Read Online Fogged Inn (A Maine Clambake Mystery Book 4) by Barbara Ross - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Barbara Ross
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our broken-down couch and looked around the apartment. The big window framed a black sky, unbroken by stars or ambient light. The sun set early in December, especially when you were as far east in a time zone as coastal Maine. I let my thoughts wander. It had been a long, stress-filled day. Le Roi jumped up and settled beside me, purring loudly. He loved it when I was home and sitting still; it was such a rarity.
Suddenly I sat bolt upright, disturbing Le Roi, who meowed in protest. There it was. The fuzzy thing I’d felt was important but hadn’t been able to remember. All four of the couples that had come to the restaurant the night before had paid with gift certificates!
Because they’d stayed so long and drunk lots of extra coffee and after-dinner drinks, they all gave me some cash or a credit card at the end of the night, so I’d forgotten, burying the coincidence somewhere in my sleep-deprived subconscious.
Gus had an ancient, gigantic cash register on which he rang up his sales. He didn’t take credit cards, or checks for that matter. Chris and I were improvising. I ran credit cards through an app on my phone, and we kept cash in a cigar box that sat behind the bar. At the end of the night I hid it under my bed until I could get to the bank the next day to deposit whatever cash we weren’t keeping to make change.
I got down on my knees and felt under the bed until I pulled out the wooden cigar box. The four gift certificates were still in there, and as I suspected, the serial numbers were in order. The certificates looked real, but then I’d designed them based on a popular template I’d found on the web. The only thing that was off was the expiration date. Maine law prohibited expiration dates on gift cards. Yet there was a date on each one—November 30. Yesterday. Henry Caswell was the only person who had mentioned the date, but all the couples thought that their certificates were about to expire.
Heart pounding, I went to my desk. I fired up my laptop and looked at the spreadsheet I’d created to track the gift certificates. Gift certificates represented a liability to a business. Once you accepted the money, you owed the goods and they were carried on your books as a debt, so it was important to know how many were out there and for what amounts.
We hadn’t sold many. I’d started offering them only at the end of October. Sales had started slow but picked up as we got closer to Thanksgiving. I assumed it was because of the holidays. Gift certificates for a nice dinner were a great gift for an older parent or a couple on a tight budget who deserved a treat.
On my spreadsheet, I’d matched the purchaser with the serial number of the gift certificate. I’d created the gift certificates on my laptop. So as not to embarrass myself, I’d started the serial numbers at 100001 instead of 1. The four gift certificates I’d collected the night before had been sold during the first week of November as a part of a lot of five. That raised so many questions. First of all, who had bought them? I checked the app I used to process credit cards. It didn’t store or provide much information, just told me the credit card had been approved and gave me a transaction number. Yet I must have written down the name of the person who bought them. I had to have mailed the certificates to the purchaser somehow. I searched through the notebook I kept next to my computer, looking for the information. Nothing. Then I searched my e-mails and found nothing. I must have written the name and address on a scrap of paper and thrown it away.
I checked my phone. If the buyer hadn’t e-mailed, he or she must have called. But again, we were improvising, using my cell phone for reservations and other calls to Gus’s Too. As a result, I’d become even more attentive than usual about checking messages and deleting the ones I had dealt with.
As I’d feared, there were no calls on my phone from unknown numbers. I couldn’t find what
Suddenly I sat bolt upright, disturbing Le Roi, who meowed in protest. There it was. The fuzzy thing I’d felt was important but hadn’t been able to remember. All four of the couples that had come to the restaurant the night before had paid with gift certificates!
Because they’d stayed so long and drunk lots of extra coffee and after-dinner drinks, they all gave me some cash or a credit card at the end of the night, so I’d forgotten, burying the coincidence somewhere in my sleep-deprived subconscious.
Gus had an ancient, gigantic cash register on which he rang up his sales. He didn’t take credit cards, or checks for that matter. Chris and I were improvising. I ran credit cards through an app on my phone, and we kept cash in a cigar box that sat behind the bar. At the end of the night I hid it under my bed until I could get to the bank the next day to deposit whatever cash we weren’t keeping to make change.
I got down on my knees and felt under the bed until I pulled out the wooden cigar box. The four gift certificates were still in there, and as I suspected, the serial numbers were in order. The certificates looked real, but then I’d designed them based on a popular template I’d found on the web. The only thing that was off was the expiration date. Maine law prohibited expiration dates on gift cards. Yet there was a date on each one—November 30. Yesterday. Henry Caswell was the only person who had mentioned the date, but all the couples thought that their certificates were about to expire.
Heart pounding, I went to my desk. I fired up my laptop and looked at the spreadsheet I’d created to track the gift certificates. Gift certificates represented a liability to a business. Once you accepted the money, you owed the goods and they were carried on your books as a debt, so it was important to know how many were out there and for what amounts.
We hadn’t sold many. I’d started offering them only at the end of October. Sales had started slow but picked up as we got closer to Thanksgiving. I assumed it was because of the holidays. Gift certificates for a nice dinner were a great gift for an older parent or a couple on a tight budget who deserved a treat.
On my spreadsheet, I’d matched the purchaser with the serial number of the gift certificate. I’d created the gift certificates on my laptop. So as not to embarrass myself, I’d started the serial numbers at 100001 instead of 1. The four gift certificates I’d collected the night before had been sold during the first week of November as a part of a lot of five. That raised so many questions. First of all, who had bought them? I checked the app I used to process credit cards. It didn’t store or provide much information, just told me the credit card had been approved and gave me a transaction number. Yet I must have written down the name of the person who bought them. I had to have mailed the certificates to the purchaser somehow. I searched through the notebook I kept next to my computer, looking for the information. Nothing. Then I searched my e-mails and found nothing. I must have written the name and address on a scrap of paper and thrown it away.
I checked my phone. If the buyer hadn’t e-mailed, he or she must have called. But again, we were improvising, using my cell phone for reservations and other calls to Gus’s Too. As a result, I’d become even more attentive than usual about checking messages and deleting the ones I had dealt with.
As I’d feared, there were no calls on my phone from unknown numbers. I couldn’t find what
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