just have to live with that.”

But after checking in with Chris and learning that Marco hadn’t been seen or heard from since the start of the parade, I wasn’t worried about appearing controlling, I was just worried.

As Nikki and I wandered the booth aisles, hoping to delay the moment when I would have to come face-to-face with my mother’s latest creation, I kept a sharp eye out for Marco. Despite Nikki’s warning, I’d called his cell phone twice more, but he hadn’t picked up. It simply wasn’t like him to ignore his phone message or to stay away from his bar without contacting someone.

Normally, I would have been too busy myself to fret about Marco’s silence, but this hadn’t been a normal day. I tried to assure myself that it was nothing more than a phone glitch and that he would show up at any moment. But as more time passed, that excuse stopped working.

“Would you quit checking your phone?” Nikki asked, growing impatient with my fretting, which, by the way, was a trait I inherited from my mother, so it wasn’t like I could get over it. She pointed to a blue striped canopy just ahead. “There’s number twenty-four, but I don’t see your parents . . . Wait. Is that your mom’s hat?”

We came to a halt in front of the booth and stood open-mouthed. “It propagated,” Nikki said in awe.

Hanging from hooks on a pegboard on the right side were rows of big feathered hats in an assortment of styles—wide brimmed, panama, fedora, derby, and even beret—in colors such as frightening fuchsia and garish lime green. On a narrow shelf below the hats stood similarly hued feathered fans and picture frames. By contrast, sedate, hand-loomed capes and scarves by an artist named Claire from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, filled the other walls.

Nikki immediately grabbed a bubblegum pink sun hat and tried it on in front of a mirror, tilting her head at a rakish angle for effect. “What do you think? Kind of cool, huh?”

“Yes, if you’re a pink flamingo.”

Throwing me a scowl, she put the hat back on its hook.

“May I help you?” a woman asked us.

“We were just admiring these hats,” Nikki replied, ever the diplomat.

“Aren’t they unique? A local artist did them.”

“Really?” Nikki asked, trying to look serious. “What’s her name?”

“Nikki, stop teasing poor Claire,” my mom said, stepping into the booth behind us. She introduced us to Claire, a heavyset woman well into her sixties who had long gray braids that draped over the shouldes of a blue, green, and white plaid cape. Then Mom turned to me with a smile. “How do you like my new art project?”

A small crowd had gathered behind us, gawkers who were pointing to the hats and elbowing each other with snickers. No way was I going to let them make fun of my mother. I was the only one allowed to do that.

“Mom, these hats are going to be sell-outs,” I gushed loudly, snatching one for my own head. “Everyone in town is going to want a Maureen Knight original. It’ll be the new status symbol. I mean, look at them. They’re so breezy, so joyous, and the colors—wow.”

“Take it off,” Nikki whispered frantically. “The hat. Take. It. Off.”

I checked my reflection in the mirror and saw the reason for her panic. The orange and yellow derby had settled on my head in such a fashion as to make my red hair stick out beneath it like a clown’s wig. Certainly not a strong selling point. Luckily, the crowd had moved on.

“Didn’t I tell you her new project was a tickler?” My dad chuckled at his joke as he wheeled himself into the now-deserted booth. He held up one of the small, wax-coated bags of baby dills sold all over the square. “Pickle?”

Ick. Too sour to eat alone. I took a pass and so did Nikki. “Ready to go, Abs?”

“Ready. Good luck with sales, Mom.”

“Whatever doesn’t sell here at the booth I’ll bring to Bloomers,” she told me.

Yay? Dad held out the bag and I stuffed a gherkin in my mouth.

“By the way,” Mom said. “Your father and I saw Sean Reilly earlier, so I mentioned to him what happened to you at the parade. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem shocked.”

Considering that Reilly thought I was a walking trouble magnet, no, he wouldn’t be shocked. As a young rookie, Sgt. Reilly had worked with my dad, then years later had helped train Marco, forging a friendship that endured to this day, which was how I’d met him. Now Reilly and I were friends, too, sort of, except when I poked my nose into police business, or put myself in danger, or put myself in danger
because
I’d poked my nose into police business. Then he wasn’t so friendly.

“Mom, I told you it was no big deal. You didn’t have to bother Reilly with that.”

“It
is
a big deal, Abigail, at least to some of us. Did you know Snuggles was arrested?”

“We saw the cops take him in,” Nikki said.

“And do you know why? Because after the parade was over, he got into a fistfight with a bystander.”

“A clown in a fist fight?” Claire looked appalled.

“Never trust a clown,” I told her. “They’ll toss you into a burning building without giving it a second thought.”

Mom turned me to face her. “Abigail, the bystander was Marco.”

My jaw dropped. Marco and Snuggles? Oh, no. Was it because of what Snuggles said to me? I was horrified. I was also secretly flattered. More than that, although it was hard to admit, I was relieved that Marco’s absence hadn’t been because of the woman. “Is he all right?”

“The police arrived before any harm was done,” Dad said.

So my gut feeling had been right after all. Marco
had
gone after the clown.