“You won’t need it,” he said with a smirk. “I’ve got mine. I’ll keep you safe.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “I’ll just bring along my own, if you don’t mind. I’ve seen you at the target range.”
Chapter 2
Savannah gazed out the window as they passed one mansion after another after another in the exclusive enclave of Spirit Hills. As they drove deeper into the valley, each estate seemed grander than the last. Here in the heart of the canyon, the trees grew thicker, and the road curved more tightly and rose in elevation with each twist and turn. And with every crook in the road, more and more of the panoramic view was revealed.
If you lived in San Carmelita and were rich enough, you could afford to live in Spirit Hills. If you were filthy, stinking rich, you could afford to live on one of the hillsides at the end of the canyon, overlooking the valley, the town, and the Pacific Ocean. And you could feel pretty darned good about it.
Or at least, Savannah figured they should feel pretty good about it. Heck, if she lived here, she would!
In McGill, the little rural town where she had been born, most people had looked down on her immediate family. Her barfly mom and never home trucker dad had made pretty sure of that. Their deeds and misdeeds had secured the family’s reputation as white trash in the better part of three counties. Other than turning out a new baby every year and naming each one after a town in Georgia, neither of them had accomplished anything that would have garnered any respect from their neighbors.
But Granny Reid was respected and deeply loved by all who knew her—with the possible exception of Leon Hafner, who respected her but harbored precious little affection for her since the skillet incident. And when the courts had taken Savannah and her brothers and sisters away from her parents and put them in Gran’s care, their lives had taken a decided turn for the better.
But not before Savannah had learned the pain of having people look down on you. Way down. And she had to think that living here on what seemed like the top of the world and literally looking down on everyone else…that would go a long way toward healing any inferiority complexes one might have incurred during a rocky childhood.
“Do you ever wonder what they eat in joints like this?” Dirk said as he guided his ancient Buick Skylark around another curve and shifted into low gear to climb a particularly steep hill.
“Is that all you ever think about?” she asked him. “Food?”
“No, sometimes I think about sex and baseball.”
She groaned and shook her head. “What do you mean, what do they eat? They eat just like the rest of us. Well, they probably wash it down with wine instead of beer or soda pop, but—”
“I mean, do people who live in a place, like say, that one there…”—he pointed to a sprawling Tudor mansion on their right—“…do they actually bring home a bucket of chicken when everybody’s too tired to cook? Or do they eat pheasant under glass every night?”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again. We both agreed last time that very few people actually have pheasant under glass for dinner anymore. And no, I’m not going to try to make it for you. Ever. Barbecued game hens are the closest I’ll ever come.”
He didn’t reply, and they sat in silence for a while until she added, “And to be honest, I’m plum confused as to why you, of all people, would even give a hoot about a fancy schmancy dish like that. You’re more of a hot dog and hamburger guy. What’s with this obsession you have about pheasant under glass?”
He shrugged and looked mildly uncomfortable. “I don’t want to tell you. You’ll laugh.”
“So what? I always laugh at you. Spit it out. What is it?”
“It’s a James Bond thing, okay?”
“James Bond?”
“Yeah, I read somewhere or heard that he likes it, like it’s his favorite dish or whatever. And you know I’m a big fan of his.”
She shook her head and stared at him. “I never heard that.”
“Well, believe it or not, Miss Smarty Pants, you don’t know as much about some stuff as I do.”
“Besides, James Bond is a fictional character. Do you mean Sean Connery likes it?”
“No, I mean James Bond. Never mind. I didn’t think you’d understand.”
“Lord help us,” she mumbled under her breath. “Next thing you know, he’ll want his beer shaken, not stirred.”
She rolled down her window to let in some of the fresh evening air and to release some of the less refreshing aromas of the burger and taco wrappers that he had tossed onto the back floorboard. Pheasant under glass, indeed.
“I want to talk about this case,” she said. “Like, why are we going to Dante’s mansion rather than this Daisy O’Neil’s house?”
“Because her mother called 9-1-1 from Dante’s, said she wasn’t leaving there until they told her where to find her daughter. She’s convinced that the other girls had something to do with Daisy’s disappearance, and she’s causing a big stink about it.”
“Seems like Dante would have been the one calling the cops if she’s harassing him on his own property.”
“Yeah, you’d think so. We may wind up having to toss her out of there if we can’t settle her down.”
“The thought of ‘tossing’ a worried mother anywhere doesn’t exactly agree with me,” Savannah said. “If I had kids and one went missing, I’d be beside myself. I lost one of my kid sisters—I think it was Atlanta—in a Wal-Mart one Sunday afternoon for twenty minutes, and I about went out of my mind imagining what might have happened to her.”
“Yeah, that’s just gotta be the worst. The absolutely worst thing that can happen to a parent…having a kid go missing. But this gal will turn up. I can feel it.”
She sniffed. “Oh yes, the infamous, infallible Coulter intuition.”
“Hey, don’t knock it. My instinct has gotten you out of some nasty jams over the years.”
“And gotten me into plenty of them, too.”
“Be that as it may.”
They rounded a curve, and on a separate hill above them and to the left was the most magnificent mansion Savannah had ever seen. Crowning the hill, the palatial home looked like a cross between a Tuscan country villa and the Acropolis.
Illuminated by exquisitely placed architectural lighting, the limestone façade glowed golden against the darkening twilit sky. Arched and shuttered windows, some two and three stories tall, reached to ornate eaves and a red-tiled roof.
They drove through an avenue of giant, mature oaks that momentarily obscured the view of the house. Something about their black, gnarled trunks and the way their thick foliage blocked out even the last rays of the fading sunlight gave Savannah a creepy feeling. She felt like she was watching the prelude to some sort of horror movie as they passed between them.
But the sense of foreboding left the moment they exited the oaks and entered the circular motor court. Giant palm trees danced in the evening breeze, throwing lacy shadows across the front of the mansion, and in the center of the court, a four-tiered marble fountain was lit with golden floodlights. The water that cascaded from layer to layer sparkled like streams of liquid topaz.
“Wow, I heard about this place when they were building it two years ago,” she said, “but I had no idea it was so grand! Glory be, what a spread!”
“Eh,” Dirk replied. “My trailer looks this good when the neighbor’s mutt runs too close to my front door and the outdoor security light flips on. It’s all done with lighting.”
“Yeah, right.”
They parked in the court between a new Porsche convertible and an older rusty and dented minivan. On the van’s bumper was a faded sticker that read “My Kid Is On the S.C.H.S. Honor Roll.”
“Something tells me that van belongs to Daisy O’Neil’s mom,” Savannah said. “I can’t imagine the guy who lives in this place driving it. And I’m sure they’d expect any servants who owned that to park around back and out of sight.”
Dirk nodded. “And from what I�
��ve read about her, I don’t think Miss Tiffy would be caught dead in any vehicle that didn’t cost as much as your house and my trailer combined.”
Savannah recalled the appraised value of her own house on her last tax statement and added twenty-five cents for Dirk’s single-wide monstrosity that still had vestiges of dinosaur poop on its tires. “No,” she said, “I doubt that she would.”
They left the Buick and walked across the granite-paved courtyard, through a gracefully arched colonnade, to a wrought iron double door. The delicate iron work formed two letters—a T on the left and a D on the right.
“Andrew Dante,” Savannah mumbled, mulling the initials over in her mind. “Should be an A, not a T.”
They both looked at each other with raised eyebrows. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “He put his kid’s initials on his door?”
“Maybe his wife’s name is Tiffy, or something equally stupid that starts with a T.”
“Or he’s a doting father. An extremely doting father.”
“That would explain some of the stories I’ve read in the tabloids. To hear them tell it, she’s a brat who gets everything she wants and then some.”
Savannah pushed the button next to the door and heard the Westminster Chimes echo inside. “Ah, don’t believe everything you read. Rich people get a bad rap just because everybody’s jealous of them. Some of the nicest, most humble, and most generous people I’ve ever known were rich.”
“Naw. I hate ’em all. You can’t be a decent person and be rich.”
She shook her head and sighed. “Coulter…there isn’t one single solitary group of people under the sun that you trust, respect, or like.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Is, too.”
“Is not. I like dogs.”
The door opened, and a tiny woman in her early twenties stood there in a black and white maid’s uniform. Her thick dark hair flowed around her shoulders in a manner that struck Savannah as impractical for the active work of a housekeeper. And the skirt on her uniform was so short that should she need to bend over, she would have to squat ever so gracefully so as not to expose her diminutive derriere.
It also struck Savannah that both the person who had designed this costume, as well as the one who had decided that this young lady should wear it, were well aware of the clothing’s limitations—or benefits.
Savannah gave Dirk a sideways glance and saw his eyes flit, ever so briefly, over the outfit and then lock on the maid’s face. She had to give the guy some major points for professionalism. Better than anyone, she knew his predilection for French maid and cheerleader garb.
“Hello. May I help you?” the maid asked in a breathless, half-panting voice that sounded like it was straight from an 800-Call-to-Talk-Dirty phone line. She ran her fingers through her long hair and then shifted her weight from one foot to another, sticking her hip out to one side in what she undoubtedly thought was a sexy pose.
A quick look at Dirk told Savannah that he thought so, too.
His eyes bugged out just a bit as he looked her up and down one more time. But he cleared his throat, and apparently his mind, because he managed to dig out his badge, flip it open under her nose, and say with only the slightest squeak, “I’m Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter, San Carmelita Police Department. This is my colleague, Savannah Reid. We received a call that you have a problem here tonight. Is there a Ms. O’Neil around?”
The maid glanced uneasily over her shoulder. “Uh, yes, but…”
Savannah could hear a woman’s angry voice deep inside the house, and a man’s, too. They sounded as though they were arguing.
Dirk looked past the maid and tried to see into the massive foyer behind her. “Is that Ms. O’Neil I hear?” he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “I need to talk to her right now.”
He gave his best, most authoritative cop wave of the hand, and predictably, the young woman stood aside to allow them in. Savannah decided then and there that the maid was more legs and hair than backbone. But she cut her some slack. After all, when she’d been that age, her composition had been much the same.
Hey, she thought, you live and you learn, and you eventually learn how to stand up on your hind legs and roar…like at abusive jerks in supermarkets.
She grinned at the fresh and refreshing memory as she followed Dirk into the mansion. A vision of her would-be assailant lying on the floor, soaking in a marinade of ketchup, pickle juice, and balsamic vinegar, brought a grin to her face and a resolution to her heart.
I simply must do that more often, she thought before pulling her mind back to the business at hand.
The two-story foyer was depressingly large…depressing only because it occurred to Savannah that she could probably put her entire house inside its confines and still have room to park her Mustang, Dirk’s Buick, and Tammy’s VW bug. But even in her downhearted state, she had to admit it was impressive. From the marble floors to the turned oak staircase with its curved railings to the stained-glass rotunda ceiling, this architectural introduction to Dante’s domain said it all.
Andrew Dante had it all.
Or at least, one might say more than his share of it all.
If it just hadn’t been for the pink walls.
They weren’t a delicate, apple blossom pink. They weren’t a hint of smoky pink.
Nope, not even close to anything that could be called classy, Savannah thought. The walls were the color of the medicine that Granny Reid had dispensed by the bottleful over the years, curing everything from stomachaches to adolescent crabbiness. And while it might have been a welcome color to a person suffering from what Gran called “the green apple quick step,” it didn’t belong on walls. And certainly not the walls of a magnificent mansion.
They passed through the foyer and into a great room, following the ever escalating sound of the argument. Again, Savannah was struck by the sheer enormity of the room. The fireplace to her right was large enough for even a tall person to stand inside. And she could see at least three distinct seating groupings: one around the hearth, another near an ornately carved bar to the left, and another at the far end of the room, close to a nine-foot concert grand piano.
But for all its grandeur, the pink curse seemed to have infected this room as well. The walls were a slightly less vulgar shade of pink, but the furniture was upholstered in shockingly bright raspberry velvet.
Again, Savannah wondered who might be the source of this decorating nightmare. But her curiosity was satisfied when she saw a life-sized painting that hung over the fireplace.
The oil was of a pretty, if somewhat haughty-looking, young woman in a ball gown, her platinum blond hair spilling over her bare shoulders. The voluminous dress gave the impression that its wearer was floating in a cloud of organza…bright pink, of course. And in the painting’s background was a garden of roses, again every unnatural shade of pink imaginable.
Something told Savannah that the teenager in the painting had been responsible for choosing the color scheme for this palatial home.
And definitely should not have been, she added to herself, as they hurried past islands of velvet, diamond-tucked furniture to the other end of the room where the woman and man stood arguing beside the piano.
“The cops are going to be here any minute now,” the tall, blond Viking of a man was telling a tiny redhead who glared up at him with clenched fists and a look of fury on her tear-wet face. “And I’m going to have you arrested for…oh, I don’t know…disturbing my peace or something like that. I told you to get out of here or—”
“I am not leaving here until I’ve spoken to that no-good brat of a daughter of yours. I want to know what she’s done with my Daisy, and don’t tell me she isn’t here because I saw her look out her upstairs bedroom window when I drove up.”
“It wasn’t her,” he said. “It was probably one of her friends or a maid or whatever. And it doesn’t matter anyhow whether she’s here or not because I’ve already talked to her, and she said she doesn’
t have a clue where Daisy is.”
“She’s a liar! A rotten, spoiled brat, dirty little liar. She’s hurt Daisy. Those girls have hurt her and—”
The blond man was handsome, his features fine and chiseled, his physique muscular beneath his polo shirt and designer jeans, but his face turned ugly with anger at the insult. He took a step closer to the redhead just as Dirk and Savannah reached them. “You better watch your mouth when you’re talking about my daughter! Tiffy’s a good person who’s done a lot for your kid! A whole lot! And you don’t appreciate it! Why I ought to—”
“No! Hold it right there!” Dirk said as he took hold of the man’s arm. With his other hand, he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his badge, and held it practically under the man’s nose. “You called the police? Well, we’re here. So everybody just settle down till we get this all ironed out. What’s going on around here?”
“My daughter is missing,” the red-haired woman said as she started to cry. She covered her eyes with her hands for a moment and let the sobs overtake her. Then, after ten seconds or so, she recovered herself and managed to say, “My Daisy is gone, and she would never have just disappeared on her own like this. Those girls she hangs out with…those pampered, rotten girls…they’ve done something bad to her. I just know it! They’ve always treated her like dirt, made fun of her, used her, and acted like they were way better than her because she doesn’t have their money. And now, now I know they’ve hurt her. They’ve done something horrible to her. I can just feel it.”
When she dissolved into tears again, Dirk gave Savannah a helpless look—the one he always gave her when he had a crying female on his hands.
Dirk didn’t particularly mind if a male perpetrator was screaming with fury or blubbering like a kindergartner who had just been told there was no Santa. But when it came to weeping women, Dirk caved every time.
Savannah reached for the distraught mother and wrapped one arm around her shoulders. “Now, now,” she said. “Why don’t you and I come over here and sit down and talk for a while. You tell me all about Daisy and what’s been going on with her, and we’ll leave Detective Coulter with…uh…is it Mr. Andrew Dante?”
Poisoned Tarts Page 3