Murder at the Boutique Across the Street
I have always found the owner of the little fashion boutique to be, well, very and extremely unapproachable. Not in a bad way. I meant that in every possible positive connotation and with the greatest admiration. She seemed to belong to another world— one I could never enter nor could ever quite understand.
It must have been the way she dressed. Every time she came into the café for her morning drink (a large, hot earl gray almond milk latte with one pump of lavender syrup and a sprinkle of nutmeg on top) she seemed to be wearing something new. She came in once wearing a slip dress covered with a thousand butterfly wings. My eyes had kept wandering to them as their iridescent turquoise and lavender wings shifted this way and that, like they were real and wanted to escape their sewn manacles. The boutique owner had noticed my wandering eyes and had smiled a wolfish grin. That day, her lips were painted a metallic purple. Her hair was a pretty lilac beneath her dark choppy bob. Another time, she wore a corset of soft and supple leather, laced with kelp over a cascading skirt of ocean waves that foamed white at the edges. It had been quite cold that day, but her shoulders were bare and I couldn’t help but stare at the moons and stars that danced across her collarbones. Again, she caught my wandering gaze and when I handed her the paper cup, her fingers lingered a little too long on mine. They burned when I pulled them back, but it must have been from the hot drink. The last day that she came in for her latte, she had been in a dress of delicate autumn oak leaves. Her peek-a-boo highlights were a matching scarlet and her nails were painted to look like the leaves on her dress. The edges were uneven, like they had been chewed on. I wasn’t sure if the red around her eyes was to match her dress or to hide the dark circles under them.
It must have been the way she carried herself. She seemed to float into the café every morning, drifting between other customers. Past the wizened elderly couple who held hands and people watched at the seat next to the window. Past the mother with the hyperactive twins who never raised her voice beyond a murmur. Past the college kid who always wore a beanie no matter the weather. Next to everyone, she seemed like one of the fae folk in those Irish folktales I used to read at my Gran’s place. An otherworldly creature trapped in an ordinary world. Except she looked anything but trapped. She did everything easily. Laughed, talked, flirted. Simple things that took me half my life to even try. She had smiled at me so easily the last time I saw her. Talked to me so easily about the weather and the way the fallen leaves were beginning to become crisp. About a squirrel that she had finally gotten to eat from her hands. And she may have been flirting very easily, too. It had taken me nearly a year to notice that and when I did notice I wasn’t sure how to react. So I didn’t. I just handed her her drink as usual, and watched the back of her leafy dress as she glided out the door and back to her boutique.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Today, I didn’t see the boutique owner. It was a Monday in the middle of autumn and the skies had been the same slate grey for nearly a month. Every time a customer entered, a gust of cold entered with them and curled chilly fingers around my neck. I have my hair up in a high ponytail. The boutique owner had told me once that it looked good, and I have been combing my hair up and tying it with a bow scrunchie ever since. I also started wearing blush on the center of my cheeks rather than the edges, started wearing more jewelry, and switched from clear lip balm to a berry tinted balm.
She closed the boutique on Sundays, so it had been a day since she had come in. As the clock struck nine o’clock, I finished up an order of lattes that I placed in a paper cup holder and gingerly handed to a college intern with anxious eyes and sweaty palms. I then started on the boutique owner’s drink. A good pinch of earl grey blend tea scatters into a cup of hot water. I let the tea bloom for seven minutes, longer than I would usually make other customers’ drinks (I started the brewing early so that the tea would be extra concentrated and the drink would only take a minute to finish after she came in). The bell at the door jingles. My eyes shoot up, a smile readied, but it is just a man in a thick grey coat with an unruly dark beard. The cold that enters with him makes me shiver. He orders a large earl gray latte with a pump of lavender syrup and almond milk. Hot. With vanilla extract. He stands at the register the entire time I make it. I brew the tea for only about four minutes and quickly dump the steamed almond milk in. As he drops his change into the tip jar, I notice long, angry scratches on his wrists. He smiles at me when he leaves, but for some reason I find it hard to return the gesture.
The boutique owner will be here soon. After filtering out the leaves, I add one pump of lavender syrup and a tiny pinch of vanilla bean from my secret stash in the back of the fridge. I steam the almond milk and pour it gently into the tea. The stream of milk turns into thicker foam and I quickly jiggle the steaming cup down the surface of the latte, and then ease the milk up to form a leaf. I grin down at my best attempt and leave the lid to the side so I can show her when she came in. But she never came in. The tea latte grew cold behind the counter. The foamy leaf dissolved.
During my lunch break, I walk past the boutique and glance inside. The bright magenta “OPEN” sign is off and the store is dark inside. The mannequins in the display window are dressed in various sweaters and dresses made of individually cut velvet leaves that mirror the colors of the trees lining the little boulevard. Except the dresses in the store looked washed out without lights to bathe them in life. There is no notice at the door explaining the store being closed that day. I guessed the boutique owner had fallen ill. I suddenly wished I had her number to ask if she was alright, if she needed me to post something on her store so others would know to come back another day. I wonder if she has anyone to do that for her.
My break will end in less than a minute, but I can’t seem to tear myself from the sight of those dresses at the display. Where did she learn to sew and design? What inspired her otherworldly designs? How did she breathe such life into mere fabric? Fabric that looked like it had grown on a living tree on her, but now lay as lifeless and empty as the dried leaves on the side walks. My neck is cold and my manager is texting me to get back. I turn and leave. At the door to the café, I turn back to take one last look at the boutique. I noticed the same man from this morning, the one with the unruly beard who had ordered the earl gray latte, standing where I was standing before. He, too, is staring at the dresses. He snaps a picture and then leaves. The wind runs its cold fingers down the back of my neck. I shiver.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Ava Kobayashi was dead. Murdered. I watched the television from behind the counter, a wet rag in my hand in the middle of wiping sticky syrup dispensers. I may have stopped breathing. I had never known her name; our café just gave out numbers to customers. It was faster that way, less personal, but more efficient. The news anchorwoman told me more in a minute than I had ever known in the couple of years that she was coming in. Ava’s picture was from her college graduation nearly five years ago. In it, her hair was longer and undyed. Her winged eyeliner was gentler and her lips were painted a nude pink. She looked… ordinary. Ava had been the eldest daughter of immigrant parents and had majored in fashion design with a minor in business administration. After her studies in New York, she had worked in a large clothing company for children’s clothes, but moved back and used that money to open up the boutique across the street.. On Sundays, she would volunteer at the local park to help plant trees and maintain the community garden. Her parents said that Ava had been the happiest she had ever been.
A little over a year ago, she went on several dates with a man who she had met while volunteering. His name was Nathan Bennett. He worked as a financial consultant, but had lost his job after several violent outbursts during work. Ava stopped seeing Nathan after the fifth date, when he screamed at a waiter over his steak — late and overcooked. Several months later, she filed a restraining order against him after he showed up every night at her house with bouquets of roses, then boxes of chocolates and oversized stuffed animals, then an aluminum baseball bat that he used to smash her windows in. Ava moved back in with her parents for a while. He stopped showing up. Just last week, she had moved back to her own house. Last Saturday evening, Nathan followed her to work and had watched her all day in a café across the street. He had watched as she closed the store for the day and had entered while she was taking inventory in the back. The autopsy showed that she had died from asphyxiation. The boutique keys were missing from her person and were found tossed in a pile of dead leaves swept over by street cleaners. A quick look at the security cameras immediately led the authorities to Nathan Bennett, who was detained in his apartment yesterday evening. His walls were covered in photos of Ava and he had even collected the paper coffee cups she tossed in the trash cans outside the boutique.
After that day, I thought about quitting my job. I didn’t really know why or how that would help fill the gaping hole that had opened in my chest. The boutique owner, Ava, wasn’t even my friend. We had never gone past the stage of small talk to fill the time between her ordering and me handing over her drink. Her murderer had been condemned to a lifetime in prison, so there was no sense of injustice that weighed down my thoughts. Perhaps it was because I no longer had a reason to use my secret stash of vanilla beans. Perhaps it was because the boutique across the street was now a toy store and the dresses from other worlds were replaced by plastic slides and wooden rocking horses. Perhaps it was regret. Regret at having never gotten to know Ava beyond her drink order. Regret at assuming that she was unapproachable. Regret at my own inaction and incapabilities.
The bell at the front door dings and the mom with the hyperactive twins approaches the counter. I shake the cloud of thoughts from my head and plaster on a smile. After she orders a rose latte, I ask for her name to write on the cup.
