Cloaked in Malice

by Annette Blair

  “She doesn’t believe you,” I said. She had plenty of good reasons not to. But Nick didn’t know all of that yet.

  He grabbed at the fence and shook it, while her newest scream became a whimper.

  “I had no idea how hard this would be for you, Paisley,” I said. “My apologies.”

  She almost laughed but her mirth was interrupted by a hiccup. “This isn’t half as scary as leaving, waiting for the boogeyman to jump out of the trees and drag me back.”

  “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “I didn’t feel safe outside the place. I was taught not to.”

  “And now?”

  “Almost safe.” She started running before Nick turned a corner and disappeared from sight. “As long as we keep up with your Nick.”

  “Keep him in our sights. Gotcha.”

  We found him taking out his blinking little stylus—it had red, yellow, and green lights—and he intended to use it to unlock the house’s side door.

  Paisley chuckled, moved a ceramic toad the size ofa basketball, and handed him the key she’d left be-neath it.

  He unholstered his gun, cocked, and pointed it, before he used the key. “Stay behind me.”

  “Seriously, Nick,” Paisley said. “There’s nobody here.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  She giggled, a great sound. “I had the run of this place. I know its every secret.”

  Nick barely turned to her. “Which you’ll show me.”

  “Absolutely,” she said, hugging herself though I got the feeling she was hugging her shirt, and I wondered if she’d sleep in it tonight.

  The door opened easily. Immediately to the right, we found a set of curved stairs going up.

  “Those are the back stairs; they lead to the second floor, then the stairs to the attic. I’ll show you both later.”

  To the left, several paces down that hall, a door opened to an odd room. An ancient stove stood to the right side, between windows with wood stored beneath them. An old stone fireplace took up the back wall, two high square doors beside it.

  A tan and brown metal table centered the room, carved oak high-back chairs surrounding it.

  “We called this the summer kitchen, though we used it year round. The square wooden door to the left of the fireplace opens to our well. We either hauled well water here or we got it from the tap in the real kitchen.

  “Pap always said the plumbing was new, but even I could tell it was ancient. Behind the square wooden door on the other side of the fireplace are shelves where we’d put the bread to rise in winter, warm as it stayed from the fire in the hearth.”

  I found the room charming.

  We passed the summer kitchen, and slightly farther on, Paisley opened the door to another set of curved stairs, these to the cellar, across the entry hall from the summer kitchen. The cellar stairs door frame met the main kitchen door frame, opening to a large, colorful, old-fashioned—or should I say new-fashioned—kitchen.

  Nick pointed down the curved stairs. “Is that where you got your money from those long metal boxes?”

  “It sure is,” Paisley said, her voice thready.

  “I’ll need to see that.”

  “You’re speaking for the Federal Bureau of Inves-tigation right now, aren’t you?” Paisley asked. “You can’t be my friend anymore under the circumstances, can you?”

  “Not at this moment, no, ma’am.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. I know you’re one of the good guys.”

  “I am, ma’am.”

  I nodded encouragingly at Paisley. “Hopefully this will lead us to finding out who you are and why you were incarcerated here.”

  “Incarcerated, really? Kewl.”

  She’d been here too long. I still saw flashes of the child in her. I suppose it wasn’t a bad thing that she was getting excited and less tense, while I was going in the opposite direction.

  When Nick stepped on the first stair downward, I nearly screamed.

  “Uh, Mad, your fingernails are cutting into my wrist,” Paisley said.

  I pulled my hand away fast. Good thing she’d rolled up Bepah’s sleeves. I had to be more careful with her. I kept wanting to hug her. “Sorry. Guess you don’t need me to hold your hand.”

  “No, but I’d be glad to hold yours.”

  “No, thanks.” I wanted to grab her like a lifeline.

  “It’s a root cellar,” she whispered as we reached the bottom of the stairs. And not because roots were growing inside between the big round foundation stones. Because of the dwindling bins of root vegetables—potatoes, carrots, turnips, and…I covered my nose. “What is that smell?”

  “Rotting beats. I could never eat as many as they did. Mam cooked them in everything. Pap used to eat them like candy when he worked in the garden. Pluck them from the dirt, rub ’em on his shirt, and crunch.”

  We shivered together.

  The cellar itself looked a bit like the home of a hoarder, unlike the pristine rooms I’d glimpsed upstairs.

  “Take a left,” Paisley told Nick, “then a right.”

  He stopped short and whistled. “Are those the metal boxes with the money in them?”

  “Yes, they are, and the money is all crisp and new and neatly stacked, every stack the same size, except for the one I ripped open.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Those ‘boxes,’” Nick said, “are military-issue metal caskets.”

  Fifteen

  Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  “Caskets that bodies would go in?” Paisley’s legs lost their bones, so Nick and I moved fast to catch her and keep her from falling. The floor looked worse than dusty.

  I shivered.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Now I need you to hold me up,” Paisley said. “I grew up with caskets in the basement. Coffin Farm, that’s what we should call this place. It’s always needed the right name.” For some reason, that made her laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

  “She’s hysterical,” Nick said. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to bring her back here.”

  “No, you don’t get it,” Paisley said between hiccups—which was how I knew that fear played a role in her mirth, “Mam and Pap are six feet under wrapped in feed sacks. Not even six feet.” She put a finger to her lips. “Shh. I got tired. They’re about four feet under.”

  More laughter. More hiccups.

  “I wonder what she’s like when she’s drunk,” Nick muttered.

  Suddenly Paisley straightened. “I’ve never taken a drop in my life.” She ran her hand over one of the metal boxes. “Good thing there are no more than two, and I know their contents. I do know their contents, right?” she asked, her voice going soft. “I only ever opened the one.”

  Nick nodded. “You want me to open them? Put your mind at rest?”

  “Please.” The squeak of her voice made me think of a mouse begging for a nibble, or to be put out of its misery.

  Paisley covered her eyes, and I quickly did the same, both of us now expecting to find bodies in them, so certain that we shuddered at the sound of them being opened.

  Do you know how noisy old metal caskets can get?

  “Tell us when we can look,” I said, fighting blindly with a cobweb, trying not to imagine its owner in my hair—shudder—and trying not to breathe in too much must and dust.

  Nick chuckled, probably watching me batting blind at sticky webs. “Oh, it’s money all right,” he said.

  When we looked, he was flipping through one of those neat green stacks that half the world would die for. “Serial numbers in sequential order. Old-issue U.S. currency. Maybe.”

  I grabbed his chin and turned his face our way. “Maybe?” I asked.

  “Well, this island is a good place for a counterfeit operation.”

  “Do you see a printing press?” I asked. “Paisley, did you grow up with a printing press? The odd green ink stain here and there?”
/>
  “No and no. I think. Not sure what a printing press looks like. Can hens lay eggs in it? Can it bale hay?”

  I shook my head. “I think not.”

  Nick shut the first casket. “Then the money’s probably real.”

  My heart felt lighter. “That’s good, right? It’s Paisley’s money.”

  “Not necessarily.” Nick shook his head. “Numerical order? Very bad. Straight from the U.S. Treasury, or acquired on route to the distribution center. Paisley, I’m pretty sure this money’s not yours. And if it’s hand-printed, it’s definitely not yours.”

  “Oh, scrap. Now I’m going to jail for stealing some of it, right? My whole life will come down to three months of freedom in small-town Connecticut.”

  Nick smiled, less a Fed than the friend at the moment. “You didn’t know what was happening, and we still need to find out why you were here. Let’s concentrate on that for now. The money’s been here how long?” He looked at Paisley.

  “All my life, as far as I know.”

  “Then it can wait another day or so.” Nick shut the second casket and turned to lead the way back upstairs. Before we went up, he took off his hiker’s backpack, searched it, and gave us each a pair of latex gloves “to slide on,” the word “slide” being a joke.

  “I want no fingerprints on anything else,” he said. “Bad enough I’ll have to explain my prints on the caskets and on the stack of money I examined.”

  Paisley hiccupped. “Mine will be on the small broken stack.” She twisted her body in the way of a child having a silent tantrum, or she was mentally slapping herself upside the head. “Dillweed and turnip greens, I’m a homeless pauper! After the Feds swarm this place, I won’t be able to live here, will I? Not that I’d want to, but it’s better than being homeless. Marginally.”

  Nick led us into the main kitchen, which smelled, oddly enough, of cinnamon and apples, a room with bright curtains and brighter ruffles, kaleidoscopic yet tasteful. A master’s blend of reds to yellows, the fabric’s colors turned the room magazine-cover homey and surpassed the era for decorator style.

  Even the tablecloth looked happy. I ran my hand over it and recognized its feed sack quality. One edge showed the holes where you could pull away the cord that held the sack together. Doing so would open it to a large square of usable fabric. Mostly feed sacks were made of two different prints, but if you were lucky, both halves would be the same and you could make something larger.

  I’d studied Depression Era feed sack wear in fashion school, and its obvious place in the history of textiles. Its weave was nubby and not tightly spaced, which gave away its origins, but it did the job—for low quality clothing and housewares—and the prints were varied and sometimes superb.

  A cooking fireplace dominated this kitchen, its hanging pots and hooks exposed, a double bake oven to one side, as well as a “modern” six-burner woodstove across the room. Though newer than the four-burner black wrought iron woodstove in the summer kitchen, both had gone out of fashion a long, long time ago.

  “Cheer up, Paisley,” Nick said, “The government might let you live in the shack when my team is finished dusting it for fingerprints.”

  “Don’t knock it. I had great times with my grandfather there.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “You remember your grandfather?”

  “I remember him trying to make me a set of play clothes there, by hand. He cut his belt into thin strips to make leather binding, which he wove around the outside edges of cloth, raw and outdoorsy. I loved the jeans he made me from his own and small crooked blousy tops that made me feel girlie. He made me a warm coat from a gray woolen blanket, too. I loved that coat.”

  “You don’t still have it, do you?” I sounded like I hoped not, knowing it could be dangerous to whine about vintage when I loved it so much. If I wasn’t careful, I’d confess to the psychic gift Paisley already suspected.

  Nick raised both brows my way, his concern visible, and Paisley caught him at it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I figured her out, though she denies it. Maddie went bonkers after I shoved that cloak into her arms. You might not realize yet, Agent Jaconetti, but I know how to keep a secret. As I told Maddie, I think that shutting up has been burned into my DNA. Like with a branding iron.”

  Sixteen

  Home is a place not only of strong affection…it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind…cast-off and everyday clothing.

  —HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

  “Paisley,” Nick said, “you weren’t so much branded as you were brainwashed by professionals.” The somber statement, and its repercussions, rattled me as much as they did Paisley.

  She bit her lip and frowned. “Probably happened somewhere between the shack and here. Because I remember being there. But I only remember finding myself here.”

  Nick made a note of that.

  “That’s quite the handy bit of perception,” I said. “How old were you when you found yourself here?”

  “About twelve,” she said.

  “Yep,” Nick muttered. “Brainwashed.”

  “That sounds awful,” I said.

  Paisley snorted inelegantly. “Try living it.”

  “It’s not much different from PAS,” Nick said. “Parental alienation syndrome,” like in a nasty divorce where they use the kids as pawns, but in this case, Paisley ended up believing that her past never happened.”

  “How?” we asked, Paisley and I.

  “If and when she referred to her past, she would have been distracted, or told she was mistaken, maybe punished for mentioning it, belittled, anything to get her to stop thinking about it. She would have been taught over and over again that she would be safe only here. Brainwashing goes on all the time in the real world, especially to children in dysfunctional families.”

  “Are there any functional families, really?” I asked. “Or are they part of the same myth that created Santa Claus?”

  Nick chuckled as he opened a wood bin, a bread box, and rummaged through the cupboard beneath the sink.

  “Seriously, though, brainwashing is awful,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “And it scars the child.”

  Paisley frowned. “How scarred am I, do you think?”

  Nick bit the inside of his lip, but I noted his eye twinkle as he turned away so Paisley wouldn’t be insulted by his amusement.

  I huffed, miffed at Nick. “Your lack of memories, Paisley, for one thing, right, Nick?”

  He nodded as he checked cupboards and kitchen drawers, but he didn’t look back at us.

  “I gotta get my memories back,” Paisley said to herself. “This place is old-fashioned, isn’t it? Way different from the Carriage House Bed-and-Breakfast, where I’ve been staying. I like it better there.”

  “Get a load of the old linoleum in here,” I said, “gray with yellow and red confetti. It matches that creepy clown cookie jar with the red and yellow trim.”

  “I hate it,” Paisley said. “Those royal blue eyes follow you around the room.”

  I didn’t want to know that, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings again. “Ugh! Melmac dishes. Orange, gray, lime, and dark green in the same set. I thought they were hideous in my grandmother’s cupboard; I think they’re hideous now. And for me, things usually get more beautiful with age; I mean I get to appreciate the history in their raison d’être, but this particular set of Melmac? Double barf.”

  Paisley shrugged and went to the room off the kitchen, in the back left corner of the downstairs, probably once a borning room. Living in Connecticut most of my life I was familiar with these rooms common in old houses and once used for births, illnesses, and deaths. “This was my playroom. See my toys.”

  “Who made them?” I asked.

  Her face flamed. “I made them when I was small.”

  I tried to apologize, but she shrugged me off and left the room.

  “Don’t belittle
her childhood,” Nick warned.

  “I thought Mam should have made her a nicer doll with a nicer dress, that’s all, but I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I get it; she may not like her past, but nobody else had better say how awful it was.”

  I’d been there. When I was ten, people couldn’t hide the pity in their eyes when they called me “little mother” as I herded and coddled my three motherless siblings. I hated it.

  “This was Pap’s room,” Paisley said. “First line of defense,” she added, as if daring me to make a crack about the room fronting the house.

  “First line of defense?” I asked.

  She traced a butterfly on a bureau scarf. “That’s what he always said.”

  The round-edged, blonde furniture made of diagonally opposing veneer strips with inlaid bands were forties pieces. Blue tufts dotted the light green chenille bed, and on the wall, a crucifix under a curved glass cover on a cloudy blue background sat in a gold frame.

  It made me think of a stage. Every room. And yet Paisley had lived here.

  “Where did your Mam sleep?”

  “Upstairs, across from me, but she moved down here after Pap died. Upstairs, that’s the sewing room now.”

  We left the front bedroom via the hall, passed the front door at the stairs, to get to the living room, opposite. This, too, like the kitchen and the big bedroom, had a fireplace. But this room also had a piano.

  “Who played the piano?” I asked.

  “Mam and Pap,” Paisley said, which seemed normal to her and odd to me.

  Central chimney, three main rooms, upstairs and down, not to mention the borning room and its upstairs counterpart. Add a basement, attic, summer kitchen, two bathrooms, and a well house. If not isolated, and surrounded by an electric fence, this would have been a great place for a child to grow up…with her real parents. In the real world.

  “Here, at the top of the stairs,” Paisley said, “is the padlocked closet I broke into.”

  I followed her up with trepidation. Panic rose in me and I didn’t know why. If I’d been her, carrying a big old pair of metal cutters to open a forbidden room, after just burying my supposed mother, I might have wet myself.