Page 42 of Summers at the Saint
She climbed into bed, but she was too wired to sleep. Something was going on at the Saint. Garrett’s drunken confidence about stealing liquor was just the tip of the iceberg.
Parrish pulled out her blue notebook and scrawled some hasty notes. She had no idea what any of this meant, but she did know it wasn’t good. She yawned, then dug a sleep gummy out of the bottle on her nightstand and chewed it. Next she texted her aunt.
Hey, Traci. Can we meet up ASAP? Got something serious we need to discuss. About the Saint.
She was drifting off to sleep when she heard her phone ding with a response. So Traci was up too. Was she worrying about the fate of the hotel?
Gah! Now I’m worried. How about Sunday breakfast, my house, 10 am?
Parrish texted a thumbs-up emoji, yawned, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 24
On Friday morning, KJ was in the stockroom, opening boxes of new merchandise. He’d been working for two weeks and was astonished by how much there was of it, and how fast it sold in the Saint’s pro shop.
He scored the flaps of a cardboard carton with a box cutter and lifted out the packing slip, indicating the shipment contained sweaters from a company called Suki Smith. Inside were layers and layers of cellophane bags. He opened the first bag and out slid six women’s cashmere sweaters. They were impossibly soft to the touch and in a rainbow of vibrant and pastel hues. He set them on the table and opened the next bag, and then the next.
When he’d emptied all the boxes, he went back over the packing slip with a yellow highlighter, marking off each of the items in the shipment. When he got to the description of the sweaters, he had to force himself to slow down and concentrate. Each color had a different name and style number and price. There were V-neck sweaters and button-down cardigans and half-zips and mock turtlenecks. Who knew that many kinds of sweaters existed?
And the colors. Jadeite. Hibiscus. Orchid. Azure. Cerise. Pearl. What the hell?
Also, the numbers seemed to be off. According to the packing list, he should have unpacked two bags of each color and style ofsweater, which would have made for 144 sweaters. But he only counted 120. He recounted and the number came out the same.
Marcie, the shop manager, had given him a sheet of the shop’s computer-generated price tags and the pricing gun. He stuck the gun in the back pocket of his carefully pressed logo shorts. The clothes were definitely a perk of the job. Marcie had stressed that he wear the shop’s clothes every day when he reported to work. And he had to be carefully groomed, she’d warned, looking him up and down that first day.
“Trim up those sideburns, get rid of the five-o’clock shadow, and don’t let me see you in here looking wrinkled or messy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a walking mannequin. We want our customers to want to look like you. Understand?”
He found her behind the cash register, chatting with a woman who was asking questions about golf shorts for her son. He waited until the customer had wandered away. “Hey, uh, Marcie. You know those Suki Smith cashmere sweaters?”
She was sorting through a stack of the previous day’s receipts. “What about them?”
He showed her the packing list. “I don’t understand these color names. Like, what’s ‘cerise’ and also, ‘azure’ and ‘pearl’?”
She glanced at the list. “Don’t they teach vocabulary at that high-priced college of yours? Cerise is like a pinky-purple. Azure is blue. Pearl is off-white. Orchid is light purple.”
He laughed. “Why can’t they just call it those colors? Why have tricky names?”
“Because those sweaters retail for just over a grand apiece,” she said. “People don’t want to pay that kind of money for a plain green sweater. So it’s called jadeite. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She looked annoyed when he didn’t leave. “Anything else?”
“Well, yeah. The packing list says we should have received one hundred forty-four sweaters, but I counted. Twice. And it looks to me like we only got one hundred and twenty. You want me to call the company?”
Marcie plucked the packing list from his hand and lowered her voice. “You just leave that to me. Get the sweaters priced and put them out here on that front table. And be quick about it, because I need to run an errand and I can’t leave the shop while you stand around in the stockroom with your thumb up your ass.”
“Bitch,” he said, under his breath, when she hurried from the pro shop. Marcie was sweet as pie with the customers, to whom she brazenly sucked up at every opportunity. But when they were alone in the boutique, she was a pint-sized Mussolini.
Barely five feet tall in her stylish wedge-heeled sandals, Marcie had a set of boobs that, even to KJ, did not look like original factory equipment. He marveled that she was able to stand upright. But right from the start, he could tell his boss had it in for him.
Take today. He spent the rest of the shift hustling, keeping all the displays neat and restocked, writing up reorders and ringing up customers. It had been a productive day. He’d sold a hella lot of logo shirts, windbreakers, and even an entire set of golf clubs—to the tune of $3,200. But every time he looked up, he caught his manager giving him the stink-eye.
He wondered what he’d done to earn her wrath today. Finally, ten minutes before closing time, she approached a father-son duo who’d been perusing a rack of last season’s marked-down winter jackets.
“Sorry, folks,” she said. “But we’re closing a little early tonight to do inventory.”
As soon as they were gone, Marcie locked the plate-glass door. She turned to KJ.
