by B. T. Alive
“You idiot,” Fiona snapped. “Can’t you see what he’s doing, you stupid civilian?”
At the word civilian, I wondered whether Fiona had been in the military. Then I realized that she must have been talking about the telempathy. It had to be maddening to have to keep the whole secret of psychic powers even while Dante was manipulating her right in front of us. It was maddening for me.
“What I see is a beautiful man, who I thought I’d lost!” Adora cried. “We should all be only grateful he’s alive—”
“Hey, Adora?” interrupted Tina. I hadn’t even noticed that Tina had moved, but somehow she’d snuck around behind us all and was now interposed between the woman and Dante. “Have you met Summer’s cat?”
And she thrust Mr. Charm into Adora’s arms.
The transformation was nearly instant. Adora’s passion evaporated, leaving her looking confused, and thoughtful. Then she scowled, and fixed Dante Radcliff with a furious glare.
“You monster,” she hissed. “Of course Lee wasn’t actually canceling. She was just upset. And what did you do? Ran off with the nearest—”
“Steady on, there, darling,” cried her husband Kelvin. He mopped his own wide forehead with a pristine white cloth, and then he gave Dante a nod so chummy that it was almost fawning. “I won’t say I’ve always seen eye-to-eye with the man, but he at least deserves a hearing. I’m sure there’s a reasonable—”
“His name is Mr. Charm,” Tina said, snatching my long-suffering cat from Adora and dumping him into Kelvin’s lap.
“Oh,” said Kelvin, nonplussed, and he absently patted Charm’s head. “I just remembered. The man can’t swim. Carry on.”
“Judge me all you want! All of you!” cried Dante. He burst out of his corner and shoved past Fiona to the center of the open space. “You want your ‘reasonable explanation’? I couldn’t go through with it! Even before she canceled, before the vines…” He ran his hands through his shaggy hair, and his look of real torment roused in me a stab of sympathy, in spite of everything. “I had thought that seeing you all would cure me—all my great loves, assembled together to bless and affirm my choice. But instead… instead… all I could see was that my heart belonged to another.”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if calling on some divine witness. “God forgive me,” he exclaimed. “I even called her to my side, that very night… I pleaded, I begged, I proposed…”
Dead silence.
Proposed?
Even for Dante Radcliff, this was making my mind melt. The dude had called in one of these women the night before his wedding and asked to marry her? Who the heck was it? She should have killed him!
“Say what you will,” he continued, his voice throbbing with Shakespearean pathos. “But after a lifetime of a wandering heart, can you blame me? For wanting to be sure? All I ever truly wanted was for my one, true wedding to last a lifetime.”
There was a dreadful silence.
And then, from the back of the room, a new voice boomed, the throaty voice of an old woman with vigor and spunk.
“One true wedding? One?” She laughed. “You never did know how to count.”
Chapter 22
Everyone twisted in their seats. At the back stood a woman who had to be in her seventies, with wild scraggly hair, blazing eyes, and huge bright teeth bared in a fierce grin. The grin was almost too large for her head; her jaw muscles bulged. Whoever she clamped those teeth into, they were very unlikely to escape.
“You remember me, don’t you, Martin?” she demanded.
“Martin?” I said.
“You must have the wrong man,” said Dante Radcliff. But he’d gone quite pale.
The woman sighed, in an explosive outburst that was ragged like she’d smoked for decades. “So that’s how you want to play it,” she said.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” said Lee, and her cold voice, speaking for the first time in all that craziness, was almost hideously normal. “You surely aren’t claiming to be Dante’s… ex-wife?”
“It’s not Dante, lambchops, it’s Martin. Martin Thomas,” said the old woman. “Not quite as glamorous as ‘Dante Radcliff’, but if I was going to fake a new name, I’d try to do better too. But I’m an honest woman, and I’m stuck with Noreen Quigg.”
“That’s the not fake name?” Lee said. She arched an eyebrow.
“Old Irish name, sweetheart. Passed it on to my daughter.” Her eyes went to slits, and she nodded at Dante. “His wife.”
Lee stiffened.
“I’ve never seen this woman before,” Dante blustered. “She’s delusional!”
“Am I now?” said Noreen Quigg. She held up a massive, thick, black photo album. It was old, clearly dating from before digital cameras, and when he saw it, Dante went even paler.
“Whatever you’ve got there, it’s faked!” he yelled, as she began to walk, with slow, inexorable steps, toward the front of the room. She held the gigantic book before her like it was some kind of procession, and her eager gaze never left his face.
“These people know me,” he said. “They’ve known me for years.”
“How many years?” she croaked, as she stepped into the center and he fell back, glaring but keeping his distance, as if the album might burn him at the touch. “It’s been ten this Christmas since you abandoned my Noreen. And your children.”
“He had kids?” demanded Fiona. She was lurking in a shadowed corner, arms crossed, but watching every move.
“Still does,” said Noreen Quigg, and she opened up the album.
On the first stiff page was a formal family portrait, all red Christmas sweaters and big smiles, like you might get enlarged for the fireplace. Though the grinning man in the photo was certainly ten years younger, he was also, just as certainly, Dante Radcliff. Or, apparently, Martin Thomas.
In case I’d had any doubts, Tina, who had sat down beside Adora as Noreen came up, gasped and covered her mouth. I could see in her face that this was much closer to the Dante she’d known as a teen.
Beside him in the photo sat a nice-looking woman with a huge smile, and though she was quite young, in her early thirties at the most, she looked so much like her mother Noreen standing here that it was uncanny. Even the sadness in the eyes was the same.
There were also three super cute children, from kindergarten down to newborn.
“I’m sure that’s very impressive,” Dante snapped, not even looking at the photo. “But you can do anything with computers these days.”
“Yes,” said Noreen. “Even track down a delinquent who won’t pay child support.”
Fiona scowled with disgust.
“Isn’t this all a bit too convenient?” Dante scoffed. “Right as I plan my wedding, a strange old woman shows up with a doctored image, making outrageous claims? If I were really that delinquent, don’t you think this woman would have found me by now?”
“Not if you changed your name,” I piped up. “Besides, you were super secretive about your wedding online. This geek guy looked and he couldn’t find a thing.”
Lee startled, and she gave Dante a thoughtful look.
“I’ll tell you why it took so long,” Noreen growled, and those massive teeth clenched. “Because you did some kind of mind game on my daughter, and she wouldn’t even tell me you were skipping until this year. She only broke down when she couldn’t get the overtime to pay for your daughter’s prom dress.”
Dante flinched, and the guilt in his face was so naked that only the most deluded could have doubted it was true. For that one moment, he looked like he might be sorry.
But then his eyes cut to his audience, to us watchers looking on, and his face closed up with cold anger.
“I’m afraid you’ll find I’m rather insolvent,” he told Noreen, straining a ghastly smile. “But if she insists on pretending she’s my long-lost spouse, she’s more than welcome to half my debts.”
“You lying wretch,” Noreen muttered. “They told me you’ve got a vineyard and your own isl
and.”
“Ah. Those would be hers,” Dante said, with a nod toward Lee.
“I’ve found you, boy,” Noreen rasped. “And I am going to make you pay.”
Dante’s lips creased in a grin of fury. “Mom. No one ever made me do anything.”
“How could you?” Tina burst out. “How could you hide all this? How could you not say anything?”
Oh, Tina. Even now, she was still capable of getting hurt by this guy… of being surprised that she’d misjudged him so catastrophically.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he snapped. Even for Tina, he couldn’t hide his bitterness. “Of course I hid it. If I hadn’t, if I hadn’t hidden everything about myself except the microscopic sliver that you all wanted to see, the part that made you feel special… why, you’d hate me.” His gaze swept us all, glittering and triumphant. “And so you do. Every last one of you lovers hates the real me.”
There was an awful silence. The air was thick with a unanimous, unspoken assent.
But then Lee stood.
As Dante stared, openly flabbergasted, she stepped toward him in one smooth motion and gently took his hand.
Then Dante smiled.
I can’t remember how exactly the rest of us cleared out of there. I have a vague sense of Dante and Lee standing together, hands clasped in some invisible Bubble of True Grueling Love as others around them excoriated or implored. My own lingering, artificial affection for the man, which I’d been trying to ignore like a persistent headache, had utterly vaporized… I could almost feel his energy withdrawn as he himself was sucked into the vortex of Lee’s adoring gaze. They certainly seemed to deserve each other.
I managed to get Tina out of there, and I (and Mr. Charm) spent the rest of the day trying to help her recuperate, doing all her favorite Wonder Springs things, from a forest walk through the autumn glory to baking colonial scones in the legit eighteenth century wood stove of the Hearth. I’d never seen a wood stove before I came to the Inn, but when you come in from the chill to that radiant, miraculous warmth that can seep into your bones… if that’s not some kind of good magic, what is? And on top of that, you get to make scones?
By the time Tina was climbing up to her tower room for the night, she was finally really actually almost pretty much smiling again. Like before, like none of this had ever happened.
Which is why the next morning hurt so bad.
I woke to frantic pounding on my bedroom door. Only one person pounds like that, and even she’d never sounded so distraught.
“Tina? What is it?” I said, as I opened the door. “Oh my gosh! What happened to you?”
She was soaked. Her eyes were haunted, and raw from their own rain.
“He’s dead,” she said.
“Who? Dante?” I said. “Again?”
She winced, and I said quickly, “I mean, I’m sorry, but unless you’re really sure—”
“They found the body,” she said. “What’s left of it.”
“Where?”
She took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was lifeless.
“Under a mountain of stolen grapes.”
Part III
Chapter 23
It wasn’t so much the rain that got you, I reflected, as Tina and I crossed the one-lane concrete bridge toward Haven Island under the sunless dead sky. It was rain plus the cold wind. No matter how you held your umbrella, the wind would find a way to splatter you, make you feel the icy chill.
“So much for the sunny South,” I said. “I was kind of hoping you all didn’t get winter.”
“It’s Virginia. In November,” Tina said, morose, as she traipsed straight through a puddle. Her bright pink galoshes were festooned with kittens and unicorns; she’d probably been wearing them since middle school. “You can cycle through all four seasons in fifteen minutes.”
“Really?” I said. “I don’t know, that might be a dealbreaker. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about anything,” Tina snapped, and she strode ahead quickly on her own.
I thought, I hate to say it, Dante Radcliff, but this time you’d better really be dead.
He was.
As we trudged up the drive toward the vineyard, I slowly made out a massive new shape, dimmed by the gray rainy haze. I guessed what it was right away, but somehow I still had to fixate on it to be sure, checking and rechecking and straining to catch more detail as we approached. But what else could it be, besides a gigantic mound of grapes?
As if it didn’t already look big enough, I realized that small figures were picking their way around it. I recognized the short, dumpy figure of the medical examiner, a dour woman who for some reason had to drive down from the biggish city of Manassas, hours away. Seeing her made it definite; she only ever came here for a corpse.
And there were other figures too, people I didn’t recognize. Working at the pile with shovels.
I squinted. There was an open area at the base of the pile, a hollowed-out space where the people were digging. I knew I shouldn’t look there, but my gaze was still drawn, by some irresistible force… oh God, was that a foot…
“Don’t,” rasped Tina, whirling back toward me and blocking my view. “I’m right here, you know.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling strangely dissociated and, in some other mental space where there wasn’t a dead body twenty feet away, finally weirded out by these little details of trying to hang out with an empath.
“I need you to focus, Summer,” Tina said, grim. “Or we’re not going to solve this.”
“I was focusing,” I said.
“No, you were freaking out,” she said. “And I already freaked out enough for both of us. The first time I came.”
“You came over here before you got me?” I said. Though I belatedly realized that, given we both lived in the Inn, she must have gone somewhere to get so soaked. Just call me Holmes.
“Cade texted me,” Tina said. “And I just ran. I wasn’t thinking. And when I saw it, what’s left of him… I just lost it. And they kicked me out, and now there’s this tape.” She thumbed the yellow crime scene tape that wound a jagged circle around it all, snaking from vine to vine.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m sure the sheriff, will understand.”
“Understand what?” said Sheriff Jake, suddenly standing with crossed arms on the far side of the tape. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you ladies to leave.”
“Are you serious?” I snapped, but he bristled his mustache with such severity that I was taken aback. I reminded myself that there was actually a dead guy over there, and I tried a tone of more respect. “Sheriff, I’m sure you can agree that we might have a helpful insight. Consider our history here. We’re practically professionals.”
Sheriff Jake snorted, and nodded at Tina. “She’s carrying a cat.”
“You know exactly why she’s carrying that cat,” I hissed, in a low tone. The gentlemanly Mr. Charm did look a bit bedraggled and stoic in the sideways rain, spilling over Tina’s arm, but it was still a low blow. I must have looked truly incensed, because he frowned and leaned in close.
“Summer,” he said, “this one’s different. This is a legitimate crime scene. We’ve got help.” He gave a significant glance toward the medical examiner. “Much as I appreciate what you’ve done in the past, I can’t let you jeopardize this investigation.”
“We’re not going to!” I said. “We’ve already got intel you can use!”
His eyebrows raised. “‘Intel’?” he said. “What is this, the ’90s?”
“I’ve seen your apartment. You tell me,” I snapped. “I’ll be happy to share what we’ve learned, if—”
“With all due respect,” the sheriff said, “unless your hairstyle’s a deliberate fashion choice I haven’t seen yet here in the Clinton Administration, you just rolled out of bed, Ms. Sassafras. Which means that unless you’ve started conducting investigations in your lucid dreams, you haven’t been awake since the man was
killed.”
“With all due respect,” I said. “While you spent the other day dragging the river for a dude who was faking his own funeral, with the help of a woman you thought you’ve known for decades…”
The sheriff scowled, but he didn’t interrupt.
“… Tina and I found out that this isn’t the first husband Lee Lannon’s lost.”
Now the sheriff scowled in earnest. “Explain.”
“Only if you—”
He glowered.
I decided to make a gesture of goodwill. I filled him in on everything that Rhonda’d told us, including the attack on the secretary and the police investigation.
When I finished, the sheriff said, “Hmm.”
“That’s it? Hmm?” I said. “What if she murdered her first husband?”
“You said there was an investigation,” he said. “If she’d murdered her husband, she wouldn’t be here.”
“Maybe,” I said. “How do you know who did that investigation? Maybe it was some joker from the state troopers.”
I have no idea why, but for some reason there is this ancient rivalry between the local sheriffs around here and the state troopers. At least, the one local sheriff I know. Maybe he’s always afraid they’re going to take his job… though I’m not even sure that’s how it works…
He harrumphed, but his eyes had an appreciative gleam. “I’m sure they did fine work,” he said. “But if I get a chance, I can take a quick look.”
“Awesome!” I said. “So what exactly happened here?”
The sheriff hesitated. To his credit, he looked a bit embarrassed. He glanced back at the group around the hill. Some were watching us, with expressions I couldn’t make out in the mist. The dour woman from Manassas was facing us with crossed arms.
“You really have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What?” I said. “Nothing? After what I just told you?”
He sighed. “Look, you can talk to Frannie,” he muttered. “She found the body. Between 11 and 11:30pm.”