Cut, Crop & Die by Joanna Campbell Slan Read Free Book Online Page B

over. Word for word. They say they were traumatized. They don’t want rain checks. They say that to try again would be disrespectful to Yvonne’s memory.” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall expressively. “How can they blame me?”
    “Us,” I said in a moment of solidarity. If folks were parroting the same script, I’d wager someone was coaching them. And I bet I knew who—but blaming Ellen Harmon wouldn’t solve our problems.
    I decided not to tell my boss about my discussion with Detweiler. Maybe, I prayed, word would come from the authorities that Yvonne reacted to a substance she hadn’t been aware she was allergic to. Surely, considering the size and acreage of the Botanical Garden, the woman could have brushed or touched a lethal plant. And certainly, with all those flowers in bloom, there had to have been a lot of bees. I prayed for something—anything—but a delivery system suggesting a deliberate desire to do her harm. And if any angels were listening, I asked them to make it abundantly clear none of us at Time in a Bottle had anything to do with Yvonne’s abrupt departure from this earth.
    “More supplies still in your car?” I asked as Dodie shoved the box she’d toted in along the floor.
    My boss sank into her office chair. She appeared not to have heard me. Her face was hidden in her hands; her body slumped over her desktop. Built like a Valkyrie, Dodie seemed invincible—not only because she could make two of me, but because she had a warrior’s spirit. She was not a Pollyanna or a Suzy Sunshine, but an Unsinkable Molly Brown who rolled up her sleeves and made the best of tough situations. When George died, she was the one who forced me to take charge of my life—reminding me Anya’s welfare depended on it. Through thick and thin, chipboard and vellum, Dodie stood by me. She refused to let me wallow in my misery. Once I learned she’d been through her own personal hell—the accidental death of her teenage son—I never questioned her right to tell me to “buck up.”
    That strong, invincible woman was difficult to reconcile with the haggard ghost sitting in front of me. Crumpled over her workspace, she seemed eerily small and defeated.
    “Dodie? I asked if you have more boxes in your car. I’ll go get them if you give me the keys.”
    She turned blurry eyes to me. Their washed-out gray was as flat as a piece of Bazzill Basics cardstock. “Huh?”
    I opened the mini-frig near her desk and grabbed a Diet Dr Pepper, the official store remedy for nearly all of life’s crises. “Drink this. You need caffeine. It’s going to be okay. Yeah, the women will complain, but they’ll get over it. So give them their money back. Big deal. It’s not that much, and we’ll make it up some other way.”
    A meaty hand reached for the cola. Her flesh was puffy around the wedding band that cut a deep groove in her finger. “Maybe. I haven’t even checked the answering machine here at the store. Didn’t feel like it.”
    “I’ll do it.” This felt odd. Usually, Dodie oriented my emotional compass due north, zero degrees past nonsense. She ran the store like a well-drilled military operation. The ding-ding-ding of an internal alarm sounded inside my head.
    There was more to this than Yvonne’s death.
    I pulled up a chair.
    “What’s going on?”
    She turned her face away.
    “Hey,” I tapped her downy forearm. “I know I’m just a lowly employee. But we’ve known each other for years. You’ve had my back every step of the way. It’s my turn to return the favor. What’s wrong, Dodie?”
    The words poured out. A week ago Monday, her husband Horace’s boss called him into the executive’s office and let him go from his job at RCC, a local telecommunications company. Since he was six months from retirement—and had never had a performance review below superlative—the Goldfaders were caught totally off-guard. All their benefits disappeared when the boss told Horace: “We’re