Hmm.
I moved closer to the window.
Oh, dear. This couldn’t be good. There was no way this was good.
The red hat and black coat was Claudia, and the multicolored hat and pink coat was her sidekick Tina Heller. Either the other three women had bought new hats and coats or I didn’t know them well enough for clothes recognition.
Tina turned her head away from the cluster and darted a look my way. The sheer venom in her glare was nearly tangible, fierce and ugly and raw.
I took an involuntary step backward. What had I ever done to deserve such a look? Okay, Tina wasn’t my favorite person on the planet, but I couldn’t recall doing any of the classic three things that would land me permanently on a woman’s hit list: flirting with her husband, making fun of her new hairstyle, or telling her that she’d gained weight.
As Yvonne and I watched, another woman scurried down the sidewalk to join the others, her arms laden with an awkward arrangement of sticks and cardboard.
Lois, who could smell trouble even faster than she could come up with a story for Paoze, came up front. “What’s going on?” She peered out the window. “Is that CeeCee Daniels? What’s she got there? Wait a minute. Those are—”
“Signs,” I said tonelessly. As my former friend CeeCee distributed the handmade signs around the group, I saw enough text to understand what was going on.
“They’re picketing us?” Lois’s voice rose almost to a shriek. “They can’t do that! This is a public street. A public sidewalk! They can’t do this, can they?” She turned to me, frowning, scared, angry. “Can they?”
Lois was looking at me, Yvonne was looking at me. I had a ferocious wish to be an employee again, and not the owner to whom the hard questions ultimately came.
I turned back to watch the goings-on. The snow piles tossed up by the city’s plows were serving as a lumpy reminder of the coming winter, and into those snowbanks Claudia and her crew stuck handmade sign after handmade sign.
“Convicted Killer Inside.”
“Make Rynwood Safe.”
“Bookstore Harbors Convict.”
“Can Your Children Be Safe There?”
Yvonne unpinned her name tag and held it out. “I’ll leave by the back door,” she said. “Then you can go out and tell them I’m gone. If you’re lucky”—she gave a tiny smile—“they’ll all come inside and start buying books.”
I stared at her. “What?”
She shook the name tag and the loose point of the pin flapped around dangerously. “I’m quitting.”
“No, you’re not,” Lois and I said.
Yvonne continued to hold out her tag and I continued to refuse to take it. “There’s no quitting in bookstores,” I said. Except for Marcia, but that hardly counted since I would have fired her anyway. “And no quitting right before the busiest season of the year.”
“If this is the busy time,” Yvonne said, looking around at the empty store, “I don’t want to know what the slow season is like.”
“This is an anomaly,” I said firmly. “Claudia and her cohorts will get tired of standing out there in half an hour. They’ll slink back to wherever they came from, and one by one they’ll come back and shop. There isn’t another children’s bookstore this size within a forty-five-minute drive.”
Yvonne’s arm wavered, then dropped. “You think this will blow over?”
“Absolutely.” Which was a complete lie, but if my earlobes were any guide, I was becoming accomplished at the task. “Put that tag back on. We’ll have customers pouring in before we can get another round of tea brewed. Speaking of which, how about chamomile?”
As Yvonne headed to the teapot, Lois edged close. “Once Claudia gets a bee in her bonnet she might as well have it cast in stone.”
“I know.”
“So you don’t really think they’ll go away by lunchtime?”
We watched a man join the group. He carried a sign that read, “A Killer Is Roaming Free.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“What are you going to do?” Lois’s voice was hushed.
“I’ll think of something.”
But what that something was, I had no idea.
“There’s not much you can do,” Evan said.
That was not what I wanted to hear. I gripped the phone receiver in my office tighter and hoped I’d heard wrong.
“If they’re not physically blocking access to your store,” he said, “for the most part they’re within the law.”
I latched on to the middle of his sentence. “For the most part? You mean there’s a part where they might be breaking the law?” I envisioned a police van pulling up to the curb, officers tumbling out and handcuffing everyone.
He sighed a lawyerly sigh. “Constitutional law isn’t my area of expertise, but I can tell you that fighting their right to free speech would be an expensive and costly proposition.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“And they could get support from many civil rights groups,” Evan said. “I’m afraid yours is not the sympathetic side.”
“But Yvonne didn’t do anything.” I was nearly shouting. “It isn’t fair!”
The echo of my words thrummed in a hollow beat down through the memory of my childhood—through everyone’s childhood.
“Beth—”
“I know, I know. Don’t expect life to be fair.”
“You know that already. No, I was going to say that I could lend you money if you really want to fight this.”
“You . . . would?”
“Of course.” He sounded surprised. “What’s important to you is important to me. I thought you knew that.”
Tears stung my eyes. I’d known that he seemed to like spending time with me, that he enjoyed being with Jenna and Oliver, but that was all very different from writing a check. Especially a check the size that a project this size might require.
“Thanks,” I said softly. “That means a lot to me.”
“And you mean a lot to me.”
I closed my eyes briefly, wanting to say the words back to him . . . but I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. One of those.
“Why do you think I—” He stopped.
“Why what?”
“. . . Nothing.”
A couple of things went
“Think about my offer,” Evan said. “Okay? Just think about it.”
And if he wanted to remain anonymous, I wasn’t about to interfere. “I will. Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very, very much.”
My hand stayed on the phone after I disconnected. What a wonderful man. There were many reasons I was
