Anger bubbled in her chest.
Who are all these people? This is my store.
Agitated, she wheeled away from the display and found Darla parked in front of the shredded cheeses. She clucked her tongue, staring daggers at a woman whose cart caromed towards her own.
“Why are so many people here?”
Darla shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought all the snowbirds left.”
“Idiots. We should have come earlier.” Darla tossed two packages of BOGO bacon into her cart. Publix offered one brand or another buy-one-get-one-free every week, so between the two of them, Darla and Mariska had close to twenty packages of bacon in their freezers. Trapped by a hurricane, they’d die of high blood pressure and salt intake long before they ever died of starvation.
Darla cocked her head like a curious beagle. “Hey...”
“Hm?” Mariska read the back of a package of fat-free cream cheese knowing she had every intention of buying the full-fat package.
“The eggs are all gone.”
“What?” Mariska turned to see a system of shelves she’d never realized existed. They’d always been covered with cartons of eggs.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know…”
Mariska watched a woman roll by with a child in her cart, the boy barely visible over multiple packages of toilet paper and paper towels.
“She’s going to lose that kid in there.”
“These empty shelves remind me of the last time a hurricane...” Darla’s voice trailed off as another woman stormed by with at least a dozen packages of ground beef.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” Marla followed her friend’s gaze to the passing cart. “Why is she—oh no.”
Mariska and Darla’s gazes met.
“Panic-buying,” they said in unison.
Darla set her jaw. “Snowbirds. First they clog up our highway, then they swarm our beaches like nasty little ants, and then they steal all our food.”
Mariska shook a fist. “Usually we only have to deal with snowbirds or hurricanes, not both. This early storm is for the birds.”
“Snowbirds.”
They giggled.
Darla sobered. “Okay. We’re going to have to do this like a military operation. I’ll hit the paper products, you hit the milk.”
Mariska craned her neck to see around the growing crowd. The refrigerated bins, once overflowing with chicken, beef and pork, glowed naked and white like empty rib cages.
“It’s all gone,” she whispered, her tone implying she’d lost a friend.
Darla’s shoulders slumped. “We’re too late.”
“But the hurricane only turned track towards us this morning. It probably won’t even hit us.”
Darla gritted her teeth so hard Mariska worried she’d crack a tooth.
“What is wrong with these people?”
“It’s like they lose their minds. You’d better get a move on to the paper products. I’ll meet you there.”
Darla saluted Mariska and took off, shamelessly sprinting her cart in the direction of aisle eight.
“Water!” Mariska called after her.
Mariska hustled to the meat, barely slowing to snatch the last bottle of her favorite coffee creamer from the shelf as if she’d been training for a Coffemate emergency all her life.
She stared with dismay at the empty meat shelves. Nothing remained except hot Italian sausage and corned beef set out for St. Patrick’s day—the one day a year people choked down corned beef in order to get back to drinking.
She grabbed the sausage, thinking lasagna, and pushed toward the paper product aisle. There, she found Darla standing with several other women, all of them gaping at empty shelves, seemingly shellshocked.
“All gone,” said Darla as Mariska approached.
The four of them stood there a moment longer recognizing a moment of silence, until one of the women spoke aloud.
“Potatoes.”
She slapped her hand over her mouth, realizing her mistake.
The women looked at each other, eyes wide with panicked determination. Leaping to action, three carts collided. Darla dodged them at the last second and skated by.
“I’ll get you a bag!” she called behind her as she torqued the cart around the corner headed for more produce.
“Get lettuce!” screamed Mariska.
Chapter Three
“Hey, do you need me for anything?”
Charlotte and Frank’s heads swiveled toward a salt-and-pepper-haired man crossing the lawn of the house next door. He wore khaki shorts, a bright pink polo and white sports socks pulled to mid-calf. A lime-green canvas belt circled his waist with tiny, embroidered martini glasses. He held a golf club, for no apparent reason, in his left hand.
Frank sniffed. “Depends. Who are you?”
The man thrust out his chin. “I found the body and called it in. Name’s Jack Canton.”
“You found the body?” Frank jerked a thumb in the direction of the woman being interviewed by Deputy Dan. “I thought she found it.”
Jack shrugged. “You could say we found it together. I heard her scream and offered to call it in because she doesn’t speak English so good.” He rolled his eyes to show how ridiculous he found that fact.
“So she found the body,” murmured Charlotte, suspecting for the rest of Jack’s life, his new favorite cocktail story would be, The Day I Found a Body.
Frank nodded his cheek in her direction without actually looking at her and she frowned.
I know. Shut up.
Frank fished his notepad from a leather case on his Batman-like utility belt. “We’d like to take a statement from you. You want to do it here or down at the station?”
The man looked at his watch, unable to hide his annoyance. He’d wanted to claim responsibility for finding the body, but apparently hadn’t counted on being dragged into the paperwork portion of the equation. Charlotte guessed him to be about sixty-five years old. Odds were good he didn’t have a nine-to-five job.
Jack crossed his arms against his chest. “I was about to put up my own hurricane shutters but I can take a minute.”
Really? Charlotte eyed the golf club in his hand. Apparently, he carried it
