Sarah rose to her feet, anxious to warn Margo and get her out of the shop as soon as possible—sale or no sale. But before she could leave the desk, the phone rang.

“Good morning, Old Things, this is Sarah,” she said as she answered automatically.

Without preamble, a man said, “I was in your shop the other day looking at an Irish mahogany breakfront wardrobe, and I think I absentmindedly left a small black notebook inside. At least, I hope I did. Could you look for it, please?”

“Sure. Hang on just a minute.” She put him on hold, then winced as the phone immediately rang again. Answering the second line, she found one of their shippers upset because he couldn’t find the armoire he was supposed to be picking up. Sarah put him on hold as well, then began searching through the folders on the desk.

“Need a hand?” Margo asked cheerfully.

Sarah found the relevant folder. “Oh, you noticed?” She smiled at her partner. “Guy on the other line lost a small black notebook here the other day. He says maybe inside that Irish breakfront. Could you check, please?”

“You bet.”

Sarah turned her attention back to the aggravated shipper, relating the address where he was supposed to be and soothing him when it developed that the mistake had been his. She listened to his sheepish apologies, her gaze absently following Margo across the shop to the huge wardrobe, one of their most massive pieces.

“No problem, Mike,” she murmured, hanging up the phone just as Margo reached the wardrobe and swung open the heavy doors.

All Sarah remembered thinking afterward was, That candelabra on top shouldn’t be wobbling like that. And then, in a terrifying instant, she realized why it was.

“Margo! It’s falling!”

Sarah was too far away to help, and the wardrobe was so huge and heavy that even though Margo was reacting to the warning, turning, her face white with shock, there was simply no way she could get out from under the thing in time.

Sarah knew that. There was nothing she could do but watch, totally helpless, the scant few seconds that passed stretching into a lifetime she lived paralyzed with dread.

Then she saw Tucker lunge from between two tallboys and grab Margo’s arm, both of them now in the path of the toppling wardrobe.

It was the last thing she saw, her eyes closing instinctively, as the wardrobe crashed to the floor with a force that shook the entire building.

FOUR

“I keep telling you, it wasn’t at all unusual. Customers leave things in here often and call us in a panic. I didn’t think twice about it.” Sarah kept her voice even with an effort. “I didn’t notice anything in particular about his voice. Just a man, that’s all. Very polite and worried about the notebook he’d lost. I thought.”

“But you believe his call was designed purely to cause you to go to the wardrobe and open it?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Not to me, Miss Gallagher. It could have been a simple coincidence.” Sergeant Lewis frowned at her. “But even if the call was placed with such an intention, what do you expect us to do about it?”

“Find him,” she said, with a very faint snap to the words.

“Miss Gallagher, according to the Call Return on your phone, the call came from a pay phone near here—one of the very few left—at a busy service station where at least a dozen people and quite likely more have made a call today. Nobody working there noticed anything or anyone unusual. There are no prints on what’s left of that wardrobe, except the prints that should be there. Your security system was active until Miss James came in here this morning, and shows no signs of tampering, so how anyone could have gotten in here and rigged this, leaving no evidence behind—”

“Are you saying we imagined it?” For the first time in all this, Sarah’s overpowering emotion was anger. It felt good.

“I’m saying…maybe the wardrobe just fell. It’s an old piece with a shallow depth, and the doors are heavy. Maybe it was just unbalanced.”

Sarah drew a breath. “That wardrobe, Sergeant Lewis, has been in this shop for nearly a year. I’ve opened both doors countless times, and so has Margo. So have numerous customers. It never fell before.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at a couple of his men who were standing near the overturned and seriously damaged wardrobe, and from both he received faint shrugs. Sighing, he looked back at Sarah. “There are no signs that anyone tampered with it, Miss Gallagher.”

“In other words, you’re not going to do a thing about this.”

“There’s nothing I can do.” He sighed again. “Look, Miss James wasn’t hurt—”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Margo said. She was sitting near Sarah with an ice pack pressed to the back of one shoulder, which had been dealt a glancing blow from the falling wardrobe. She was still rather pale, but composed—and uncharacteristically quiet. “But at least I wasn’t smashed flat as a waffle. Thanks to Tucker.”

Lewis looked mildly troubled for a moment but didn’t comment on Margo’s unusual simile. “I’m not discounting what happened to you, Miss James, believe me. But it could have been—probably was—an accident. That’s all I’m saying.”

Tucker spoke up for the first time. “What about the customer?”

Lewis looked at him, frowning slightly as he took in the other man’s lounging position in a very fine George I walnut wing armchair, also near Sarah. Lewis didn’t like Tucker, and it showed. “What about her?”

Tucker, who had been curiously expressionless since the police had arrived and hadn’t said much before then, shrugged. “She vanished pretty quickly. Didn’t even say good-bye. But then—maybe she just doesn’t like loud noises.” His sarcasm wasn’t blatant, but it was there.

With a clear air of humoring him, Lewis held his pencil poised. “Okay, did anybody get her name?”

“Desmond,” Margo said. “Cait Desmond. I called her a miss, but she mentioned a husband later, so she’s a missus.”

Quietly, Tucker said, “She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”

“Wasn’t she?” Margo frowned at him.

“Some men notice. I do. No rings at all.”

Margo looked back at Lewis. “Okay, then either she was a wife who likes bare fingers or she lied about the husband. Although I don’t know why she would have.”

Still quiet, Tucker said, “When you left her alone and started back here, she got up and moved toward the wardrobe. I was on the other side of the shop, but I saw her. A piece of furniture blocked my view for a moment, and by the time I moved to get a better look at what she might be doing, she was returning to that chair where you’d left her. And if I had to come up with a word to describe her attitude, it would have to be—surreptitious.”

“You are a novelist, are you not, Mr. Mackenzie?”

The implication was clear, but Tucker didn’t rise to the bait. “I am. But I’m not in the habit of imagining things unless I’m getting paid to do so.”

“Funny that you’re just now mentioning what you…saw,” Lewis said coldly.

Without offering an excuse, Tucker merely said, “I started toward the wardrobe then, no more than vaguely concerned, but Margo got there before me. She and I were both knocked off our feet when the thing fell; by the time I got up, the customer was already out of the shop. It seemed more important to make sure Margo was okay, so I didn’t take the time to rush outside and see where the woman went after she bolted out the door.”

“A gesture of courtesy I very much appreciated,” Margo told him.

Tucker inclined his head gravely, but his gaze remained fixed on Lewis. “I’ll buy that she was startled—the whole building shook—but there was no reason why your average customer would run away without even stopping to find out if everybody was all right. Or returning to check after the first panic might have driven her outside. Goes against human nature. Unless, of course, she had something to do with the…accident.”