card for Frances, or at least amend the one she had, and on and on. As Harriet expertly assembled the lovely glass jars filled with creams and lotions, the ceiling, or wall, or whatever it was, made another ominous creak.
“Goodness!” she said, and looked up. “Maybe there’s a plumbing problem. Honestly!”
I handed over the money, feeling nervous, feeling that I wanted to get out of the store. But not quite yet. While she was making the change, I asked quickly, “So what do you think happened to Claire Satterfield?”
Harriet shook her head and sighed. “I think she was run down by a member of that horrible group. Those awful people saying”—she made a face—“spare the tares. They’ve bothered us before.”
“Really? How?”
“Oh! They come in here and yell at us. They say, ‘How can you sell cosmetics that are tested on poor, innocent animals?’ They make a scene and drive the customers away. It’s pathetic. Why don’t they just go out into the wild with the animals if they love them so much? Why bother us?” She showed me the receipt and made a perfunctory gesture to show the products and receipt to the camera. Then she ducked down and brought out my bag. I tucked it in the zip bag with the change and turned to leave.
“For heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Harriet. We were standing not two feet away from each other. I felt another shiver of fear.
“You’d better call security,” I said.
Security came. It came in the form of Nick Gentileschi. Above the store entrance, the security blind floor broke open with a splintering crash. Gentileschi’s heavy body plummeted from overhead.
“Oh, no, please,” I said as I backed up, away from the mess. “Please let this not be happening….”
Harriet’s screams turned into a sirenlike screech for help. Curious customers sidled up to the scene, like filings to a magnet. I was about to turn away, when a flash of paper caught my eye. Something slipped out of Nick Gentileschi’s pocket and rested next to the place where the linoleum met the plush gray carpeting.
The slip was actually two pieces of … what? I looked more closely. Photographs.
I leaned in and stared incredulously at two photographs taken at very close range. A large woman was half- naked, caught by the camera in the act of undressing. A dark skirt hung from the woman’s ample hips. A dark-and- light jacket was draped on a wall hook behind her. The top of her body was completely exposed; her breasts hung pendulously as the camera caught her action of slipping off her bra.
Even slightly out of focus, the woman was recognizable. It was Babs Braithwaite.
I backed away from the photographs, the shattered counter, and the sight of Nick Gentileschi contorted above fluorescent-lit displays. From the corner of my eye I could see Stan White hurtling down the escalator. Shoppers, surprised and morbidly curious, gathered on both ends of the aisle. My feet inched backward until I hit the table filled with zircons. The boxes tumbled. I fell on top of them. I realized that the gasping I heard was coming from me. I closed my mouth, rolled over, and saw Stan White display his badge to the onlookers.
“I’m from department store security!” he bellowed. “Please clear the store. Do not use this exit!” And with that, Stan White turned away from the hesitantly departing crowd and gazed dispassionately at Nick Gentileschi’s body. He felt for a pulse, then stepped into the aisle and loomed over me. In the background, I could hear Harriet sobbing.
“Are you all right?” he demanded.
“Yes,” I burbled from the floor, “I think so.” My hair was in my face and my skirt was tangled around my hips. I was having a hard time breathing.
“Did you see what happened?” When I nodded, Stan stabbed a stubby finger at me and barked, “Don’t leave.” He gulped and added, “Please.”
Leaving me sprawled amid the fake gems and their velvet boxes, he darted over to the remaining group of gaping spectators. Grimly, he herded them away from the area leading to the counter. Then he pulled displays into the aisles to isolate the area around the shattered glass, the destroyed merchandise, and Nick Gentileschi’s twisted corpse. I watched as he made call after call on the phone behind the cosmetics counter. Harriet sat on a low shelf, her knees to her chest, her back pressed against the cabinet that held the Frosted Cherries Jubilee lipsticks. She was whimpering uncontrollably. Her lovely, perfectly made-up face and manicured hands were streaked with blood from splinters of glass. Her blond twist of hair had fallen apart and hung in clumps and strands, like remnants of insulation.
I maneuvered myself behind the counter, carefully avoiding the mess, and asked if I could help. Her whimpers immediately turned to wails: “Twenty-eight years! Twenty-eight years in this business! And nothing, nothing has ever happened. Not like this. Why is this … why?” When I reached for some cotton balls to dab away the blood on her face, she made batting motions to get me away. “No, no, no!” she screamed. “Leave me alone! Go away!”
Fine, I thought, fine. Wait for the police, paramedics, whatever you want.
“Okay, please move back,” said Stan White once he was off the phone. “Please move away from the counter.” He scowled in my direction, apparently recognizing me for the first time. “You? What are you doing here again?”
“Nothing.” I squeezed past the mess again, in no mood for explanations.
He made an awkward move in my direction, then looked confused. When he caught shoplifters in the store, he knew what to do. When he had a corpse to deal with, however, he was less sure. “Don’t leave,” he ordered me again. “The police are coming. They want to know if anyone saw … if there were any witnesses.”
“I’m not going.” I stood, shaking, on the lush carpet I couldn’t bear to look at Nick Gentileschi’s corpse sprawled on the shattered Mignon counter. Nor could I listen to another moment of Harriet’s abject weeping. Dizziness swept over me. An empty seat in the shoe department beckoned. I sat down uneasily, making sure that I faced away from Nick Gentileschi’s body. The store’s overhead speakers crackled and the gentle background music stopped mid-bar. A female voice announced that owing to an emergency, Prince & Grogan was now closed. Apparently Stan White had called the office with the intercom. All shoppers should depart in an orderly fashion, the calm voice went on soothingly, either through the exit that went into the parking lot or via the elevator located next to Lingerie. This would take them down to the parking lot exit.
I glanced at the wall display of pumps, espadrilles, and walking shoes, and thought vaguely that the police wouldn’t want everyone dismissed. But the store had a reputation to uphold, and that reputation said the only excitement was in shopping. The dramatic loss of their security chief didn’t qualify as a good retail experience.
It wasn’t long before the Furman County Sheriff’s Department arrived in force. Tom must have been tied up with another investigation, because the stern-looking team strode in without him. A victim advocate accompanied them. I stayed only long enough to give my name and phone number and the very sparse details of what I’d heard and seen. Cracking noises. A body falling. No one suspicious around. Yes, I’d known the deceased, but only in passing. When the investigating officers asked if I knew whether he had any enemies, I said they might want to look at the photos that had fallen out of his pocket. Why? The cops wanted to know. I told them the woman in the pictures had claimed someone was behind the mirror when she was trying on a bathing suit yesterday. The investigating team took their pictures, brushed fingerprint powder over every surface in sight, and sealed up the photos from Nick Gentileschi’s pocket in evidence bags. They also strung up yellow police ribbons, assigned a smaller team to start on a search of the store in general and the security office in particular. The victim advocate asked if I needed help. I said I did not, but that I was fairly sure Harriet Wells needed quite a bit of it. A policeman
