It took Kirsty a minute to focus on her employee. Her brain was still frozen from studying her bank account details.
“Trouble?” she asked.
“Big brother has ridden in to sort things out. Betty looks like she wants to set fire to a village in retaliation and Rainne looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than sunny Invertary.” Magenta studied the sky through the shop front window as she shrugged out of her black leather coat. “Okay, maybe not sunny, but she still looks like she wants to run.”
Kirsty snapped the laptop shut, aware that the same grim set of numbers would be there to greet her when she opened it again.
“Poor Rainne, I should have made more of an effort to help her out.”
“You’ve been up to your eyeballs keeping this place afloat.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Kirsty said on a sigh. “But still, I did tell her we could coordinate window displays and advertise together. We just never seemed to get round to it. I hope her brother didn’t give her a hard time. Did it look like he was mad?”
“I didn’t see him. I saw the aftermath. So I’m guessing he was mad. Wouldn’t you be if your life savings bought Betty’s Knicker Emporium?”
“I’d be happy just to have access to my savings, so I could waste it on whatever I chose to.”
r /> Magenta winced.
“Sorry, that was insensitive.”
Kirsty waved her words away with a flick of her hand. It was old news. Literally. She had the newspaper headlines to prove it. She went to join Magenta at the window. Sure enough, there was Rainne, looking like she’d been exiled from a hippy commune and didn’t know what to do with herself. Her shoulders drooped, her eyes were dark and her skin almost as pale as Magenta’s—and that was saying a lot considering Magenta’s white goth makeup.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Kirsty said.
“Why bother?” Magenta said. “All she’s going to do is whine and whimper. Look at her. I can’t understand how she stays upright when she doesn’t have a backbone.”
“Magenta!” Kirsty said, giving her young friend a look heavy with meaning. “That’s harsh. She’s struggling. Running a business is hard enough without having to deal with Betty too.”
Kirsty’s heart broke for Rainne; she looked every bit as lost as Kirsty felt. Magenta frowned.
“It’s eat or be eaten out there,” she told Kirsty. “And that girl has ‘tasty snack’ tattooed to her forehead.”
“Remind me to tell the town council never to let you volunteer for the Samaritan help line. I can hear you now: ‘Stop whinging about your life, suck it up and get on with things.’“
Magenta gave Kirsty a rare grin. Kirsty couldn’t help smiling back as she went out to talk to Rainne. She felt the crunch of autumn leaves underfoot as she trotted across the road towards Betty’s place. The old underwear shop had been an Invertary institution as long as she could remember. She’d been dragged there as a child to get her first bra, and later she’d suffered the humiliation of being present while her mother bought a girdle. She smiled at the memory. The only problem with Betty’s Knicker Emporium was that it was about four hundred years out of date. Well, that and Betty. Betty was a big problem.
“You okay?” she asked Rainne.
“Great. Fabulous. Wonderful,” Rainne said flatly.
“Tell the truth, girl,” Betty said as she elbowed Rainne in the side.
Rainne was too polite, or too scared, to tell the old woman off. Kirsty wasn’t—it was one of the perks of being a local.
“Cut it out, Betty,” she told her. “Or I’ll tell the vicar that you’re bullying again.”
Betty scowled but didn’t protest.
“What’s going on?” Kirsty asked Rainne. “Is your brother shutting you down?”
“Ha!” Betty said. “He can try.”
They ignored her. Rainne hung her head and looked dejected.
“Really, he can do whatever he likes—it’s his money. I shouldn’t have borrowed it. I don’t know anything about running a business. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Kirsty couldn’t have agreed more, but didn’t think it was the time to tell her.