The Glitter End, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Vivian Conroy
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design and illustration by Anne Wertheim
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Conroy, Vivian, author.
Title: The glitter end : a stationery shop mystery / Vivian Conroy.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:
Stationery shop mysteries ; book 3
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003837 (print) | LCCN 2021003838 (ebook) | (paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.V64 G55 2021 (print) | LCC PS3601.V64 (ebook)
| DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003837
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003838
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Excerpt from Last Pen Standing
Acknowledgments and Author’s Note
About the Author
Back Cover
Chapter One
“Watch out for the top of the door!” Delta Douglas’s voice rose in pitch on the final word, and she shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the moment when the corner of the large wooden structure would chafe the lintel as it entered her shop.
Holding her breath, she listened for the screech of wood chipping paint, but there was nothing but the hum of the traffic behind her back on Mattock Street and the distant song of a bird in the oaks near the parking lot.
Carefully, she opened one eye and scanned the door. Everything looked pristine. She released her breath with an audible sigh of relief, but then her gaze fell to the structure now being maneuvered around inside her shop. When it had been initially unloaded, it had already looked huge, but now, among her precious stationery products, it seemed enormous. She wasn’t sure what it was; she had merely expected the deliverymen to bring a display case for a miniature art installation. Miniature meant tiny, right? So why was this thing they carried, resembling a shallow sandbox on tall table legs, so big?
“Look out for the…” She rushed inside, stretching her arms out in a vain attempt to shield the counter’s glass top from impact.
One of the men in blue overalls turned to her with a grin. “Don’t worry, lady, we know what we’re doing.”
I’m glad at least one of us does.
Delta raised her hands and raked back her hair from her sweaty face. This might not have been such a good idea, after all.
When she had read in the newspaper about the famous Montana artist Tilly Tay, who had spent her entire life re-creating Montana scenery in incredibly lifelike miniature worlds, she had known it would be perfect for their shop, Wanted. The store already reflected their small town’s gold rush past, and a miniature world full of prospectors and outlaws would be the perfect addition. After all, Wanted was housed inside Tundish’s former sheriff’s office with many original features of those Old West days. They had gold-mining scales, an old map with possible gold deposit sites marked on it, and information about the outlaw gangs that inevitably came after the precious finds. It made total sense to add a temporary exhibition to help bring in customers this rainy, and therefore quiet, November.
She and her college roommate Hazel had joined forces earlier that year to run Hazel’s stationery shop together. Delta had left the city where she had spent many years working as a graphic designer to finally chase her childhood dream of creating her own line of paper products. Since moving into small-town Tundish, “the town with a heart of gold,” Delta had experienced both the thrills and the challenges of managing your own business. There was so much more to running a store than just drawing new designs, and Hazel, with her business acumen and experience, was way ahead of her. Delta was glad she could trust her friend to lead them to the right decisions and keep the administrative side of the business on track, while she hoped her own efforts with Tilly Tay would prove worthwhile in attracting more clientele.
With the leaf-peeping season over and the year slowly winding down, the tourist stream was drying up. Outdoor activities on water and in the mountains could still take place if the weather was good. But, unfortunately, with such a wet November, the canoe rentals had already packed it in, and several of the weekend trail activities were canceled. Tour buses still swept into town every few days, unleashing groups of middle-aged women who took a quick look down wet Mattock Street, ducked into their coats, and rushed into Mine Forever for coffee and pancakes before being shepherded to the gold-mining museum. The shop obviously needed a little more than a deal on notebooks to draw the crowds inside. After seeing Tilly Tay’s display proposal, Delta had been pleased with her excellent business idea, but, right now, as she watched one of the overall-clad men shoving aside a table with his hip to make way for his monstrous construction, she wondered why she had ever agreed to a miniature display.
Because it’s supposed to be tiny.
Only it wasn’t. This shallow sandbox the men were trying to set up was at least twelve feet long and wide, and it dominated the shop completely.
“Wow.” Hazel, in a corduroy jacket and purple shawl wrapped around her head, stepped through the door and inched back at once, throwing Delta a bewildered look. “What is this?” Hazel had just returned to the shop from getting some caramel twists at the bakery across the street. Run by their Paper Posse friend Jane, it offered them an endless supply of treats. Jane had a deft hand at finding perfect combinations for her pastries and sweets and also lent a sympathetic ear when things weren’t going too well for Wanted. With her positive outlook on life, she managed to convince her friends that the rainy days wouldn’t last forever.
Avoiding collision with one of the men, Hazel slipped over to stand beside Delta and whispered, “Is this it?”
“The start of it.” Delta grimaced at her friend. “They are just building the outer housing, as they call it. Judging by the way they put up that wooden base, it serves as a display table where they will build the rest. But I have no idea what else will follow.” She gestured through their shop window at a huge truck parked in front. “That is big enough to hold who knows what. In the pictures Tilly sent me, I only saw close-ups of cute little houses, saloons, and horsemen.”
Unwrapping her rain-splattered shawl, Hazel gnawed her lip. “We should have considered this more. Oh…” She rushed forward and barely saved a stack of notebooks from a crash to the floor. Throwing a look at Delta, she called, “Can you help me move this?”
Together, they moved the table into one of the old cells used for displaying washi tape and crafting kits. It was a bit crowded with another display, but they could just wring themselves past the notebooks to get out again.
“This barely leaves our customers space to move. It feels more like a storeroom than a store.” Hazel sighed. “I had no idea that Tilly’s display would be so domineering. People will take one look inside Wanted and decide it’s too full to come inside.”
“I assure you it will look great once it’s all set up. You won’t notice the size of the base anymore, just the sweet little town on top. Customers will flock to see all the details up close,” Delta said cheerfully, more to silence her own doubts than Hazel’s. Her courage was waning, and she wished she hadn’t been quite so impulsive.
The men had finished putting the large wooden base in place. One of them checked if it was solid by leaning on it while the other went back outside. Delta and Hazel watched anxiously through the window, waiting to see what he was going to come back with. It looked like…
“Is that a sandbag?” Hazel asked Delta.
She shrugged, unsure.
He came back in with the large jute bag slung over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. He lowered it to the floor with a thud that made some sand seep through the bag’s fabric and dot the floorboards.
Hazel pointed at it. “Shall I get a dustpan and clean that away?”
“Don’t bother, lady. It will get sandier than this pretty soon.” The man opened the bag and began pouring sand into the display. The other used his hands to divide it across the surface in a more or less even layer. Some got shoveled over the edge and drifted down.
“We need to vacuum as soon as they’re done,” Hazel whispered to Delta. “Sand gets carried everywhere if you walk through it. With it being so wet outside, it will get really messy. I don’t want people to think it’s not clean in here.”
While the one man was still working with the sand, the other went outside again. He disappeared into the back of the truck. Hazel poked Delta with an elbow. “Now he will appear with plants.” She sounded half joking, half desperate.
“No way,” Delta countered, but she held her breath as she waited for him to show himself again. What could he be bringing inside? She wondered if that wooden base with the thin legs could hold the weight of everything they intended to pile in. What if it gave way in the middle of the night and covered their entire business with sand and greenery?
Or worse: what if it gave way with customers in the shop? She could already hear the panicky cries or see the headline in the Tundish Trader: Customers almost buried under shop display.
She should have thought this through better.
“What’s going on here?” a cheerful male voice called as Ray Taylor walked through the door, casually dressed in a leather jacket and stonewashed jeans. Despite the rainy weather, he hadn’t bothered to zip up his jacket showing the crisp white shirt underneath.
A former quarterback who had left the team with an injury, he had come back home to Tundish to help with his family’s age-old hotel, the Lodge. The hotel lay beautifully against a hillside overlooking the crystal-clear lake near the town. Consequently, the Lodge was booked year-round, often by people whose families had come here for generations, knowing the Lodge and the Taylor family from the very start of their business, when leisure time had still been a privilege of the rich and famous. Old, yellowing photographs displayed at the Lodge’s iconic fireside showed the visitors of old, their clothes and fancy automobiles, testifying to the hotel’s glorious past.
“Isn’t it a bit late in the year for a beachside theme?” Ray queried with a puzzled frown, nodding at the sand-filled display filling up all space.
“That’s not a beach.” Hazel gestured widely. “It is supposed to become a representation of Tundish in the gold-mining heyday.”
“Really?” Ray cast a doubtful look across the empty sand. “I don’t see how yet.”
“Coming through.” The man in overalls pushed himself past Ray, bumping him against the shoulder with an armful of rocks.
“More weight,” Hazel hissed to Delta, but the man overheard and commented, “Papier-mâché, lady. Lightweight. Running a paper store, you should know, eh.”
Ray frowned at the man’s tone but didn’t comment. He asked Delta, “So this is a permanent addition to the store? Like a sort of model to show what Tundish was like? I guess it would have been more at home in the museum. Or did Mrs. Cassidy convince you to take it off her hands?”
Mrs. Cassidy was another member of the Paper Posse crafting group and a tireless volunteer at Tundish’s gold-mining museum. She could be found regularly, in nineteenth-century clothing, staffing the reception desk or gift booth or taking tourists around the museum’s many rooms retelling the rich history of their little hometown.
“Actually, it was my idea,” Delta said. She felt obliged to clear Mrs. Cassidy of Ray’s suggestion that the display had somehow been forced on them. It wasn’t. It had been invited in. By me.
Ray focused on her with his deep brown eyes. He gave her a lopsided smile. “To bring in more business? It’s not exactly booming right now.”
“I thought you wouldn’t notice at the Lodge,” Hazel said. “You have so many regular guests coming.”
Ray kept his eyes on Delta. “Rosalyn managed to pull in executives who have their meetings at the hotel.”
Rosalyn was Ray’s older sister and manager of the Lodge Hotel. She constantly came up with ideas to pull in new clientele.
Ray continued, “Lunch included and all. That is doing really well. I was more thinking of the town, the diner.” He pointed through the window at Mine Forever, sitting on the other side of the street. The diner was completely styled in the town’s Old West theme with a huge mattock and sieve on top of the roof and a gold nugget for a door handle.
In summertime, waitresses popped in and out to serve all the customers sitting at the outside tables, watching the busy traffic and authentic fronts of Mattock Street. But, in deep fall, the tables sat empty, every now and then pounded by rain. Customers did step inside for a coffee or hot chocolate, but the busy comings and goings of summer were long past, and the touch of melancholy that hung across everything even seemed to turn Mine Forever’s shiny doorknob dull.
“Are they struggling?” Hazel asked with worry in her voice. “I mean, Mine Forever is an institution in this town. They’ve always been there.”
Ray shrugged. “I can’t tell you much about it—only that the owner was at the Lodge last week playing cards with friends, and he looked pretty grim and said something along the lines of selling the whole place.”
“I can’t imagine he’d say that,” Hazel said, looking shocked. She nervously wrapped her shawl around her hand and unwrapped it again. “If he can’t survive…”
Delta swallowed. Would they be next to discover that their costs began to run higher than their income and that they wouldn’t be able to continue much longer? And just when she was considering moving out of the cottage she shared with Hazel and finding her own place to live. Her hopes were to share a new home with her gran, who was in town temporarily, preparing for the sale of her beloved house that she was forced to leave after some unfortunate rezoning. For Gran’s sake, Delta wanted a nice place for the both of them where they could live together, but, if money was tight, that could become harder. Gran got money off the sale of her home, of course, but Delta wanted to move in with her to give her company, not live out of her pocket. She hoped Hazel was also still supporting that step away. It had been discussed at the start, but they had grown comfortable with sharing the cottage, the rent, the chores, and meal preparations. It was so much fun and felt just like college where they had roomed together, but, with Gran’s arrival, it seemed logical to find her own place quickly.
Ray brought his attention back to the display being set up. The papier-mâché rocks were put in place, and he grinned. “Looks like a kid’s terrarium. For frogs or turtles.”
“Turtles need water,” Hazel retorted.
As if on cue, one of the men pulled a shimmery substance from a container and began to thread something waterlike through the landscape. Ray winked at Hazel. “Your wish is their command.”
Hazel flushed. “I’ll go make them coffee.” She inched past the display and disappeared through the door leading into their small pantry.
Ray rolled his eyes. “Did I say something wrong?”
Delta shook her head. “We’re just a bit concerned about this whole display thing.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “I am a bit concerned about it. It was my idea. I thought we needed something to draw tourists now that the main season is over and Christmas not yet in town. Just a bit of excitement. I arranged for the mayor’s wife to unveil it tomorrow, with half the town present. But…” She nodded at the truck outside. “I had no idea it would be this massive.”
