by L. L. Muir
She gently lifted the girl’s bare calf, pretending to look closely at the little purple shoes with sparkly pink bows all over them. And while she oohed and aahed, she absorbed the child’s desperate need—for a stuffed lamb. Lamby. Millicent knew where it was, but not how to get to it. Nor did she have the vocabulary to explain.
“I bet you took your favorite toy to Grandma’s house, didn’t you?”
Millicent stopped wailing again, but she teetered on the edge, perfectly willing to start screaming again if necessary.
“What’s your favorite toy, huh? A stuffed animal?”
“She’s been carrying her lamby around for the past few days,” said her father. Then a lightbulb went on and he started searching the room, concentrating on the toy area. He grabbed his phone and dialed. “Hi, mom. Do you happen to see Milly’s little white lamb anywhere? I can’t find it, and Milly’s hysterical.” After listening a little, he hung up. “She said Milly had it with her when she got in the car. But I brought in everything. The car is empty.”
Milly didn’t care for his assessment and started wailing again.
Maddy closed her eyes and patted the child’s leg. She clearly saw the inside of the car, from the backseat. Little David reached over and ripped the toy from Milly’s arms, then stuffed it deep under the seat. The heartbroken toddler started wailing.
“We’ll stay with the kids,” Maddy said, “if you want to go check under the seats. Stuffed animals can get stuck in the smallest spaces.”
Milly stopped crying instantly. David’s head came up. He’d heard the last words at least, but he definitely noticed that the painful noise had stopped. His mouth dropped open as he watched his dad head out the front door. Then he turned and narrowed his eyes at Maddy.
“Be careful, David,” Maddy said. “Any mean things you do to your sister, she’ll remember. And one day, she’ll make you cry.”
Maddy looked at Tripp and realized that he hadn’t been as distracted as she’d hoped. The look in his eye promised they’d have a nice long talk on the ride home. And she suddenly wondered how far she might have to walk to find a Greyhound bus station.
Whittaker ran back inside shaking a stuffed lamb in front of him like a trophy. It looked like it had been white once upon a time, but was now pastel dirt-colored. Maddy stood and got out of the way so he could present it to his daughter, who snatched it out if his hands and hugged it tight while she glared at her brother, letting him know that she hadn’t forgotten.
David gave Maddy one more dirty look and snuck out of the room.
Whittaker hugged his girl, then turned and hugged Maddy before she could avoid it. He suddenly pulled back and grabbed her bare hand, to give it a squeeze. The emotions that flooded her nearly knocked her off her feet and she reached out to Tripp with her gloved hand.
He was suddenly there, next to her, giving her what support he could. Without bothering to take his seat again, Tripp asked Whittaker about his day on Friday, then jotted down the grandmother’s number so he could cross Whittaker off the list of suspects. He warned the man he might have more questions for him later, offered his sympathies, and got Maddy out of there as if he shared the same empathic abilities she had.
9
The next day, Tripp found himself back on the road to Dinkville. It was a twenty-minute drive, but in Falls County, it took twenty minutes to get anywhere.
There were now three cities in his purview—Spirit Falls, Moosedrop, and the smaller town of Dinkville. All three were laid out in a triangle and unless you were in a real hurry, it took twenty minutes on the highway to get from one to another. In a hurry, with the lights flashing, he could make it in ten.
When he’d left DV—which most people preferred to call Dinkville, so they didn’t have to say the word dink—he’d been hoping that a break in the case would keep him from ever needing to drive up that dead-end road again. But since no one had come forward with a confession, he still had to consider Madison Muir a suspect.
The coroner didn’t have the exact cause of death yet, and it might be a while before they had one, but there had been bruising around the neck. Surprisingly, she couldn’t specify what had caused the bruising. Another thing he had to wait for.
But if he’d learned anything in his years of investigating in Washington State, it was that murders were best solved quickly. The longer it took, the more likely unknowing witnesses would forget what they’d seen, the more time the murderer would have to cover his tracks and hide evidence.
Maybe behind a locked door…
He didn’t actually want Ms. Muir to be guilty. He just wished…
He wished Dinkville wasn’t twenty minutes away so he could… So he could…
Hell, so he could see her again.
Damn it!
Mac checked her calendar and was happy to see that no one had booked an appointment for the next few days, and considering their new bucket of trouble, that was probably for the best. It was also Sunday, so she hoped for a quiet day.
She had a quick vision of a handsome deputy arriving at her door, and she had to think fast to keep her heart rate from jumping, so Maddy wouldn’t notice. Her sister wasn’t quite as talented at hiding things from her, of course, but then again, Maddy couldn’t see the future like Mac could.
It never failed. If Maddy managed to keep a secret, Mac would get a glimpse of her confessing at some future date. So her sister had learned there was little use trying.
Until yesterday.
Maddy, the little minx, had lost her temper with a cop. Even after Mac had tried to warn her of the danger waiting at their door. But did she listen? Did she paste on a smile and give the officer no reason to come back again?
No. And now he was headed their way. Only today, it was Mac’s turn to deal with Officer Fife. And if she didn’t feel like talking to Maddy afterward, she wouldn’t have to.
Tit for tat, and all that.
Mac took long deep breaths and drank a bottle of water at room temperature. Thankfully, at the last second, she remembered to silence the doorbell.
Honestly, Tripp had not expected Madison Muir to answer the door at all, even though her car was still in the carport. But she did. And with a smile, too.
He was instantly suspicious.
“Deputy Fife! What a surprise.” She stood aside and gestured for him to come in.
He took his time wiping his boots on the mat so he could compose himself. He didn’t want her seeing how surprised and pleased he was. “Thank you,” he said gruffly, then followed her into the foyer of a house that actually needed a foyer.
It was much bigger inside than he’d expected. When she’d remodeled, she’d obviously knocked out some walls.
“Not Victorian on the inside anymore, is it?” He gestured to the house in general.
She took his cowboy hat and hung it on a coat rack behind him. “Parts of it will always be,” she said. “But I wouldn’t expect a small-town sheriff to know about such things.” When she led him into the living room, she was still smiling as if she’d never had that lapse in manners the day before. She even pointed to the chair she wanted him to sit in.
Next, she’ll be ordering tea.
“Can I get you something? Water? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice. Thank you.” He moved toward the seat she’d assigned him, though he planned to get a look behind a certain curtain before he sat down.
She went back into the foyer, which would take her to the open part of the house. To his surprise, she motioned for him to follow her. He glanced at the blue curtain with white swirls hanging on a random section of the wall and figured it was the one Daphne had told him about. But there was no time for peeking if she expected him to join her.
He found the kitchen. She was filling a cup and nodded to a small table in an alcove. From the outside of the house, the space would have looked like a tower.
She shrugged. “Why live in a house with dozens of little rooms when you can have a few really big ones,
right?”
He smirked. “You’re talking to a bachelor. A small room is all I need, Ms. Muir.”
“Oh, call me Mac.”
“Mac? I thought your name was Madison.”
She shrugged again and smiled pleasantly, but there was something else underneath that smile, and he had the feeling that he would never understand what that was, no matter how long he tried. “Yesterday, I wanted to be called Madison. Today, I feel like a Mac.”
She brought two cups with her and joined him at the table. A tray with milk and sugar waited in the center. The condensation on the outside of the little jug told him the milk was cold.
“I don’t suppose you were expecting me.” He watched her carefully. “You know, psychic and all.”
She tested her coffee and smiled at him over the rim of her cup. “You’re right. I was.” She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head for a second or two. “Two sugars. No milk, right?”
“Right.”
He smiled at her little trick, but he never thought it was anything more than that. For all he knew, Farley was still messing with him and feeding her information. But he hoped not. Murder wasn’t something to joke about.
“I’m hoping you have something to tell me about Monica Whittaker.”
“She was murdered.” It wasn’t a question.
He kept his breathing steady, trying to appear much calmer than he felt. “Yes.”
“She was here last Thursday. Showed up early for her appointment, so I assumed she was pretty excited about something.”
“So you do remember? That’s helpful. Was this the first time you’d met her?”
She smiled. “You’re trying to catch me in a lie, aren’t you?” She shrugged it off before he could respond. “She came twice before. No. I take that back. She came before that, with a friend.” She frowned down and to the right, trying to access actual memory, not trying think up something new. “I think she was making the friend come—no. Not a friend. Her assistant, maybe. Whittaker intimidated her, but then again, some friends do that, don’t they?”
“So she’s been here a total of four times...” He pushed his cup away, expecting to be sent packing any minute, just as soon as the real Madison Muir took off her friendly mask. “And yet you didn’t recall knowing her yesterday.”
The kitchen filled with her light, careless laughter and he wondered if she was trying to throw him off. Because there had been nothing light and careless about the woman he’d met the day before.
“You’re bound to find out sooner or later, so I may as well tell you now...” She winked at him, then picked up the little jug and poured more cream into her coffee cup. She knew she was teasing him while she stirred it, tasted it, then set her cup down again. “I have a horrible memory. We’re talking Swiss cheese. It’s a family quirk, really. Mostly short-term stuff. I need my schedule in front of me all the time just to remember what day it is.”
“Must be tough to run a business then.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yesterday, you said you had a conference call?”
“Oh, that’s right. I did. And yes, I run a handful of businesses online.”
“I assume you are licensed?”
“I am. And I assume you already knew that. How many licenses did you find for M. Muir from DV, Idaho?”
He was enjoying the game as much as she was, but he found himself waiting for that other side of her to reveal itself again. That had been fun too.
“Six, so far. One was a t-shirt company.” He looked around. “You’re not silk-screening in the basement, are you?”
She laughed. “Heaven forbid. No. We create the designs and have someone else print them up and distribute them.”
“No need getting your hands dirty, right?”
“Exactly.” She held up her hands. “A master’s degree in business keeps these fairly clean.”
He looked around again. “You said we? We design the t-shirts?”
Her gaze dropped to her coffee and she took a long drink, obviously hiding her reaction.
Interesting.
“My business partner and I. A family member from out of state.”
“Ah.” He left it at that and let her worry for a minute about what he might be thinking. She was definitely guilty of something, but maybe not murder. “So, enough about those businesses. Let’s talk about the business that’s not online. Tell me about this appointment.” He took his phone out, opened the app, and set it on the table. “You don’t mind if I record our conversation? Isn’t that what you said yesterday?”
She stared into his eyes for a few seconds. “Did I?”
He couldn’t help smiling. She was making sure he remembered her “bad memory” excuse.
“Yes. You did. So. Ms. Whittaker arrived early... And?”
The woman took a breath and thought silently for about half a minute. “I told her that whatever she was planning, she had to forget about it. Let it go.”
“Why?”
“Because I sensed danger. I think she was going to meet up with someone—”
“A man?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I warned her there was danger, grave danger, if she followed through.”
“You could see this danger? You saw what would happen to her?”
It was getting harder and harder to believe that she’d forgotten this appointment, or that she could have forgotten the name of a woman in so much danger when they’d met only two days before.
“I didn’t see what happened. I saw...a black body bag being zipped closed over her face. Her wet face. Wet hair. Wet underwear.”
“So you knew she’d be murdered.” And she knew the woman had been found without all her clothes on, which was a detail she shouldn’t have known.
“Death is always a possibility. But any little thing can change the future, can’t it? You turn the wrong way on a road and avoid the collision you might have been in. You make love one night and you’ll have a girl. You wait another day and the child will be a boy. Little decisions, every minute, lead to what will be.”
Her voice had taken on a trance-like quality that sucked him in. When she was finished, she looked as surprised as he was. “Can I give you some advice, Deputy Fife?”
“Not if you’re going to call me that.”
She shrugged. “Just as well. You probably wouldn’t want to hear it. Hell, I don’t want to hear it. You won’t mind...in the end…but you’ve got a long row to hoe, as my aunt used to say.”
Madison or Mac, or whoever she was, didn’t have anything more to add, even though he asked her in three different ways to repeat herself. If she was involved, she was far too clever to get tripped up by little details. And she certainly didn’t fall for the trick of him suggesting details that were slightly different than her original story.
He left even more flustered than when he’d arrived, with nothing new to help his case…unless his case was against one M. Muir.
10
Maddy waited until they were in the car and on the road before she opened her mouth. “How did you know?”
Tripp shrugged a shoulder and drove with both hands on the wheel, his knuckles drawn and white. “I don’t know. The look on your face, the fact that you reached for me.”
She snorted. “I did not reach for you.”
They stopped at a red light and he watched her while they waited for it to turn. “You know, after meeting you the other day, and twice the day after, I started questioning my ability to read people. I couldn’t get a handle on you. But now…” The light changed and he turned his attention back to the road.
“Now?”
He chuckled. “Never mind. Forget it. Thanks for what you did for that little girl, and for her dad. I think maybe little David will think twice before he picks on her again, don’t you?” He suddenly frowned. “Unless… I mean, you weren’t just assuming he’d taken the toy, right? You…” He waved in a circle in the general direction of her abdomen. “He really took her
toy? You weren’t just freaking him out?” He glanced up at her face and blanched. “Of course not. You wouldn’t do that. I’m just riffing here. Don’t mind me.”
“Barney?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’d better pull over.”
“Oh, now, I didn’t mean to insult you or anything. Obviously, you’ve got something real going on—”
“Pull over, Barn. You’re freaking out.”
He blinked at the road a couple times, nodded, and pulled onto the shoulder. Maddy grabbed one of the sacks from their lunch and handed it to him, told him to breathe into it.
The smell of catchup and onions filled the car and it didn’t take long for him to settle down. But as soon as he did, his face lit up again. “You really can help me solve this case, can’t you?”
Privately, she could admit that she was a little excited by the idea of finding a killer and getting him off the street and far away from Dinkville. But her involvement would only complicate things.
“That would be risky for you,” she said.
“Not for you?”
She rolled her eyes and ignored his suggestion.
“Because you’ll cast some spell on me?”
“I don’t cast spells.” Anymore. “You’d have a hard time explaining my involvement, for starters. And besides, you’d be miserable spending time with me. As you’ve already learned, my personality changes from day to day.
“You’re just afraid you’ll fall in love with me.”
Her laughter came out in a bark, but instead of being offended, he just grinned.
“And you, Deputy Fife, are afraid I won’t.”
His smile dimmed only a little as he pulled back onto the road. “Guilty as charged, officer. Guilty as charged.” When he glanced at her stricken face, he chuckled. “Lighten up, Maddy. I was only kidding. Maybe you need to breathe into a bag.”
She nodded and smiled, but it was too late. He’d already spooked her.