Shop Till You Drop

Chapter 18

When Helen opened Juliana’s Monday morning, she thought she saw someone back by the dressing rooms.

“Hello?” she called into the darkened store. “Anyone there?” Helen was frightened. Too many odd things had happened here lately.She flipped on the lights and reached into her purse for her pepper spray. With the spray in her hand, Helen had the courage to walk through the store.

“Hello?” she called again. She looked behind the counter but saw no one. The carpet had been vacuumed last night by the janitor service, and no footprints disturbed the deep pile.

“Who’s there?” Her voice sounded like a croak. There was no answer. But she could swear someone was in the store with her.

When Helen opened the dressing room door, she saw it—a flash of blond hair and black. But there was no one in the room, and no way for anyone to run past Helen. There was just an empty dressing room, with a freshly vacuumed carpet, a peach silk dressing gown on a padded hanger, and a pair of tiny black heels in a size Helen could never hope to wear. There was no blonde in black. It was a trick of the room’s triple mirrors.

“It’s my imagination,” she thought. It’s Christina, whispered a voice in her mind.

But Christina was dead and had been dead for more than a week. Why would she be in the store now? Yet Helen had the feeling she was there, saying good-bye, walking past the ice blue silk jackets she so admired, caressing the Hermes scarves, drinking in the vibrant D&G colors, reveling in the rioting Versaces, looking at the painting of the make-believe Juliana, and finally, defiantly, sitting on the silk-satin loveseats for the last time.

“Christina, if that is you, I hope you are at peace,” Helen said, and she felt foolish when she said it. But then she didn’t feel foolish, and she didn’t feel frightened any more. She was sure whatever had been in the store was gone. Still, when Tara showed up at ten that morning, she was relieved to see her.

Tara blew in like a fresh breeze. “I’m in black in honor of Christina,” she said, solemnly. Helen had called her from Margery’s last night and told her that Christina was dead.

Helen almost smiled. She could hardly call that outfit mourning. Tara’s top stopped just south of her black bra, and her Brazilian lowrise jeans barely covered her bikini wax, leaving most of her flat midriff exposed. But Helen thought Christina would have appreciated the effort.

“Poor, poor Christina,” Tara said. “It’s so horrible. I can’t believe it.”

Her black veil of hair parted, and Helen saw Tara’s forehead. Even skillful makeup could not completely hide the ugly bruise.

“How are you?” Helen asked.

“I’m OK,” Tara said, and shrugged, baring more midsection. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

Helen didn’t either. She didn’t know what to say or why Tara had faked the robbery. They were both relieved when the doorbell rang. Tara looked out and said, “Do you really want to buzz this woman in? She doesn’t look like one of ours.”

Unlike Christina, Helen buzzed in almost everyone. The only person she ever kept out was a mother with two little girls, and those children had chocolate ice-cream cones. But even Helen had her doubts about this woman. She was short and stout and wearing a shiny black satin dress with fussy ruffles and rhinestones. Her chubby feet bulged out of patent leather heels. Her gray hair was tortured by a frizzy perm, and her bangs were chopped off straight across her forehead. Her skin was pale white and thickly powdered. Her mouth was a thin, mean line in blood-red lipstick. She didn’t look like someone who would shop at Juliana’s, and yet she seemed familiar.

“Honestly, Helen, that woman scares me. She looks like a vampire. Do we have to let her in?”

“I think I’ve seen her somewhere before,” Helen said.

“Halloween II?” Tara said.

Helen laughed and buzzed in the woman. She bustled in, looked around the room with disapproval, and dropped a shapeless black leather purse as big as a doctor’s bag on the counter. Tara stepped back as if it were poisoned.

“I’m here for my sister Leanne’s last paycheck,” the woman said, her jaw thrust out like a bulldog’s. “And don’t try to deny it. I’ve been through her books and I know she’s owed one more.”

“I’m sorry, but we have no one named Leanne working here,” Helen said, more politely than the woman deserved.

“Oh, yes, you do. You just don’t know her God-given name. She called herself Christina. She liked that phoney foreign froufrou. Our parents gave us honest, down-to-earth names, Leanne and Lorraine, but Leanne’s name wasn’t good enough for her. Arkadelphia wasn’t good enough, either. She left home more than twenty years ago. Said we were hicks.” From the set of the woman’s jaw, the insult still rankled. “Then she went and took an Eye-talian name instead.”

“Oh, of course, you’re Christina’s sister, Lorraine,” Helen said, and as soon as she said it, she saw the woman had Christina’s eyes, without her clever makeup, and her pale skin, powdered into flour whiteness. Her thin lips could have used some collagen.

“The police said you would be in town,” Helen said. “I am so sorry. We’re all in shock. Christina’s death was so sudden, so unexpected.”

“I always expected it,” Lorraine said. “My sister was a sinful woman. She lived a life of shame and degradation, and God struck her down so she would no longer infect the righteous.”

Tara gasped. Helen felt a sudden rebellious urge to defend Christina. “I think you are mistaken, Lorraine. Christina managed a fashionable store and was much loved by her clientele. Many of them were her friends.”

“Whores and kept women,” Lorraine said, looking directly at Tara, “who use their bodies for shameless display and immorality.” Tara backed into a rack of blouses until they almost covered her bare middle.

“I said to Leanne, maybe I don’t have your looks, but I have something more lasting, my immortal soul.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure in that case that you won’t want to stay here any longer than necessary,” Helen said frostily. “You wouldn’t want to jeopardize it. Let me get Christina’s check out of the safe.”

Helen came back with the check and a release form. Just because she could, Helen made Lorraine show her driver’s license for identification. She saw the birth date. Lorraine was forty-three, only four years older than Christina, but she could have been her mother.

This woman is cold, Helen thought. She finds out her sister is dead, and by the next morning, she has already counted her money and wants her last paycheck.

Lorraine’s black purse swallowed the check and snapped shut. “It’s not for me,” she said, as if she could read Helen’s mind. “This money will be used for the Lord’s work.”

“Will there be a memorial service for Christina here in Florida?”

“No, I am taking my sister away from this Sodom and Gomorrah. She will be buried back home where she belongs.” Then the woman’s mouth snapped shut, remarkably like her purse, and she marched out.

Tara was weeping and wiping her runny mascara on the back of her hands. Helen handed her a tissue. “Poor Christina,” Tara said. “Going back to Arkadelphia. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that!”

Helen thought Tara’s statement made a weird kind of sense. “Reminds me of what Mark Twain said about heaven for climate, hell for society.”

“I see why she never mentioned her sister,” Tara said. “I’d want to forget I was related to that, too.”

In her mind, Helen saw Christina again, slender, smart, and so sophisticated. Helen understood at last why Juliana’s green door had a lock. Christina was not barring all those nameless women with bad T-shirts and cheap shoes. She was keeping out one person only, her terrible sister.

She had lost that battle. Lorraine was taking Christina home—a fate worse than death.