The Coldwater Warm Hearts Club (26 page)

Her mom had never really talked much about her childhood, and Lacy's grandparents on that side of the family were gone before she was born. Since Mr. Cooper had mentioned that he'd known her mother before she married George Evans, Lacy quietly steered the conversation to his recollections of her mom when she was younger.

Shirley Higginbottom Evans didn't grow up on the wrong side of the tracks. There were no tracks at all in the little hill community where she was born. Her mother was raised in a two-room house with no running water. That circumstance didn't change until the Higginbottoms moved down to Coldwater Cove when she was ready to go to high school.

“But don't feel sorry for her. Lots of us grew up with nothing so far as the world can see. Myself included,” Mr. Cooper had said. “Things are nice to have, but they don't matter in the bigger picture. If you're raised with love, that'll trump indoor plumbing every time.”

It also explained why her mom's things meant so much to her. She'd never known any surplus until she married the man who would someday be Lacy's father. Now Lacy was ashamed of the way she'd fussed at her mom over collecting too many thingamabobs and doodads.

Lacy had been raised with love
and
indoor plumbing, so she was without excuse for her condescending attitude. She was determined to change that.

She gave her dad a kiss on the cheek before turning to go into the house. He slapped the helmet back on and prepared to engage in another skirmish in the War of Squirrel Insurgency.

“Mom,” Lacy called out as she removed her shoes at the slate entryway.

“In here, dear.” Her voice had a little quaver in it. When Lacy found her mom affixing stickers to a set of gold-trimmed collectors' plates, she noticed her nose was red. She'd been crying.

“Mom, don't do this.”

“Whatever do you mean?” she said brightly, trying to blink back tears.

“If these things mean so much to you, you shouldn't part with them.”

Mom cocked her head at her. “But you're always trying to get me to cull my things.”

“Yeah, well, I've been known to be wrong. Often,” Lacy admitted. “If you love them, you should keep them.”

“But you're right, Lacy. I've been looking at the place with fresh eyes and I can see what you've been trying to tell me. That hutch is terribly overcrowded.”

The shelves in the old oak piece sagged. Probably because it was crammed with two full sets of china, a dozen mismatched crystal goblets, and a couple hundred salt-and-pepper shakers. Shirley Evans would be hard-pressed to find room to add so much as a paper clip to the chaos.

“Will it make you happy to have the hutch less crowded?” Lacy asked.

Her mother ignored the question. “I have so many decorative items, none of them can be properly appreciated.”

For the first time in Lacy's life, her words were coming out of her mother's mouth. The turnabout felt all wrong. “Mom, do
you
appreciate them?”

“I do,” she admitted with a sigh. “Just knowing they're there, even if I can't see them all properly, makes me happy.” Her chin trembled. “I can't help it, Lacy, I love my pretties.”

“Then it would be wrong to part with them,” she said with a hand on her mom's shoulder. “Keep the ones you love, Mom.”

“What if I love them all?”

Lacy smiled. “Then keep them all. Remember the family motto.”

“If a little is good, a lot is a whole bunch better,” they repeated in unison, and then collapsed into a hug full of laughter. And a few tears.

What was a little intentional clutter if it made her mom happy? Design wasn't always about aesthetics. It was about surrounding yourself with things that lifted you up, things you loved, things that reflected who you were. Like a mossy stone, the house was filled with items her mom had collected as she rolled through life. This old Colonial, packed with all its bric-a-brac and whatnots and thingummies, was her mom down to the last frilly hand-tatted doily.

Far be it from Lacy to change a thing.

“Now, dear, I know you didn't interrupt your busy day just to watch me blub over a few treasures. What's up?”

“I got some wonderful news today,” Lacy said, patting her jeans pocket. There was an envelope with a check for thirty thousand dollars in there. And it was made out to
her!

Her contact in Boston had authenticated the painting she'd sent him as a genuine, heretofore unknown, Erté original. He wrote that he'd ship it back if she wished, but if not, the check was his offer to buy the piece from her. Lacy only had to cash it to agree to his terms. This would knock a huge chunk out of her loan to the O'Learys.

She had asked Jake to pray for her. It seemed God had listened.

“Mom, do you remember that painting I bought the day we went to Gewgaws and Gizzwickies together?”

“Sure.”

She pulled out the check and explained what had happened. The pair of them danced around the room, hopping up and down. The check slipped from Lacy's hand and fluttered to the floor.

“Oops!” She retrieved it and quickly stuffed the check back into her pocket. “Don't want to lose that.”

“I should say not. See? You never know when you'll find a real treasure in a secondhand shop,” her mom said. “You should come shopping with me more often. First you help Jake's mom sell her Fiestaware for what it's really worth and now this.”

Lacy had been giddy with joy over her windfall, but at her mom's words, her belly spiraled downward. Like Jake's mother and her soup bowls, the people who had consigned the Erté to Gewgaws and Gizzwickies, whoever they were, had had no idea what they were selling.

If Lacy didn't try to find the original owner, she'd be no better than those bargain hunters from Kansas City who were trying to make off with Mrs. Tyler's four-thousand-dollar bowl for a measly ten. It wasn't fair to take advantage of people like that. Even though she definitely needed the money, the check in her pocket suddenly felt like a lead weight.

What if the previous owners of the Erté also needed money? Wasn't this a little like buying Manhattan from the Indians for a song? Lacy had chafed under the unfairness of her settlement with the Boston DA. But how could she, in good conscience, pass that unfairness on?

And she realized, with a sinking heart, what she had to do.

Her mother's friend Gloria, who ran the consignment shop, would remember whom the painting had belonged to. Anyone who knew to the inch where a bunch of plastic grapes should be would surely recall the owner of a genuine Erté.

 

—a note from Wanda Cruikshank to the
Coldwater Gazette
typesetter and printer

 

 

 

A
s it turned out, the person who had consigned the painting to Gewgaws and Gizzwickies was Tina-Louise “Grandma” Bugtussle. The artwork had come to town wrapped in a holey quilt, part of a pickup bed full of odds and ends.

Gloria had sifted through the stuff and agreed to consign half a dozen items, including the Erté painting, which, thanks to the quilt, was undamaged. She judged the rest of the load to be of little value. Coming from a junk-shop owner, that was saying something. Since it was fit for nothing but kindling, Junior had hauled the remainder to the dump.

“Them old things was just taking up space anyhow. High time we was rid of 'em,” Grandma Bugtussle told Lacy. “I been using the smokehouse for storage, you see, but after Junior bagged a wild hog, we had to clear out the place so's we could cure us some ham.”

She couldn't remember exactly how the painting had come into the Bugtussle family's possession, just that she'd inherited it from her mother-in-law. Great-Grandma Bugtussle had been a woman of generous proportions who'd grown tired of seeing “that skinny womarn” on her wall.

Tina-Louise “Grandma” Bugtussle, who hadn't missed too many meals herself, agreed that the lady in the painting was painfully thin. She hadn't really fancied the thing, but “when somebody gives you something, whether you like it or not, you'd best take it. No tellin' whether they might give you somethin' good next time.”

So the painting was relegated to the smokehouse along with other items she considered of no earthly use. “But if I'd a knowed that skinny womarn was worth so much, I'd a hung her in the outhouse at least. That ways somebody'd be lookin' at her ever' day.”

She thanked Lacy profusely for being honest enough to seek out the original owner of the painting and promptly offered to pay her back the twenty-five dollars Lacy had laid out for the piece at Gewgaws and Gizzwickies. After a good bit of rooting around for carefully concealed Mason jars that were secreted in various places in the Bugtussle home, Grandma was only able to come up with $17.50, but she promised she'd be good for the rest once she took that check for thirty grand to the bank.

Evidently, the idea of a finder's fee, or even the 15 percent per transaction Gloria charged at Gewgaws and Gizzwickies, never entered Grandma Bugtussel's head.

Lacy wasn't about to bring it up. She didn't trust herself to say much at all since it required every ounce of willpower she possessed to turn the money over to Mrs. Bugtussle. Heather Walker had always claimed she received more than she gave when she did a good turn for someone else.

So far, Heather was wrong. Lacy waited for the glowing I-did-something-right feeling to come.

Nothing.

Lacy took copious notes for her article for the
Gazette,
carefully omitting the part she'd played in this unlikely art find. Besides the fact that Lacy was still trying to fly below the radar and didn't want a mention even in a paper as obscure as the
Coldwater Gazette,
Wanda would want her to focus on the rags-to-riches human interest angle. So she asked Grandma Bugtussle what she planned to do with the thirty thousand.

“Land sakes, I ain't no Donald Trump. How should I know about high finance?”

After a few minutes' consideration, the old lady decided to use the windfall to replace the cinderblocks under the family home. The current ones had settled badly and the house had been a bit “shifty” all last winter. Then after that, if Junior could tinker with the old school bus that was parked in the front yard and get it running again, Grandma intended to take the whole Bugtussle clan out to California to see Disneyland.

“Guess it makes sense for us to use the money to pay a call on the second happiest place on earth,” Grandma said.

“The second?” Lacy asked, wondering how the old woman had so mixed up Disney's claim to fame. “Where's the first?”

Grandma Bugtussle tutted under her breath. “Law, child, you ain't got the sense you were born with, do you? The happiest place on earth is home, right here in the hills around Coldwater Cove, o' course.”

Lacy wasn't too sure about that as she signed the check over to Mrs. Bugtussle. She didn't have much cause to feel happy at the moment. “There are those who'd beg to differ.”

“Maybe so.” The old woman eyed her shrewdly. “But if where you are ain't the happiest place to you, then you ain't home yet.”

Her words were a smack upside Lacy's head. They rolled around in her brain all the way back to the
Gazette
office.

Where was home? Boston?

Probably not.

If she still had her business there, she likely would have kept the Erté for herself, hoarding away her treasured find and enjoying it as much as her mom rejoiced in her ceramic chickens. It never would have occurred to her to seek out the painting's original owner. But that was more about the type of person she'd become while she lived in New England than the place itself. Lacy had been so inwardly focused—all about
her
career,
her
success—that she'd lost sight of how anything she did or said impacted other people.

Maybe that was why she'd been blindsided by Bradford Endicott's betrayal. She hadn't seen it coming because she wasn't looking. She'd never really considered Bradford a creative partner. That was her bailiwick. Even though he'd been almost her fiancé, she'd rarely had a romantic thought in her head about him. He'd been an empty suit, a prop, mere arm candy. His old-money name was the most appealing thing about him. She used it to bolster her design brand.

I used him,
Lacy realized with dismay.

She'd never quite reached the Prada-wearing devil level of meanness, but her attitude had been despicable. Bradford must have felt it. How could he not?

Not that she was excusing Bradford's criminal behavior, but the way she'd behaved toward him must have made it easier for him to do what he did.

She'd made acquaintances in New England, associates and colleagues, but not real connections. It was all about the angles. What could they do for her and her business?

After living in Boston for ten years, she had one friend to show for her time there. Shannon Keane was the only one who seemed to realize she was gone, the only one who missed her enough to call every week.

Lacy liked to think it was because New Englanders were so reserved by Coldwater standards, but if she were honest with herself, she knew it was her own fault. She'd completed myriad design projects. She'd created beautiful things. But she hadn't invested in anyone else's
life
while she was in New England.

She hadn't shown herself friendly. Hence, no friends.

But she was trying to change. Being back in Coldwater Cove had pulled her out of her own problems a little. She was making tentative connections with others for the first time in a long time. She was surrounded by a growing circle of souls she cared about—her parents, Heather, her coworkers, all the members of the Warm Hearts Club, and even Effie.

And they cared about her. With the possible exception of Effie . . .

Then there's Jake.
A jittery glow shivered over her at the barest thought of him. She still wasn't sure how to name what she was feeling for him. The intensity of it scared her even more than his flashbacks did. If she didn't guard herself, thoughts of Jake would consume her and she'd get nothing accomplished but mooning around over him all day. She almost didn't care so long as she could be with him, so long as she could help him, and maybe . . . make a life with him.

Was that love?

Perhaps. It might be only obsession and she'd end up using Jake like she'd used Bradford. She wasn't sure she could be selfless enough for love yet. Love meant putting someone else first. Always. She was woefully out of practice with that. Her heart was such a shriveled wreck of a thing, she wasn't sure she could manage love. But she was trying.

Didn't the way she dealt with the check for the Erté prove that? If she could put the Bugtussles ahead of her own interests, surely she could give Jake first place.

But if it was love she felt for Jake, did love make this little backwater place home? And if Coldwater Cove
was
home, why wasn't it, as Grandma Bugtussle had said, the happiest place on earth to her?

Lacy didn't have any answers.

As she pulled to a stop in front of the
Gazette
office, her cell phone rang. Caller ID on her phone let her know that the incoming call was from the district attorney's office in Boston. She didn't answer it. Once the ringing stopped, she turned off her phone without checking to see if whoever it was had left a voice mail.

She'd just given away thirty thousand dollars because her conscience wouldn't let her keep it. That ought to have bought her some good karma. After all, those funds would have held the O'Learys at bay for months. As things stood, she didn't even have enough to make one more payment on that hateful loan.

Now the DA was after her again for some reason. Shannon must have knuckled under and given that Hopkins fellow her new number. And on the first day she'd done something selfless for somebody else, too.