Cloaked in Malice

by Annette Blair

  “So call it in.”

  “I don’t want to hurt Paisley by turning this into a crime scene, but there’s no way around it. Thankfully, only the three of us know the sad details of her past, and nothing we know so far is illegal.”

  “About Paisley,” I qualified.

  “About Paisley,” he agreed, checking his phone. “Great, it’s dead. Yours?

  I checked. Nothing. “Mine too.”

  Never mind. We’ll use the marine radio when we get back to the boat.”

  Paisley showed us Mam’s and Pap’s graves, and Spotsylvania’s as well, while in the field beyond them, a turkey buzzard sat on a scarecrow’s head.

  “Your scarecrow is dressed like a clown,” I observed. “So out of sync with your lifestyle.”

  Paisley got the hiccups. “I know, but Pap loved clowns.”

  “Did you see many out here?”

  “None, but Bepah used to paint them, too.”

  “Like he painted your grandmother’s Oleg Cassini wedding gown?”

  “Can you show us his paintings?”

  “I wasn’t allowed to believe in my Bepah—you’re right,” she said, her gaze snapping up to Nick’s, shocked speechless for a minute. “I was brainwashed.”

  She crossed her arms, hugging that old blue plaid shirt, took three steps away, and came back. “One day, after drawing pictures of a gown, I asked Mam if she were a painter, what would she like us to do with her paintings after she died.”

  Paisley licked her lips. “Mam looked at me for a long, uncomfortable time, then she said if she painted, we should bury her paintings with her. I was satisfied with that answer then. But now, now, for the first time, I take that to mean they buried my grandfather’s paintings with him.”

  “You remembered more than you let on, and Mam suspected it,” I said. “She even warned you away, with that long look, from letting it go any further than her.”

  “I hate this place.” Paisley walked over to the clown scarecrow and kicked it over. “Even when I asked the question, I didn’t understand the point of it.”

  I couldn’t look at Nick. We hadn’t talked exhumation, however necessary. But those paintings might help. Change of thought. “Paisley? Where are all the slaughtered animals?”

  “In freezers in the barn.”

  I looked at Nick. “Had freezers been invented when this place was built? I mean, given its Depression shingles and well house?”

  He slipped his hands into his pockets and gave an attempted innocent shrug that came off as a gun being cocked, metaphorically speaking.

  I let the obvious answer go. “I am not opening any freezers,” I vowed.

  Nick winked. “Why, what are you afraid of?”

  “I think you know.”

  “What’s a dead body or three?”

  Paisley laughed like he told a joke. “Oh,” she said, “speaking of cemeteries”—which we weren’t—“you have to see this. They used to tell me not to go back here. They said I might fall in an old well, but after they died, I did a lot of things they said not to. It’s soooo spooky.”

  I started to follow. “Like the rest of this place isn’t spooky?” I stopped dead.

  Nick chuckled and kept going.

  When the turkey buzzard made a gagging sound, I realized that a spooky cemetery had more to offer than buzzard sick.

  At first I thought Nick and Paisley were looking at a big old tree with a lot of grass around it, but it was fenced in, and the grass grew only inside the fence, like it had been ordered not to cross the fence.

  I saw a badly spelled sign planted in front of the tree centering the circular graveyard: Man’s Best “Frend”, in black paint within the design of a red and white polka-dot doggie bone. The gnarled roots of that old tree told a morbid story, and frankly, I could empathize with the sick sound that buzzard made.

  Paisley tilted her head, as if her childlike self was arguing with her adult common sense, and neither won. “Did you ever see headstones growing into a tree before?” she asked. “Kinda funny, huh? Not to mention those old dogs’ names.”

  I examined a bounty of headstones, some leaning, some bowing, all looking as if they were being strangled and uplifted by the tree’s gnarled roots, the gravestones’ corners or bottoms embedded in the natural curvatures of the wood.

  I was instantly worried that the rough, engraved names, one on each stone, though simple, spoke nothing of a man’s canine friends but of an honest man’s natural enemy, the kind of greedy, heartless creature that commanded power and struck fear in the prudent: “Scar, Tuna, Smoots, Teets, and Momo.”

  Twenty

  People used to complain to me all the time, “I can’t even hear you sing because your clothes are so loud.”

  —CYNDI LAUPER

  I was leaning toward the fact that even though Pap couldn’t spell “friend,” he could have spelled “mob” if not “Mafia” or plain old “hit men.”

  “What silly fake names,” Paisley said on a chuckle. “They’re worse than mine and they’ve always made me laugh.”

  “I thought you never went here until after your Mam died?” I asked.

  “Okay, so I disobeyed her every chance I got, so sue me. It wasn’t much fun growing up here, ya’ know?”

  I felt like an idiot, especially when Nick gave me a warning look. “Paisley, these names are neither fake nor anything to laugh about,” Nick said, checking his phone again, without success. Then he did a slow three-sixty, his gaze fixed on distant points, up into trees, across the farmyard, down toward the meadow, and beyond the electric fence.

  He scanned the area so intently, he made me wonder if he might not be wearing some kind of secret long-range contacts that only the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security knew about. I mean like teeny built-in spyglass or binocular contacts.

  Okay, so I had a dangerous imagination, but this place fired it like nothing in my previous life experience.

  Without warning, Nick sprinted to the open fence, closed it, located a keypad behind a fairy door in a tree stump, of all the weird things, and reversed whatever he’d done with the stylus to get us in, thereby locking us in.

  “I’m not sure I like this,” I said, standing beside Paisley, a goodly distance away from Nick.

  “Why?” Paisley kicked a rock. “I lived to talk about it. Even to come back to it.”

  Yeah, and how stupid are you for coming when you knew what this was like, and how stupid are we for following you here?

  “The fence is electrified again,” Nick said when I met him halfway, leaving Paisley in my dust.

  “I pretty much figured.”

  “You really think those dead dogs are mobsters?” I asked him.

  “They’ll need to be exhumed,” he said, his back straighter than it had been. “We need to leave as soon as possible,” he suggested. “After we check the freezers.”

  I shivered despite the August sun.

  “Wait,” Paisley said, reaching us, her chin coming up. “Your voices carry. You don’t think those are dogs in the cemetery. How can that be? I never heard or saw anyone here, except Mam and Pap.”

  Nick tried his iPhone again. “You must be a heavy sleeper,” he said, distracted as he tried walking around and holding up his phone, a regular cliché of a com-mercial.

  “I used to be a heavy sleeper, but since Mam died, I can’t sleep for anything. The night she died, I had the creeping shakes all night. I was sick, too, but the night sickness has gotten less severe over time.”

  Nick and I looked at each other, communicating the obvious without words.

  “They gave you something to make you sleep,” Nick said, stepping into the barn, where we found more glistening stainless-steel Sub-Zero freezers than the appliance section of Sears. State of the art, I might add.

  “Were these here when you lived here?” I asked Paisley.

  “Yep, they just showed up one d—”

  Nick eyed her. “You’ll need to have a checkup back in Mystic, to be sure t
hey didn’t use substance controls beyond a sleep aid.”

  Paisley hiccupped and shivered, despite the sun, sea breezes, and her grandfather’s blue plaid flannel shirt “I’ll get checked out for my own sake and for your investigation,” she said, “because that’s what this is now, right? I mean. Six dead whatevers, or whoevers, with stupid names.”

  Stupid names. I had to agree with her. “You don’t remember having pets with those names, do you?”

  “No, but I don’t remember much of anything before the shack, and after, for a while. Maybe Smoots and company were pets who died before I got here?”

  “The dog, you do remember, was Spotsylvania. Bit too many syllables, don’t you think?”

  Paisley closed her eyes and released a slow sigh before she opened them and gave us a blank look that spoke volumes. What could she say?

  “Right,” Nick said. “If each of you would grab a freezer door, open it, and stand behind it, I’ll check the contents. You can do it together if you want, and I’ll tell you when to shut them.”

  In one way, I didn’t like not being in the know; in another, I appreciated Nick’s silence as he examined the contents of the freezers that Paisley and I revealed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Close those doors and open the next two.”

  Paisley, like me, looked only too happy to stay behind the doors.

  Nick took quiet notes, bless him, poker face in place, though I thought his lips held too firm a line for comfort.

  When we’d finished, he thanked us but said nothing more.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I said when we met him in the barn doorway.

  “Then don’t. The less anyone knows, the better.”

  “But Madeira knows more than anybody,” Paisley said, “because I’d swear she got something from the clothes.”

  “Sorry if I don’t believe that kind of thing,” Nick said. “I’m a doubting Thomas where psychics are concerned. And even if it were true, which is impossible,” he added, “a psychic reading is usually skewed toward the reader’s limited knowledge. Telling the authorities about what someone may, or may not, know psychic-wise would probably get you and her a psychiatric evaluation, if not a long-term stay on a psych ward.”

  “He’s saying, Paisley, that psychics are widely doubted, and plenty of psychiatrists believe they’re disturbed.”

  Okay, so we were trying to cast doubt on my abilities. Since I had my doubts about Paisley herself, on and off, I figured that was best.

  “Nick,” she said, “I’m going to trust you to tell me what I can and can’t answer, once the investigation gets going.”

  “Me and/or a lawyer,” he said. “Depending on the circumstances. Now, let’s get the devil out of here.”

  Paisley didn’t move, so we stopped and looked back at her.

  “Don’t you want to take a look at the files while you’re here?”

  Nick turned to face her. “Files?”

  She led us deeper into the barn through a door behind the freezers that led to what Nick and I knew to be a safe room, though it was much bigger than the one in Nick’s basement, where I had temporarily kept my shop’s furs in air-conditioned cold storage.

  “This sort-of portable room just showed up one day, and I asked about it, but they were good, Mam and Pap, about changing the subject, so I never did find out how we got it.” Paisley used a keypad beneath a floorboard and the door opened, but she was the one who gasped. “Computers! A laptop and a desktop. They’re new, too, but then it’s been a year or more since I’ve been in here.”

  “They’re on,” Nick said.

  “And they’re reasonably new,” I said. “They have cameras on them.”

  “The better to be seen,” Nick said, his thumb to his chin, his mind miles away, and then he “saw” us again. “Paisley, what did you expect to find in here?” he asked. “If not computers?”

  “The area where this portable room stands used to be full of banged up old file cabinets, dingy olive green, with an ancient desk in the corner and shelves of dusty agricultural books. No computer tables or computers; that’s for sure. So when this room showed up, I figured everything from that room got moved in here.”

  “Did you ever look in the file cabinets?” Nick asked.”

  “Of course I did. We kept important stuff in them. Don’t laugh. They had pig drawers.” She stifled a giggle. “Horse drawers. One for Rhode Island Reds. There were accounting books, of course. I never opened them. Each kind of animal had several drawers, detailing their health, sicknesses, cures, breeding, parentage, and, unfortunately, butchering, storing, and recipes for good eating. There were drawers for farming methods, specific crops, good crop years, bad crop years, and why, that kind of thing.”

  Nick made another note. “There’s the state-of-the-art generator I knew must be hiding on the property somewhere,” he said.

  “We should bring Eve back with us to look at the computers,” I suggested.

  “That’s against the law.” Nick urged us out of the safe room. “Hacking into a computer would get us into so very much trouble. I mean—wacky theory, but suppose this farm belongs to the good guys?”

  “Oh,” Paisley said, showing genuine relief. “Being one of the good guys would make me feel so much better about my growing-up years.”

  “It really is time for us to leave now,” Nick said. “And for me to get to a place where my phone works so I can call in reinforcements.”

  “Wait,” Paisley said. “I want my grandmother’s dress. Bepah loved it and so do I.” She ran inside alone, which gave me palpitations.

  “Is she not disturbing a crime scene?”

  “One, we don’t know it’s a crime scene. Two, she might as easily have packed it and taken it the first time,” Nick said. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  Paisley emerged a few minutes later with the leather garment bag folded up and buckled like a handbag. “Ready,” she said.

  For all we knew, she could have a weapon in there. I saw the suspicion in Nick’s gaze and he took his gun from his holster once more.

  As we headed for the electric fence, I turned to Paisley. “How did you escape, since the electric fence was still live when we got here today?”

  She pointed to the center of the fence. “See that tree?”

  I gasped. “You went out on a limb, literally, knowing that you could fall on an electric fence?”

  “Desperate is desperate,” she said, “and get this, by the time I got to the end of the limb, my weight allowed it to gently lower me to the ground, until it hit the fence, caught a zap, split where it sizzled, and broke. But I only fell a foot or so.”

  “I call that extreme anxiety coupled with a high level of stupid hope,” Nick said, “and enough luck and ingenuity, if turned into energy, to light up New York City.”

  Paisley moved her gaze from Nick to me, her brow raised in question. “Have I been praised or insulted?”

  “Both,” he said.

  She raised her chin. “See, I’m not so dumb after all.”

  “I never said you were.”

  We made our swift way back to the shack—Nick wouldn’t let us dally, and when we got there, he did that three-sixty look around again, focused like a cobra, ready to strike. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he told Paisley.

  She surprised us when she took a pillowcase and filled it with almost every trinket she could find, including the small casket carrying the gold half-heart necklace, a silver candlestick, a poppet—a dry grass doll—which she fetched from beneath a mattress along with the most tattered copy of Swiss Family Robinson I’d ever seen. It wasn’t that much really, and it fit inside the garment bag’s front pocket.

  I looked at Nick, again, but he shrugged. “Mementos,” he said. “She could have taken others and we’d never know.”

  “Okaaay. So you can square that with the Feds?”

  “If they ask for a time line, I won’t lie, but I won’t offer one if I don’t have to.”

&nb
sp; “I’m ready,” Paisley said, carrying the garment bag—she’d put her own purse inside as well—and taking her cue to move from Nick, who’d been pacing, stopping to listen, and getting the two of us all antsy.

  He led us to the boat, practically at a run, but when we got to the dock—no boat.

  Nick went to where he’d tied the rope. “I thought I tied it well enough.”

  But then he lifted a piece of rope to show us. “It’s been cut.”

  Twenty-one

  Grunge [fashion] is synonymous with the condition of youth and stands for fear of the future…a feeling of helplessness.

  —GERDA BUXBAUM

  Somebody had been to the island today, while we were here, and they didn’t want us to leave. Alive?

  My heart started running the Boston Marathon without me.

  How would we get home, under the sticky circumstances? It seemed that we had two choices: swim back or scream. Neither would allow for dignity, and if we ran across another waterspout, the attempt could kill us.

  Poor Paisley. She’d already fought to leave this island once, and she had not wanted to come back, but we talked her into it.

  It wasn’t a matter of hating to hear Paisley say, I told you so. It was a matter of keeping her from feeling the raw nerves that would come with the more frightening conclusions of our situation.

  Only one choice left, then—be myself. “It would appear,” I said, trying to hide panic with sass, “that somewhere in Fishers Island Sound, some nasty, motley boat crew might as well be wearing an assortment of vintage selections from Vivian Westwood’s Pirates Collection.”

  “It would, indeed, appear,” Nick agreed, going with my fake easy attitude. “And one can only hope that they are,” he added, “because appropriately dressed as pirates, they would be easier to recognize and arrest.”

  And that would be if someone were inclined to look for us, which they wouldn’t be, because nobody knew we were here.