Maureen the Homeless Lady is laughing at her.
She’s got a huge smile on her nearly toothless mouth as she throws her head back and laughs heartily, even though the laugh dissolves into a cough halfway through. The cardboard she’s sitting on trembles with each cough. “You better watch your step, girlie!” Maureen cackles as she brushes filthy gray strands from her face.
She doesn’t dignify Maureen’s heckling with a response. She quickly walks up to the door of the bookstore, unwilling to be late. Not that there will be customers lining up at the door, but it’s a pride thing. She’s never opened up the store late before, and she doesn’t want to start just because she stayed out too late with Joel last night and had a few too many drinks.
Except when Cassie gets to the door of her shop, she freezes in shock.
There’s blood all over the door. All over the door and all over the glass windows. The entire entrance to her store is soaked in dried crimson.
She takes a step back, her entire body shaking. Who would do something like that? And why? It’s not like she has any enemies.
Unless…
No. Not that. Nobody knows about that.
She reaches a trembling hand into her purse and pulls out her phone. She needs to call the police to report this. It’s the simple and obvious thing to do. Except she can’t make herself dial 911. When did she become so frightened of the police?
Of course, that’s a rhetorical question. She knows exactly when she grew wary of the people who could potentially throw her in jail.
But she doesn’t have a choice. She needs to call them.
It will be fine.
Chapter 11: The New Girl
“It’s paint.”
The officer taking the report from Cassie doesn’t seem terribly impressed. Sympathetic, but not impressed. Admittedly, she was hysterical when he first arrived, sobbing about blood on the windows of her store. But Officer McNeil took one look at the crimson stain and made his declaration. Paint.
Cassie’s brows knit together. “Are you sure?”
He nods without hesitation. “Yep.”
“Oh.” She frowns, feeling stupid. “I thought for sure…”
In retrospect, he’s clearly right. The way the red material cakes against the door clearly resembles paint. And it sort of smells like paint. She saw it and her mind immediately went to blood. She wonders if that was the desire of whoever did this. They could have chosen any color of paint, but they chose something that looked like blood.
“There are a lot of vandals in this neighborhood,” Officer McNeil says with the wisdom of a man much older than his years. Cassie looks at his buzz cut and baby face and decides he couldn’t possibly be older than she is, but he acts like a cop with one week till retirement. “I’m surprised this is your first incident.”
“Yeah,” she mumbles.
“I’ll put in the report.” The officer holds up his notebook. “But… you know, this kind of stuff happens. At least they didn’t break anything, right?”
That’s true, but it’s hard to explain how personal this feels. Maybe he’s right—maybe it was some random kid who did it. But somehow, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like this attack was aimed directly at her.
“That homeless woman right outside,” the officer says. “She might have seen something. Did you ask her?”
“No,” Cassie says. She doesn’t want to admit Maureen the Homeless Lady makes her nervous, and she would never willingly approach her.
“Let me go ask her then.”
Please don’t, Cassie wants to say. The officer already wrote down his report and now she wants him to leave. But he insists on questioning this homeless woman.