Wicked Business

by Janet Evanovich

  Nina Wortley is the owner-manager of Exotica. She’s in her early sixties. She has long, frizzed, snow-white hair. Her face looks like it’s been dusted with cake flour, and her bony fingers are loaded with all sorts of rings. She favors floor-length, silky, midnight blue capes and frothy white gowns that she gets from the overstock costume store two doors down. And she accessorizes this fantasy fashion ensemble with sensible wool socks and Birkenstock clogs.

  Nina smiled when she saw Glo. “I was just thinking about you. I got in a new shipment of powdered orange spotted toad. I believe Ripple called for a smidgen in his recipe for controlling barking in enchanted objects.”

  “Thanks,” Glo said, “but I don’t have a barking problem.”

  Nina cut her eyes to Glo’s broom. “Has his mood improved with the extract of contented cow?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Well, if he starts barking, I have just the thing.”

  After five minutes in the Exotica Shoppe with Glo and Nina, I was ready to start barking. Bad enough I had to deal with Diesel and the whole abilities beyond normal thing. Glo and Nina took suspension of disbelief to a whole other level.

  “I want to talk to you about the Lovey book of sonnets,” I said to Nina.

  “You’re the third person to ask about it since the professor was killed,” Nina said.

  “We want to know everything,” Glo said. “We’re investigating, and we might save mankind from Armageddon.”

  “That would be excellent,” Nina said. “Let me know if you need help. I have a few spells I’ve been saving for a special occasion . . . like doomsday.”

  “Was Gilbert Reedy a regular customer?” I asked Nina.

  “No. He happened to walk past the shop and saw the book in the window. He was very excited about it. He knew the entire history. He said it completed his collection.”

  “Who else came in and asked about the book?”

  “A vampire. He was supernaturally handsome. He had shoulder-length black hair, and deathly pale skin. He came in the same day the professor was killed. He wanted to know if the key had been sold with the book. And then a woman came in a day later and asked the very same question.”

  “Do you know the woman’s name?”

  “No. She was waiting outside for me to open the store. She was pacing and smoking. And her hair was every which way, as if she’d been running her hands through it.”

  “Short black hair?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “My age?”

  “Maybe a little older.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Beastly. She was practically snarling. She said I was ten minutes late. And she demanded I tell her the location of the little key. Can you imagine?”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I told her it was sold with the book. And then I offered her a Zuzu wafer because she was so angry and I thought it would calm her. They’re very delicate and they smell wonderful. Like cinnamon and roses. They’re made from shortbread dough rolled paper thin and infused with essence of crushed Zuzu berries.”

  “And these cookies make you happy?” Glo asked.

  “No,” Nina said. “They give you diarrhea. Zuzu is really nasty stuff.”

  “Has anyone else asked about the book or the key?” I asked Nina.

  “That’s it so far.”

  “Do you have any other books by Lovey?”

  “No. I just had the one. I don’t even know when I acquired it. I was dusting one of the top shelves, and I came across it and was taken with the engraved cover. Anyway, I put it in the window and did a little research on it.”

  “I bet you used Ryan’s Big Book of Enchanted Works,” Glo said.

  Nina straightened a row of glass jars holding pickled eyeballs. “Actually, I Googled it. You know, the Internet. There wasn’t a lot out there . . . just that his sonnets were said to inspire lust and some woman was accused of witchery because of them. I don’t think she was ever convicted.”

  We left Nina, and we went to a nearby pub. Glo and I got cheeseburgers and beer. Broom didn’t seem to want anything.

  “He never eats when people are watching,” Glo said.

  “He’s a broom,” I said to Glo. “Brooms don’t eat.”

  “True, but I’m pretty sure he’s an enchanted broom. And sometimes when I get up in the morning, food is missing. Once there was a half-eaten bagel on my kitchen counter, and I know I didn’t eat it.”

  I looked at Broom, leaning nonchalantly in the corner, against the back of the booth, and I thought he might have twitched a little. Probably, he was laughing at us.

  “Too bad about your date tonight,” I said to Glo. “Why was he arrested?”

  “The usual. He shot someone in the head with a nail gun. Honestly, I’m going to stop going out with carpenters. This is getting really old.”

  It was after ten when I got home, and Cat was waiting for me. I closed and locked the door and bent to scratch Cat behind his ear. We went into the kitchen, I gave him a pumpkin muffin and some milk, and waited while he ate.

  “I had another one of those strange days,” I said to Cat. “Diesel thinks the hunt is on for one of the SALIGIA Stones, and it looks like someone was killed because of it. What do you think?”

  Cat looked up at me and blinked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I think, too.”

  I turned the lights off, and Cat and I padded up the stairs to my bedroom. My bedroom walls are pale green, and the sheers on the window are white and floaty. I found my bed in a secondhand store, and it was exactly what I wanted. It’s queen-size and has a wrought-iron frame that has a fanciful, scrolly design on the headboard and footboard. I have a small table and lamp at bedside, and a small chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. No television. Just a notepad and pen on the table, and a book.

  I puffed my pillows and snuggled under my genuine synthetic down comforter. Cat curled at my feet.

  “This is the good life,” I said to Cat.

  Cat didn’t look around at me. Cat knew it was good. Probably, he would think it was even better if he hadn’t been neutered, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. I thought about reading a few pages, but that’s as far as it went. It had been a long day, my stomach was full of cheeseburger, and I was tired.

  I never have problems falling asleep, and I rarely wake up in the middle of the night. My eyes open every morning at 4:10 A.M., which is five minutes before my alarm goes off. So it was odd to wake to a dark room and see 2:00 on the digital display of my clock radio. I lay very still, barely breathing, listening, knowing something had dragged me out of sleep. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw that Cat was crouched in the middle of the bed, his tail bristled out like a bottle brush, his attention riveted on a shadow at the far end of the room. I realized the shadow was a man, and my heart stopped for a moment.

  It was Wulf. He was standing statue-still, silently watching me.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Not long.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Compliance. I want you to stop helping my foolish cousin. Without you, he would be forced to give up and move on.”

  “I can’t see him doing that.”

  “He would have no choice. He would be ineffective.”

  “Why do you want him to give up?”

  “I have my reasons. And some of the answer is obvious. I need to secure the Luxuria Stone, and he’s making it more difficult than it should be.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him.

  Truth is I’d tell him anything if I thought it would get him out of my bedroom.

  “You have no idea how dangerous this hunt is,” Wulf said. “This isn’t a game. There will be terrible consequences if you continue.”

  There was a flash of light, Cat growled low in his throat, and when the smoke cleared, Wulf was gone. I didn’t hear him leave. No footsteps on my stairs. I didn’t h
ear a door open or close. Only the rumble of an expensive car engine catching on the street below my window.

  “Jeez Louise,” I said to Cat.

  I switched my bedside light on and debated calling Diesel. It would be comforting, but it wouldn’t really serve a purpose. Wulf was gone. At least for now. I got up and turned every light in the house on, and checked to make sure all the doors were locked. I grabbed some cloves of garlic and my big chef knife, and I went back to bed. Okay, I know garlic is for vampires, and I don’t think I believe in vampires. At least I don’t want to believe in vampires. And Wulf probably isn’t a vampire. Still, it can’t hurt to carry some garlic with me just in case, right?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Clara watched me pipe frosting onto a batch of spice cupcakes. “You look like you’re asleep on your feet,” she said. “You just frosted a cupcake with your eyes closed.”

  “I had a bad night. Wulf popped into my bedroom at two in the morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep after he left.”

  “He popped in?”

  “I woke up and there he was . . . watching me.”

  “That’s creepy. What did he want? Did he attack you?”

  “No. He wanted to talk. The conversation ran somewhere between a threat and a warning. He wanted me to stop helping Diesel.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” Clara said.

  Glo had been listening from the doorway. “She can’t stop helping Diesel. She has to save the world or we’ll all go to hell.”

  “Hell would be a bummer,” Clara said.

  Personally, I thought we were in big trouble if I was the one standing between the world’s population and hell.

  “I need coffee,” I said to Clara. “I need a nap.”

  I left work early, drove home, and crashed into bed. When I woke up, Diesel was standing, hands on hips, looking down at me.

  “Could you ring a doorbell?” I said to him. “I’m tired of men barging into my house. Whatever happened to privacy?”

  “Is someone barging in besides me?”

  “Wulf. He dropped in last night to tell me I should stop helping you or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “He didn’t say, but I don’t think it was good. Big trouble. Lots of danger. That sort of thing. He said if I stopped helping you, you’d go away.”

  “I wouldn’t go away,” Diesel said, “but I’d be severely limited. He’d have a huge advantage.”

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Did you read Goodfellow’s diary?”

  “Yeah, and it wasn’t easy. Almost a hundred pages written in cramped script, detailing everything from the purchase of chickens to indigestion. And he had indigestion a lot.”

  “What did he say about Lovey?”

  “Lovey told Goodfellow he was in possession of an ancient artifact, a stone of great and terrible power, and it was a horrible burden that he wasn’t able to shed. He couldn’t destroy the stone, and he couldn’t part with it. When the stone was passed to Lovey by a distant relative, he was warned of the damage the stone could do if its evil energy was ever released. He was also told that the stone wasn’t always evil. The stone that now brought people to their knees with lust . . .”

  I did an inadvertent giggle.

  Diesel grinned down at me. “Lizzy Tucker, you have a dirty mind.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I like it. It shows potential.”

  “Get back to Goodfellow.”

  “Lovey told Goodfellow the stone was originally pure. It originally held the power of true love, but it had been corrupted by an evil force, just as all the Stones of SALIGIA had been corrupted long ago. Lovey was convinced the stone could be restored to its original purity, and that it could bring true love to him and to the world. Unfortunately, Lovey never found out how to remove the curse on the stone. Sensing his life was about to end, he hid the stone for safekeeping, leaving behind cleverly disguised clues. Goodfellow writes that only a believer in true love will have the ability to find the clues and the stone.”

  “What do you think?”

  Diesel shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. My job is to keep the stones out of Wulf’s hands. For what it’s worth, when I read the paper I got off Reedy’s desk, the one written in 1953, it was the first time I heard this version. For centuries, people have searched for the stones. The possibility that the stones could be uncorrupted is new to me.”

  “It’s a nice thought.”

  “I guess, but I don’t want to go down in history books as the guy who rid the world of lust. Speaking for myself, I like lust a lot. And to be honest, the whole true love thing feels kinda girly to me.”

  “I must be getting used to you,” I said. “I’m only a little horrified.”

  Diesel grinned. “It’s all about lowered expectations.” He stretched, and scratched his stomach. “I’m hungry. Do you have any more pumpkin muffins left?”

  I shoved my feet into my sneakers and laced them up. “I have pumpkin muffins and blueberry muffins. And I think you’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

  Diesel followed me down the stairs and chose a blueberry muffin. “I’d like to go back to Harvard,” he said. “I have some questions for Julie. I don’t get the dating thing. At first I thought Reedy believed the sonnets would bring him true love somehow, and all he had to do was find the right woman, but that’s not it. The women were part of the search for the stone. I don’t think Reedy was interested in finding his own true love.”

  An hour later, we met Julie in Reedy’s office.

  “Unfortunately, I only have a few minutes,” Julie said. “I have a class at the top of the hour.”

  “I appreciate the few minutes,” Diesel said. “Some women have come forward saying they dated Dr. Reedy recently. The family would like to know if he was serious about any of these women. We thought you might know.”

  “First, let me say that I had the utmost respect for Dr. Reedy. And in fact I believe he considered me to be a good friend. Putting all this aside, I have to tell you he wasn’t always the most rational of men when it came to anything connected to John Lovey. He believed the Lovey sonnet book was a huge breakthrough. He said it contained the first clue to the Luxuria Stone’s location. He even paid a visit to someone in Louisburg Square who, according to Dr. Reedy, owned the object that held the next clue.”

  “Do you know what the object or the next clue was?” Diesel asked.

  “No. Only that Dr. Reedy got to see the object that held the clue, but he couldn’t decipher it. His contention was that only someone who believed in true love could decipher the clue. Call me a cynic, but I think it’s possible there simply wasn’t a clue.”

  “So he was looking for a woman who believed in true love to decipher the second clue,” I said to Julie.

  She nodded and checked her watch. “Yes. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I have to run.”

  “One final question,” Diesel said. “Who was Ann?”

  Some color rose to Julie’s cheeks. “She was another one of the true-love women. The last, so far as I know. And Dr. Reedy changed after meeting her. He became agitated and untrusting. He even accused me of spying on him when I was waiting outside his office for our weekly meeting.”

  “Do you know anything about her? Last name? What she looked like?”

  “No. Nothing. Only Ann.”

  Julie left, but we stayed in Reedy’s office.

  “There has to be something here to help us,” Diesel said. “A Beacon Hill address on a scrap of paper. A map. A phone number for Ann.”

  “I imagine it would help if we had the book of sonnets.”

  “Only if we knew what we were looking for. Wulf has the book, but I don’t see him moving forward. He’s got Hatchet trying to steal the key. My guess is he needs the key for something more than just opening the book. I’m sure Wulf has already opened the book without the key.”

  I sat in Reedy’s chair and studi
ed his desktop. I’d already gone through everything on his desk and in his drawers the other day, but I repeated my search. It seemed to me that if a clue existed, it would be close at hand. Reedy would have been at his desk, taking notes, doing his research. One of the items on his desk was a book on the life and works of Vincent van Gogh. It hadn’t seemed significant yesterday, but today it caught my attention because I remembered the librarian saying the cover on Lovey’s book of sonnets reminded her of Van Gogh’s almond blossom painting. I thumbed through the book and found the painting. Oil on canvas. Branches and blossoms against a blue sky. Completed in 1890. It was owned by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but it was currently part of a traveling exhibit.

  The page was held by a computer printout of what at first glance appeared to be the same painting, but on closer inspection showed small differences. Someone had circled the differences and written private collection and a Louisburg Square address in the margin.

  “I think I might have something,” I said to Diesel. “Come look at this. The librarian said the Lovey book cover reminded her of a Van Gogh painting of almond blossoms. I found this art book on Reedy’s desk, and it looks like there were two almond blossom paintings that were similar but different. One is owned by a museum, but it looks like the second is in a private collection. There’s a Louisburg Square address here, and Julie said Reedy went to see someone in Louisburg Square about the clue.”

  Diesel looked over my shoulder and ruffled my hair. “Way to go, Sherlock.”

  Beacon Hill is a Boston neighborhood delineated by the Boston Common, the Charles River, and busy Cambridge Street. Streets are narrow, lit by gaslight, and mostly one way. No matter where you want to go on Beacon Hill, if you’re driving, you can’t get there from wherever you happen to be. Sidewalks are uneven from time and tree roots. Residences are primarily Federalist-style town houses, with some Greek Revival thrown in for variety. Charles Street slices through the residential area from one end to the other, with its antiques shops, restaurants, boutique stores, coffee shops, bakeries, and greengrocers. Louisburg Square sits two blocks uphill from Charles. The Square itself is a green oasis surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence and a sprinkling of trees. Houses around the Square are redbrick with black shutters, and usually five floors, with half of one floor belowground, opening out to a tiny backyard. This is high-end Boston real estate, with houses selling for multimillions of dollars. I’d walked the streets as a tourist, from Charles Street, up Beacon, to the Massachusetts State House, so I had a vague understanding of the geography.