Which meant shut up, Stevie and mind your beeswax. Hint taken.
“I’m sorry, Mateo. So sorry about Tito and your mother and Bianca.” To leave this world with unfinished business is agony for the people you leave behind.
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Please, let me pay you for your time.”
I waved him off. “Are you kidding me? Look at this place. Absolutely not. I wasn’t able to contact your father and you almost lost an eye. Please, Mateo, go be with your mother. Talk to Bianca. She’s hurting and she needs all of you.” I held out my hand to him and when he took it, I squeezed before letting go.
“Do you think whatever that was—whoever that was—was talking about my father?”
His question was so raw, so charged with emotion, I wanted to address it carefully. “Pig” and “affair” were certainly words one would attribute to a situation like Tito’s, but I couldn’t bring myself to say as much. Not after all the other heartache they had to deal with.
“I wish I had a better answer for you. For all I know, it could be some dead farmer, acting out from the afterlife.”
The corner of Mateo’s lip lifted and he snickered. “Thank you again. Good night, Miss Cartwright.”
“Night, Mateo,” I whispered, bereft at the turn of tonight’s events.
As he exited, I followed behind him, locking the door. Bel rose up, flying toward me to land on my shoulder, snuggling his head against my ear. “You okay, Boss?”
I stroked his tiny head. “A little shook up, for sure. You okay?”
Belfry purred in my ear. “Yeah. I took cover under the cash register. Dang, girl. When was the last time we had an entity that angry?”
“You’ve had entities behave like that before?” Win asked.
I grabbed the broom from the corner and began to sweep up the mess. “Only a couple of times, if you don’t count the time I had the witch slapped out of me.”
“Why don’t we ever talk about that, Stevie? As in, the actual event? The night it happened?”
“Why don’t we ever talk about how you died?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question.”
“Don’t demand an answer to a question when you won’t answer my question.”
Win chuckled, warm and safe in my ear. “Touché. So shall we talk about this son Maggie so desperately wanted to tell Tito about?”
“And if Tito’s son is the kid in the picture, the one I saw at the food truck court, why did Tito have a picture of him if the Bustamantes only just recently found out about him? Like, has Tito always known?”
“That is curious,” Win replied in one of this thoughtful mutters.
“Sure, but can we first talk about where you went there? What was going on? You scared the bejesus right out of me. Especially knowing there isn’t much I can do to help you.”
“Aw, I’m chuffed, Stephania. You like me, admit it.”
“I like knowing you still have a soul.”
“Are you saying my soul was up for grabs?”
I puffed out another breath of relief. “I’m saying that sometimes, a malevolent spirit like the one you encountered can take you to a place where your soul is at stake. Yes. If that ever happens again, and you can find a light—any light—go into it. Understood?”
“But that would mean I’d have to leave you forever, my dove,” Win said with clear regret, deep and resonant.
A sadness crept into my heart, so profound it almost stole my breath. But not a chance in H-E double hockey sticks would I ever let him live that kind of utter misery.
“That’s true, and I’d miss you, but you’d miss your soul more. So any idea what plane you were on?”
“I don’t know. One minute there was sunshine and blue skies, and the infamous in-between buffet table filled to the brim with countless treats I no longer have to add up the calories for, and the next, I was somewhere as silent as a tomb. Silent and oppressive. Like a heavy weight in my chest.”
I still couldn’t explain how he’d been swept off to another plane without even knowing he had. Under normal circumstances, I’d consult my witch friends, but that was off the table now.
Leaning my cheek on the handle of the broom, I tried to explain to the best of my ability. “An angry spirit will sometimes flock to a dark plane if they were unsettled before their death. Whoever that was, if that message was related to Tito, they were angry we brought him up.”
“She was certainly angry. And how did that spirit make a room so hot the Flawless Brothers were virtually staining their muscle tees with sweat, when I can barely even open a refrigerator door?”
I grinned and began to sweep again. “Because you’re not angry, Win. Which tells me that even if I still don’t know how you died, I do know you weren’t eaten up with anger and jealousy when you did.”
“Says you. Trust me when I tell you, my dove, walk a mile in my shoes after competing with Hans Gruber for a post in the Maldives as the president’s security detail, and then we’ll talk anger and jealousy.”
I stopped sweeping. “You were up for a position against the guy from Die Hard?”
“Honestly, Dove, there are days when I don’t know how I’d get through the tedium if not for you and your LOL comments. Anyway, the president—”
“The Maldives has a president?”
“They do.”
“Okay, so if he wasn’t the guy from Die Hard, who was Hans Gruber?”
“The bane of my spy existence. Tall, athletic, strong as an ox, always just a hair away from besting me at everything. The arse.”
Ah, now I was getting somewhere. Every now and then, I picked up small hints of who Win had been before he died, and I tucked them away in my vault of Win information.
“So you’re not tall and athletic?”
“I said nothing of the sort. Now, are we going to talk about the elephant in the room or natter on about Hans ‘Perfection Personified’ Gruber?”
“You mean Bianca’s alleged half-brother?”
“No. I mean your snow-globe hoarding. Shall Bel and I gather the forces of Ebenezer Falls and host an intervention?”
As the weight of what had just occurred lifted from my shoulders, I threw my head back and laughed, my turban falling to the ground.
We should definitely talk about this son Maggie claimed Tito had but knew nothing about. But not right now.
Right now I just wanted to relish the fact that Win was still with me.
Still in my ear.
Still in my life.
Chapter 7
“Mornin’, Stevie,” Enzo groused as I hobbled over a pile of crown molding in the middle of the kitchen, tightening the belt on my bathrobe. “Coffee’s ready and the missus sent ya some blueberry-apple muffins.”
I sighed with happiness when I saw the fat, golden-brown plate of muffins dotted with plump blueberries on the counter next to the coffeepot, the scent of almonds and cinnamon in the air. “Remember that marriage proposal I made to you yesterday, Enzo?”
He tipped his Yankees cap at me. “Yep.”
“I rescind. I’m saving all my proposals for Carmella. Tell her as we speak, I’m hoarding away my pennies for a big fat diamond and doves at our upcoming nuptials.”
“You want I should tell her to pack her bags?” he teased.
Biting into the moistest muffin in the history of muffins, I nodded. “I want. Please thank her for me, and thank her for the tray of lasagna, too. It was amazing. Thank her for all the wonderful meals she includes me in. You have no idea how grateful I am for you two.”
Enzo grunted as he grabbed his nail gun. “Sometime ya oughta come to the house and eat one with us. We worry about ya, ya know? Out here all alone. No neighbors.”
My heart melted a little. How long had it been since someone had worried over me? “I’m fine, Enzo. Promise. I’m not as alone as you think.”
He scrunched up his round face. “Talkin’ to yourself don’t count.”
I
frowned, taking a sip of my coffee—which was its own special heaven. “Talking to myself?”
“Uh-huh. You do it all the time. Always mumblin’ about somethin’. And I been meanin’ to ask ya, who’s Spy Guy?”
I froze. I needed to be more careful or Enzo would worry me right into the crazy bin. I chose to play dumb. “Um, no clue what you’re talking about.”
Enzo cocked his head, his half-smile crooked. “Yeah? Well invite the voices in your head for dinner, too.”
I grinned, saluting him with my amazing cup of coffee and heading off to shower, my head still full of the events of last night. Grabbing the local paper from outside the front door, I still marveled at how tenacious the kid who delivered them could be. He somehow climbed my treacherous stairs each and every day to drop it at my front door. I tipped accordingly.
“Morning, Stevie.”
I plodded up the stairs, hanging a right to my bedroom. “Morning, Spy Guy,” I whispered.
“Why are we whispering,” Win whispered back.
“Because Enzo thinks I’m nuts.”
“You are.”
I giggled. “Follow me to the bedroom.”
“Well, well. Cheeky this morning, aren’t we?” he asked, accompanied by a deep chuckle.
I hung another right into my bedroom, a room that grew more amazing by the day, as Enzo’s renovations began to really take shape. “You know what I mean, you flirt.”
Hopping up onto the bed Win had made especially for me—built into the wall of windows like a queen-size nook, it hugged the gorgeous glass overlooking the Puget—I set my mug and muffin on the bookcase above the bed and unrolled the newspaper. As I read, my heart grew heavy in my chest.
“So we were right. Damn. I’d hoped we were wrong.”
Tito had, in fact, been murdered. Local Man Drowns in Bizarre Nacho-Cheese-Related Death. As I read the article, I pushed my muffin aside, no longer hungry.
“He drowned in cheese?” I gasped the words.
Win clucked his tongue. “That’s what it says. So someone held him under in a vat of cheese? How ghastly.”
I ran my hand over my forehead. “We don’t know that, Win. Maybe he fell into it after having a heart attack. You know what the media’s like. They embellish to sell papers.”
“A heart attack again? That can’t be your explanation for everyone who dies in Ebenezer Falls, Stevie.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Well, it can’t always be murder either, Spy Dude. Not everything is nefarious. Sometimes people just die and the circumstances are unfortunate.”
“But this time I think ’tis foul play.”
Crossing my legs, I tucked them beneath me as I watched the boats in the Sound float by silently. “Let’s look at this logically, from the standpoint where our ghoulish, mystery-loving hearts aren’t involved. So really, who’d want to murder Tito, Win? Okay, so maybe he vamped about town, had a child out of wedlock he maybe didn’t know about—or didn’t tell Maggie about. Maybe he did know, and she doesn’t know he did. But murder him over it? No way you could convince me Maggie did it in the heat of the moment. She was broken last night. That wasn’t guilt, that was sorrow.”
“When it comes to love and passion or affairs of the heart, people do many unexpected, totally out-of-character things. Many bad things, Stevie. In-the-heat-of-the-moment things. Maybe even drown-someone-in-cheese-in-the-heat-of-the-moment things. What does your gut say, Dove?”
I hated what my gut said. But if my gut was right, I wanted to catch the son of a butt scratcher who’d killed my Taco Man and taken away the best dang lunches I’d ever had. Tito deserved that much, as did his family—even crusty old Bianca.
“My gut says murder.”
“Our guts should go on a date. They have a lot in common.”
“Have you thought about Tito’s alleged son at all? We didn’t talk about it last night. Who do you think he is? Why was he suddenly a topic of conversation for the Bustamantes? Did Maggie leave Tito because she found out about this son—or were there other reasons? Why didn’t he know about this son before he died? Mateo said they’d only recently learned of this half-sibling, and that Maggie was going to confront Tito.”
“Thought about it all night long. Are you thinking the son is who I’m thinking it is?”
“The guy who looked like he’d lost his best friend from the food truck court yesterday?”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Win agreed. “Surely deserves investigation, if nothing else.”
My spine tingled, a sure sign we were about to embark on something we should probably keep our noses out of. “Yep. So our next move is?”
“The food truck court, of course. Surely someone saw something. You don’t drown a man in cheese and get away clean. Pardon the pun. Also, you can begin a taste-test interview with new candidates for future lunches.”
I nudged Bel, sound asleep on my pillow. “Bel, buddy? Wakey-wakey.”
He twitched, stretching his wings. “Up and at ’em?”
“What’s our schedule like at the store today?”
“Slow until about four. Then you have a reading with that snarky Bootsie Davis.”
Bootsie made me laugh. He was eighty, sharp as a tack, and convinced his old buddy Jerome Jenkins had hidden a passel of money in their nursing home just before he died. Money that Bootsie claimed Jerome owed him from a game of Moonlight Madness Poker.
“Good enough. Then we have almost an entire day to snoop around. I’ll shower and dress and we’re out.”
As I slipped from the bed and padded to the bathroom, I began formulating questions for the food truck owners in my head.
A sure sign indeed my gut was probably right about Tito’s death being a murder.
* * * *
Skirting the perimeter of the parking lot, I saw the enormous wooden cross erected on Tito’s behalf at the front of his food truck, flowers piled high and scattered, their petals blowing in the warm breeze from the Sound. Tito’s happy, smiling face—round and adorable—looked back at me from a picture hung on the cross, his sombrero tilted jauntily over his right eye.
My heart clenched and twisted in my chest at the closed sign on the window where Tito had served tacos.
It was another cloudless day. Beautiful. Sunny. Taco-less.
The food court’s vibe was somber at best. People milled about, their eyes looking to Tito’s truck then away with glum expressions.
One of the food truck owners, Colette, of Colette’s Crepes, had begun a funeral fund for Tito’s family to help with expenses. A big bucket for donations and free crepes sat on a table she was running just outside her truck.
“Do be generous,” Win said, his tone as depressed as I felt.
But I loved that he wanted to give to Tito’s family. I also loved that he knew the donation bucket was exactly where I was headed. He didn’t know the Bustamantes, but I did, and that my feelings mattered to him made me feel warm inside.
As I approached Collette’s table, prepared to drop a check into the bucket, I caught a bit of the conversation between two of the other truck owners. Levonne Ray, who owned the gourmet burger truck simply called Meat, and Patty Sanderson, who owned the chicken-and-waffles truck.
Skirting the conversation, I paused before writing the check, pretending to choose my free crepe.
“Y’all heard what happened with Tito, right?” asked Levonne, a recently graduated college student and transplant from Alabama.
Patty straightened her signature black kerchief, tied at the back of her head under her bright red hair, and frowned. “Heard what?”
Levonne nudged her with his elbow and thumbed in the direction of the spot where Jacob, from The Deep Sea Diver, usually parked. “That nuttier-n’-squirrel-dung Jacob, givin’ Tito hell, callin’ him a cheat. Like he has any daggone right to use that word.”
My ears tingled. Everyone seemed to know Tito had cheated on Maggie, which could explain how angry Bianca was with her father. Maybe she was just embarras
sed, and if that were the case, I’d feel pretty crappy for thinking about making voodoo dolls in her honor.
“Jacob had the gall to accuse Tito of cheating? Cheated doing what?” Patty asked, her pale skin growing paler.
Levonne’s deep-set blue eyes went bright as his lips thinned. “Uh-huh. Said he snitched and told that Marvin Wexler from the permits department that Jacob didn’t have no permit to park over here. So old Marvin made Jacob come into the county office on the day that big TV show was comin’ to interview everybody last week, remember? Wouldn’t let him off the hook, neither. Made him come into the office and wait. Said he’d condemn his truck and have it booted out of Ebenezer for good if he didn’t. Jacob missed the taste-testin’ with those fancy Hollywood people for that cookin’ channel because he was late. So Tito got the spot.”
Patty rolled her dark green eyes and scoffed. “Tito’d never do something like that. He knew Jacob was always parking here without a permit, and he might have given him hell for not following the rules, but Tito didn’t want anything to do with Cook It Yourself. And I’m also betting he wasn’t at all interested in going on the road with his truck because his citizenship test was coming up.”
Levonne nodded his platinum-blond head, his ruddy cheeks red from the sun, and jammed his hands into his cutoff shorts. “That’s what I said to that madder-n’-a-hornet’s-nest Jacob, but he wouldn’t listen. Stormed on over there like Tito owed him money. Knocked so hard on that door, thought he was gonna knock the whole dang trailer down.”
Patty gasped, running her finger under the tie on the neck of her apron. “Please say someone defended him, Levonne? If I’d been here, I’d have given Jacob the kick in the backside he so deserves. He’s such a bully!”
“Yep. Me an’ Tito’s kid Mateo got him to cool down, but he sho’ was mad. Said all sorts of crummy stuff, cussin’ and the like. Said because he missed the taste-testers, Tito got the gig.”
“First, that kind of reasoning is as irrational as Jacob, so I’m not surprised. Just because Jacob wasn’t here doesn’t mean Tito wouldn’t have gotten a spot anyway. What makes Jacob think his fish and chips are so good that no one else’s food could compete, and the only way to get on the show was to eliminate him? Golly, he’s conceited!”
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