Out of Bounds

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.

Nonchalantly, Posy stretched one hand toward the bag, but she was too slow. With another quick swish of her tail, the dog shoved her face into Posy’s bag and emerged with her acid-yellow, leather business card wallet clutched between small, white teeth.

“No. Angel, drop it!”

Angel disappeared under the skirt around the table holding a model-train display with a village skating rink as the centerpiece. The tiny bell in the steeple of the chapel jingled when the dog bumped against the table leg. Posy knew from unfortunate experience that there’d be no catching Angel, and less than no chance the dog would do something as helpful as obey a command. She didn’t even bother lifting the table skirt. If Angel had a Twitter account and opposable thumbs, she’d send the #SillyHumans hash tag trending every day.

“Angel is under stress right now,” Trish said. Which was a new one. Sometimes Angel was delicate. Other times she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. The one true explanation for her dog’s terrible behavior—that Angel was a demon-spawned obedience-school dropout in a fluffy white fur coat—was never mentioned. “I’ll replace that...whatever it was.”

Posy lifted her bag, looking in vain for a spare inch or two on one of the tables where she could put it out of the dog’s reach. She ended up slinging it over her shoulder, holding it tight against her side with one arm.

Her mom bustled toward the back of the store. “I’m unpacking a shipment. Come on and I can tell you the news,” she said. “Watch that garland!”

Posy stooped to duck under a rope of gold, spray-painted eucalyptus leaves and pinecones. She turned sideways to edge past a display of the beautifully detailed, handcrafted papier-mâché mangers her mom commissioned from an artist in Pennsylvania.

Wonders didn’t have aisles so much as narrow alleys between displays crammed full of Christmas glitz and glitter. From the handblown ornaments hanging on color-coordinated trees, to the loops of beaded crystal garland Posy ducked through as she passed the register, the store carried everything and anything Christmas and delicate.

Her mom’s real specialty was miniatures. Wonders was the best-stocked retail outlet on the East Coast for holiday decorators who took verisimilitude in their train displays or light-up Christmas villages to the extreme. Every inch of horizontal space inside Wonders contained tiny, detailed, uncannily realistic miniatures and scene scapes.

Posy ran a hand over the thick nap of an ivory, velvet tree skirt. She’d worn more than her fair share of velvet Christmas dresses when she was in elementary school. Each one had been beautiful on the hanger, but the heavy fabric and childish styles had exaggerated Posy’s large frame, making her feel even more self-conscious. Trish had exquisite sewing skills—she just didn’t have any gauge to tell her when enough was so much more than enough.

In the crowded back office, her mom was bent over an open cardboard box, Bubble Wrap mounded around her ankles. A ceramic angel lay on the carpet next to her feet. She didn’t look up as Posy came in, but said, “See that envelope on my desk?”

Posy nodded and then realized her mom, who was unwrapping another angel, couldn’t see her. “Yes.”

“It’s for you. Open it up.”

The envelope was blank, no return address or mailing labels, and Posy couldn’t help feeling curious as she undid the metal clasp and slid the sheaf of stapled pages out.

She read the first few lines of the top sheet, then quickly leafed through the attached deeds and mortgage documents. “Mom?”

Trish put the second angel down and then lowered herself to her knees to reach deep into the box in front of her. “It’s your legacy, Posy.”

The papers listed all her mom’s assets, the house, Wonders, a two-year-old minivan and a safe-deposit box at the bank.

“My what?”

“Your legacy. From me to you.”

Her mom was trying to give her all the clutter Posy had been doing her best to keep strictly out of her own life for the past twenty years.

Posy was both touched and horrified. “This isn’t a legacy, it’s—” An albatross. “Mom...”

“Posy. You’ve been telling me for years that I need to sell the house, haven’t you? It’s too big for one person. And every time I add a new product line to the store, you accuse me of slipping one step closer to a hoarding diagnosis.”

Posy nodded. She felt completely confused and a finger of panic crept up her back. Surely her mom wasn’t planning to leave Kirkland. Where would she go? Rochester? Posy’s brand-new condo?

“Well, consider your advice taken. I’m selling everything. To you.”

“Selling?” Posy said, looking more closely at the pages. “Oh, Mom, it’s a nice impulse, but I just bought my condo. I don’t need your house or your car, and I can’t take care of Wonders. And where are you going to live? What’s going on?” She paused as fear crept into her gut, making her queasy. “Wait, why are you doing this? Are you okay? Everything’s okay, right?”

Posy set the legal papers aside and took a good look at her mom. Friends often described Trish as animated. Her ash-blond hair and bright green eyes were different enough from Posy’s black hair and dark brown eyes that they’d never be mistaken for relatives, let alone mother and daughter. Even though her mom was pretty, as sparkling as one of her ornaments, Posy noticed now that there was something different about Trish. Was the sparkle only a fever?

“I’m in love.” Trish clasped her hands over her heart. Actually clasped them and closed her eyes. She was a Precious Moments statue come to life.

Her mom spent way too much time looking at snow globe scenes.

CHAPTER TWO

“Y OU’ RE IN LOVE?” Posy stared at her mom, who was still clasping her hands to her heart. Still surrounded by Bubble Wrap.

“Mitch. His name is Mitch. He’s a bit older than me. He was a surgeon—worked on hands—and he’s retired now out in Ohio, with pots of money. We’ve been corresponding online since last October, and seeing each other for three months. Posy, you won’t believe this, but he loves me. He loves everything about me and he wants me to move in with him.”

Trish was right. Posy didn’t quite believe it. After her marriage broke up, Trish had become increasingly needy and clingy when anyone so much as asked her on a date.

Posy had a clear memory of a guy who’d come to pick Trish up for a first date being coerced into fixing the washing machine. He hadn’t come back for a second date. For Trish, love meant never having to solve your own problems. Not too many men stuck around after the first crisis.

It had been several years since her mom had gone out with anyone, as far as Posy knew. Despite her daily phone calls and innumerable weekly texts, she’d been keeping this guy a secret for three months?

“A surgeon? Where did you meet?”

If her mom said Match.com, she was going straight to the FBI to get a profile of this supposed surgeon/

paragon. She felt disloyal, but it was hard to believe Trish had met a guy and hadn’t scared him off. That had never happened, in all of Posy’s twenty-eight years.

“We met at the Holiday World trade show. I was testing a line of nutcrackers, which if anyone ever tries to tell you resin composites look exactly like hand-carved wood, you should run the other way. But anyway, Mitch noticed that I was uncomfortable with the salesman’s hard sell and he stepped in and put a stop to it.”

Anyone who helped her mom walk away from an investment in faux-wood, resin-composite nutcrackers won bonus points in Posy’s book.

“Why was he looking at nutcrackers?”

“He wasn’t. He was buying antique-style streetlights for his train display. The wires are so thin you can barely see them. I’ll show you—”

“Mom! The surgeon.”

“He’s retired. He owns a wonderful place near Toledo called Mitch’s Train Yard. It’s this incredible Christmas train display that fills his whole barn. He has a shop and a small café and is building up a model-train museum.”

“Your new boyfriend is a model-train-collecting professional?” Was there any way this was true? Had her mom actually met a guy who would not only put up with her crazy collections, but enjoy them? Share them? Contribute to them?

“We’re perfect for each other. It’s too bad your dad isn’t still here. I think he’d have enjoyed meeting Mitch.”

Posy’s dad would have hanged himself with a string of Christmas lights before he got anywhere near a meeting with her mom’s new boyfriend. But she didn’t say that to her mother. In the three years since he’d died, Trish had been mentally revising their relationship until it would be hard to know from her stories that after their divorce Posy’s dad had gone out of his way to avoid her company.

Trish became absorbed again in the angels. She picked one up and ran a finger over the gilded wings. “So once you write me a check, I’ll be free and clear and I can move in with him.”

“Mom, I’m not buying all your stuff so you can run away to Toledo. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for you.” And happy that her mom was finally willing to consider downsizing. The house and store were the sources of many of the problems Posy had been called in to manage, but as much as she wanted them gone, she didn’t want her mom rushing into a relationship with a virtual stranger. “You don’t have to move right away. What if we make a plan—we’ll talk to a Realtor, get someone to look at the accounts for the store and see if you can attract a buyer. Even if you just want to liquidate the stock, you need to think this through.”

Trish was shaking her head.

“No? What no? Mom, is there something else you’re keeping from me?”

“I don’t want to get into the details.” Trish’s hands tightened on the angel and she broke the left-hand wing off. “Oh, no.” Her shoulders hunched up close to her ears and she seemed to shrink right in front of Posy. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

If Posy hadn’t already guessed there was something very wrong going on in her mom’s life, that would have been an unavoidable clue. If Trish didn’t want to discuss something, it was Upsetting or Uncomfortable or even worse, Embarrassing. She’d happily chat about cancer, crime, war, politics, heck, even religion, but as soon as the conversation brushed up against shame or negative image, Trish shut the door.

“Mom, you didn’t really think I was going to buy every one of your earthly possessions without finding out why this is necessary.”

“I told you the reason. Mitch. He’s a hand surgeon. I’m going to move to Ohio.”

Patented Trish Jones “looking on the bright side” nonsense.

“Bullshit.”

Trish pressed her hands together and her mouth tightened briefly before she smoothed her expression. “Posy, there’s no need for that type of language.”

“Tell me why you need money all of a sudden. Is this guy pulling some kind of scam?”

“No!” Trish practically shouted. “He doesn’t know. The truth is... I’m not sure how to... I need the money because...” Trish sniffed and shook her head as she picked up the pieces of the broken angel and tried to fit them back together, but she only managed to chip the end off the wing. Angel, the dog, zipped in out of nowhere and scooped the piece of ceramic off the floor before running back out into the store. “Because I don’t want to go to jail.”

Of all the things that had come out of her mother’s mouth over the years, that had to be about the most shocking. Jail? Trish Jones? Cardigan-sweater wearer, volunteer for good causes, poodle aficionado, owner of a Christmas shop spelled with an extra P and an E?

“Jail?”

The wing snapped off a second angel her mom had picked up.

“Put the angels down before you massacre the whole heavenly host, okay?”

“I didn’t want to tell you this,” Trish said. “It would have been so much easier if you’d bought everything. I could have paid the money back and no one would ever have known.”

“What money?”

“I ran a fundraiser. It was just a small thing. I put a story on my Wonders blog about the community center we’re trying to open here. Some of my readers wanted to help, so I set up a donation button. But then Chloe Chastain linked to it from her blog and her readership is much larger than mine—mommy bloggers have a big reach. Before I knew it, I’d collected quite a bit of money.”

Posy was having trouble tracking the details. She read her mom’s blog, but she had a very small core of regular commenters, fellow Christmas-shop owners and miniatures enthusiasts. Chloe—her old neighbor—ran a blog that was a different story. She’d somehow turned a twice-daily post about life as a divorced mom, taking her toddlers to the park or sipping wine from a plastic Barbie cup, into a successful business. Posy didn’t read Chloe’s blog, but she did look at it from time to time. She had to do something while waiting for movies to load on Netflix.

“Mom, the crime?”

“I don’t have the money anymore.”

She doesn’t have the money anymore. Oh, Lord.

Posy coaxed the details out of her. Trish had been shocked at the amount of money people donated. She’d told a friend of hers about it and the friend had asked to borrow the money. Trish’s friend ran a Christmas store in Maine and her credit line had been reduced by her bank. She told Trish she just needed the money for a few days while she collected on several overdue accounts.

Posy’s voice shook as she asked, “When is she going to pay you back?”

“I’m afraid I was taken in. She lied about her situation, Posy. She declared bankruptcy last week and her assets are frozen. I’m not going to get the money back.”

“I don’t understand why you lent it to her in the first place.”

“She sounded like she really needed the help. This economy has been so hard for so many of my friends. I couldn’t say no when she needed help.”

Which was close to the truth, but not exactly the whole truth. Trish needed to be loved. She collected emotional debts the same way she collected miniatures—fervently and to an extreme. If her friend told her she would be eternally grateful for the loan, Trish would have had a hard time turning her down.

“Now Chloe Chastain keeps calling me. She wants to know when the Fallon Foundation is going to acknowledge the gift. She says she’s accountable to her blog readers. Posy, she’s going to tell everyone what I did.”

Everyone including the police.

“So that’s where I come in? I buy your stuff so you can pay the money back without anyone finding out?”

Trish nodded.

They needed a list. Figure out how much her mom owed and then sell whatever they had to or even get a loan to pay it off. Glancing around the office for a piece of paper and a pen, she realized she was still holding the deeds to her legacy. Wonders, the house. Trish’s car. Her safe-deposit box where she kept her grandmother’s diamond earrings. Did her mom really think she could write a check to cover all that?

Oh, no.

“Mom, how much money did you collect?”

“Sixty-eight thousand dollars. Sixty-eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six dollars, actually.”

Posy leaned against the desk and fanned herself with the papers. She wondered if she was going to vomit. “Sixty-eight—” she was barely able to form the words “—thousand dollars? From your blog?”

“Chloe’s blog gets twenty thousand hits a day.”

“Sixty-eight thousand dollars?” She couldn’t stop repeating the number. It seemed absurd, but Trish kept nodding in confirmation. She’d thought they were dealing with a few thousand, ten at the most. How in the heck had she raised that much money?

How big was Chloe’s audience, anyway?

When she’d recovered enough to ask questions, the answers she got were even more alarming. Trish was in serious debt. Wonders had limped along for several years, never straying too far into the red or the black. She’d sold the building a few years ago when it needed a new roof and an upgraded fire-suppression system, and she couldn’t afford to bring it up to code. After the economy went downhill, Trish mortgaged her house twice to keep Wonders going. The final blow came when she’d mismanaged the holiday ordering the previous Christmas. Now Wonders was about as sunk as a shoppe could get without actually closing its doors.

She’d gone to her bank in a panic this week to try to get a loan to pay the fundraiser back, but she had no assets and bad credit and she’d been turned down flat.

Of all the dramas her mother had created over the years, this one was far and away the most insane. Posy was accustomed to bailing her mom out of jams and patching up messes.... She’d held her hand through an IRS audit a few years ago. This was unbelievable, though.