Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [103]
“Opportunity is knocking loud and clear, Dolores,” Connie had told her over Chinese takeout in her apartment after they’d gone to see the shop for the first time. “We gonna open up that door and let ’er in or not?”
“We’ll do it!” Dolores had boldly thrown in with Connie and the two of them made an offer on the Cut N Curl the next morning.
It had been a hectic nine months, but they were doing just fine. Business was booming even before the apartments were completed.
“You believe how lucky we are?” Connie had said to Dee just the week before. “I mean, are we lucky or what?”
Yeah, Connie. Real lucky . . .
Dolores wandered downstairs, thinking that while Connie’s luck may have run out, hers was holding strong. After all, she did have Vinnie to hold on to, Vinnie to help her through these dark days and nights. She couldn’t even begin to think of how she would have made it without him.
She went into the kitchen, still in her nightgown, wondering what to do with her day. She still wasn’t ready to face going into the shop. She went to the front door and looked out and saw the morning newspaper still out on the lawn.
Kid can never seem to get it past the first few squares of walkway. What is it with him?
She opened the door to go out for the paper, but a chilly gust of wind pulled her back. She grabbed the first thing she could find to wrap around her, the sport jacket that Vinnie had worn earlier in the week and had left over the back of the chair nearest the front door.
She slipped into the jacket and pulled it snug around her and walked outside. The sun was brighter than she’d expected, and she squinted as her bare feet crunched through the dry leaves that were already falling from the oak on her neighbor’s lawn. She picked up the newspaper and tucked it under her arm, remembering how Connie had loved the change of the seasons.
And Halloween. Damn, how Connie loved Halloween. Every year they’d worked together, Connie would make up little goodie bags and bring them into the shop for the customers.
She jammed her hands into the pockets of the jacket as she turned back toward the house. The fingers of her right hand felt something in the lining, something small and round. Almost without thinking, she explored the tiny hole in the bottom of the pocket. She worked the object out of the hole, taking it out as she walked up the steps. She looked down at her hand and blinked several times, certain she was not seeing what she was seeing.
Connie’s ring. There was no mistaking it.
With trembling hands she turned it toward the light, her eyes searching the inside of the ring. There it was. CNP. Connie Noelle Paschall.
But how could Connie’s ring have gotten into—
Her legs began to shake and went out from under her as she sat down on the top step.
Connie’s ring.
Connie’s ring in Vinnie’s jacket.
The chief of police had said that it was likely that whoever had killed Connie had taken her ring as a souvenir.
Dolores’s mind raced back to the night Connie was killed, remembering how Vinnie had disappeared for ten or fifteen minutes and came back in a sweat that she’d excused as the result of the mussels.
It wasn’t possible. Not Vinnie. Oh, not Vinnie.
Oh, please, God, not Vinnie . . .
Turning the ring over and over in her hand, she pulled herself up by the stair rail and went back into the house in a daze. She dropped the jacket onto the chair where she’d found it and went upstairs to change. Connie’s ring on her finger, she pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. When she could locate only one sneaker, she slipped on a pair of orange rubber flip-flops and grabbed her purse. Back downstairs, she paused at the chair where she’d draped Vinnie’s jacket. Should she return the ring to the pocket or not?
She left it on her finger and tore out the back door, needing to