Blood Will Tell

by Mary Bowers

  He stood up to accompany me to the door, then stopped. “You and Michael are a team, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. He’s a big help with the shelter. I don’t know what I ever did without him.”

  “Another facet of love. Willa probably isn’t interested in paranormal research.”

  “You never know until you ask. So are we friends again?”

  “Of course. I know you well enough to accept you with all your stray thoughts, silly ideas and eccentricities.”

  I soft-punched his arm. “Right back at you, Ed.”

  * * * * *

  I left Ed’s house feeling pretty good. Then I saw Harriet.

  She was standing at the other end of Santorini Drive, somewhere between Frieda’s mansion and Willa’s house, and she was looking up into the face of what from this distance looked like a distinguished gentleman. By the way he posed his body, without moving a muscle, I could tell he had graceful manners. He was well-built, in a sort of rawboned, broad-shouldered way, and as he looked down the nine or ten-inch difference in their heights, he seemed to hover over Harriet in a scholarly way. I think it was in the way he was tilting his head as he listened. They seemed intent on one another, and I began to glide toward my SUV, hoping they wouldn’t notice me.

  Fat chance.

  “Is that you?” she bellowed, looking my way suddenly.

  I pulled up guiltily. Then I turned to my new customer and unfolded a bit. I gave a cheery wave, hoping that would be enough, but she summoned me.

  Telling myself this would be a good time to get my hands on her check before we incurred any costs for the dinner, I walked down the street and joined them.

  I looked at the man expectantly and he introduced himself as Christopher Stanley. “Call me Kip,” he said.

  “I’m Taylor Verone,” I said, shaking his hand. “Call me Taylor. Ed mentioned you, when you bought the Brinker house. He says you’re quite an expert in early legends. I was in that house when the Brinkers were still living there; it’s a lovely house. Are you enjoying it?”

  He really was an attractive man. Not handsome, exactly. His jaw was a little too prominent, and his complexion a bit too weather-beaten, but any woman would have noticed him. The shape of his nose was really good: straight and strong, and that can really make a man’s face. He had a full head of longish, wavy auburn hair that was blowing romantically in the ocean breeze. Patches of gray at his temples were probably what had made him look distinguished from a distance. His eyes were as clear and blue as cool water, and he had a way of looking at you as if you were being very interesting indeed. And pleasing.

  Harriet’s voice cracked into the space between us like a pry bar.

  “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you busy arranging my Mystery Dinner? I thought you said it would be difficult to work it into your schedule. I’m certainly paying you enough.”

  “I am working on the Mystery Dinner,” I said. “This would be as good a time as any for the check, by the way. There are costs involved, and we like to get payment in advance.” She stood firm and said nothing. Well, I hadn’t expected her to scurry off to get her checkbook instantly, but I wasn’t going to leave without that check.

  “And just how are you working on the dinner while you’re here visiting your friend Ed?”

  “I can’t bring in my usual volunteers on a Wednesday night; some of them work in restaurants, and they have evening shifts. I needed to recruit Ed to do my part of things so I can be freed up to work in the kitchen.”

  She stared at me. “Are you going to be the cook? Can you cook? We can’t have just anybody preparing the food. I have a very sensitive palate, and I am allergic to certain varieties of cheese.”

  Trixie had said something about nuts, but I managed to keep my mouth shut, which was easy because Harriet was on a roll.

  “There needs to be a professional in the kitchen, monitoring the ingredients of every dish that comes to the table. Naturally, coming from a prominent family, I’m used to rather sophisticated fare, and I don’t suppose I can hold you to those standards, but I will be paying you enough, and I expect quality.”

  “Don’t worry. We have an excellent chef. We’ve already checked with him, and he is making himself available, even though he has a restaurant of his own. He’ll be contacting you to go over the menu, but thanks for mentioning the food allergy. I’ll make sure he knows about it, and you should mention it too. We’re always careful about things like that.”

  “Would this be the interesting concept dinner Harriet was just inviting me to?” Kip asked.

  I explained the Mystery Dinners to him, and he seemed to find the whole idea not just fascinating, but gripping. Thrilling.

  “What a shame,” he said in a courtly way, “that we will be deprived of your storytelling talents. I should have looked forward to that.”

  He was gazing intently into my (no-doubt glistening) green eyes when he was distracted by something behind me.

  “Ah, Trixie,” he said, and I was happy to pick up a note of disappointment in his voice.

  When I first picked up Ed’s typescript of The Santorini Horror, I had wondered for a moment if it was about Trixie Dare. She had become the thing he watched out for before ever leaving his front door. You know, the neighbor you don’t want to see when you’re going out for the mail? The way Ed told it, if Trixie saw him she’d come right up and start rubbing herself against him, but I’d have to see it to believe it. She was warm and friendly and her voice was thick like honey, just dripping with drawl, but she wasn’t touchy-feely from what I’d seen. She probably just laid an affectionate hand on Ed’s arm from time to time, and to him that amounted to full-body contact.

  I turned just as she was shouting, “Did you guys hear the news? Ed’s thinking of getting married. We have to talk him out of it, quick! Can you imagine? He’d roll over in the morning, see a woman lying there and scream his head off.”

  I heard a startled gasp above us and looked up to see Willa Garden standing on her balcony, looking down at us and listening.

  Behind me, Kip’s pleasant baritone said, “To whom?”

  Trixie just pointed up.

  I couldn’t even look.

  * * * * *

  “She knows,” I texted to Ed, using the pretext that I needed to let Michael know I was going to be later than I’d told him. “Get out here.”

  “Seriously, Willa,” Trixie was calling up to the balcony as if she hadn’t just monumentally faux-pas’d, “I really mean it. I was beginning to think the man didn’t have it in him, but he sure is acting like a fool in love. You gonna marry him? For real? If you’re even thinking of it, we gotta talk, girl.”

  “What’s going on?” asked yet another woman’s voice. I had turned my back to the group to send my text, and when I looked up, a small, slim, dark woman in her sixties was coming out of the house next to Kip’s.

  As graciously as if bombs weren’t being thrown around, Kip introduced her to me.

  “Taylor, this is my friend and neighbor, Linda Small. Linda, this is the woman we’ve all heard about, who runs the animal shelter on the outskirts of Tropical Breeze, Ms. Taylor Verone.”

  She came forward and shook my hand, and I gave her a smile, all the while looking for Ed and trying to be subtle about it.

  “Don’t make any plans for next Wednesday night,” Harriet told her. “I’m having a little soiree at an old shooting lodge I once visited as a girl. We’ll be given a tour the house. It should be interesting. The entire neighborhood will attend.”

  “It’s not a shooting lodge anymore, and it hasn’t been since the original owner sold the place to the Cadburys,” I said. “I never heard anything about Waffles going hunting.”

  “’Waffles?’” Linda said. She was ignored.

  “Well, it’s certainly not the sort of estate one would have expected of a Cadbury,” Harriet said broadly. “At least we Strawbridges know how to build a decent home.” She gazed up at Frieda’s ersatz-Greek monstr
osity with proprietary eyes.

  “I won’t be there,” said yet another voice, which turned out to be Dan’s.

  “Why not?” Harriet demanded, staring at him hotly as he strode up to us.

  “Security risk. We can’t have all the houses empty at the same time. I’ll stay here and keep a neighborhood watch. You guys go and enjoy yourselves.”

  He went right on past us without breaking stride and made for the beach. Clever man, I thought. He’d rather be run over by a tank than go to a “soiree.” From most people it wouldn’t have been the most convincing excuse in the world, but from him it was very believable.

  “I can’t make it either,” Linda said before she could be drowned out again. She actually raised her hand while she said it. “I signed up for a wine-and-painting class that night, and it’s already paid for. Besides, I want to go to it. You guys have fun, but I’m going painting.”

  I was beginning to think it was a good thing I’d come to Santorini that day. The Mystery Dinner seemed to be falling apart.

  “Oh, Linda, it wouldn’t be the same without you,” Kip said. “I tell you what. I know the teacher; I took his last class. I’ll get in touch with him and see if he won’t let you attend the next one instead, and I’ll come with you to that one.”

  She looked at him and hesitated. “You will?”

  “I will,” he declared, making it a vow.

  “Well, in that case . . . .”

  “What’s going on here?” a man asked testily.

  Harriet turned briskly and said, “Go back into the house, Sherman. It’s nothing.”

  A haggard-looking, white-haired man, otherwise similar to Kip but looking like he’d just gotten up from a feverish nap, gave Harriet a hard look, took a cursory glance at the rest of us, turned around and went back inside Frieda’s mansion.

  “My house guest,” Harriet said. “He’s been down with a headache today. Jet lag. He flew in from Madrid yesterday. He’s the one who’ll make it nine.”

  “Eight now,” I pointed out. “Dan’s not coming.”

  “Oh, he’ll come,” Harriet said grimly.

  “Is Sherman a good friend?” Kip asked politely.

  “He runs my family’s foundation. I’ve known him for years.”

  “How nice he’s come to visit you.”

  I was still looking for Ed, but not only was he not coming out, Willa was.

  She came drifting toward us in a plain-jane tee shirt and cotton capris, with $10 flip flops on her feet, and said, “What on earth is going on out here? What was that you were saying about Ed?”

  Everyone in the damn neighborhood seemed to be present and accounted for except for Ed. I even saw the plantation shutters go open and shut at the rental house where the nervous guy was staying, and you almost never saw signs of life over there. I’d never even seen the man, myself. Ed told me about him, and said he was a mental patient or something.

  I decided violence was called for. I stared Trixie down as I took Willa forcefully by the arm and steered her toward Ed’s house.

  “Nice meeting you, Kip,” I called over my shoulder.

  “The pleasure was mine, Taylor,” he replied. I could just hear him grinning.

  “Y’all believe that?” Trixie said as I tried to get out of hearing range. “She just about knocked that poor woman right down.”

  Willa surprised me by murmuring, “And not a moment too soon,” against my ear. Then she sighed and shook her head. “Ed really is a sweetheart, but why does he have to be so . . . so –”

  “So Ed?” I said.

  “Exactly. I know Trixie must have misunderstood him, but just what was that all about?”

  By that time we were walking up the path to Ed’s door. “I think I’m going to let him tell you himself.”

  He had seen us from his office window, of course. With perfect timing, he opened the front door, invited Willa in, ignored me completely and shut the door in my face.

  In a way, it was a relief. I had been perfectly willing to try to help those two amateurs figure out what they were feeling and what they wanted to do about it, but from the dawn of time inexperienced lovers had been fumbling around trying to get it right without causing themselves too much damage, so I figured they could too. At their ages, even if they were suddenly gripped by overwhelming desire, no one would be scandalized. And only Trixie would be disappointed.

  I sent up a quick prayer for them and got into my car before anything else could happen.

  Chapter 8

  It wasn’t until I was all the way back to Cadbury House that I remembered I’d forgotten to pry a check out of Harriet, so by the time I got into the house, I was in kind of a bad mood. The sight of Michael, working intently on the banquet table, somehow managing not to look small in front of the gigantic fieldstone fireplace, brought me back into my own wonderful world, and I relaxed a little.

  He looked up and smiled. “How’s Ed?”

  I sat down beside him and leaned on his shoulder for a moment. He had shaved that morning (he didn’t always bother if he wasn’t going out), and his skin was nice and smooth. He smelled good. I let my cheek slide over his before I gave him a little kiss and leaned back in my chair. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how tired and headachy my visit to Santorini had made me.

  “I think he’s in love,” I said. “Or whatever passes for love in his world.”

  “I always figured if he ever fell in love, it would be with a ghost,” he said, sitting back and putting his pen down. He rubbed his eyes, and when he took his hands away, they looked a little red. The blue of his irises looked iridescent.

  “Willa just about is,” I said ruefully. “She’s a nice lady, but she doesn’t exactly sizzle and pop. That might just make her perfect for Ed, come to think of it. Juicy ladies like Trixie just seem to terrify him. But I’m not sure this is the real deal, Michael. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say he loved her. He said he wanted to be her knight in shining armor.”

  “That sounds more like Ed,” he said, nodding. Michael was nice and trim, fit without being bulgy, and very tan from golfing three days a week. His once-brown hair was now completely white, very short and very thick.

  “But does it sound like love?” I asked idly, looking across the table. “What does the goddess think?”

  “Bastet?” He reached out to stroke the cat; she was on the table, curled up neatly and watching us. He reached for her, and she allowed him to lift her and cradle her in his arms. “Bastet seems to think the whole Mystery Dinner is a bad idea. She’s been trying to distract me from getting things organized, and when I called Lorenzo, she kept trying to bat the pen out of my hand. Have a look at my notes.”

  Michael has very neat handwriting, for a lawyer. Around his precise notes, there were a few skips and jumps in the ink.

  I gazed into her bored green eyes and said, “You’d better behave yourself, or I’ll have to lock you up in The Cattery while we serve all of Santorini.”

  Bastet is a beautiful animal, as graceful as a work of Egyptian art, and somehow, as exotic. Many times, if we’re sure we have a tableful of true animal lovers, we let her roam around during the dinners, and sometimes we’ll bring in especially calm dogs from the kennel for them to pet.

  As I talked to the cat, she stared at me. The green of her eyes began to fill my vision, and I began to feel the kind of “read” that I sometimes get from her. A connection that, if I let it go on long enough, might turn into a voice in my head. I looked away.

  “By the way,” I said to Michael, “Harriet has a food allergy. She says cheese, Trixie says nuts, it could very well be both. She’s just the type to have a lot of fussy little problems, real or imagined, but we’d better have Grady talk to her about it.”

  “He always checks into things like that,” Michael said, still holding Bastet in the crook of his left arm as he picked up his pen with the other hand and made a note of it anyway.

  “What do you think we should serve? She’s
really overpaying, although I forgot to get a check from her while I was in Santorini.”

  “That’s not like you. What happened? Was Ed being a handful?”

  “Actually, during the messy part, Ed wasn’t even there. And he should have been.” I told him all about it, and of course, since he hadn’t been there, he thought it was funny.

  “Seriously, though, Michael, that was no way for Willa to find out he was thinking of proposing to her.”

  He nodded agreement, but sat there for a few moments, smiling to himself. “Call Ed after supper,” he said at last. “I want to know what went on between those two.”

  “He may not have it figured out by tonight.”

  He laughed, and then we got serious and went over his notes.

  “How about scallops for the appetizer?” he asked. “They’re expensive. She’ll feel like she’s getting her money’s worth.”

  “Sounds good. Unless she’s allergic to shellfish, too.”

  “And then filet steaks. They don’t take a lot of prep, and they can be served with a quick side of root vegetables. What?” He sat back and looked into my scowling face.

  “I suppose we need to go all out to impress her, since she’s paying the bill, and she is a Strawbridge, but I can’t help but think, ‘pearls before swine.’ She’s only going to criticize everything anyway, no matter how Grady outdoes himself.”

  “Everybody else will appreciate it,” he said, giving me a wink. He’s not a winker. It was cute. I cheered up and helped him decide on dessert. These were all just suggestions anyway; Grady would make the final decisions on the menu.

  * * * * *

  As I suspected, none of our regular volunteers were going to be able to make it except the one that really mattered: the chef. Grady’s wife had volunteered to be his prep chef, though, and that was a blessing. Grady Walczak was a culinary school graduate who owned a little bar-be-cue joint down the road. He could cook like Gordon Ramsey, but he looked like . . . a guy who owns a little bar-be-cue joint down the road. Kind of tall and kind of hefty and very much a good-ol’-boy, with a complexion that tended to redden easily, but not from anger. I’d never seen Grady angry. I said he could cook like Gordon Ramsey, not that he behaved like him. He had gingery-brown hair and eyes, and a look of perpetual contentment. And he did love to cook.