I parked and hit the lock button on the remote key. I didn't want anyone else making off with my stolen purse. I passed by a kid who was rounding up shopping carts and went into the store, hoping that the woman might still be there. Talking to the manager, perhaps. What I dreaded was that she might have already called the police, but I saw no patrol cars in the lot, and a quick scan of the line of checkouts showed no officers. I did the same routine as when I was looking for Sarah, walking past the end of each aisle, looking from the front of the store to the back. I slowed as I went past the aisle where Sarah had been looking at pasta sauces and the woman with the blonde hair had been checking out garbage bags. There, still halfway down the aisle, was the shopping cart with nothing but a box of cookies in it.
For a moment I thought, Just put the purse back. Drop it back in the cart, let someone else find it. Maybe the woman would come back later, check with store management, and they'd tell her, "Lady, it was right there where you'd left it. If it had been a dog it woulda bit ya."
All I had to do was nip back to the car, smuggle the purse back in, place it in the cart and -
And then the kid I'd seen rounding up shopping carts out in the parking lot appeared at the end of the aisle, reached for the box of cookies to put it back on the shelf, and hauled the cart back to the front of the store.
Out of desperation, I made one more round of Mindy's, but the woman was clearly gone. Although I'd hoped to resolve this situation by talking to no one other than the woman herself, which would have been awkward enough, I could see now I was going to have to make some inquiries.
I approached the woman at the express checkout. "Excuse me," I said, "but is the manager around?"
She pointed. "Checkout 10. Wendy."
There, I found a heavyset woman in a "Shop at Mindy's!" apron ringing through an elderly couple's groceries. Her name tag read "Wendy."
"Pardon me," I said, coming around from the bagging side. Wendy grabbed one item after another, passing them over the scanner. The couple both looked at me, wondering who the hell I thought I was, interrupting their business this way.
"Hmm?" said Wendy.
"Was there a woman here, about ten minutes ago, who'd lost her purse?"
"At this checkout?"
"No no. Not right here. But in the store. I understand there was a woman all upset about losing her purse."
Wendy kept advancing the conveyor belt, scanning items, not looking at me. "I heard something, but she didn't ask me about it."
"Maybe she talked to someone else? Or called the police?"
"If she talked to anyone else, they would have let me know about it, and if anyone called the police, you can be damn sure I'd hear about it."
"You're sure?"
Wendy took her eyes off what she was doing long enough to give me a look that seemed to suggest that this was the sort of thing a person might remember, especially if it happened in the last five minutes. "Okay," I said. "Thanks." And I turned in a hurry, thinking that I better get back to the other grocery store, where Sarah might already be waiting out front for me. I got back in the car and started the engine, but before putting it in drive took a moment to assess the situation.
Why hadn't the woman gone to the store management to report her purse missing? She'd had a fit in the aisle. Sarah had seen that much. But what had she done after that? Maybe she'd gone out to her car, thinking she'd left the purse there. But she wouldn't have been able to get into her car, of course, because the keys were most likely in the purse. Unless she didn't have a car, and walked to do her grocery shopping. There were hundreds of houses within walking distance of Mindy's. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from our neighborhood. So maybe she walked back home, thinking that her purse hadn't been swiped, but that she'd forgotten it. But if she got home and found her door locked, she'd know she had her keys with her when she left, which would mean that she'd left home with her purse. And if she'd had her purse when she left, and didn't have it now, that meant that yes, someone had swiped it.
And furthermore: Who's on first?
Was there a point to this line of thinking?
There was an easy way to solve this, I told myself. Get the purse out of the trunk, check the wallet for a name and an address, go to her house, return the purse, offer a million apologies, hope to Christ she had a sense of humor.
An excellent plan. But first, I had to pick up Sarah. She had said she'd be fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was pushing half an hour now. As I feared, Sarah was already standing out front, weighed down with four white plastic shopping bags.
"Pop the trunk," she mouthed from the other side of the passenger-door window.
Shit shit shit shit shit. Wasn't this what went through my mind only half an hour earlier? That Sarah would come out and want to put the groceries in the trunk? Of course, my plan back then (it seemed like hours ago) was that by now the purse would be back with its rightful owner.
I shouted, "Just throw them in the back!"
"What?"
I fumbled with the power window switches on the armrest under my left hand. First I put down the left rear window, then the right rear, then the window where Sarah was standing. She had that tired, why-did-I-marry-him look on her face. "You figured it out, huh?"
"Just throw the stuff in the back seat," I said. She sighed, opened the rear door, and set the bags on the floor. She slammed it shut and got in the front.
"Sorry I'm late," I said.
Sarah nodded. "Did you get anything?"
"Hmm?"