Ladies Courting Trouble

by Dolores Stewart Riccio

  “My little Tinker Belle falls asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow,” Fiona said. “Oh, good, you’ve got the tea ready.”

  “Still not talking?”

  “Yes, not talking. But she will, she will. I have faith, and I have spirit.” Fiona filled our cups and passed the cookies. We sipped the steaming brew cautiously. “You’re looking for something and you need help?”

  “Right. I’d like to find out where Lee Deluca is hiding. Freddie set an Internet trap for the boy, but there’s been no response so far.”

  “And you can’t zero in on him yourself?” Fiona asked.

  “You know I don’t have conscious control over my visions. They come and go in their own good time.”

  “Well, when you’re ready, that will change. But I do understand, my dear. It can be so dreadfully upsetting. A walk on the wild side.”

  “So…will you help me?”

  “Of course, but before I try dowsing, how about if we apply a little common sense to the problem?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where did you find the hemlock greenhouse?” Fiona’s smile just bordered on smugness.

  “Lydia Craig’s place…Oh, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s been deserted ever since she died. Lydia probably hid a key near the door, and Lee figured out where. What a perfect hideout!”

  “Well, not ideal. The water must be turned off so the pipes won’t freeze. Still, he’d know the layout, and it must be full of cubbyholes that a kid would have ferreted out. You’ll suggest this to Stone?” Fiona asked.

  “I guess I ought to. I’m tempted, though, to have a look around myself first.”

  “Wait until morning, and I’ll go with you. I can leave Laura Belle with Deidre. Maybe I can help to spell the boy out of hiding before he does more damage to himself and others.”

  “Laudable, but unlikely,” I said. “Shall I pick up you and Laura at eight, then? We’ll drop her off at Dee’s and have a good look ’round the Craig place.”

  Our plan unwittingly set a dangerous sequence of events in motion. What happened later almost turned me off amateur investigations forever.

  “Fiona and I are going out early tomorrow, Joe. I’ll be home by lunch, though.”

  “Shopping?”

  “Sort of.” My amazing, lovable husband had that rare quality of not being suspicious. Either that, or his head was so full of his own concerns that there was no room for doubting what he was told. Which gave me a slight twinge of guilt, but nothing that reason couldn’t overcome.

  Deidre was the elected babysitter, and Phillipa might feel the need to report to Stone. But Heather was right there in the neighborhood, so I decided I’d ask her to go with us. While Joe was watching some show about Phoenician shipbuilding on the Discovery channel, I ducked into my office to call. At the same time, I booted up my computer and checked up on Freddie’s Troubadour trap. Nothing yet.

  “What’s up, Cass? Another Mission Impossible?” Heather greeted my late call.

  “Eight-thirty tomorrow morning, Fiona and I will be on our way to the old Craig place. Want to join us?”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Heather demanded, echoing my own reaction. “You’re guessing that Lee’s hiding out there, aren’t you?”

  “Not me. Fiona. She didn’t even dowse it.”

  “Let’s face it, she’s a phenomenon, a force of nature.”

  “Yeah, Mary Poppins meets Miss Marple. And we’ve got her. Are you in?”

  “Always. Dress warmly. There’s been talk of one of those Cape blizzards, and you know we share the same weather patterns.”

  I worried that my going out “shopping” in a blizzard might alarm Joe, but as it happened, he slept late and never heard me as I prepared to slip out the door at seven-thirty.

  But Scruffy did. Hey, hey, I need to pee. He danced around the kitchen, making a case for urgency. I grabbed the leash off its hook but didn’t bother to clip it to his collar. At this hour, he’d attend to business and not run off after squirrels. True to form, he sniffed the bushes around the garage and chose his spots with care.

  The fact that I had car keys jingling in my other hand, however, had not escaped his attention. A ride, we’re going for a ride! Let’s open the windows and feel the breeze in our ears. He trotted confidently toward the driveway. It took some fancy footwork to whisk the dog back into the house and shut the door on his crestfallen face. By then I could see through the glass pane in the door that Joe had woken up and wandered into the kitchen.

  I waved gaily and ran down to the Jeep. The skies, although a strange shade of yellow-gray, seemed clear enough. But I noticed flocks of noisy gulls were flying off the ocean to the inland ponds and lakes—never a good omen.

  In the haunted shadows of two looming catalpa trees, the decrepit Craig mansion now sported a FOR SALE sign, offered by local Realtor, Fanny Finch, and a dayglo pink notice, ESTATE AUCTION VFW HALL February 1st, Bertie Pryde, Auctioneer. “The Finches and the Prydes, a finger in every pie,” Heather commented. “Bangs tells me that Lydia directed the firm to sell all her property, the proceeds to become part of her estate. She didn’t fancy having her relatives rifle through her belongings in the guise of retaining items of sentimental value. I wonder how she’d have liked Bertie Pryde messing around with her prized possessions.”

  “What about letters and personal papers?” Heather and I busied ourselves looking under all the obvious flowerpots and rocks near the front door.

  “The firm sent a junior partner to sort through Craig’s papers, unenviable task. I wonder if there were any love letters. Rumor has it that an early romance was thwarted by Lydia’s parents. Maybe that’s what soured her,” Heather said.

  Fiona stood aside, assuring us that we were wasting our time. She felt certain we’d find no key in the usual hiding places.

  “If Fiona can’t locate the key, Lee probably pocketed it when he moved in here,” Heather said.

  “Shhhh. Let’s be very quiet. Voices carry in this cold, still air. Maybe we can locate an unlocked window. We should at least try them,” I said. “I won’t give up so easily.”

  “Let’s stay off the porch, though. It looks as if it’s rotted through,” Heather said. “I hope Bertie has a good insurance policy covering his movers. I wonder if Fanny Finch will be able to sell this old derelict. Talk about a ‘handyman’s special.’”

  Fiona fished in her green reticule, mumbling to herself. “Stones and rocks, dials and clocks, open minds will open locks.”

  Heather and I glanced at each other nervously, as Fiona, cackling wildly, pulled what looked like an ancient multi-tool knife out of her reticule. Only this set of tools looked like none other I’d ever seen. She held it aloft with a gleam of triumph in her eye.

  “Are those lock picks? They are, aren’t they?” Heather demanded. “Ceres help us, I’ll have to take you along if I ever decide to raid a laboratory again.”

  “I’ve had these since the sixties, my dears.” Fiona’s eyes sparkled with merry memories. “Sometimes they worked to break into government buildings and burn draft records.” She twirled through the set expertly and selected one tool that looked like a miniature harpoon. “Rather an old-fashioned lock. This should do it.” Removing her purple mittens, she hunched over the door intently, still murmuring her incantation, “Rocks…clocks…locks,” to herself. We were so quiet I could hear ourselves breathe, each breath turning to mist on the chilly air. One fat flake of snow fell, then another. Perhaps we would get that storm after all.

  Click, click, click. “Eureka,” Fiona whispered, and turned the elaborate marble knob. The massive oak door swung open readily enough, squeaking on ancient, unoiled hinges. Tiptoeing as softly as possible in our heavy winter boots, we stepped into the entry, filled with hulking Victorian hall pieces, as ugly as gargoyles. The living room we could see beyond promised more of the same, cave-dark, with heavy drapes closed and smelling of dust, mice, and mildew.

  “Shal
l we stay together or split up, do you think?” Heather whispered.

  “Stay together,” Fiona commanded, suddenly pulling herself up into a wisewoman glamour. There was a sense of illumination around her in that shadowed place, especially around her hands, which she now held in front of her like a Hindu greeting. “I will dowse the way.”

  When Fiona gets herself into a full glamour, we naturally follow her lead, as we did now. We checked out the two front parlors, where heavy sofas were swathed in sheets, then the library. I noted that the huge oak rolltop desk showed signs of having been thoroughly cleaned out, not a piece of paper remaining. The books had been packed and labeled with lot numbers and Bertie Pryde’s logo. None of the other rooms we’d seen appeared to have been sacked yet, the mantels and side tables still laden with dusty ornaments.

  We advanced through the dining room and butler’s pantry to the kitchen “on little cat feet.” Fiona put her finger to her lips and pointed out a candle and a pack of matches on the counter, then a bucket of water in the sink. She examined the fireplace with care and pulled out a shred of a white paper bag with greasy stains, giving it a knowledgeable sniff. “Takeout clams,” she mouthed in triumph, and pointed her finger at the ceiling. Heather and I looked up at the sooty white expanse as if seeking the handwriting on the wall.

  “No, no,” she whispered. “Upstairs. Let’s go upstairs to see if he’s been sleeping in any of the beds.”

  “The Three Bears search for Goldilocks,” Heather murmured in my ear.

  “Yeah, maybe so, but this house is strictly from Great Expectations,” I whispered back. “And that’s just what Lee Deluca has, extremely great expectations.”

  There was no way to climb the stairs quietly. Although they were carpeted in a tarnished-looking red, every step harbored its own special squeak. Fiona, however, seemed to have the knack of still-walking like a deer hunter through the woods even while wearing her bulky MacDonald-tartan cape and lugging her green reticule.

  We entered each room with trepidation, as if Lee might jump out at us from a bathroom or closet. I had to keep reminding myself that this was just a boy, probably an unarmed boy, and we were three mature women.

  Lydia Craig’s pale green bedroom appeared untouched since her death, the prim mahogany four-poster neatly covered with a crocheted bedspread yellowed with age. Next to it, an almost pretty sitting room, with delicately flowered rose wallpaper, was equally unused except for the small white desk, which had obviously been emptied, as had the rolltop downstairs. Like the kitchen, these rooms were less dusty than the others, suggesting that they comprised Lydia Craig’s true “apartment.”

  Unfortunately, I hovered too close behind Heather, and when she stumbled over a chaise longue, we both pitched forward. Fiona threw up her hands in a gesture of despair.

  In the next moment, we heard a series of sounds down the hall. The twang of a shade snapped up too fast, the slide of a heavy window thrown open, the rustle and thump of someone jumping over the sill. We hurried to follow the obvious sounds of whoever—but it must be Lee!—was escaping the house. The room we sought was two doors down from the sitting room. Cold air was blasting in an open window. Outside it was the porch roof. We raced downstairs, lithe Heather in the forefront, her bronze braid swinging as she bounded ahead, but we weren’t quick enough. Lee had jumped to the ground and disappeared around the corner of the house.

  “Oh, Sweet Isis,” Fiona groaned, holding her side. “He was here all right. Did you notice the tumbled blankets on top of this bedspread?”

  “I’m thinking now,” Heather said, “that it might have been better if we’d brought the police into this, asked them to search the house.”

  “I was rather hoping we could get a line on Lee informally first. Maybe get him to incriminate himself.”

  “Stone could have waltzed in here with Bertie Pryde and had a quiet look around. After all, the boy is an official missing person,” Heather said. “Neville Borer is Lydia’s executor, and I doubt he would have gone for his client’s grandnephew camping out in her property.”

  “We’ve screwed up, ladies,” Fiona pointed out. “I fear you’re still going to have to tell Stone, Cass, that the boy was here. And now he’s gone.”

  “Maybe he’ll sneak back,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. As a safe house, the Craig mansion was blown.

  “Hey, look at it come down now!” Heather drew our attention to the increasing fall of snow, as the world around us turned to dancing white flakes. “Perhaps we’d better get out of here before this gets too deep for safe driving.”

  “Oh, I’ll have to get Laura home, then, while the roads are still passable,” Fiona said. “And cancel our therapy session for tomorrow, praise the Goddess. We’ve been bumped up from speech therapy to a husband-and-wife team of psychiatrists in Quincy, Wacker and Wacker. Elective mutism, they call it. They want to try anti-anxiety, social phobia drugs, but I want to try time and love.”

  “Laura’s awfully young for mind-altering meds.”

  “It will never happen. I know I agreed to seek therapy for my little Tinker Belle, but I draw the line at pharmaceuticals. A magical banishing line, that is.”

  Magical banishing line? I wondered just how Fiona would accomplish that, but, occupied with negotiating slippery roads, I resolved to question her later.

  Heather’s home was nearby; I let her off first. Sorry as I was to miss brunch with Captain Jack and his wonderfully bracing boiled coffee, I didn’t want to worry Joe. So we hurried away to collect Laura, then get Fiona and her charge home before the gathering storm shut down Plymouth. Afterward, I supposed, I’d better call Phillipa and let her juggle the hot-potato news about Lee Deluca.

  Joe had left a note on the kitchen table.

  Gone to Home Warehouse for a couple of decent snow shovels and some more ice melt. Don’t worry, pet-safe stuff, and will drive carefully. Love you. J.

  After a perfunctory greeting, Scruffy pressed his nose against the bird-feeder window in the kitchen and studied the weather disconsolately. Paw-freezing white stuff all over. No good place to pee.

  “Nevertheless, you’ll have to go sometime. I’ll take you out in a few minutes.”

  Why can’t I have indoor accommodations like some other canines do?

  “Because you’re not a Chihuahua, you big horse.” Time to make that unpleasant call to Phillipa.

  “So I have the fun of telling my husband, the police detective, that you guys have spooked the suspect out of his hiding place and Goddess knows where he is now?” Phillipa summed up the situation in a chilly tone.

  “Yeah, I guess that about says it all. Sorry. Don’t be cross. Who knows what kind of problems might have arisen with an official search, maybe complaints about roughing up a missing boy. Whereas with Fiona and her lock-pick kit…”

  “Surely you jest. Fiona has a lock-pick kit? Does Joe know what you’ve been up to? Oh, just a moment. Call waiting. Let me see who it is real quick and get back to you and your fascinating life of crime.”

  But Phillipa was gone a few heartbeats more than she should have been. Then she was back, her voice betraying a trace of nervousness. “Stone says the blizzard is sporting gale-force winds, many roads are impassable, and he doesn’t know when or if he’ll be home. Where’s Joe?”

  “Goddess knows. He went to Home Warehouse to buy snow shovels. Two of them.”

  “Ah, togetherness. But wait, there’s more news. Just to add a little extra wrinkle, someone’s reported that a huge old catalpa tree over at the Craig place has crashed into the mansion’s roof.”

  “Uh oh…it bodes ill for the estate auction,” I said. “I wonder where Lee Deluca will hole up now. He’ll need a decent shelter in this storm.”

  “Might run for Grandma’s. Keep checking that computer trap Freddie left for him.”

  Sure! At that moment I lost both the lights and the phone. Obviously, computer entrapment would have to wait until power was restored. I still had my cell, of course, bu
t I’d need to be careful not to use up its charge. Where was Joe? I looked out the window at the fiercely swirling snow—a white, inscrutable world.

  As soon as I turned on my cell, it rang. “Hey, sweetheart, I’m having a bit of a problem here. Are you all right?”

  That Rent-a-Wreck wouldn’t be worth a damn in the blizzard. “No lights, no telephone, but I’m okay. Where are you?”

  “Owl Swamp Road near the old Grange Hall. The car skidded into a drift. I’ll have to dig it out.”

  “Did you get the new snow shovels?”

  “No, they’d sold out of the kind I wanted. I’ve got a shoebox in the back of the car, though. I’ll use that.”

  “Look in the trunk. Maybe you’ll find something sturdier. Listen, honey, I’ve got the Jeep, four-wheel drive and all. Let me come and get you.”

  “Absolutely not! I’ll be fine. Better, if I don’t have to worry about you.”

  “Are you wearing your watch?”

  “‘Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.’”

  “Right. I’ve got just noon. I’ll turn my cell on again at twelve forty-five and call you, okay?”

  “Okay. Synchronizing watches now.”

  “And, honey…please get home safe. Soon. Watch out for traffic while you’re shoveling. Drivers won’t be able to see you.”

  “I’ll be fine. You stay inside until I get there.”

  If only he hadn’t gone out in the storm to buy, of all things, snow shovels. Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into, Stan. I put on my heaviest winter gear, my new purple parka. Scruffy joined me at the door, heavy-pawed. I Velcro-strapped him into his fleece-lined slicker, which I only use in really rotten weather.