Turner held up a palm, professional, even-handed in the way that somehow made it worse. "Let's slow this down. Ms. Lawson says one garment is unaccounted for. Can you tell me what happened to the third dress?"
"I gave it to the attendant," Alicia said. "Hannah. The size was wrong. Zoe needed a size up, and the other color β"
"There was no attendant when she came out," Deborah cut in. "I was right there. I watched the door."
"You were at the jewelry case," Alicia said.
"I was close enough."
Kim finally wrote something down. Alicia could not see what it was, and the not-knowing made her stomach tighten. She had stood in rooms far more consequential than this one β bankers across polished tables, landlords who smiled while trying to raise her rent out from under her, suppliers who assumed someone else must really own her company β and she had learned to meet disbelief with documentation. But there was no documentation for a dress handed through a fitting room door. There was only her word, being weighed in public against Deborah's certainty.
"Would you mind stepping away from the counter, ma'am?" Turner asked.
It was phrased as a request. It did not feel like one. Alicia withdrew her card when Emily, pale, pressed cancel and handed it back with trembling fingers. The garment bag with Zoe's blue dress stayed on the counter, suddenly less like a purchase and more like evidence.
"Is that necessary?" Alicia asked quietly. "I have a receipt being processed. I have identification. I have β"
"If nothing is missing, this will be cleared up in a few minutes," Turner said. "But I need to ask you a few questions where we're not blocking the register."
They were, of course, still completely visible. He moved her perhaps six feet, beside a mannequin in an emerald gown, where every customer had a clear view. The store she had built β every rail spaced by her hand in the early years, every fitting room mirror angled so a woman could see herself honestly and kindly at once β had become a stage, and she had not chosen the play.
"Where is the third garment now?" Turner asked.
"At the desk, I believe, awaiting the size swap," Alicia said. "That's the procedure here."
"You believe," Deborah said from behind him, not even bothering to lower her voice. "She believes. Officer, people who pay for things don't usually have to believe where they put them."
A murmur went through the onlookers, not quite agreement, not quite dissent β the sound of a crowd enjoying its own uncertainty. Alicia folded her hands together to keep them still. At forty-five, she had raised a daughter largely on determination and reheated dinners, and negotiated a lease in a winter when she was not sure the store would survive until spring. Her discipline was famous among the few who truly knew her; she did not raise her voice or plead. But standing under her own chandeliers, questioned like a shoplifter while strangers assessed her coat for signs of guilt, she felt that discipline tested as no boardroom had ever managed.
"My instincts about people," Deborah announced to no one and everyone, "have never been wrong. Not once in twenty years of running committees. You learn to see it."
Alicia met Turner's eyes. "Officer," she said, "ask the attendant. Ask the staff. Check whatever you need to check. But please do it now, because my daughter is going to walk back into her mother's store β into this store β and I would like this finished before she has to watch it."
Turner frowned slightly at the phrasing, but before he could ask what she meant, Kim looked up from his notebook toward the fitting room corridor.
"Then let's start," Kim said, "with the attendant."
Chapter 12: The Third Garment
Hannah Price emerged from the fitting room corridor carrying a clipboard and a measuring tape over one shoulder, and she stopped so abruptly when she saw the officers that the clipboard knocked softly against her hip.
She was twenty-four, quick and methodical, the kind of attendant who remembered which customer liked a room with warmer light and which one wanted no conversation at all through the door. Alicia had hired her β not personally, not anymore; Maria Santos ran hiring on the floor now β but Alicia had approved the training program that taught Hannah to log every garment that moved between a room and the service desk. She clung to that fact now the way you hold a railing in the dark.
"Hannah Price?" Officer David Kim asked, gentler than his partner had been. "You were working the fitting rooms this afternoon?"
"Yes, sir. Rooms one through six." Hannah's gaze flicked from Kim to Alicia to Deborah, and Alicia watched understanding arrive in stages: the police were real, the crowd was real, and the woman she had helped an hour earlier β passing sizes through the door, laughing once about how teenagers could reject a dress in under four seconds β was the reason they were here.
"There was a party in room three," Kim said. "A mother and daughter. Three dresses went in."
"Yes," Hannah said immediately. "A blue silk, a black crepe, and a burgundy wrap. I checked them in myself. The tags are on my board."
Deborah made a sound in her throat. "No one is disputing what went in, dear. It's what came out."
Hannah blinked at her, then looked back at Kim, as if deciding which adult in the room was actually in charge of the facts. "The burgundy one came to me," she said. "The size was pinching under the arm. Dr. Grant handed it out to me β her daughter kept the blue one on β and she asked if we had it a size larger, or in the navy if we didn't. I said I'd check stock. I took it to the service desk by the stockroom door and logged it, because that's where we hold garments waiting on a swap. Then room five needed help with a zipper, and a delivery came in, and I β I didn't get back to room three before they went to pay. That's on me. The dress never left the second floor."
Silence landed with weight. Somewhere below, a till drawer closed and a child laughed, oblivious.