Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5)
Read Grand Theft Retro (Style & Error Mystery Series Book 5) Online
Authors: Diane Vallere
Tags: #birthday, #samantha kidd, #Pennsylvania, #designer, #Mystery, #Literature & Fiction, #General, #cat, #Mystery & Detective, #Humor & Satire, #Women Sleuths, #General Humor, #black cat, #Fiction, #seventies, #Humorous, #Humor, #Fashion, #samples, #retro, #Romance, #Thriller & Suspense, #amateur sleuth, #diane vallere, #Cozy, #caper
Grand Theft Retro
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Book 5 in the Style & Error Mystery Series
Diane Vallere
GRAND THEFT RETRO
Book 5 in the Style & Error Mystery Series
A Polyester Press Mystery
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Diane Vallere
All rights reserved.
Ebook ISBN 13: 9781939197191
Printed in the United States of America.
Dedication
To Valerie Harper
Contents
Chapter 1
WEDNESDAY
NIGHT
There were seven and a half reasons why it was a bad idea. If I had listened to my inner voice, the one that tabulated those seven and a half reasons, I might have spent the weeks surrounding my birthday enjoying myself. I might have spent my days at my job writing editorials about style from decades past. I might have had a date for Saturday night. Instead, I was hanging from the side of a building. The last thing on my mind was cake.
And as much as I’ve been trying to distract myself from my current situation, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the truth. Being on the cusp of a birthday might not be my biggest concern.
The fact that I’m about to fall three stories to my death pretty much trumps any concerns I have about my age.
One day earlier…
It was closing in on eleven o’clock at night. The sun had gone down hours ago, taking with it my desire to stay at the offices working on editorial content and retweeting #OOTD (outfit of the day) and #FashionFail (white socks with sandals) under the
Retrofit
Twitter account. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a farmer, and the rise and set of the sun had nothing to do with my work load.
I could be a farmer,
I thought, gazing out the window at the pitch black sky and the mostly empty parking lot.
I could wear Wellingtons and overalls and raise chickens.
Someone knocked on the door frame. I whirled around. “Chickens,” I said.
Our newest intern to take on the role of office manager and schedule coordinator looked startled. “Um, sure. Chickens. Listen, Samantha, Nancie’s finishing up with the manager of the auction house. She said as soon as they’re done, she wants to see you in the boardroom. You know what that means.” She grabbed both ends of the scarf that had been wound around her neck and adjusted it so the ends were closer to even, and then went back to her tiny desk out front.
I did know what it meant. If my boss, the owner of
Retrofit
, the eZine where I’d held a job for a solid four months, had requested my presence in the boardroom at eleven o’clock at night, it meant she wanted to go home. Which meant the rest of us could finally go home, too.
“I’m on it,” I said to myself.
I left my cubicle and walked down the hall to Nancie’s office.
Retrofit
had been started on a shoestring budget, but thanks to Nancie’s ability to talk people out of their advertising dollars, she’d catapulted us from fashion blogger territory into becoming a regular website with tens of thousands of page views a day. The concept was simple: how to take yesterday’s trash and modernize it into today’s world of style. Fashionistas checked in with us on how to incorporate vintage finds into their daily wardrobes. Collectors searched our databases to see if that pair of culottes they scored at a yard sale over the weekend had a chance of coming back into style.
Retrofit
had been cited by more than one industry professional as a website to watch.
Our online subscribers doubled almost daily. We were one of the fastest growing style-dedicated websites on the internet.
The past few months had all but erased the memory of the spotty work experience I’d had after I gave up my job in New York and moved back to Ribbon. Four months at
Retrofit
had gone a long way toward restoring my instincts and making me feel like I was part of something that appeared to be successful.
I arrived at the boardroom and tapped on the door before going inside. Nancie stood with her back to me, talking to a tall man. He was attractive in a boldly masculine way. He had jet black hair and strong features, and wore a white collared shirt under an unstructured navy blue jacket, and jeans. His skin tone, a shade I could only achieve with a steady stream of appointments at a tanning salon, glowed against the white of his shirt. He had an air of determination about him, probably thanks to the fact that his two eyebrows almost connected above the bridge of his nose.
Nancie turned toward me. “Sam,” she said. “This is Tahoma Hunt. He works at a Bethany House. We’ll be working closely with him on our next project.” She turned to Tahoma. “This is Sam Kidd. She’s my right hand around here.”
He held out his hand. “Tahoma Hunt. Executive Director, Bethany House.”
“Samantha Kidd,” I said while clasping his grip. “Nancie’s right hand.”
He smiled as though I’d said something funny. He put his left hand on top of our handshake, making a hand sandwich. Not a naturally touchy-feely person by nature, I stiffened at the contact but held my smile in place.
Tahoma turned to face Nancie. “Call me when your team is on board,” he said. “I’ll make whatever arrangements necessary to help your project become a success.”
“Perfection!” Nancie said. She put her hand on his shoulder. He dropped my hands and stood very straight. Despite the fact that his body was hidden under at least two layers of clothes, I could tell that he was both physically fit and proud of his build. “Sam, wait here. I’ll be back after I see Tahoma out.”
I stifled a yawn and dropped into one of the vacant chairs that sat around the boardroom table. The wall in front of me was filled with colorful Post-its. Nancie often liked to work out ideas this way, shifting colors from the left to the right and back again. I claimed not to understand her system, thought I suspected it was a problem solving technique she’d read about in whatever recent
How To Succeed
book was at the top of the bestseller lists. Nancie was a self-taught dynamo when it came to running
Retrofit
, and far be it from me to criticize her methods.
About a minute after she’d left me alone, she returned. She took a swig from her environmentally friendly travel mug and set it back down on the table with a
thunk.
“Sam, I know it’s late. We’re going to call it a night soon. But first, I need to know if you’re in or you’re out.”
I searched her expression for clues as to what she was talking about, and then tried to rewind my thoughts to a place where maybe she’d offered me some kind of opportunity. The only thing I could think of were chicken coops.
“Are we talking about…” My voice trailed off, hoping she’d take over.
She sat in the chair next to me and leaned forward. The white cuffs of her crisp cotton shirt were flipped back over her black sweater dress. Despite the fact that she ran a successful website dedicated to shifting trends, Nancie embraced a simple black and white dress code and low maintenance beauty routine. Even her jet black hair was never out of place, thanks to a Japanese treatment and a turbo-powered flat iron.
“As you know,
Retrofit
’s subscriptions are on the rise. You know what that means?”
“I’m thinking it’s good—”
“It’s perfection! Except that just last week five new fashion blogs started up. We have to stay ahead of the curve. Be new. Different. Risky. Do you know what that means?”
“I’m thinking you want more content—”
“We have to beat everybody else at the game that we started. Change. Be aggressive. We’ve built a database of over a hundred thousand names in a little over four months and we show no signs of slowing down. Those names are our future. They’re gold. They’re money in the bank. And you know what you do with money in the bank?”
“Save it?”
“Leverage it to make more! I’ve been talking to a team of investors. They’re interested in taking
Retrofit
to the next level.” She stopped talking and looked at me. Was I supposed to say something now? She hadn’t asked me a question.
“I feel like I’m supposed to know where this is going,” I said.
She leaned forward. “Here’s where it’s going.
Retrofit
is going to produce a trend magazine. Print. National distribution. This is the big leagues, Sam. This is what I always dreamed of. But I can’t do it alone. What do you say? You convinced me to take a chance on you when I started this thing. Are you still with me?”
I felt the old familiar one-two punch that I used to feel in my former career. The immediate fear of a near-impossible challenge and the subsequent sparks of excitement to figure out how to get it done. “Nancie, that’s big. Huge, even. But how are you—we—going to produce a magazine? There’s two of us. Four, if you count the interns, but they change every three months. I like the idea, but I think maybe there’s a little more involved than what we can handle.”
“I thought you might say that. Pritchard, you can come out.”
The door at the back of the board room opened and a man in a three piece suit entered. He had glossy dark blond hair parted deeply on one side in a comb-over attempt to hide the fact that he was balding. He wore both tie pin and cuff links, and when he reached his hands up to smooth the sides of his hair, I saw the chain of a pocket watch draped across his vest.