LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE

      “Chief Campbell!”

      Kat’s name rattled up Main Street as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk. She had just stepped out of Big Joe’s, a Starbucks wannabe, carrying an extra-large coffee, for which she had paid Starbucks’ prices. Normally, the concept of four-dollar java would have annoyed her. But it was a gray and frigid morning, and she needed the heat and clarity that coffee provided. Unfortunately, the sound of her name, now being shouted a second time, prevented her from taking that first, precious sip.

      “Hey, Chief!”

      The source of the yell was Jasper Fox, owner of a flower shop burdened with the name Awesome Blossoms. Despite the cold, perspiration glistened on his face as he barreled up the sidewalk. Huffing and puffing, he waited until he reached Kat to finish his sentence.

      “I’ve been robbed.”

      Kat, coffee cup suspended in front of her mouth, blinked with disbelief. In Perry Hollow, robberies happened about as often as solar eclipses. Its pine-dotted streets and exhaustingly quaint storefronts were mostly trouble-free.

      “Robbed? Are you sure?”

      Jasper had an absurd mustache that dripped from his face like two dirty icicles. Whenever Kat saw him, she thought of a walrus. That morning, the mustache drooped even lower than normal.

      “I think I’d know,” Jasper said.

      His hangdog expression told her he had been expecting a different response. Something action-packed and decisive. Maybe Kat could have lived up to his expectations had she been given a chance to take a sip of her coffee. Instead, she could only lower the cup and watch Jasper as he watched her.

      She knew what he was thinking. She read it in his eyes. He saw a woman five feet tall, ten pounds overweight, and six years shy of middle age. A woman who darkened her blond hair in order to be taken seriously. A woman who had bags under her eyes because the boiler was on the fritz and her son was up half the night with a cough. Most of all, he saw a woman—with a badge pinned to her uniform—idling on the sidewalk when she should have been investigating the town’s first theft in more than a year.

      Knowing all of this was going through Jasper’s brain, Kat asked, “What was stolen?”

      “I’ll show you.”

      She followed him down Main Street, which was waking up faster than she was. She spotted Lisa Gunzelman unlocking her antiques store and Adrienne Wellington adjusting a floral-print frock in the window of her dress shop. Similar activity took place on the other side of the street as store owners got ready for another day of commerce in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania.

      Their efforts were in vain. The town had seen few visitors since the Christmas rush, simply because January and February were too cold for shopping. Now it was the middle of March, and although store windows showed off shorts, sunglasses, and tank tops, the scene outside was anything but springlike. Just two days earlier, a nor’easter had dumped six inches of snow on the roads. That was followed by an arctic chill that froze the plowed snow into miniature icebergs against the sidewalks. Kat stepped around one as she followed Jasper into his own store, two doors down from the dress shop.

      Once inside Awesome Blossoms, Jasper made a beeline to the rear of the store and pushed open a door that led back outside. Kat followed him through it, finding herself in the center of a vacant parking lot covered with a thin sheet of ice. Only then did she begin to understand the situation. Jasper’s delivery van—a ubiquitous white Ford with the store’s name painted across its sides—had been taken during the night. The realization gave her an inappropriate kick. At last, something to investigate.

      “Are you positive this is where you parked it last night?”

      “Of course.”

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