Raeanne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer. RaeAnne Thayne

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       CHAPTER TWO

      FOR THE FIRST TIME IN months, Claire was relieved when business was slow. She didn’t know how she could provide any sort of decent customer service when she still had hours of work to do clearing up the mess the burglars had left behind.

      In desperation, she had finally swept the tens of thousands of spilled beads into one huge bin to be sorted back into compartmentalized trays. If she’d been forced to tackle it by herself, she didn’t know what she would have done.

      “This is going to take months. You know that, don’t you, honey?”

      Ruth seemed to read her mind, in that uncanny way her mother had perfected. Claire managed to keep from grinding her teeth, but before she could answer, her best friend chimed in from the other end of the worktable.

      “Are you kidding, Mrs. T.?” Alex McKnight’s dimple, much like her brother’s, flashed with her grin. “You’ve got the town’s best and brightest beaders here. With all of us superwomen working together, we can probably cut the job down to three weeks, tops.”

      “I say we can do it in two,” Evie Blanchard, Claire’s assistant manager, spoke in her quietly cheerful way. Monday was supposed to be her day off, but when Evie heard about the burglary, she had insisted on cutting short a late-season cross-country ski outing to help with the cleanup effort.

      Evie and Alex were two of the seven women surrounding the String Fever worktable, each with a small kaleidoscopic pile of beads in front of them they were sorting by color and shape into compartmentalized trays that lined the middle of the table. After that, the spilled beads would have to be sorted by size and type—furnace glass, handblown glass, semiprecious stones, cloisonné—and organized once more on the shelves.

      Claire’s mother sat at one end near Maura—Alex’s next oldest sister—and Mary Ella, their mother. To Claire’s left was Evie and on her right was Katherine Thorne, who had sold her the store nearly two years ago, while Alex sat across the table.

      Chester, of course, presided from his place of honor on his favorite blanket, curled up on his side. Sometimes she thought half her customers came into the store just to visit her dog, who was never quite as happy as when he was stretched out in his corner at String Fever, listening to all the chatter.

      During those first difficult months after Jeff moved out, String Fever was where she found solace and calm, here amid her friends. Like beads on a wire, they were all connected, linked together by bonds of friendship and family, by shared experiences and a common passion for beading.

      “Did you hear about Jeanie Strebel?” Maura, Alex’s older sister, was saying.

      “No. What happened?” Claire asked.

      “She was knocking icicles off her roof with a broom the other night and a big one shot right down and knocked her over. Broke her leg in three places. Jeff did surgery yesterday, from what I hear. Her daughter told me she was going to be in the hospital until Sunday.”

      “Oh, no!” Mary Ella exclaimed. “And they’ve already been hit with more than their share of troubles since Ardell had his heart surgery three months ago.”

      Maura nodded. “I bumped into Brianna at the market this morning before I opened the store and she told me all about it. Have you seen those twins of hers, by the way? They’re growing like crazy and have the most darling dark curls and huge eyes. Anyway, guess what happened while her dad was at the hospital with her mom last night?”

      They all waited expectantly and Maura let the pause lengthen for dramatic effect.

      “Come on, Maur.” Alex finally ruined the anticipation. “Just get on with it. What happened?”

      “They had a visit from the Angel of Hope.”

      Excitement seemed to shimmer around the table at the announcement. Even Ruth leaned forward, her eyes wide. “Really? Another one?” she asked.

      “It had to be. Somebody left ten crisp hundred-dollar bills in an envelope slipped under their front door to help with medical expenses. You should have seen Brianna’s face when she told me about it. That sweet girl. Her eyes were all red and weepy and she just glowed from the inside out.”

      For the past few months, a mysterious benefactor had been stepping in to help people who most needed it. When Caroline Bybee’s ancient Plymouth coughed its final death knell last fall, she woke up one morning to find a later-model used sedan in her driveway, complete with a gift title and a note signed only “Drive Carefully.”

      A few weeks before that, a young divorced mother who sometimes came into the store told Claire someone had paid her heating bill for the entire winter. She had no idea how or why but the gas company assured her she had full credit on her bill to last into the spring.

      During the holiday season, Claire had heard that more than one struggling family—all with young children—had discovered envelopes full of cash on their doorstep with only the words “Merry Christmas from Someone Who Cares.”

      Those were only the things she knew about. She had to wonder how many acts of generosity had somehow escaped the winding tendrils of the Hope’s Crossing grapevine. She didn’t know who had first come up with the nickname Angel of Hope, but the whole town had been buzzing about the identity of the benevolent patron.

      As tough as she sometimes found living in the same town with Jeff and Holly, stories like this provided another reason to stay. People here cared about each other. How could she doubt it, with her dear friends rushing to her aid in her moment of need?

      “You’re all my angels of hope,” she told them fiercely. “I can’t tell you all how much I appreciate your giving up your lives to help me for a few hours.”

      “Of course we would come in to help you.” Mary Ella smiled, her green eyes so much like her son’s bright with affection. “You didn’t even need to ask, my dear. The moment I heard your store had been robbed and that the little shits had left such a mess behind, I knew I would be spending the afternoon helping you clean it up.”

      “I still can’t believe anybody in town would be so vindictive as to cause such trouble just for the sake of making a СКАЧАТЬ