LITMIR.BIZ

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up or Claire’s mother wasn’t available.

      Macy loved to bead, creating bracelets and earrings for her friends, and she had a burgeoning sense of style. Claire let her work off the cost of the beads she used by sorting inventory and doing light filing for her.

      Owen wasn’t much interested in beading, but after he finished his homework under her watchful eye, she allowed him an hour of Nintendo on the console in her office—which the thieves must not have discovered in the cabinet. Because she didn’t let him play video games at home, coming to String Fever was usually a genuine treat for him.

      She loved having a few extra hours with them when they weren’t bickering. This didn’t look like one of those times.

      “Macy has a boyfriend, Macy has a boyfriend,” Owen sang out, his wool beanie covering his dishwater blond hair and his narrow shoulders swamped in the bulky snowboarder parka he insisted on wearing.

      “Shut up!” Macy followed closely behind with a harsh glare at her brother, somehow managing to look both outraged and a little apprehensive of her mother’s reaction at the same time. “You don’t know anything.”

      “I know you were walking after school with Toby Kingston and you were laughing and looking all goofy.” Owen crossed his eyes and let his mouth sag open in what Claire assumed was his interpretation of a lovesick twelve-year-old.

      “I was not.” Macy’s color rose and she looked mortified, especially when she saw Riley sitting in the visitor’s chair. “Mom, make him stop!”

      “Owen, stop teasing,” she said automatically.

      “I wasn’t teasing! I’m telling the complete and total truth. You should have seen her! Macy and Toby sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S…” His voice trailed off when he finally focused on something besides tormenting his sister and realized she had company in her office. “Sorry. Hi.”

      Riley looked amused at the sibling interchange. Big surprise there because he’d written the playbook on teasing one’s older sister. Or in his case, five older sisters. “Hey.”

      “Owen, Macy, this is Chief McKnight.”

      Macy dropped her messenger bag next to the desk. “Anna Kramer said a bunch of stores in Hope’s Crossing were robbed last night and String Fever was one of them. Is it true?”

      Even though she didn’t want to unduly alarm her children, Claire couldn’t figure out a way to evade the truth. “Yes. They took my computer and a little money out of the till. They also yanked out all the displays and dumped them on the floor. That’s what Grandma and the others are doing in the workroom, helping me sort the beads that were spilled.”

      “Why didn’t you call me?” Macy turned the glare she was perfecting these days in her mother’s direction. “I had to hear about the store being robbed from Anna, the biggest know-it-all at school.”

      “I asked your mom not to tell too many people about the robbery yet while we’re still trying to figure things out,” Riley said.

      Macy looked impressed. “Wow, like a real police investigation?”

      His dimple flashed. “Just like.”

      “You’re Jace’s uncle, huh?” Owen said. Jace was Riley’s sister Angie’s youngest kid and he and Owen were inseparable.

      “Guilty.”

      “Jace is my best friend. We’re in the same class at school.”

      “So I’m guessing that means you’ve probably got a part in tonight’s Spring Fling.”

      “Yep. This year the third grade is doing a patriotic show. I get to be Abraham Lincoln.”

      “You should see his dorky hat.”

      Owen glared at his sister. “Shut it. You’re just jealous. Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. When your class did the Spring Fling, you had to be a stupid pansy.”

      Here we go. Claire sighed. The two of them bickered about everything from which row of the minivan they each would claim to whose turn it was to feed Chester.

      She fought back her stress headache and opted for diversion, her favorite fight-avoidance technique. Divide and conquer, the time-proven strategy. “Macy, go ask Evie what you can do to help sort the beads.”

      As soon as her daughter left, she turned to Owen. “When you finish your homework, you can play the Lego Star Wars video game your dad bought you this weekend, before we have to go home and get you in your costume for the pageant.”

      “Can we go to McDonald’s for dinner?”

      He always knew how to hit her up when she was tired and stressed, when the challenge of cooking a healthy, satisfying meal for her family seemed completely beyond her capabilities. “We’ll see how well you do with your homework first.”

      In an instant, he reached to whip his homework folder from his backpack at the same time Riley rose to give him space on the desk for the ream of papers he always seemed to bring home.

      “I’ve got to run. Let me know if you think of anything else that might help the investigation. No matter how small or insignificant the information might seem to you, it could provide the break we need.”

      “I will. Thank you again for all you’ve done.”

      “You can wait and thank me after I catch the ba—” He caught himself with a quick, apologetic look to Owen. “The bad dudes. Good luck tonight, Abe. You were always my favorite president.”

      Owen grinned as he spread his homework on the desk and reached for a pencil. Claire followed Riley back to the workroom, where he took time to say goodbye to his mother and sisters and the other women still sorting away.

      “Wow. This looks like a big mess,” he said.

      “You let us worry about the beads,” his mother said. “You just get back out there and catch whoever did this to our Claire.”

      “No pressure, right? On my way, Ma.” He kissed his mother’s salt-and-pepper curls, then headed for the door.

       CHAPTER THREE

      THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, the more they stayed the same, and all that.

      Riley sat in the auditorium at Hope’s Crossing Elementary School, feeling a little like he’d traveled back in time. The place looked just as it had when he was here twenty-five years ago. Same creaky folding chairs, same red-velvet curtains on the stage.

      The third-grade class of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School had been presenting a Spring Fling Spectacular for more than thirty years. Riley could vividly recall his own stint in their play, which his year had been a salute to the original miners who staked claims in the area. Despite old Mrs. Appleton’s stern warnings to the contrary all through their rehearsals, he had been overwhelmed by the crowd and the excitement and had stupidly locked his knees right in the middle of a rousing song about turning silver into gold.

      His spectacular dive off the stage as he passed out into the lap of the grumpy fourth-grade teacher holding the cue cards was probably still legendary in the hallowed halls of Hope’s Crossing Elementary School.

      He smiled at the memory as he sat beside Angie, his second-oldest sister. Angie’s son Jace—Owen Bradford’s best friend—was starring as the narrator of tonight’s pageant.

      He had been away from town for a long time, since he left an angry, troubled punk who couldn’t wait to get out. When he was a kid, he had loathed these rituals, these prescribed, hallowed traditions that beat out the quiet rhythm of life in a small town. Now, fifteen years later, he was astonished at the comfort he found in the steadfast continuity of it all.

      He might have changed drastically in those intervening years

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