Page 84 of The Woman Left Behind

Since it felt like he’d known Kimmy Milford his entire life, and he’d never seen her in anything but some incarnation of that outfit, Harry didn’t even blink.

“Kimmy, you have something to report?” Harry asked her.

Kimmy shot Polly a look and huffed by her. Harry moved out of the way so she could enter his office.

As he followed her, he was surprised to see she didn’t settle into a seat so she could share in detail her ideas about what was happening and put every effort into pumping Harry for information she could disseminate freely, doing this adding her own spin to anything Harry would say (not that he was going to say a damned thing).

He was also surprised when she started it off by stating, “I’m not gonna take a lot of your time, Harry. ’Spect you got better things to do.”

He stopped by the side of his desk and crossed his arms on his chest. “What you got for me, Kimmy?”

“I heard about the Rainiers. I kinda knew Av. She liked Christmas.”

Kimmy ran the local holiday shop, and no surprise to anyone, her specialty was Christmas.

“Her girl likes it too,” Kimmy went on. “She decorates some of the houses she looks after as well. I know her a lot better.”

Harry had no doubt Lillian put on a show at Christmas.

“I’m just gonna say, Michelle Dietrich always kitted out their place at Christmastime,” Kimmy reported.

That got Harry’s attention.

Kimmy kept going.

“She was always buying new gear to shake it up. But that year, the Christmas before the Rainiers went missing, and everyone was talking about them maybe stealing a bunch of stuff before they did, Michelle asked to do Christmas on account. Told me she’d pay me, just invoice her. I never did that kind of thing, but she was a good customer. She did it up big for Halloween too. So I made an exception.”

“And you invoiced her,” Harry guessed.

“Yeah, and she didn’t pay it. Like, months, Harry, she didn’t pay. I sent reminder after reminder, then I started calling her. She got pissy at me. Told me she was just busy. She’d get to writing me a check. She couldn’t believe how rude I was being when she’d always been such a loyal customer. Now, we’re talkin’ I delivered a truckload of Christmas to her house in November, and I don’t do deliveries either, and the next May, she still owes me thousands of dollars. It wasn’t like I demanded a check the next day, but just to say, I never sent Christmas on account to anybody. I did her a favor. She dragged her feet for six damned months.”

“Did she eventually pay you?”

“Yeah, she came in, nose right up in the air, handed me the cash and told me, since I didn’t value my customers, she was going to go to Spokane or Seattle to do her Christmas from then on. Woman never stepped foot in my shop again. Gotta say, it was a loss to my bottom line, but not my peace of mind.”

Harry felt his pulse thump.

“She paid in cash?” Harry asked.

“Three-thousand-five-hundred-some-odd dollars in cash,” Kimmy confirmed. “I keep my receipts, Harry. Would have to dig, may take some time, but you need it, bet I’d be able to find it.”

“I don’t know if I need it, Kimmy, but it won’t hurt to have it,” he told her.

“Then I’ll get on it.”

Harry narrowed his eyes on her. “That all you got?”

She jerked up her head. “What’s concrete that I know. But you want rumor and innuendo?”

Fuck yeah, he wanted everything he could get on Gerald and Michelle Dietrich.

“Hit me,” he invited.

Kimmy didn’t hesitate.

“Gerald and Michelle made an art of in-your-face living large. They wanted everyone to know they were the haves, and the rest of us poor suckers were the have-nots. They both came from money, and I guess that crap is ingrained in people like that.”

Not all of them, but some, definitely.

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