Gretchen Birch Boxed Set (Books 1-4)

by Deb Baker

  Gretchen tucked the phone into her pocket and started down the mountain.

  THE END

  GUISE AND DOLLS

  (A Gretchen Birch Murder Mystery)

  by

  Deb Baker

  Chapter 1

  Gretchen Birch looked down at the ten-card spread, wishing her aunt had chosen a different preoccupation. Nina wore a head scarf for dramatic effect. “You drew all bardo cards!” she whispered in her husky voice. “Out of a deck of seventy-eight tarot cards, only thirteen of them are negative. How could this happen?”

  Nina stared at the cards, worry creased on her forehead.

  Gretchen glanced over at the contemporary doll reference book she had been using to research a one-of-a-kind Shirley Temple. That was before Nina had burst into her workshop with her tiny diva dog, Tutu, and distracted Gretchen from her real work. She was a doll restoration artist and needed to restyle a unique Shirley Temple doll’s hair exactly as it had been in the 1930s. The customer expected the doll back today.

  Nina cleared her voice. “You are in imminent danger unless you overcome external influences. The cards show despair and futility!”

  Despair. Futility.

  Gretchen Birch glanced sharply across the table at her aunt. Old-fashioned words coming from the New Age queen.

  “Your unconscious mind picked the cards,” Aunt Nina said. “You can’t blame me.”

  The tarot deck illustrated full scenes, complete with figures and symbols. Gretchen’s ten cards, all face-up, depicted steely swords and women wearing blindfolds, their arms pinned to their sides with bindings. If Gretchen believed in this stuff, she would have been concerned. She pointed at one of the cards. “Three swords slicing through a red heart. What does that mean?”

  “Sorrow and strife. It’s your final outcome card, the results of the other influences, and your destiny, if you don’t change your path.”

  Wobbles, Gretchen’s companion cat, stretched out on the sofa, watching the two women. The black tomcat was missing a back leg, consequences of a hit-and-run car accident, but he had adapted well to his disability. He stared at Gretchen without blinking.

  “Aren’t you supposed to give me positive guidance?” Gretchen asked. “This is all doom and gloom.”

  “I’m only the interpreter. I can’t help it that you selected negative cards.”

  “Can we reshuffle?”

  Nina shook her head. “No. See this,” She held up a card. “The nine of wands. This card means you have a hidden enemy. My advice is to quit your present path.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Don’t do the museum project, or at least turn it over to someone else.”

  “I can’t do that.” The Phoenix Dollers Club was hard at work on a luncheon and play presentation to benefit a house that they were converting into a museum, an unexpected opportunity they couldn’t pass up. “We’ve started rehearsals,” Gretchen said. “The play must go on.”

  “I can’t force you, of course. You’ve always been willful. But I’m warning you, Gretchen. Don’t take a passive approach to your life. You can change your future.”

  Aunt Nina had come a long way with her readings. Last month she’d still been using an instruction booklet. She didn’t need it any longer. “After the information presented in these cards, I’ll have to stay close by and protect you from yourself.”

  “I’m a big girl, Nina.”

  “Even big girls make mistakes.” She held up one of the other cards on the table.

  “The nine of swords,” Gretchen’s aunt said. “Misfortune! Ruin! Pain!”

  Chapter 2

  May Day. May 1. Instead of dancing around a maypole with multicolored ribbons streaming behind her, Gretchen was crouched on the rough ground, surrounded by desert shrubs and cacti. In spite of her surroundings, Gretchen felt like the May Queen.

  “There,” Matt said, squatting on the ground next to her. The wonderful and familiar aroma of his Chrome cologne wafted through the air. “That’s the spot.” She heard excitement in his voice. She was right there with him, feeling it. too.

  She could think of worse things than spending the final hour right before dusk on the hard earth of Phoenix’s Camelback Mountain beside the man she’d been lusting after. Not that she would ever admit to lusting. But she was.

  In fact, she was lusting this very minute. Three months into their relationship and they still were performing the opening act of the mating ritual, as they had agreed. First-base kid stuff. Both of them were recovering from bad relationships; Gretchen from discovering her longtime lover had a fidelity problem, Matt from a marriage to an unfaithful wife that ended in a messy divorce. They had agreed to take it slowly, not rush into anything too intimate.

  Slow was okay with Gretchen, but according to Nina this was getting ridiculous. “You’re adults,” she’d said. “Not teenagers. Lose the clothes.” At the moment, lying prone next to Matt on a secluded ridge on the mountain, Gretchen agreed with her aunt.

  She should be savoring every moment of the romance, all the richness and wonderfully complex emotions that go with it. Instead, the sexual tension was growing between them every day. Matt had to be feeling it, too, but it wasn’t a subject she felt comfortable discussing with him.

  They had taken to crawling around on mountains, observing the mating habits of other species. Not exactly the best solution to built-up frustration.

  “Right there,” Matt said.

  Gretchen looked in the direction he indicated, getting her bearings before leveling the binoculars. She gasped involuntarily as she trained the lenses on a mesquite bush and found it. Yes. Another bird to add to her growing life list.

  A male phainopepla—shiny black with a long tail and a tall crest, just like the picture in her bird book.

  “Wheeda-lay,” it called.

  The female flew in and landed next to her partner.

  A couple like Matt and Gretchen. A pair. After the final heart-wrenching discoveries before her fiancé became her ex, she was staying cautiously optimistic.

  Gretchen could see the female phainopepla’s signature red eyes. “How do you pronounce the name again?” She was a better climber than Matt, but he knew his birds and their calls.

  “Fay-no-PEP-la. Do you see both of them?”

  “Yes.” Still holding the binoculars to her eyes, she watched the pair take off together as though on cue.

  “Did you see the white patch on top of the wing?”

  “Yes.”

  Gretchen lowered the binoculars. Matt wasn’t watching the birds fly off. He was gazing steadily at her. He flashed a smile. The guy had the best smile in the world. “Come here,” he said, sitting down and reaching out to her.

  She scooted over and they kissed under an enormous saguaro cactus, its white flowers closed since late afternoon. After nightfall they would open again. The romantic in Gretchen wanted to stay, watch them reopen, let nature take its course.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Matt said.

  “Really?” She hoped not.

  “Let me show you.”

  The second kiss should have been sweeter than the first, but instead Gretchen felt the familiar and highly annoying vibration of his cell phone.

  Matt released her abruptly and raised the phone to his ear. “Detective Albright,” he said, suddenly all business.

  Gretchen sat up straight and allowed herself an internal moan. She wanted to thrown his phone off a cliff. She was used to long hours spent apart from Steve, her ex-fiancé. He was an attorney, driven to make partner, but Matt’s career as a Phoenix detective seemed to consume him even more. His work cut into the tiny amount of time they found for each other. It would take some getting used to.

  She saw the hard edge to his jaw, the narrowing eyes. She could feel the distance between them growing as it always did when he switched into work mode.

  Just great. Here it comes.

  “Gotta go,” he said, snapping the phone closed and risin
g. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  They began the descent, Matt moving faster than she thought safe.

  “Be careful,” she warned, hopping from rock to rock. “Don’t slip.”

  “As soon as we’re in the car, call your mother. Ask her to pick you up at Eternal View Cemetery. I’ll be busy for the rest of the night.”

  Stones gave way under his feet.

  “Slow down,” she warned again.

  Amateurs! They thought the hardest part of a mountain climb was the ascent, but beginners suffered more injuries on the way back down by becoming too relaxed, too careless. Gretchen took a final moment to look out over the Sonoran Desert, at the city of Phoenix spread out below. She slowed to take it in and to consider lost possibilities and opportunities.

  If only she’d destroyed his phone.

  “Hurry up, please.” Matt kept going.

  “All right. I’m coming. Tell me what happened.”

  “A homicide.”

  “In Eternal View Cemetery?”

  “Yes.”

  Gretchen glanced at Matt, taking in his broad shoulders and lean, muscled back. How could he do this job? And could she deal with the hours and the internal baggage that had to come with his work? Was this really what she wanted? A guy who seemed to crave danger, who mingled with drug addicts and pedophiles and killers and who knew what else?

  Gretchen didn’t know what the distant future held for them, but here in the present she knew she wanted Matt Albright.

  Slow down, she reminded herself as they reached the trailhead, step cautiously in this relationship in the same way you’ve learned to traverse rocky terrain.

  Once in his car, Gretchen attempted to reach her mother. Caroline didn’t answer the home phone or her cell. Gretchen left voice messages at both locations.

  Matt was on his cell phone, immersed in a world of human atrocities and blight that Gretchen hadn’t been able to understand or imagine. Tonight, she would get her first chance.

  Should she try to find Nina for a ride home? As soon as she thought of her aunt, she rejected the idea. Nina would flip out if she had to enter a cemetery at night, let alone one where there’d been a recent murder. Aunt Nina avoided places where negative energy lurked. One of her many quirks, right up there with her claims of colored auras and psychic messages.

  Matt sped along Twenty-fourth Street and turned onto Camelback Road, heading toward the cemetery. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder, sending an electrical charge down her spine.

  “I really am sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “We were having such a great time.”

  “Wonderful,” she agreed. “And I have a faynodoodad to add to my life list.”

  Matt laughed, but with an edge that told her he was paying only slight attention. His mind was elsewhere. “You’re going to have to learn to pronounce its name properly. That’s one of the most important birding rules.”

  “You made that up.”

  “On the spot.”

  Ahead Gretchen saw lights flashing. Matt rolled down the window when a police officer walked up to the car. Matt flipped out identification, so impatient to get to the scene that the wheels still inched forward. “Let Caroline Birch through when she arrives,” he said, once the cop recognized him and waved them through.

  “You’re taking me inside the cemetery with you?” Gretchen had hoped he would, but hadn’t expected it. He could have dropped her at the entrance to wait for her mother. Instead, she really would have the opportunity to observe him in the field.

  How romantic!

  “A gorgeous woman like you? The cops would be all over you. No way am I taking that chance.” He flashed a quick smile. “And you know how vulnerable a woman alone is. I want you to wait in the car. Keep the doors locked until your mom gets here.”

  Another cop waved them through a second checkpoint.

  “It happened in the old section,” Matt said, driving toward the back of the cemetery. He parked behind a line of cars. A van was already positioned between the headstones, its back doors wide open. Gretchen could see a gurney inside. She looked away.

  “The medical examiner beat us,” he said, swinging out of the car. “Be good. Stay in the car.”

  He walked rapidly away before Gretchen could reply.

  How was she supposed to completely understand him and his work when she was ordered to wait in the car?

  Through the car’s windows, Gretchen watched a flurry of activity, as much as she could make out in the darkness. People stood in a group a distance away. Two officers were with them, their heavy-duty flashlights and gleaming badges visible. Who were the others? Witnesses to the crime? Passersby who had stumbled upon a corpse? Or were they suspects?

  Her cell phone rang. “I got your message,” her mother said. “I’m on the way, but it’s going to take about twenty minutes. Where will I find you?”

  “At the crime scene.”

  “What! I don’t like that at all.”

  “We didn’t have a choice. When you get to the cemetery entrance, give your name to the officer. He’ll let you through. I’m waiting in Matt’s car.”

  “Gotcha. Oh, and Gretchen? Stay in the car.”

  The same thing Matt had told her.

  After disconnecting, she leaned back and tried to concentrate on life rather than on death. She and her mother hadn’t been particularly close until Caroline had been diagnosed with breast cancer several years previously. After that, their difference views on life seemed like petty reasons to continue their discord. They had established a real friendship. Caroline was a six-year cancer survivor, going on seven, and she had changed significantly. Now she pursued her dreams instead of talking about them. One of those had been writing a comprehensive doll book and seeing it published.

  Alive and vibrant. Unlike the poor, dead person here tonight. Was the victim male or female? She hadn’t asked.

  Gretchen raised her head and peered out searching for Matt. She saw a small circle of people looking at something on the ground. A woman squatted over what must be a body. The medical examiner?

  Matt wasn’t in the circle. He was about thirty feet from the spot where the team worked on the body, and he was aiming a flashlight at a grave marking.

  What was he looking at? Should she take one little peek to find out? She had twenty minutes before her mother would arrive. After all, she wasn’t a child. Why should she wait in the car?

  Gretchen slid out, closed the door as quietly as possible, and stopped behind a gravestone for a few moments. Shadows played through the cemetery, and wind stirred the evergreen leaves at the top of a palm tree. She moved to the tall tree, treading quietly over the red clay earth.

  The old part of the cemetery was tucked way at the back and didn’t have the uniformity of the newer section. Headstones weren’t lined up in neatly spaced rows. Even the grave markings were more varied.

  She heard the murmur of voices. They reminded her of the hush of a funeral visitation, low and respectful tones. Several people bent over the deceased. No one noticed Gretchen. She crept closer to Matt, sliding along the side of the crime scene at an angle. He hadn’t moved from the headstone. From her position slightly behind the detective, she could see what held his attention.

  Thick writing on rough granite, the words Die, Dolly, Die.

  All red as the color of blood. Please no, don’t be blood, Gretchen thought, even as she realized it looked thicker, brighter. Lipstick? It had to be. Gretchen knew lipstick.

  Matt spoke without turning around. “You were supposed to wait in the car.”

  Gretchen’s first impulse was to duck down and crawl away. She quickly weighed the odds of retreating without making a fool of herself. They weren’t good.

  “How did you know it was me?” she asked.

  “Mathematical deduction. Simply a matter of determining how long it would take you to disobey a direct order from a law enforcement official. By my calc
ulations, you’re right on schedule, a little behind really.”

  “I thought maybe I could help.”

  “You can help by not touching anything. Help by not getting involved.”

  “Okay.”

  “Gretchen.” He stared at the grave marker. “You have a bad habit of tripping over trouble.”

  That was an understatement. She’d had more than her share of difficult situations recently, but she couldn’t see how any of them might have been handled differently. It wasn’t her fault that trouble followed her around.

  “Let’s not have a repeat of past disasters,” he said.

  “Is it lipstick?” Gretchen asked.

  “Probably.”

  “A woman’s body then?”

  “Yes.”

  When he looked at her his face was hard and his eyes were angry. He wasn’t a man she’d want to cross paths with if she had committed a murder. “The woman crawled from here over to there,” he explained. The flashlight beamed along the ground between the headstone in front of them and the site where the group of professions hovered over the body. “See those dark spots? Drops of blood.”

  Gretchen shuddered, staring at the ground. “What about the words?”

  “Rage.”

  He turned and called out to the team hovering over the body. “Did you find a tube of lipstick?”

  “No purse,” replied the woman who Gretchen had pegged as the ME.

  “How about checking the area?”

  “We’ll take a look,” a cop said.

  Gretchen stayed close to Matt.

  “Can’t you cooperate?” he said to her. “Can’t you wait in the car like I asked?”

  “I’ll go in a minute.” His car was parked in darkness. She needed light.

  Matt’s flashlight beam cast eerie shadows along the sides of the headstone. Others with flashlights were scanning the ground in the vicinity of the body. “No ID.” Then the same woman’s voice. “You need to see this.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Matt said.

  He strode toward the murder victim’s dead body. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, Gretchen had stopped existing. The intense beam from a floodlight came on, revealing more of the scene.