It's Murder at the Buy-Right

2

"It's a crying shame you threw that thing away," Daisy Ann said.

There was a lull in customers. Daisy Ann was tidying up her station. She always called her register her 'station.' She thought it lent more of a businesslike atmosphere to her conversation.

In spite of the fact that there was only one cash register in the grocery store, and it was a country establishment, everyone else called it Daisy Ann's station, too.

"What are you talking about?" Deke asked, looking up from his accounts.

Deke's cubby hole was at the front of the store, near Daisy Ann's station.

It was a small cubicle, barely larger than a small closet. But it was his dog house, his home-away-from-home, and his office. There was room for an office chair and little else. Little cubicles lined each wall. They were stuffed to overflowing with only-Deke-knew-what, and that was just the way he like it.

His space.

His store.

And even if it did look like a packrat's den, Deke knew what was where. He could lay his hands on any piece of information scrawled on a scrap of paper whenever he wanted.

Daisy Ann was amazed at how quickly he found an old invoice or a supplier's telephone number. The man was his own database. It was just his system of stashing and filing that drove her crazy.

"Be sure to leave a few magazines off-kilter, Daisy Ann. It looks spooky to walk through the door and find everything like somebody took a ruler and a level and rearranged the rack. You can get too perfect, sometimes. It ain't natural. There's always disorder in nature. It's perfectly normal.

Besides, we want the folks to feel like it is fine to browse the racks, and maybe buy one or two, not make them feel like they'll get a jolt of electricity if they touch one and mess up your display."

Daisy Ann took a second look. Those magazines and trashy papers looked great. She took pride in her work. All the titles were neatly aligned. Still, Deke was the boss. She puckered her mouth and raised her right eyebrow.

Maybe just one, she thought.

"Why aren't you smiling, handsome?" Daisy Ann asked the celebrity on the cover of the magazine staring her in the face. "You look like you swallowed a licorice stick dipped in castor oil."

She held it closer.

"Must have chased it all down with a nice refreshing glass of cod liver oil, too. Poor fellow. You really don't look happy."

She took a gander at the headline.

"Oh, tsk, tsk. Marriage troubles again. Well, big boy," Daisy Ann said, "I guess we gals can give a guy gas pains. Huh. You could use some baking soda. Lots of it from that sour look on your face."

She turned the copy upside down and stuck it in the rack, stood back, and examined her handiwork. Funny, when you turned him over, he wasn't half as handsome. Must be an optical illusion, she thought. She couldn't take her eyes off his face. She thought of all that blood rushing downhill, clogging up his tear ducts, and turning his cheeks to cherries.

"A migraine waiting to happen," she muttered. "Oh, shoot. I can't stand it. I can't. I don't care what Deke says! The thought of you looking at the world with upside down paper pupils is awful."

She looked at her boss who was engrossed in his work.

She righted the cover of the famous movie star, making sure he was nestled inside the magazine rack in perfect symmetry with all the other copies behind him.