"Of course." Hannah took the dress, laid it across the desk with the care the store required, and made a note on her pad. "I'll keep it right here with your name โ sorry, I don't think I caughtโ"
"Just 'desk hold' is fine," Alicia said, smiling. "I'll be two minutes. I'm taking these two with me to the register area to look at them in the daylight by the windows first โ the light in here flatters everything, which is lovely and not helpful."
It was a thing customers said in her store every day. Attendants nodded at it every day. Hannah nodded now, marked her pad โ *two out, one held for size swap* โ and turned to a woman emerging from Room Two with an armful of black.
Alicia walked toward the tall windows at the end of the floor with two garments over her arm: the cornflower dress she had already decided against but wanted to check once in honest light before she surrendered it, and the plum gown she had decided nothing about at all, whatever her face claimed.
Behind her, she heard the small sound of a coat being gathered up.
Deborah Lawson had counted, as she had promised the empty air she would. Three had gone in behind the oak door. Two had come out over the woman's arm. The third โ and Deborah had watched the whole transaction from fifteen feet away, through a gap in a rail of blouses โ the third had passed, hand to hand, across the fitting-room desk, in a movement too quick and too practiced, she was certain, to be innocent.
She did not see Hannah's note. She did not see the dress laid openly across the desk in full view of the floor, tagged and waiting, in the way of garments held openly a hundred times a day. What she saw was what her instincts had been assembling since the first floor: a woman who moved through an expensive store as if she belonged in it โ too smoothly, Deborah thought, too familiar with the procedures โ and a dress that had gone into a locked room and not come out on her arm.
People hid things in fitting rooms. Everyone knew that. Dresses went in whole and came out in handbags, in coat linings, under other clothes. Deborah had read articles. She had served on a committee with a woman whose boutique in another state had lost thousands that way, fistful by elegant fistful.
She watched Alicia reach the windows and lift the cornflower dress into the daylight, turning it, studying it, wholly unhurried โ the unhurriedness, Deborah decided, of a woman who believed she had already gotten away with it.
"Excuse me," Deborah said to Hannah, pleasantly, the way she began every correction she had ever delivered in her life. "That woman. She took three dresses into that room."
"Yes, ma'am," Hannah said. "One's on hold at the desk for a size swap. It's right here."
Deborah glanced at the desk. She saw a spill of dark fabric, unattended in the moment Hannah turned back to Room Two, and her certainty โ which had never once been wrong, not about people, not in fifty-five years โ closed over the scene like water over a stone.
"Is it," she said. "We'll see about that."
Chapter 8: The Manager
Maria Santos had managed the second floor of Harlow & Vine for six years, and she could read a customer's temperature from forty paces the way sailors read a sky.
She read Deborah Lawson's from twenty, and came off the floor at once, smoothing her jacket, arranging her face into the expression she kept for moments that might become incidents: attentive, unhurried, and absolutely neutral, like a surface nothing could be written on without permission.
"Mrs. Lawson. Always a pleasure. Is everything all right with your shopping today?"
"No," Deborah said, with the satisfaction of a woman who has been waiting to be asked. "It is not. I need to report a theft. It's happening in your store, right now, under your nose, and I have watched every second of it."
Maria did not glance around. Glancing around was how a report became a scene, and scenes, she knew, fed on witnesses. She lowered her voice half a tone and stepped half a step closer, making a small, private country of the two of them beside the evening-wear rail.
"Tell me exactly what you saw," she said. "Exactly, please. It matters."
Deborah told her. She told it well. She had the committee chair's gift for sequence: the woman noticed on the first floor, browsing too long, touching too much; the same woman followed โ no, observed โ on the second; three garments carried into Room Four; a whispered exchange at the desk; two garments carried out. A dress unaccounted for. An attendant, Deborah said, with a significant look toward the fitting rooms, who had been *very* helpful. Perhaps too helpful. People worked together in these things. She had read articles.
"The dresses are worth a great deal of money," she finished. "And she is, at this moment, wandering your floor with them, as calm as you please. I would have thought the store would want to act before she reaches a door."
Maria had listened without interrupting, because interrupting a woman like Deborah Lawson in full flow was how you got quoted, inaccurately, at a charity lunch. Now she chose her words with the care of a woman defusing something in the dark.
"Thank you for bringing it to me directly," she said. "I mean that. Now let me tell you what I can check in about sixty seconds. Our fitting-room attendant logs every garment in and out, and anything held for a size exchange stays at the desk, tagged, in view of the floor. If a dress is on that desk, Mrs. Lawson, then nothing has been taken โ it's the most ordinary transaction we do. It happens twenty times before lunch."
"It wasn't on the desk," Deborah said. "There was fabric. Anyone could haveโ" She stopped. "You're telling me you won't even look at the woman."
"I'm telling you I'll look at the *record*," Maria said. "And at the desk. Give me one minute before we involve a customer who may have done nothing but try on clothes."