Charlene gasped. “And the secret society is ongoing!”
“It would seem so.” Dorothy braced her hands on the low, redwood fence.
A breeze slipped beneath the blanket, and I shivered. Professor Starke had used the symbol to call members to his performance at Pie Town. But why? Just to fill seats, as Dorothy had suggested?
I returned the flyer to my back pocket. “But Michael wasn’t in theater. What does he have to do with this?”
“He was a playwright. He wrote The Secret Society. He must have stayed involved.” Her eyes gleamed wickedly. “They used to meet on Sunday nights, in that cave in the cypress forest above Seal Cove.”
Oh, that wasn’t spooky. Not at all.
“In the haunted forest,” Charlene whispered, her face wreathed in a delighted smile.
I blanched. Uh-oh. Secret societies were a little too on the nose when it came to Charlene’s tastes.
“Wait here.” Dorothy went inside her house, the rear door shutting firmly behind her.
Charlene rubbed her hands together. “I knew it. I knew there were secret societies operating in San Nicholas!”
“It’s just a college society,” I said, uneasy.
“Those are the worst. The Skull and Bones at Yale, The Flat Hat Club, Seven Society . . . Who knows what occult shenanigans those societies got up to? It’s all about gaining power in the outside world. They sold their souls, most likely.”
“This sounds more like a bunch of actors goofing around.”
“And yet the symbol for this society is tied to murder.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “But I wouldn’t mind talking to any society members who were at the reading. Maybe they saw something we didn’t.”
“We’ve got to infiltrate their next meeting.” She rubbed her hands together. “Secret passwords and skullduggery!”
Dorothy emerged from the house with purple fabric draped over one arm. She handed us what turned out to be hooded satin robes. “This should help you get inside. I can’t, of course, tell you the passwords. But . . .” She raised a piece of paper to my eye level. “The passcode to get into the meeting, and the password when you meet fellow members.”
I read her brief notes and smothered a laugh. “Seriously?”
Dorothy walked to the firepit and tossed the paper into its flames. “Deadly serious.”
“Why are you helping us?” I called over the fence.
Her smile turned ironic. “Are you sure I am?”
Was I? I stepped backward. “Well, thanks,” I said, backing farther from the fence. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
“I’m not sorry,” Charlene grumbled as we returned to her Jeep. “She’s behaving suspiciously.”
I folded the lightweight robes on my lap. “Dorothy gave us an in to the next secret society meeting.”
Charlene started the car. “We should return later and poke through the ashes.”
I dialed Gordon and shook my head. “The police will want to do that.” At least, I hoped they would. And I hoped Dorothy didn’t tell Gordon about our planned secret society adventure on Sunday.
“Val.” Gordon’s voice crackled over the phone, and my body heated. “How are you?”
“I’m with Charlene.”
“Oh?” he asked, more cautiously.
“We were driving past Dorothy Hastings’s house and noticed smoke coming from her backyard.”
He gusted a breath, and in it, I could hear his disappointment. “So you checked it out.”
“It wasn’t a fire, at least not an out-of-control fire. She’s burning Professor Starke’s papers.”
He cursed. “How did she—? Thanks. Where are you now?”
“We’re . . .” I scanned the dark road. We sped along an unfamiliar residential street—a mix of contemporary and Victorian homes surrounded by windswept cypresses. Where were we? I bounced one heel on the floor pad. Not headed home, that was for sure. “We left Dorothy’s place. We’re driving.”
“All right. Stay out of trouble.” He hung up.
“What did he say?” Charlene asked.
“He was interested. And annoyed.” But I thought he was more irritated that Dorothy was burning potential evidence than that we’d been snooping. And that was a good thing. “Where are we going? To the White Lady?” I asked hopefully. I could use a drink to clean the smoke from my throat.
Smoke. I fiddled with the seatbelt and wondered for the forty-second time about the smoke bomb.
“No White Lady for you,” she said. “We’re going to Piotr’s house.”
“Professor Jezek?”
“Don’t tell me you object. You thought staking out Dorothy was a bad idea,” she chided. “Look how much we learned.”
“You are right,” I said, “and I was wrong.” We’d gotten lucky. But what were the odds we’d catch another college professor in a suspicious act? Still, it couldn’t hurt to give Professor Jezek’s house the eyeball. His house was near Starke’s, and I was curious.
Professor Jezek lived in a gloomy, Hansel-and-Gretel cottage on a hill overlooking the ocean. Or at least, it would have overlooked the Pacific, were it not for the foreboding Monterey cypresses behind it.
We stood beside the entrance to his steep driveway and tried to peer over his six-foot fence.
“Yep,” Charlene said. “That ocean view is blocked.”
I consulted the map on my phone. “It looks like Starke lived right beneath him. Want to take a walk?”
We crept down the narrow, winding road. Five minutes later, we stood in front of an elegant Spanish-style home with a red-tile roof. Turning our backs on it, we crossed the road to a rope fence and peered over the cliff. The ocean crashed beneath us. In the darkness, we could make out lines of white foam. I wriggled my shoulders beneath the scratchy blanket.
“It’s got to be worth at least eight million,” Charlene said. “His family must have been loaded. But what’s Jezek’s excuse?”
I shook my head. “No idea. Professor Jezek’s house is smaller though.”
“In this location? It’s still got to be worth a mint.”
“Worth less than it was though, without a view.” Was the view worth killing over, as Dorothy had claimed? And what would happen to Starke’s house now?
I stared into the thick trees above the Spanish mansion. A light flickered between their branches, and my neck tensed.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said, pointing.
“Is that . . . fire? Woo-hoo!” She rubbed her hands together. “What did I tell you? It’s a conspiracy.”
I was pretty sure she hadn’t mentioned a conspiracy. “Let’s go see what Jezek’s burning.”
We trudged up the hill. The high fence encircling Professor Jezek’s cottage made snooping more challenging. Or it would have, if Charlene hadn’t just pushed the gate open and breezed on in.
“Charlene,” I hissed. “Wait!” I trotted through the open gate, catching up with her as she reached the corner of the stone-and-wood house. “Wait,” I mouthed, grasping her arm.
We peeked around the corner.
Professor Jezek stood on the opposite side of a firepit, nearly identical to Dorothy’s. But unlike Dorothy, his eyes were closed, his hands raised in benediction. The fire cast demonic shadows across his sloping forehead and bushy mustache. A bucket of paint with a brush balanced on the lid sat on the ground to one side.
Hair prickled on my scalp. What. The . . . ?
His voice rang out beneath the branches of the Monterey cypresses reaching over his fence. He spoke in a language I didn’t recognize but guessed was something Eastern European.
The wind stirred the cypress branches, and the trees groaned.
He turned his head and spat three times over his left shoulder.
Gooseflesh prickled my arms.
His eyes opened, and his gaze locked on mine. The professor’s face contorted. “What are you doing here?”
Crumb. “Ah . . . We saw the smoke, and—”
“Get out!”
Charlene stepped forward. “Are you—”
“Out!” he roared.
“We’re leaving. Sorry.” I turned.
The rear wall of his house was covered in painted black crosses, and a chill lifted the hairs on the nape of my neck.
I pushed and prodded Charlene down the path through the narrow side yard.
“If that wasn’t an occult ceremony,” she said, “I’ll eat my roller skates.”
“Did you see those crosses? He must have been painting all day.”
“It reminds me of something I saw in Russia,” she said. “My husband and I were visiting friends whose newborn had died. A local priest had painted crosses on the walls of their house to protect them from the evil eye. But not that many.”
“And he did have all those icons—whatever he’s doing could be religious.”
I got her to the gate and slammed it behind us.
“Interesting that all those crosses faced Starke’s house,” she said. “And Michael Starke is dead.”
“It is odd,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the gate. “But we won’t figure this out in his driveway. Let’s go.”
Grumbling, Charlene stepped into the yellow Jeep, and we pulled from the curb.
I blew out my breath. “Wow.” I looked again over my shoulder, but Professor Jezek hadn’t followed us. And then we turned a corner and his cottage was gone.
“Dorothy burning evidence,” she said, “and old Piotr covering his house in protective crosses. I’ll bet he thought someone cursed Starke and he might be next.”
“A curse didn’t kill Professor Starke.”
“You never know.” Her knuckles whitened on the wheel. She cleared her throat. “I’ve heard stories.”
“About Professor Jezek?”
“About curses.”
Of course she had. But I couldn’t muster my usual irritation with Charlene’s crazy theories. Whatever Jezek had been doing, in the firelight, beneath the creaking cypresses, it had been seriously spooky.
Lights flared in the rearview mirror and vanished.
“You don’t think he’s following us, do you?” I asked, anxious.
She checked the mirror. “No one’s following us.”
“Right.” Right. Unnerved, I kept checking behind us anyway.
When we arrived at Charlene’s, we hustled up the porch steps and slammed shut her front door.
We looked at each other.
Charlene laughed weakly. “That was something for the books.”
“Yeah. We’re scaring ourselves over nothing.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Oh, me neither.” But I pulled back the faded curtains and chanced a look into the front yard.
A dark figure crossed the street. Flames blossomed in his hand.
“Charlene—”
The figure cocked back one arm. The flame hurtled toward the house.
I shrieked. “Get down!”
The front window shattered. Fire exploded on Charlene’s floral-patterned sofa.
“My couch!”
I raced for the fireplace, banged my leg on the coffee table, and grabbed the fire extinguisher. I sprayed the couch, white foam and smoke filling the living room.
Charlene flipped on the lights and coughed, waving her hand in front of her face. “My couch! My damn couch!”
I peered through the broken glass.
The person was gone.
Something sharp and hot pricked my palm. I jerked my hand from the windowpane I’d been gripping and rubbed away a smear of blood. My mouth went dry. He was gone. He’d done what he’d came for. He had to be gone.
Didn’t he?
CHAPTER 22
I held a sheet of plywood in place while Gordon hammered it over Charlene’s broken window. The living room smelled of burnt fabric, acrid and unpleasant.
“My damn couch!” Charlene’s wail echoed from the kitchen.
“Haven’t we done this before?” he asked me, and grinned. His suit jacket lay draped over a wing chair. The cuffs of his white shirt were rolled to his elbows.
“If you’re trying to tell me that when Charlene and I investigate, mayhem follows, message received.”
“Actually, I thought the déjà vu was romantic. You know, memories of before we were a couple.”
My heart beat a little faster, and I smiled back at him.
Charlene howled. “I’ve had that couch for thirty years!”
He banged his thumb with the hammer. “Ow!” He cursed, shaking his hand.
I winced in sympathy and stepped from the window. Gordon’s presence had driven away most of my freaked-outedness. But the overhead lamp didn’t touch the shadows creeping in the corners. I switched on a lamp on a doily-covered table. And then another.
“You saw this guy,” Gordon said, “even if it was only for a moment—are you sure you can’t give me anything?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t even tell you if it was a man or a woman. It happened so fast, and . . .” Heat washed my face. How could I admit that I’d been so fixed on the fire, that it had seemed to bloom in the bomb thrower’s hand as if by magic? Our attacker had looked like a vengeful wizard. Which just goes to show how much Professor Jezek’s little ritual had gotten into my head.
“And what?” he asked.
“I can’t help thinking that both Dorothy and Jezek had fires in their yard. Then someone threw a Molotov cocktail through our window.” Earlier, Gordon’s fellow police officers had taken away the fragments of the bottle—a cheap vodka. “Did you learn anything from Dorothy?” I asked.
“You know I can’t talk about that.”
After everything that had happened? I swallowed a hard lump of disappointment. “I know. But can you tell me if she was at home when you went to see her?”
Gordon had gone to visit Dorothy after I’d made the call. If she’d been busy with Gordon, she wouldn’t have been able to firebomb Charlene’s living room.
“She was home,” he said slowly. “I was just leaving when you called about the attack.”
“Then it couldn’t have been Dorothy.” I motioned toward the couch. “Not unless she had an accomplice.”
“Thanks for letting me know about her backyard fire. It was helpful.” He frowned. “I’m not sure what to make of Piotr Jezek though.”
“I wonder if . . .” I hesitated. I didn’t want Gordon to think I was pushing him for information.
“What?”
“It’s just, his office walls were covered in icons. At first I thought Professor Jezek was super religious. But now I’m wondering if they weren’t for protection.”
He set the hammer on a doily-covered end table. “Go on.”
Charlene stumped into the living room. “That man’s afraid of something. The crosses over his office door and covering the back of his house are to ward off evil. The icons are probably just bonus help. I was sure Aidan was a vampire. But a vampire would never play with fire.”
“Um, and Aidan’s dead,” I said, my chest tightening. Had Charlene forgotten? Was this old age taking its toll?
“I know he’s dead,” she snapped. “I’m just saying, if he was a vampire and faking his death, which he isn’t, he wouldn’t set something on fire. Fire is one of the things that can kill a vampire. Now what about my couch?”
Gordon shook his head. “I wouldn’t bother trying to get it reupholstered. The stuffing’s been burned as well. My mom got a decent couch at a nearby consignment store for not too much money. Maybe you can have some luck there?”
Charlene reached behind a blackened cushion and pulled out a shotgun.
Instinctively, Gordon and I ducked.
“Charlene,” I said too loudly.
“Is that loaded?” he asked, straightening.
“Wouldn’t do much good otherwise.” She pointed it at the carpet. “Not that I was thinking on my feet when that bastard firebombed my home.”
Gordon eyed it, a wa
ry expression on his handsome face. “All right. There’ll be a patrol car outside your house tonight, Charlene.”
She snorted. “What about Val?”
“I’ll follow her home. Val, where’s your van?”
“At Pie Town.”
We got Charlene settled, and Gordon drove me to collect my van.
His cop sedan trailed behind me as I wound up the road to my tiny house. I crested the top of the drive. My headlights washed across the picnic table, the clearing, and the tricked-out shipping container I called home.
No broken glass lay sprinkled in front of the picture windows. No smoke damage blackened the corrugated metal walls. No necromancers with flaming hands lurked in the yard, and the tension between my shoulder blades released.
Gordon insisted on poking into the bushes and eucalyptus trees that ringed three sides of my yard. He rattled all the doors and windows. And then he came inside and drove the rest of my fears away.
* * *
I poured sugared peaches into the waiting piecrusts. Sunlight streamed through the skylights—one of my favorite features of the Pie Town kitchen.
I glanced toward the closed door to the flour-work room.
Charlene had been uncharacteristically quiet when she’d arrived this morning. She put up a tough front, but I worried the firebombing had shaken her more than she’d been willing to admit.
Abril cleared her throat. She laid a piecrust over a pie and crimped its edges. “How’s Doran?”
“He’s good, I think.”
“He’s been so nice about everything,” she said, her cheeks pinking.
“He’s a nice guy.” I repressed a smile. Was Abril falling for him?
“I’m sorry the poem wasn’t helpful.”
Abril had found the “die, die, die,” poem. Though we’d analyzed it backward and forward, it had contained nothing remotely menacing.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure the death of an avocado orchard is a metaphor for the death of farming in the Central Valley,” Abril said. “But I could be wrong.”
“No poetry professors or anyone else were harmed in the making of that poem.”
“Speak for yourself,” Charlene shouted from the flour-work room. “It made my ears bleed.”
Pies Before Guys Page 18