Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One

“Donna Mazell told me when I phoned dispatch that String Fever wasn’t the only store that was hit during the night.”

He nodded, even as he reached down to scratch Chester’s jowls. “Apparently the town’s criminal element had itself a busy Sunday night. At last count, four businesses were burglarized.”

“I have a security system. Why wasn’t the alarm tripped? The security company should have responded.”

“That’s a good question. I’m going to take a guess here that you’re with Topflight Security.”

“Yes.”

“I’m thinking it might not be a coincidence that every other business that was hit in the night also happens to be with Topflight Security. That’s just one of the angles we’re going to be working in our investigation.”

She frowned. “Surely you don’t think someone there had anything to do with this?” The owner of the security company was a friend and she couldn’t even contemplate that he or any of his employees might have been involved.

“One of the good things about being away from town all these years, I guess, is that I can come back without a lot of preconceptions. Right now I don’t know what to think. We’re looking into the possibility that their computer system had been hacked to allow someone access to the businesses without alerting Topflight, but we don’t know yet. At this point, we’re just adding everything to the pot and we’ll sort through it later. What time did your store close yesterday?”

“During the shoulder seasons in the spring and fall, we stay closed on Sundays. It could have been robbed at any time from Saturday night to this morning.”

“Let’s take a look at the damage. Have you figured out what’s missing yet?”

“My office computer is gone. It was a fairly new iMac I bought only about six months ago. The drawer for the cash register was emptied, but I only keep about fifty dollars in change there overnight. I took care of the night deposit myself Saturday before I went home.”

She was grateful for that at least. The weekend had been crazy, between running Owen to his dress rehearsal and her mother asking her at the last minute to pick up a couple of prescriptions for her, but she clearly remembered going to the drive-up at the bank and dropping off the deposit.

“Did they take anything else?”

“To be honest with you, I haven’t looked very carefully. I didn’t want to mess up the evidence.”

“Go ahead and walk through, see what else might be missing.”

The thieves hadn’t touched the locked glass-fronted cabinet where she kept the pricier Czech crystals Donna had been talking about and some of the handcrafted Venetian glass, or some of more valuable finished jewelry pieces either she or Evie had made or she sold on consignment for her customers. It was still intact. She did see three empty hooks on the wall where she had hung a few of the less valuable custom necklaces she had created. One good thing about that—she would instantly recognize her own pieces if the thieves were stupid enough to flaunt their loot around town.

She walked through the retail section of the store and the workroom where she kept beading equipment for her customers to use on-site—bead boards and looms, reamers, cutters. Nothing else appeared to be missing.

She headed into her office last and suddenly gasped.

Riley was there in an instant. “Whoa.” His gaze sharpened on the wedding dress still hanging in the protective bag, both slashed to tatters with what looked like a pair of her own scissors from the workroom. “Now that’s interesting.”

Interesting? She could come up with a hundred different adjectives and that particular one wasn’t among them.

“That’s a designer wedding dress,” she moaned. “I’ve had it for only two days so I could customize the beadwork on the bodice. It was a huge commission.”

A commission she could now see imploding—along with possibly the store’s entire future. “Who would be so destructive?”

“Wild guess here, but maybe somebody who’s not too crazy about the bride. Who did the gown belong to?” he asked.

“Genevieve Beaumont. The mayor’s daughter.”

Her grand society wedding to the son of one of the region’s richest bachelors was still eight months away. Maybe Gen would have time to order a replacement gown between now and then and Claire could still have time to finish the beadwork.

Or maybe the somewhat spoiled bride-to-be would decide to sue Claire for every penny she eked out of the store, for whatever breach in security had potentially ruined Genevieve’s big day.

Chester nudged her leg with his head and she wanted to sink to the floor in the middle of all those spilled beads, gather him in her arms and indulge in a big, soggy pity party. The emotions clogged her throat and burned behind her eyes, but she blinked them back and swallowed hard. She had no time to indulge in tears, not now when she had such a mess to clean up—and especially not in front of the new chief of police, for heaven’s sake.

“This is a nightmare. It makes no sense. Why just destroy the dress when they didn’t even bother to take the crystals? They’re worth a fortune.”

“I don’t know the answer to that yet. But I promise you, Claire, I’ll find out.”

Riley might have been an annoying little pest when he was younger and a hell-on-wheels troublemaker when he hit his teen years, but all she had heard over the years from Alex and the rest of his family indicated he had shaped up from his wayward youth and truly found his calling with police work.

Most people in Hope’s Crossing seemed to think the town was lucky he had agreed to give up his life as an undercover detective in the Bay Area to come back, although she had heard rumors there was discontent in the police department over his hiring.

“Tell me what else I can do to help you, then.”

“Just sit tight while I finish processing the scene. Maybe you and your dog here could head over to Maura’s place for coffee or something. I might be here a while.”

“I’d rather stay, if you don’t mind. We’ll do our best to keep out of your way.”

“Not a problem. I’m glad to have the company, I only wish it were under better circumstances.”

For the next hour, she had a front-row seat as Riley worked the scene—collecting evidence, lifting fingerprints, taking photos.

It was a bit of a jarring dichotomy trying to reconcile the pain in the neck she remembered with this wholly competent officer of the law. Mixed in there was the wild, angry teenager he’d been after his parents’ divorce, but by then she’d been living in Boulder for college and had only heard everything secondhand about his drinking, smoking and more.

The Riley she remembered was the one who had hidden a voice-activated tape recorder in his sister’s room during one of Claire’s frequent sleepovers at the McKnight home so he could overhear what she and Alex talked and giggled about.

Their conversation had inevitably centered around boys, of course, because they were probably twelve or thirteen at the time and beginning to be obsessed with the opposite sex. Claire had just started to notice the smartest, cutest boy in the grade ahead of her, Jeff Bradford. Alexandra at the time had been enamored with the quarterback on the freshman football team, Jason Kolpecki.

They had talked long into the night about their current crushes with no clue that Riley, the sneak, had recorded all of it—and then threatened to share the tape recording with the boys in question if they didn’t meet his demands, a mortifying prospect.

It was probably a good thing those who weren’t thrilled about Riley’s return didn’t know their new chief of police had once included blackmail in his repertoire. She and Alex had spent every Saturday for two months taking over his customary duty of mowing and edging the McKnights’ lawn in exchange for Riley’s promise to destroy the tape.

All the teasing and mischief of their childhood seemed worlds away, buried deep under the weight of all that had come later. Her father’s scandalous death, her mother’s subsequent breakdowns, his father’s midlife crisis that had decimated his family and Riley’s own wild youth.

Sometimes she thought she would give anything to go back to that peaceful time, when the only thing she had to worry about in junior high was her algebra grade and Riley leaking to Jeff Bradford that she had a crush on him.

After another half hour while he spent considerable time on his cell phone with, she assumed, officers working the other crime scenes, he finally collected the last evidence and loaded everything into a bag.

“That should do it,” he said. “I’m going to send everything here to the crime lab and hopefully we can get a print or two.”

“Thanks, Riley. I really appreciate everything you’ve done.”

“No problem. I hope to have information for you as soon as possible.”

He gave her the big, broad, charming smile he had perfected as the youngest and only boy in a family of five sisters, the same smile that helped him wiggle out of more trouble than she cared to think about.

A little sizzle of attraction sparked through her, just like the flickering lights floating down the mountainside in the hands of skiers during the annual Christmas Eve candle festival at the resort. She frowned, especially when he stepped a little closer and reached for her hand.

“It really is terrific to see you, Claire. When things settle a little, what do you say I take you up to the resort for dinner so we can catch up under better circumstances?”

Okay, she had been out of the dating scene for pretty much ever, since she had started seeing Jeff when she was fifteen, but that sounded suspiciously like Riley McKnight was asking her out.

“Uh.” Brilliant answer, she knew. She couldn’t help it—she couldn’t remember the last time anything beyond leaving her grocery list at home managed to fluster her. Surely she must have misunderstood. He was just being polite, wasn’t he?

“It was only a simple dinner invitation, Claire.” A dimple quirked at the edge of his mouth. “I didn’t intend to send you into a panic.”

She forced a bland smile and reminded herself this was pesky Riley McKnight. “The day you send me into a panic is the day I dye my hair purple and join a punk-rock band.”

“Now that I would love to see.”

Too late, she remembered that he never backed down from a challenge. Once when they were kids, Alex had been grounded for a month when she dared her brother to ride his bike down from the top of the Woodrose Mountain trail without hitting his brakes once. He’d made it almost to the bottom before his spectacular crash—and, of course, never once considered braking to slow his descent. That would have been cheating.

That was years ago. A man didn’t become a decorated law enforcement officer without gaining a little wisdom along the way and learning how to pick his battles, right?

“I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to catch up,” she answered as calmly as she could manage. “Alex tells me you’re renting the old Harper place on Blackberry Lane. That’s just down the street from my house. I’m in the redbrick house with the portico.”

He smiled again. “Great. Guess I know where to head when I need to borrow a cup of sugar.”

How on earth did he manage to make such a simple statement sound vaguely sexy? She decided to ignore it—just as she decided it would probably be better not to mention it had been a long time since she’d loaned anyone a cup of sugar—or enjoyed any other euphemism, for that matter.

“Is it all right if I reopen the store now? I can’t afford to be closed all day.”

“As far as the police are concerned, sure. Do you need me to send somebody over to help you clean up?”

She shook her head. “I’ll check around and see if I can round up a crew.”

“Okay. So I’ll call you, right?”

She frowned. She was so out of practice at this, she had no idea how to tactfully discourage him. Better to just plow ahead, she decided. “Riley, I don’t know if that’s such a great idea…”

He gave her a long, amused look. “Funny, I figured you’d want to know what’s going on with the case.”

“Of course I do!”

“What else did you think I meant?”

She had no way of answering that without sounding like an idiot. Now she remembered why he used to drive her and Alex crazy.

“Absolutely nothing. Please do call me. About the case anyway.”

“Right. I’ll be in touch.”

Only after he left and she moved to close the door behind him did she remember that silly horoscope. Something fun and exciting is heading your way. That was Riley McKnight, all right. Too bad she wasn’t in the market for either of those things—and especially not with her best friend’s younger brother.

CHAPTER TWO

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN months, Claire was relieved when business was slow. She didn’t know how she could provide any sort of decent customer service when she still had hours of work to do clearing up the mess the burglars had left behind.

In desperation, she had finally swept the tens of thousands of spilled beads into one huge bin to be sorted back into compartmentalized trays. If she’d been forced to tackle it by herself, she didn’t know what she would have done.

“This is going to take months. You know that, don’t you, honey?”

Ruth seemed to read her mind, in that uncanny way her mother had perfected. Claire managed to keep from grinding her teeth, but before she could answer, her best friend chimed in from the other end of the worktable.

“Are you kidding, Mrs. T.?” Alex McKnight’s dimple, much like her brother’s, flashed with her grin. “You’ve got the town’s best and brightest beaders here. With all of us superwomen working together, we can probably cut the job down to three weeks, tops.”

“I say we can do it in two,” Evie Blanchard, Claire’s assistant manager, spoke in her quietly cheerful way. Monday was supposed to be her day off, but when Evie heard about the burglary, she had insisted on cutting short a late-season cross-country ski outing to help with the cleanup effort.

Evie and Alex were two of the seven women surrounding the String Fever worktable, each with a small kaleidoscopic pile of beads in front of them they were sorting by color and shape into compartmentalized trays that lined the middle of the table. After that, the spilled beads would have to be sorted by size and type—furnace glass, handblown glass, semiprecious stones, cloisonné—and organized once more on the shelves.

Claire’s mother sat at one end near Maura—Alex’s next oldest sister—and Mary Ella, their mother. To Claire’s left was Evie and on her right was Katherine Thorne, who had sold her the store nearly two years ago, while Alex sat across the table.

Chester, of course, presided from his place of honor on his favorite blanket, curled up on his side. Sometimes she thought half her customers came into the store just to visit her dog, who was never quite as happy as when he was stretched out in his corner at String Fever, listening to all the chatter.

During those first difficult months after Jeff moved out, String Fever was where she found solace and calm, here amid her friends. Like beads on a wire, they were all connected, linked together by bonds of friendship and family, by shared experiences and a common passion for beading.

“Did you hear about Jeanie Strebel?” Maura, Alex’s older sister, was saying.

“No. What happened?” Claire asked.

“She was knocking icicles off her roof with a broom the other night and a big one shot right down and knocked her over. Broke her leg in three places. Jeff did surgery yesterday, from what I hear. Her daughter told me she was going to be in the hospital until Sunday.”

“Oh, no!” Mary Ella exclaimed. “And they’ve already been hit with more than their share of troubles since Ardell had his heart surgery three months ago.”

Maura nodded. “I bumped into Brianna at the market this morning before I opened the store and she told me all about it. Have you seen those twins of hers, by the way? They’re growing like crazy and have the most darling dark curls and huge eyes. Anyway, guess what happened while her dad was at the hospital with her mom last night?”

They all waited expectantly and Maura let the pause lengthen for dramatic effect.

“Come on, Maur.” Alex finally ruined the anticipation. “Just get on with it. What happened?”

“They had a visit from the Angel of Hope.”

Excitement seemed to shimmer around the table at the announcement. Even Ruth leaned forward, her eyes wide. “Really? Another one?” she asked.

“It had to be. Somebody left ten crisp hundred-dollar bills in an envelope slipped under their front door to help with medical expenses. You should have seen Brianna’s face when she told me about it. That sweet girl. Her eyes were all red and weepy and she just glowed from the inside out.”

For the past few months, a mysterious benefactor had been stepping in to help people who most needed it. When Caroline Bybee’s ancient Plymouth coughed its final death knell last fall, she woke up one morning to find a later-model used sedan in her driveway, complete with a gift title and a note signed only “Drive Carefully.”

A few weeks before that, a young divorced mother who sometimes came into the store told Claire someone had paid her heating bill for the entire winter. She had no idea how or why but the gas company assured her she had full credit on her bill to last into the spring.

During the holiday season, Claire had heard that more than one struggling family—all with young children—had discovered envelopes full of cash on their doorstep with only the words “Merry Christmas from Someone Who Cares.”

Those were only the things she knew about. She had to wonder how many acts of generosity had somehow escaped the winding tendrils of the Hope’s Crossing grapevine. She didn’t know who had first come up with the nickname Angel of Hope, but the whole town had been buzzing about the identity of the benevolent patron.

As tough as she sometimes found living in the same town with Jeff and Holly, stories like this provided another reason to stay. People here cared about each other. How could she doubt it, with her dear friends rushing to her aid in her moment of need?

“You’re all my angels of hope,” she told them fiercely. “I can’t tell you all how much I appreciate your giving up your lives to help me for a few hours.”

“Of course we would come in to help you.” Mary Ella smiled, her green eyes so much like her son’s bright with affection. “You didn’t even need to ask, my dear. The moment I heard your store had been robbed and that the little shits had left such a mess behind, I knew I would be spending the afternoon helping you clean it up.”

“I still can’t believe anybody in town would be so vindictive as to cause such trouble just for the sake of making a mess.” Katherine seemed to be taking the burglaries as a personal affront.

“I’m betting it was somebody staying at the ski resort.” Evie tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “What are the police saying?”

“Chief McKnight said he would touch base with me later, but I haven’t heard anything yet. It’s been only a few hours.”

“Now there’s a familiar story. Another woman waiting in vain for one of Riley’s phone calls.”

Alex’s levity earned her a frown from her mother. “His social life is one thing,” Mary Ella said sternly, “but you’d better not let me hear you say anything about your brother’s devotion to duty, Alexandra. Riley is an excellent police officer. You know Katherine and the rest of the city council wouldn’t have voted to hire him as the police chief if he wasn’t.”

Katherine looked vaguely alarmed at being dragged into a family discussion. “We feel honored that Riley would even consider coming back to Hope’s Crossing. When he agreed to take the job, I was a little worried we would have a hard time keeping him busy.”

“Is that a confession, Katherine?” Claire teased. “Are you telling us you broke into a half-dozen stores along Main Street just to keep Riley busy enough that he’ll want to stay permanently in Hope’s Crossing?”

“Claire Renée!” Ruth sounded positively scandalized. “You know perfectly well Katherine would never hurt our town like that, no matter how good Chief McKnight might be at his job and how much the city council might want to keep him.”

Alex rolled her eyes, just out of Ruth’s view and Claire bit her cheek, relieved she could find anything funny after this miserable day.

“Of course I know that, Mom,” she said. “Joking. Again.”

“It’s actually a very clever idea.” Katherine smiled. “Wish I’d thought of it. Of course, if it had been me, I wouldn’t have left such a big mess behind me for you to clean up. And I certainly wouldn’t have destroyed poor Genevieve’s wedding dress.”

That was a phone call Claire had hated making, one she hoped she’d never have to repeat. As any bride would be, Genevieve had been traumatized to learn her wedding dress had been shredded, but another telephone call to the dress designer had ended in prim assurances that another gown could be sent within the next few weeks—for a premium, of course. Claire would have to foot the bill for it until her insurance policy paid up, but she figured it was a small price to pay to keep the peace with the Beaumont family.

“Katherine, you’ve always got your ear to the ground.” The nimble fingers Alex used for slicing and dicing in the restaurant kitchen at the resort didn’t stop dancing through the beads as she spoke. “What’s the scuttlebutt about who might be behind our dastardly crime spree?”

“I wish I knew. As of an hour ago when I stopped in at the diner, all kinds of rumors were flying, everything from some Ukrainian mafia moving into Hope’s Crossing to California gangs setting up a drug operation to some secret government conspiracy. Riley’s got his work cut out for him sifting through all the crazy tips.”

“He’ll figure it out,” Mary Ella said, her voice confident. “That boy has been stubborn since he came into the world. He won’t stop until he gets to the bottom of the burglaries and puts the offenders behind bars, no matter what he has to do to find them.”

“Which is Ma code meaning her only son is sneaky and conniving,” Alex said.

“And manipulative and underhanded,” Maura added.

“Don’t forget mule-headed and obstinate,” offered Claire, who figured that while she wasn’t a sister by birth, she had been the object of his torment enough that she deserved the right to chime in.

All the women laughed, except for Ruth, whose mouth tightened. Despite her friendship with Mary Ella, Ruth held Riley in severe dislike and never found much of anything amusing when it came to him. She couldn’t get past the wild troublemaker he’d been in the past, the pain he’d put his mother through. Still, the rest of them were still chuckling when the front door chimes rang out and the man in question walked through the door.

He stood just inside the store, his dark hair slightly ruffled from the cold wind and a brush of afternoon shadow along his jawline, practically oozing testosterone amid all the sparkly beads and chattering women. Claire had a sudden mental image of running her fingers along those whiskers, of tracing that firm jawline and the dimple at the side of his mouth.

Color heated her cheeks. What on earth was wrong with her? The stress of the day. That’s what she would blame for her completely irrational response.

Riley surveyed the group of giggling women and Claire noticed she wasn’t the only one unable to meet his gaze, although she was quite certain she was the only one whose insides had taken a long, slow roll.

“Okay, now why do I suddenly have the funny feeling my ears should be burning?” he murmured.

“No reason, darling,” Mary Ella assured him, although she winked at the rest of them.

“A little narcissistic, are we?” Alex smirked.

He tugged at his sister’s dark curls in response before leaning in to kiss his mother’s cheek. Claire was close enough to catch his scent, earthy and masculine.