Ink, Red, Dead (A Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery)

by Slan, Joanna Campbell

  Contents

  Ink, Red, Dead

  Ink, Red, Dead

  A Kiki Lowenstein Mystery

  By Joanna Campbell Slan

  Ink, Red, Dead: A Kiki Lowenstein Mystery © 2011 by Joanna Campbell Slan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s vivid imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Sign up here to receive Joanna’s newsletter link. You’ll get special offers, access to bonus content, and news of the latest releases: http://www.JoannaSlan.com

  Other books in the Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series:

  Paper, Scissors, Death (2008)

  Cut, Crop & Die (2009)

  Photo, Snap, Shot (2010)

  Make, Take, Murder (2011)

  Ready, Scrap, Shoot (April, 2012)

  Praise for Joanna Campbell Slan—

  “(One of) mystery’s rising stars.”

  --RT Book Reviews

  Praise for the Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series—

  “This isn’t your typical cozy. There’s more meat on the bones.”

  --Kittling: Books on Make, Take, Murder

  “A darn good read with a surprise ending. I highly recommend it.”

  --A Bit Bookish on Make, Take, Murder

  Praise for the series--

  “(Kiki Lowenstein is) our best friend, our next-door neighbor and ourselves with just a touch of the outrageous.”

  --RT Book Reviews

  Ink, Red, Dead

  A Kiki Lowenstein Mystery

  By Joanna Campbell Slan

  Chapter 1

  “The minute we pulled into the driveway, I told Clancy this was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. I had this ucky feeling. Be sure to put that in the report.” I pointed at the pad where Detective Stan Hadcho took notes. His pen kept moving.

  “That so?” His voice was muffled by the tissues he’d stuffed up his nose. A dribble of sweat ran down his temple. The backs of his hands gleamed with perspiration. A ring of wet spread out from his neck along his collar.

  “Yes, she did,” said my friend Clancy Whitehead. “Kiki told me she had a bad feeling. I’m a card-carrying Episcopalian, high church, but I respect the power of intuition. We should have turned around and gone home.” Clancy fluffed her hair and re-applied her coppery-orange lipstick. It was a reflexive action, her attempt at regaining control. Unfortunately her hand shook like a tree in a tornado.

  I looked at her mouth. She had definitely colored out of the lines. It might have been comical under other circumstances.

  But not today.

  Hadcho kept writing.

  Clancy capped her Chanel lipstick. “Um, Detective? I’ll stand outside and tell people the scrapbook event has been called off. That okay? Drat.” She paused midway in returning her lipstick to her purse and held up the white bag. “Just look at this ink stain. Soaked right through the leather. The pen I was carrying must have come uncapped. Shoot, and I really like this purse.”

  I watched her walk away before telling Hadcho, “I wanted to turn around and go home. Really I did. I knew something was wrong.”

  Boy, was I ever right about wrong.

  When no one had answered the door at Marla Lever’s place, Clancy and I had tried again. And again.

  “Marla was expecting us, wasn’t she?” Clancy had asked.

  “Of course she was,” I had said. I opened my cell phone and dialed Marla’s number. No answer. “Hoowee, it’s hot out here.”

  “Maybe she’s around back.” Clancy fanned herself with one hand. “Taking out the trash or bringing stuff in from the garage.”

  “We can look,” I suggested with a shrug as I led the way off the concrete stoop. Heat roiled off the pavement, distorting the atmosphere, giving the world a bizarre aspect, like the mirrors in a fun house.

  Clancy and I did a slow tour of the premises, picking our way through the overgrown foliage. Ladue is the most expensive suburb in the whole metro St. Louis area. But you’d never guess that by looking at Marla’s house. This place resembled a rundown shack.

  The “lawn” came up to our knees, except for one swath of freshly mowed stubble. Damp short pieces of blades grabbed at, and clung to, our pants’ legs. The trimmed path extended maybe twenty feet, before dead-ending at an old lawn mower.

  “Guess the grounds crew gave up,” Clancy said, as she and I stepped away from the cropped lane to continue our tour around the building by pushing tall grasses aside. Lacking diligent care, the grounds reverted to their natural state, rolling prairie. Wild sunflowers nodded, native grasses waved seed heads, while pink clover beckoned bees. Stately stalks of white Queen Anne’s Lace looked on, surrounded by frayed bachelor’s buttons blossoms in blue, and orange milkweed bushes that attracted butterflies. The leaves of everything wore that slightly curled and wilted demeanor brought about by the unrelenting drumbeat of the sun.

  Huge grasshoppers whirled up like miniature helicopters to defend their territory. We responded by batting them away. Mosquitoes, smelling fresh blood, dive-bombed us. I could feel the ticks and chiggers crawling up my pants’ legs. The more Clancy and I perspired, the more attractive we became to the bugs. We made our circuit, slowly, examining the sadly neglected house and trying to decide what to do.

  “I think this is what real estate people call a ‘fixer-upper’,” said Clancy, dabbing her forehead with a linen handkerchief. I used the back of my sleeve to mop up the sweat.

  Paint peeled off the window sills. The siding had buckled and a green mold covered it. Shingles lay scattered around the property as though someone had played Frisbee with them. One window sported a silver zigzag of duct tape. Probably covering a large crack. Plywood boarded over another window. A stink rose from the house, something indescribable that made our eyes water. The smell drifted up from the soil under our feet. I wondered if the house had a septic tank that was overdue for maintenance.

  “Gee. Definitely not your average Ladue mansion,” I said. I could talk like that because I once lived in Ladue. In an honest-to-goodness McMansion. But that was one lifetime and a dead husband ago.

  “What do you suppose it’s worth?” Clancy studied the mess, folded her handkerchief and put it neatly in her purse. “I mean, considering the address and zip code.”

  “A half a million dollars. Easy. Good teardowns are hard to find in Ladue. This lot is flat. Wide. Got that nice maple in the far corner.”

  She nodded. “That’s what I thought. Marla lives here? You checked the address? She always looks like she’s hard up for cash. Why not just sell? Take the money, buy a house over in St. Charles, and pocket the rest.”

  “Beats me. If she ever answers the door, maybe we can ask.”

  Chapter 2

  We faced a detached garage.

  “Check out it.” I waded toward the building, sending up smoke signals of bugs as I went.

  Cupping our hands around our eyes, we could barely make out Marla Lever’s car. Old furniture, lawn chairs, tools, and gadgets were stuffed around her rusty Corolla. A dank smell oozed from the building.

  “What do you think?” Clancy turned to me.

  “She has to be here. Her car is.”

  “When did you last talk?”

&n
bsp; “Yesterday. Said we’d be here early. She seemed a little nervous.”

  “No kidding? Wonder why.” Clancy usually isn’t sarcastic, but she had agreed with me: moving scrapbook events from one customer’s house to the next was a bad idea.

  “She was going to try to get someone to come mow her grass.”

  “That ‘someone’ gave up.”

  “Obviously.” I scratched at a spot behind my knee. Tick bite. I just knew it. A trickle of perspiration ran down my face.

  “You figure she bailed on us? Maybe when she couldn’t get the grass cut?”

  “I have no idea.” Crickets sang lustily in the grass, falling silent as we walked nearer.

  “Call her again.”

  I opened my cell phone, redialed Marla’s number, and listened. This time we heard ringing in the house.

  “Up to you.” Clancy faked a tap dance, waved her arms and sang, “Shall we stay or shall we go? Da-da-da-ta-da-da-ta.”

  That Clancy. What a card. I shook an ant off my sleeve and weighed our options.

  We could go back to the store. That meant facing Rebekkah the Terrible, our new “Store Mangler.” (Yes, that’s what her business cards said. I didn’t bother to point out the typo.)

  Or we could sit in Clancy’s car, crank up the A/C and wait, hoping Marla would show up. Maybe she was out running errands and got behind.

  (Errands on foot? In this heat? I was dreaming, wasn’t I?)

  Or we could leave. That nagging voice in my head suggested we hightail it.

  But we couldn’t leave. Thirty-two people had RSVPed, promising to join us here in forty-five minutes for a “crop,” which is industry jargon for a scrapbook party. We would have to try to head those scrappers off. At the very least, we needed to post a message on the front door.

  Ugh. The scrapbookers aren’t going to like this!

  Clancy read my mind. Probably noticed the pained expression on my face.

  “We could stand at Marla’s door and be knocking when the others drive up,” she said, in a voice that was oh-so casual. “This whole fiasco would look like a surprise to us, which it is.”

  “We could both look pitiful,” I added. (I had practice at that. I do “pitiful” pretty well.) “That way maybe they’d blame Marla. Not us.”

  Sounds petty, but I did not want to get blamed for cancelling this crop. I know from experience that scrapbookers do not take kindly to such disappointments. Loading up all their gear is a lot of work. Excitement runs high at “crops,” our industry’s name for scrapbooking events. Tempers naturally follow at a fevered pitch.

  “Drat.” That was all I could muster. I’d lobbied long and loud against this traveling “dog and pony” show. I’m a control freak. I liked having events in the store because I could predict the environment. When you go to someone’s home, you never know if they’ll have a proper work space, good lighting, and so on. Or if they’ll have a rambunctious dog or an ailing live-in relative or a backed up toilet.

  Could happen.

  Had happened. (I thought back to Louise Hudson’s dachshund who couldn’t stop piddling with joy at our arrival. And Ekla Guitano’s father-in-law who had a bad case of gas and who insisted on sitting with us to watch what we were doing. And Kathi Zantini’s toilet that backfired, sending a tsunami of sewage into the family room where we were crafting.

  All those nightmares had come to pass.

  But not a no-show. Not yet.

  But I knew it might. We were bound to wind up at someone’s house and discover she had the wrong date on her calendar. I told Dodie Goldfader, our boss and majority owner of Time in a Bottle, the scrapbook store where Clancy and I worked, exactly that. As I warned Dodie of impending doom, her daughter Rebekkah glowered at me.

  I shared one other big concern with Dodie and Daughter: “We have customers with mega-bucks and customers who shoot bucks for food. There’s too much of an economic disparity in our clientele to pull this off. Someone is bound to feel bad. Or feel slighted. Get embarrassed.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Sunshine,” Dodie gave me a smile that wasn’t a smile. Not really. “I think Rebekkah came up with a good idea. In the immortal words of Jean Luc Piccard, ‘Make it so.’”

  So…here we were. With less than an hour to go, Clancy and I were wandering around in an overgrown yard, moistening our clothing with stinky sweat, and desperately dialing our missing hostess.

  “Maybe Marla’s in the bathroom.” Clancy sounded optimistic. “That happens when people get nervous.”

  “Yep. A bathroom in Boliva. I bet she left the country.”

  “Kiki Lowenstein, you are such a goof.”

  “No, I’m being honest. You know, and I know, Marla didn’t want to host this. I could tell she wanted out of this…but Rebekkah…”

  “Yes, exactly. ‘But Rebekkah.’ We’ve been saying that a lot lately, haven’t we?”

  “Rebekkah refused to take no for an answer. Marla tried to get out of it, but Rebekkah pushed her. So, how could Marla save face? She could run away.” Sounded reasonable to me. I wanted to run away. Right now.

  “Without her car?”

  “She could run far away. Very, very far away.” A dreamy series of tropical scenes danced through my head. “You don’t need your car if you cross the ocean. Do you know that if you Mapquest directions from Los Angeles to Honolulu it says, ‘Kayak across Pacific Ocean – 2756 miles?’ And if you go from Japan to China on Mapquest, the directions say ‘jet ski across the Pacific Ocean – 762 km?’”

  Clancy stared at me from under her thick black lashes. “Kiki Lowenstein, you have entirely too much time on your hands.”

  “No, really! It’s all true. Maybe she decided to try it. Whatcha think? Jet ski or kayak? Hmm? Could we just leave? Put a note on the door and try to contact the others?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Clancy, clearly wilting, reached inside her leather handbag. As she hauled out her keys, we looked at each other in silence, both of us feeling guilty.

  That’s when it hit me. “Wait a minute! Do you hear anything?”

  “Other than the happy hum of mosquitoes as they make withdrawals from my blood bank? No. I don’t hear a thing. Why?”

  I turned in a small circle, listening carefully. There was no noise. Not a whirl or a hum or a clank. The air conditioner was suspiciously quiet. Given the heat, that didn’t make sense.

  “What?” Clancy jingled the keys at me. “Can we go?”

  “There’s no noise. How come the air conditioning isn’t going? Huh? What if she’s here? Inside? What if her A/C went out, and she’s sick? Or…worse?”

  “The news.” Clancy whispered and turned pale.

  Every evening brought more reports of elderly people found dead at home. The culprit? The soaring temps. A nasty heat wave had wrestled the Midwest to the mat. The city and the county of St. Louis both were ready to cry, “Uncle!” Cooling shelters were filled to capacity. Neighbors had been asked to check on each other. Hazardous situations were to be reported to authorities.

  I sighed, a gust of capitulation. “Come on. Let’s try the front door again. After that, we call the cops.”

  I jiggled the handle a bit harder than before, and to my shock, the door opened slightly. Through the crack a fetid stink oozed. The smell nearly bowled me over. It was sickly sweet, rotten, and pervasive with an undertone of ammonia. I turned my head, gasping for air, and gagged.

  “Ugh!” Clancy put her hand over her mouth and coughed. “What is that smell? Cat pee?”

  A dozen little kitty faces filled the open space between door and door jam.

  “I think so.” I eased the door shut.

  “Marla has to be in there. Why else would the door be unlocked?” Clancy said. “And if she’s there. She’s in trouble.”

  “Okay, I’m going in, but I’ll need to move fast.” I gulped fresh air.

  Through the door we now heard meowing and crying and a general feline uproar. Opening it slowly, I used my toe to nudge the
cats back inside and slowly closed the door behind me.

  “Marla? Marla, it’s Kiki! Remember? Clancy and I came early to help you get ready for the crop. Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?”

  The room started moving, coming toward me. A carpet of living cats. Big and small. Striped, yellow, black, white, Siamese, long-haired, short-haired, and practically no haired.

  “Whoa,” I backed up against the entrance as they crawled toward me, wave after wave of feline faces. I scanned the room, I felt disoriented, dizzy even, standing in a narrow tunnel formed by a towering piles of newspapers. The room closed in on me.

  The heat in the house and the smell of cat pee caused me to feel light-headed. My chest walls tightened, a prelude to an asthma attack. Between the smell and the heat, I could barely catch a breath.

  “Marla? Marla!” I called.

  And the cats kept coming.

  Chapter 3

  Meowing and mewing and hissing, they pawed my legs. I plucked them off gently, and as soon as I untangled one, two more took its place. They reared back on their haunches and patted the air, trying to get my attention. They jumped over each other to get to me. They ran under each other. They rolled like the tumbleweeds in Westerns.

  “Marla? Hello?”

  I thought I heard a noise, a human groan.

  Or was it a cat?

  I walked toward the sound, following a path of urine-soaked newspapers and grotty carpet samples. I tried not to step on paws or tails, but I didn’t dare touch the makeshift walls of newspaper for balance out of fear they would come down on me. Twelve feet in, the tunnel widened into an open space where a sagging sofa faced a quiet TV. The cats hopped down from the top of the old fashioned television console to greet me, yowling at my feet and rubbing against my legs.