in and took one of the shopping carts to push while we walked around for a few minutes, checking out the merchandise. Dinah picked up a plastic bottle of Belcher’s grape juice, made a face and put it back.
“Have you thought about what we’re going to say to Dan?” Dinah said. “We could say ‘Oh by the way, I heard that you have the golden triangle of means, motive and opportunity, and Detective Adele is closing in on you.’” Dinah saw a display of Leon’s brand yarn and pushed the cart toward it.
“I’m sure the golden triangle line will get him to throw up his arms and confess to us,” I joked, following along with her.
While we went through the bin of yarn, Dinah found some lightweight cotton in a pale yellow she thought would be perfect for one of the long scarves she favored. As she was dropping the skeins in the cart, she looked up at me. “I wonder if Kelly used any of this yarn.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Everything I saw about Kelly makes me think she was purely a real-brand girl, and fancy brands at that.” Once Dinah had gotten the yarn she wanted, we went back to discussing how to talk to Dan.
“We could bring up that we stopped by his house the day Kelly was shot,” I said.
“And imply that we saw him there,” Dinah said.
“Good idea,” I said. I had been avoiding thinking about the visit because it made me feel like a jinx, but now that it was out in the open we talked back and forth about what time we’d gone there and agreed that it was right around midday.
“Remember, the prop guys were taking off for lunch when we got there,” I added. I mentioned the visit had been very short thanks to Adele. Our conversation was interrupted by a noise coming over the loudspeaker in the store. A bell rang and was followed by a voice.
“Hello shoppers. Just five minutes until the dollar-of-the-hour special starts. The mystery boxes are already in the back of the store.” At that, there was a rush of carts trying to get past ours. I heard several shoppers suggest that they should have just bumped my cart out of the way.
The sound of the bell triggered something in my mind. “Kelly’s doorbell rang while we were there,” I said.
Dinah nodded in recognition. “She said it was a real estate agent or something. And then she hustled us out of there.”
“What if it wasn’t just someone wanting to leave off an advertising brochure?”
The voice returned to the loudspeaker interrupting our conversation again. The frenzy toward the center of the store got wilder when the voice announced the boxes had been brought out and were being opened. Our curiosity won out and Dinah and I joined the stream of carts heading toward the center of the store. Though we ditched our cart when we hit a traffic jam and held on to each other as we threaded through the mess.
The stack of unmarked cardboard boxes was like an island in the middle of a sea of carts. I could have taken off all my clothes and jumped on one of the displays and started dancing and no one would have noticed.
A clerk was cutting open the boxes and unloading their contents while eyeing the encroaching crowd nervously. The area around where he was working was roped off. But as the carts kept jostling for a better position, the poles holding the ropes fell over. The carts moved in like sharks on a sea lion. He left his post with the boxes half-open and squirmed through the crowd. I didn’t see where he went because there was a crowd of people squeezed around the barricade of carts. I just heard the sound of boxes being opened, the thud of something being thrown into the carts and a lot of angry voices, complaining the people in the front were getting everything.
A well-dressed woman with recently styled hair stopped next to Dinah and me. “They should put some kind of a limit on how many you can buy. The people in the front take everything.”
“What is it?” I asked, and the woman shrugged.
“Who knows, or cares. All that matters is that it’s a bargain.”
Dinah and I held our ground far back from the fray. I noticed the crowd begin to disperse and the victors headed for the checkout, guarding the contents of the carts while