“Ms. Driscoll—Giulia—I’m stunned you’d consider The Scoop your antagonist for even an instant of time.”
Frank dashed into the garden and smothered his laughter in a zucchini leaf the size of a dinner plate.
Giulia put her back to the garden to avoid the laughter contagion. “Mr. Kanning, please don’t waste my time or your acting skills. We have always been antagonists. Our temporary truce over the Doomsday Prepper camp was exactly that: temporary.” She cut off a splutter. “You stop at nothing for a story, and I do everything I can to protect my clients. You have one chance to tell me which of your developing stories you think I’m sabotaging before I involve the police.”
A melodramatic sigh. “Ms. Driscoll, I solemnly swear we would never resort to thuggery.” More keystrokes. “I’m sending you today’s itinerary. Pit Bull can verify it.”
“Your cameraman is hardly an impartial source.”
“Jesus, did you break your minuscule funny bone in your accident?”
Silence from Giulia caused muttering from Kanning.
“Okay, okay. I apologize. From eight to eleven thirty we were in the studio making final edits to today’s episode. At eleven thirty we ordered in dim sum. I have the timed and dated receipt. We drove to the Cottonwood Central School District offices at quarter to one to set up our exposé of the county-wide high school football underground gambling ring.”
Giulia followed his recital on the itinerary she’d opened on her phone screen.
“We left at 3:10 when two power-grabbing underlings threatened to have us arrested for trespassing and endangering the welfare of a child. In July, when the youngest person on the grounds was the twenty-something lawn maintenance guy. We drove from there to the Mobil Station on Maple and French. You know it?”
“Yes. It’s the one with the Model T mounted on the roof.”
“Okay. We gassed up and Bull saw our left rear tire was low. Took the pit jockey almost an hour to squeeze us in and repair the leak. After that we drove back to the station to work on the gambling footage.”
With the exception of the time spent on the flat tire, Kanning’s recitation matched the day’s planned timeline.
“Well, Ms. Driscoll? Are we exonerated?”
She allowed herself an inaudible sigh. “Yes.”
“Don’t we get an apology?” A pout crept into his glib voice.
She did not allow herself to gag. “You’ll admit your track record lends itself to suspicion.”
Self-righteousness eclipsed the pout. “The Scoop is dedicated to exposing corruption, to giving our viewers a story they don’t dare miss, and of course to non-violence.” When Giulia didn’t reply, he continued: “Think about it, Ms. Driscoll. You’re on our side now. The Scoop protects its benefactors.”
Frank whispered in her ear, “I bet now you regret calling them in to help bust up the Doomsday Prepper sex and drug cult.”
Giulia jumped. She hadn’t seen him return to the kitchen. He backed away from her Unruly Student Glare, but the grin on his face said it all.
Kanning’s voice: “Ms. Driscoll? You still there?”
“Yes. Thank you for your infor—”
“Don’t hang up. You must be on a hell of a trail to have someone gunning for you.”
“Our clients are confi—”
“Hold it. I just realized something. Your car crasher drove a white van like ours. They must be trying to frame The Scoop. Son of a—” He hung up.
Giulia’s forehead came to rest on the cool glass top of the kitchen table.
Frank came to the back of her chair and massaged her shoulders. “Maybe his narcissistic conspiracy theory will keep him out of your hair.”
“I will never be that lucky.”
Sixteen
At six the next morning, Giulia’s muscles discovered a correlation between overdoing it at the gym and surviving a car accident.
Despite the seventy-four-degree temperature at that hour of the morning, she ditched her plans for a cool shower and instead soaked in a tub loaded with Epsom salts. A fresh dose of ibuprofen and liberal slathers of Biofreeze followed. The pungent scent preceded her into the bedroom. Frank rolled to the other side of the bed between one snore and another.
By seven thirty she was armed with strong, caffeinated, homemade coffee, had left a full travel mug on the counter for Frank, and had worked through most of the stiffness.
Bracing herself, she opened the garage door.
A school-bus yellow Chevy Aveo hatchback squatted in the Nunmobile’s place. She’d expected a troupe of circus clowns to tumble out of its five doors the moment she saw it. It had been the only sub-compact available in the Enterprise lot attached to the collision shop.
She hated it, but she was also a Cradle Catholic and the proper response had been ingrained in her since grade school. She settled herself in the Clown Car, turned the ignition, rolled down the manual window, and offered it up.
Frank had limited his comments to a spate of laughter and a photo sent to his partner, his boss, and all four of his brothers. The replies had been as expected.
“Give it some HGH.”
“Is it still using a pacifier?”
“Where’s its clown nose?”
She settled into the driver’s seat. “All right, Clown Car, let’s make the best of our temporary partnership.”
Forty minutes later, she pulled into the same Dahlia parking spot as yesterday. A black Nissan Sentra took a spot up against the landscaping a few minutes later.
Giulia chomped an Altoid and got out first, leaving her empty travel mug in the single cup holder. She’d forced herself not to dress up for this last Dahlia interview. When Sandra Sechrest stepped onto the blacktop, Giulia knew her decision had been correct. Nothing in her closet was worthy of Sandra’s black and white spectator pumps, white linen sheath dress with black edging, and onyx earrings and pendant.
“Ms. Driscoll?” Sandra’s voice was as cool and cultivated as her ensemble.
Giulia held out her hand. “Good morning, Ms. Sechrest.”
“Please call me Sandra. Thank you for being prompt. I’ll let us into the building.”
She unlocked the main door and entered a code on the security system keypad. A red light changed to green and a repetitive beep-beep-beep fell silent.
“May I offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Thank you, no.”
Sandra nodded and sipped a green concoction from a double-walled tumbler. “I haven’t touched coffee in years. Probiotic smoothies with matcha tea are essential for the modern hectic lifestyle. They have detox benefits as well. Have you tried them?”
“Not yet.” Giulia wondered if Sidney had discovered the joys of drinking what looked like toxic miso gazpacho.
The third member of the Dahlia trinity expounded on the gastrointestinal and complexion benefits of her drink. “People insist I look much younger than my actual age.” With a hand on the doorknob of the office opposite Mark Pedersen’s, she rounded on Giulia. “How old do you think I am?”
Giulia earned her reputation for diplomacy once again by answering “Thirty-three” when the honest answer was “Mid-forties with a face lift and possibly a lift of other parts.”
Sandra opened her office door with a satisfied smile on her frosted rose lips. She cranked the air conditioning and turned on a desk lamp. The burnt orange and gray décor complemented her skin tone and clothes. Even the required Dahlia magazine covers were framed in burnt orange and gray.
“Please have a seat. I suppose it’s useless to ask who hired you?”
Sandra’s desk was positioned so her back was to the west-facing window. Even without the afternoon sun, the light imparted a soft-focus halo to her face.
At least Giulia didn’t have to squint to see her at this hour. “Our clients are confidential.”
&nb
sp; Another nod. “I expected as much. What do you want to know?”
“How has Dahlia progressed now that Elaine Patrick has been its official head for three years?”
“I see.” Sandra swirled her cup of green ooze. “Our financial statements are always available to our stockholders, but to prove to your client we have nothing to hide, here is the secure web address and the password.” She wrote on a white sticky note watermarked with a pink dahlia flower. “Our finances are robust. Our clientele is loyal. Our employee turnover is one of the lowest in the industry.” Another camouflage movement, this time a green probiotic sip. “No offense to you. You’re only doing your job, but I can’t stand the practice of poking and prying for a business’ weak spots. Mark, Konani, and I have maintained a successful company under circumstances that would have collapsed a weaker infrastructure. Konani and I may have held subordinate job titles nine years ago, but we were indispensable to Belinda and Arthur, Elaine’s parents. I don’t fault Elaine for wanting to take an active role in her family’s business. It’s what anyone would do. But the minute she turned twenty-one, she dug her pastel pink fingernails into the guts of our hard work. Word got out—how could it not?—and the survivor of the Masked Massacre became news again.”
As much as Giulia typed faster than she wrote, she stuck to her legal pad. Sandra didn’t recoil when Giulia flipped to a new page, confirming her assessment of the Dahlia Triumvirate’s aura. Technology = Spies. Unplugged note taking = Safe. She’d encountered otherwise sensible business people like Sandra before, who embraced most technology but continued to believe that if they somehow didn’t type a fact into a computer themselves, their company’s information was hidden from the Zanes of the world.
Giulia’s Dahlia Suspicions Bullet List expanded.
•Double books?
•Snogging the boss?
•Snogging bosses, plural?
•Skimming the profits?
•Padding the expense accounts for Fair Trade buying junkets?
She’d have to tell Rowan and Jasper about how she tuned into the Dahlia aura, but first she interrupted Sandra’s flow. “Masked Massacre?”
Dyed platinum eyebrows rose toward a matching platinum widow’s peak. It hit Giulia that even the green of the smoothie complemented Sandra’s color scheme.
“It’s good to discover not everything is public knowledge.”
Giulia didn’t crack. “May I ask for the relevant details?”
Sandra leaned forward, the corners of her mouth crimping. “You’ll think I’m a scandal monger.”
Seventeen
“Not at all,” Giulia said, and it was true. Dahlia wasn’t staffed by scandal mongers. That label implied amateurishness. Dahlia was a Jerry Springer show waiting to happen.
Sandra fiddled with her telephone cord. Giulia catalogued this first edgy movement from her.
“Are you familiar with sugar skulls?”
Talk about a question out of a clear blue sky. “I’ve seen them on the news for Día de los Muertos celebrations.”
“Never up close?” A shiver. “They’re worse than those antique china dolls, the kind with eyes that follow you.”
If Giulia were to practice Tarot reading on Sandra, would she include skeletons or dolls in the interpretation to spook her into revealing more, or would she craft a soothing, positive reading to encourage further shared confidences? She’d have to check how Rowan would handle it.
“Were Elaine’s parents in Mexico when they were killed?” She didn’t have to flip to her notes on Muriel’s version of Elaine’s history. The details were at the front of her brain.
“No. Nothing like that. They were in their own house. Multiple murders in the sanctity of the American Dream generated more splashy headlines and paparazzi fodder.” She pushed the remains of her smoothie to one side. “Belinda and Arthur slashed and burned Dahlia to make it profitable again. Practically every business magazine wrote a feature piece on them.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It was, until one magazine published a photographic tour of their house. You know Elaine calls it a castle? I refuse. At the time the police were dealing with a series of unsolved home invasions. Security systems were disabled and only drugs and money were taken. Each time, the police found the homeowners tied to chairs and shot through the head.”
“I see.”
“One Monday morning Belinda and Arthur didn’t show up for scheduled meetings. Trust me when I say this was unlike both of them. Arthur was more easygoing than his wife, but he knew how to run a business as well as she did. Konani called Belinda’s cell. I called Arthur’s. Then Elaine’s private school called. She hadn’t shown up either. When we called the house and got no answer there, we drove over. The front door was locked and we went around to the back door.” Another shiver. “A sugar skull mask stared up at us from the threshold.”
“The home invaders liked to brag?”
A nod. “It was their trademark. We called the police and Mark Pedersen. Everybody showed up at once.”
“What did you find?”
“A stench I never want to experience again as long as I live, that’s what we found first. The medical examiner concluded they’d been killed on the Friday before. Belinda and Arthur had been tied to kitchen chairs and shot through the forehead. The maid, the cook, and the butler were in the kitchen, also dead. All of them wore sugar skull masks. Their open, cloudy eyes stared out at us through the eyeholes.” She groped for the rest of the smoothie and finished it. It appeared to steady her. “I’m better now. I don’t tell this story too often.”
Her lips crimped again. Giulia decided it was Sandra’s way of expressing Muriel’s ghoulish interest.
“They’d opened the safe and ransacked the medicine cabinets. Belinda liked Xanax, and Arthur had a stash of Oxycontin from his back surgery. They’d also found the wine cellar and the Glenmorangie. Have you ever had a taste? It transports you to another world. However, the reporters showed up while only the one patrol car was there. They took pictures through the windows and then Mark ran out the door to lose his breakfast on the back porch. They fell on us like rabid weasels. Konani, that airhead, talked to them. The ambulance and coroner and a dozen more police finally arrived and herded them off the property.”
“What about Elaine?”
The air conditioning turned off, and Giulia’s ears throbbed with the silence. Sandra’s voice came out too loud.
“We forgot about her at first.” She lowered her voice to match the quiet room. “Nobody liked her back then. She was a prissy little goody two-shoes. We avoided her as much as possible. But when we didn’t find her body, we scattered throughout the house. The police were furious.”
“Because you might have been destroying evidence.”
“We didn’t care. Just because we didn’t like the little princess didn’t mean we wanted her dead. We ran into all the rooms like those panicky idiots from the movie Clue. We finally heard this creepy muffled crying and moaning on the second floor.” Her crimped edges turned wry. “The three of us thought it was a ghost. In a perfectly normal house.”
“A perfectly normal house where multiple murders had just taken place.” Giulia used her own body language to convey a conspiratorial “I’ll never tell of your lapse in adulting.”
Sandra straightened her spine. “We found Elaine in a closet. She was starving and dehydrated. The most she remembered afterward was Belinda locking her in there as punishment.”
“Did the reporters take that part of the story and run with it?”
“Good God, no. The police and the ambulance techs made themselves into a wall and got her away to the hospital with those jackals thinking it was one of the dead bodies.” A sneer distorted her frosted lips. “All reporters should get genital herpes. But that wasn’t the scandal. The Sugar Skull murderers weren’t
used to Glenmorangie. Two of them got drunk enough to leave DNA on the lips of the bottles.”
“Criminals always seem to make one crucial mistake.”
“I’ve heard that before. It certainly proved true in this case. A week later, the police caught up with two of them as they tried to sell the Oxy and Xanax. Talk about headlines. There were five in the gang, and they’d been living in non-chain hotels using fake IDs where they could pay cash.” An elaborate wink. “They were living together. All five of them. They liked to videotape, if you get what I mean. They still had some of the Glenmorangie, and two of the women were wearing Belinda’s diamonds. You should look it up. There was talk of making their crime spree into a movie, but it fizzled out.”
Giulia finished a sentence on her legal pad. “I gather the story resurfaced when Elaine turned twenty-one.”
The grey eyes conveyed disgust. “Perry Ignatius proposed to her on her birthday. The society pages lapped it up. ‘Heiress to Dahlia More Than a Pretty Face.’ You get the idea. But she refused to give them interviews and Perry Ignatius called in some favors. Voilà. The jackals slunk back to their holes, and Elaine was free to rearrange Dahlia to her liking.”
“Not to yours?”
A single eyebrow raised itself. “Elaine may have achieved an MBA faster than most mortals, but she’d do well to ask the advice of the three people who kept her business solvent while she was hiding in her bed listening to her nanny read soothing pabulum.”
Sandra tilted her head as she scrutinized Giulia. “You should wear red. Claret and crimson are your colors.” She typed and spun her monitor to face Giulia. “These are from our new fall line.”
Giulia complimented the dresses. The colors glowed and the linen and silk appeared fine enough to flow like water through her hands. The prices reflected her assessment.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
Caught off guard, Giulia admitted the fact.
“I graduated from nursing school a few months before Arthur hired me. I never looked back, but some skills stick with you.” She spun her monitor back around. “I’ve been telling Mark we need a maternity line. It’s a huge untapped market. I’m sending him another email while it’s fresh in my mind.” As she typed, she continued, “Your boss isn’t happy, right? Male supervisors always see pregnancies as a personal inconvenience.”
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