Cremains of the Day

by Misty Simon

  “You have to go to the police and let them know Katie is planning on breaking into Waldo’s and taking something. I think it’s a ring. And she might have a really expensive necklace that belonged to me.” Was that what Waldo thought I had taken? If it was one of his mother’s necklaces, it was worth a shit ton of money. He would have been ballistic to get it back.

  “Jealous?”

  “Don’t start that with me, again. You know I’m not. But this whole ruse isn’t going to work if she gets some court to believe he had intended to marry her. I don’t know if he changed his will, but we can’t expect anyone to believe he left me his money if she’s wearing his ring.”

  “Fine. I hope you’re coming back soon. I’ve found out some info that you’re going to want.”

  “I want it now, but I don’t have time. Hold on to it. I should be home in about thirty minutes.”

  True to my word, I was cut and ready to leave twenty-nine minutes later. Katie had gone under the dryer to have her foils set, so there was no more talk about me being a bitch, or how Waldo had intended to marry her. Somehow, I had a hard time believing that was true. Although, from what Katie had said, she was just going to take a different piece of jewelry from Waldo’s place, stick it on her finger, and make up some romantic dream about the way he had proposed to her.

  I ran up the two flights of stairs to find Max right where I had left him. He swiveled in his chair, revealing a batch of snickerdoodles at his elbow and Mr. Fleefers in his lap.

  “Really? My two favorite things and you have to steal them?”

  “Hey, now. Your mom brought me the cookies without my even asking, and the cat jumped up here about ten minutes ago. I think he’s still overwrought about the kidnapping. He’s been eating and using the cat pan almost constantly since you left.”

  “Aw, poor kitty.” I bent down to rub a hand down his back and came dangerously close to forbidden territory. I was eye level with Max now too, who leaned forward and stole a kiss that made me want to sit, somewhere, anywhere. Maybe shoo Mr. Fleefers off and cozy up in Max’s lap myself.

  I straightened before I could do something inherently stupid. “So what is this info I need to know?”

  “Well, first I found definite proof that Marla and Darla are the same person.” He turned to the laptop he’d set up at the kitchen table and hit a few keys. A yearbook picture of a definitely less stylish Darla came up, but it was assuredly her.

  “Why couldn’t I find it before? I tried everything I could.”

  “You don’t have hacker friends who can get behind firewalls that are so tight I wouldn’t even know where to start. That’s why I called my guy in D.C.”

  “Wow, look at those bangs. And that nose!” Yeah, those men who had confronted Darren earlier were definitely her brothers, and she had absolutely gotten a nose job at some point.

  “And it seems Marla left town quite suddenly when she was brought up on charges for grand theft auto.”

  “They didn’t chase her down?”

  “They didn’t have to, because someone else took the fall for her, or at least that’s the way I read the report and the testimony.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope. Marla was caught almost red-handed with a car that most definitely was not hers. They had all the evidence, but then a boy named Arlin Freedman stepped forward and told the cops he was the one who stole it, then let Marla borrow it to impress her. He had all the details about when and where and how. Valiantly, he told them they needed to arrest him and leave her alone. They didn’t have any evidence he didn’t have an answer for.”

  “So do you think Arlin is Aaron?”

  He tapped a few more keys. A younger version of the pool boy popped up, but it was definitely the pool boy.

  “Should we just go out and get him at Darren’s?” I asked as I walked three steps closer, almost landing myself in his lap as I kept looking at the picture. In this picture he also had on short shorts. Had the man not learned?

  “No, we still don’t have evidence, but maybe we now have a name to give Burton to look more closely at. Evidence, proof—to take that will make him move fast if he’s smart.”

  “That is excellent!” The relief was huge as the weight of who the hell was doing all this slid off my shoulders. We still needed to know why, though I had a feeling it had something to do with the money that was hidden. At least we knew who to watch out for. Now all I needed was to find out where the actual money was. I didn’t have any leads on that and Max hadn’t had any new thoughts either, but it was enough for today. If it was the pool boy, I had a feeling Burton was going to catch him. My plan to flush out the murderer had not been fully formed in the first place. I doubted Aaron/Arlin would hear from any of my gossips, being that he was further out of the loop than me.

  Now I just had to wait to see what happened next. Burton should be calling soon because I’d left him a message about there being nothing in the safety-deposit box. I needed to hand the key and the folder back over to him. And now I could also give him the person I thought had started this whole thing.

  In the meantime, I had a man in my apartment who kissed like electric. What the hell was I going to do about that?

  I gave him a closer look, taking in his dark hair and the way it brushed over his collar. Taking in the way his dimple showed directly outside the left corner of his mouth, and the way his long fingers stroked the keyboard of his laptop. Could I? Should I? Had I remembered to shave my legs?

  “Hey, why don’t you go grab some dinner from Gina and we can watch a movie or something tonight before you have to head back to wherever you’re staying?” I would have just enough time to shave my legs and see if I still had anything in my cabinet that screamed you can take me if you really want to.

  He looked up from the laptop and smiled, melting the rest of my legs into something resembling pudding. Fortunately, there was a chair right behind me for me to sit gracefully in without looking quite like that pudding.

  “Sure. Write down what you want. I’ll grab it and a couple of drinks. We deserve a celebration. I have a feeling we might already have the money close by; we just need to figure out where it is. If that guy had a note and the access, then Waldo couldn’t have moved the money too much earlier, or the bank would have immediately alerted the man there was nothing in the box he wanted.” He shut the lid on the laptop.

  “True. And if Waldo had gone there earlier, before the guy arrived, then it would have seemed okay to have the man come in and expect to find something.”

  “Instead of the man, I think we should call him Aaron. I’m sure that’s who it is.”

  “Guilty until proven innocent?”

  “Nah, I just don’t believe in this many coincidences.” He gave me a look that I thought might have meant more than just Aaron was a coincidence, and that there could be more here than just some harmless flirting and kissing.

  But I was trying not to read too much into it beyond the physical, so I shooed him out the door and got out the razor.

  The door reopened as I was rummaging around in the bureau. Max put his hand over my mouth and bumped up against the back of me. Maybe I had sent out stronger signals than I had thought. Not a bad thing to have a take-charge guy, but this wasn’t quite like him. It wasn’t me either, since I’d never been into the control thing. We could talk about that once he removed his hand.

  If I had been asked what kind of lover Max would be, I would have thought softer, a little more gentle, a little suaver, a little more sophisticated. However, I could probably stomach this if I looked into his eyes again, and saw their brilliance and the hunger there.

  And then when I turned around, I realized why my nose seemed to have called up the smell of the pool again. Because it wasn’t Max.

  It was Aaron.

  Chapter 14

  My first instinct was to scream, but his other hand clamped around my neck, choking my breath out
. Without a second’s hesitation I brought my knee up as if my old band teacher was telling me to get those knees higher.

  The blow landed with all the ferocity I felt in my body, in my soul, for all the crap he had put me through. For all the people he had hurt, and for all the underhanded, sneaky stuff he was doing. I might not have called Darla my best friend, but she had been a human who did not deserve to be knifed in the chest and stuffed in a closet. And I might not have loved Waldo anymore, but he hadn’t deserved to be spread over the dining-room table like a stuffed turkey.

  While Aaron was doubled over, I tried to karate chop him in the back of the neck As Seen On TV, but he went down before I could get the swift chop done. Instead, I booked it out the apartment before he could get back up.

  He made a grab for my ankle and I kicked out at him, heard his hand smack the end table. He deserved that too.

  Scrabbling at the door to the apartment, I couldn’t seem to get the damn thing opened. I looked to the left to make sure he was still on the ground and saw my closet door hanging open. Jesus, had he been in there the whole time Max and I had been talking about him and what he’d done for Marla/Darla? He was going to kill me, not just force the location of the money out of me, but actually kill me.

  And what the hell was it with him and closets?

  Finally, the latch unhooked and I ran down the first flight of stairs. He must not have been as disabled as I thought, because he was only about a flight of stairs behind me when I reached the first landing and closing in with his long stride, jumping down the stairs.

  “You can’t run,” he said. “I got the rest and you’re all that’s left. You should have dated me. All those times I asked you and you thought you were too snooty for the pool boy when you were just the cleaning lady.”

  Really? I shuddered and refocused.

  Good Lord. Where was I going to go? No one else was here, and who knew how long it would be before Max came back? Once Gina got talking, she could last all night. My parents were out for the evening for their anniversary and my brothers had houses across town. My cell phone was on the nightstand upstairs.

  Damn!

  All these thought kept running through my heard as I ran down the stairs. How many of these freaking things were there?

  I rounded the corner on the first landing and tried to think the opposite of the heroines in those stupid horror movies. I knew that all exits had several locks on them and I didn’t have the time to unlock them all and escape before Aaron caught up with me. I’d just have to find a safe place in the funeral home. I kept going down the next set of steps and tried to think of what was below.

  Dead people. Dead people were below. Darla was below. Maybe seeing the woman he’d taken a fall for would be enough to make him pause. It would leave me time to get out the basement door. Who knew if it would work, but it would be better than being stuck on the first floor. The front door had too many complicated latches to get out and the back door had four separate locks. Damn my dad and his complete security. Too bad it hadn’t worked to keep this psycho out.

  I started jumping down the stairs too, and prayed I wouldn’t break my leg in the process. We had an elevator to move the corpses down on their trolleys, but there was no way I could wait for that to arrive.

  He yelled and it shot down my spine. He was not pleased. Too bad. I was not going to give up now and lay down like some shrinking violet.

  “Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he taunted, sounding much too close.

  Yeah, right. I planned on making it damn near impossible, thank you very much.

  Flying down the stairs, I dashed through the swinging doors into my father’s domain. Formaldehyde was the prevailing scent down here. The shelves were lined with rows and rows of bandages and sutures and makeup and combs and superglue. I shot past it all, but stumbled on a wheel of the gurney where Darla was laid out.

  With a sickening feeling, I watched her body start to roll off the table. I shot out a hand to keep her from doing a face-plant on the floor and threw up a little in my mouth. I did not like touching the dead, especially if they weren’t done and ready to go in the casket.

  Aaron whished through the swinging door and was mere steps behind me. Shit!

  Picking myself up off the floor, I ran into the back room, where I had some hope of hiding out while I circled back to the rear door.

  As I hoped, he stopped for a moment at Darla’s body and seemed to turn a little green. Well, at least if he didn’t have a conscience about killing, he at least had a weak stomach when he saw the aftermath.

  I bolted into the next room. Immediately, he was there too. How did he move so fast?

  I had one chance. On its prize stand was a coffin from the 1800s. It was my very last hope at this point of getting away from him.

  I jerked the latches out of place on the bottom before jumping in. I waited to hear him lumber over to the coffin. When he did, I released the latch to open the bottom from the inside the way they used to for pauper burials, then sealed the doors back together. Springing out from under the coffin, I flipped the coffin lid open and finally got the chance to try out my real karate chop. I delivered the blow to the back of his neck as hard as I could. He fell, face-first, into the coffin and I rolled him in the rest of the way.

  I locked the latches on the side, double-checked the lock on the bottom, and then went to the phone on the wall in the next room. There was no way he was leaving that thing and quite honestly, if he died from lack of oxygen, I was not going to cry.

  * * *

  Burton was both impressed and exasperated. The crime of the decade and I’d figured it out for him. But at least it was figured out now and we could go on with our lives. He’d tried yelling at me at first, but I simply pointed to the coffin again and he rubbed his hand down his face and sighed.

  That part was at least done. Now, there was just the issue of the money. If only I knew where Waldo had hidden it, the bastard. Burton had let me back into Waldo’s house to search for it after they’d gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb, but it was a no-go.

  I had, however, gotten a call from our old attorney. It turned out Waldo really had been too lazy to change the will. To Katie’s absolute screaming fit, she got not a single penny. Of course, she’d been picked up when she’d tried to break into Waldo’s house to get the elusive ring he’d promised her and had spent the night in jail, wailing about how unfair it was that I was out walking around when I was demon spawn. That had me yawning like I was back at one of her horrible high school monologues. Burton had known what he was doing and was able to pin her with changing the original meet time behind the Bean on the threat from five by changing the number into an eight. Turns out, Darla had put five on the note, but Waldo had never shown up because Katie had changed it to an eight, then stun-gunned Waldo for coming to meet Darla in the first place. She really had stuck that tape on her own mouth. So the lip wax was all her own fault. Served her right. It also served her right that I’d been able to figure out that the things Waldo thought I stole was a necklace of his mother’s worth almost a million dollars. I gave the info to Burton as soon as I’d determined which one it was and they searched Katie’s house for it after they’d arrested her for the breaking and entering. She was going to be doing some serious time, since as the beneficiary of the estate, I pressed charges on Waldo’s behalf.

  Aaron wasn’t too pleased, either. Besides being in jail, he had none of the money Darla had promised. Apparently, Waldo had spilled his money secret to Darla on one drunken afternoon. She, in turn, wanted a piece and had promised Aaron money when he’d come to find her after being let out of jail. When she couldn’t produce the money, or wheedle it out of Waldo, Aaron had killer her in a rage and ripped her pearl necklace off her throat, thinking he could sell it. Waldo’s murder was more deliberate when he wouldn’t talk and give up his secrets. As for that unidentifiable accent, apparently when he forgot himself he was from the Deep South and his words were
all hick. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it for myself from the other side of the one-way mirror in the station.

  Someone knocked on my door and I primped my hair just a bit in case it was Max. He was leaving today. There wasn’t anything more he could really do, and his time to find the money and help me had run out. But he’d promised to stop by to say good-bye. He made good on his promises.

  I was surprised when I pulled open the door and there stood Letty.

  “Hey, Tallie. Your mom sent me up. I hope that’s okay.”

  Letty had bags on top of the carry-on bags under her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped in a way they hadn’t been the other day when she’d refused to even look me in the eye.

  “What’s up?”

  “Are you really going to give up all your cleaning jobs?”

  Well, that wasn’t exactly what I had thought was going to come out of her mouth. “Um, probably.” As soon as I found that money.

  “If you do, could you recommend me to them?” She rushed on before I could say anything. “I will totally understand if you don’t want to, but I’m really going to need something more, and I just thought—if you don’t mind—I could take them over. Or even—if you want me to—I could work under you, clean some of the houses and give you a percentage. I could do that too.”

  The desperation in her voice was almost more than I could stand. Normally, Letty had always been standoffish. I had thought she had the world at her feet. What had happened? “Is Darren firing you?”

  Her shoulders shook and she held herself tight like she was going to break apart at any moment. “He’s thinking about it. And I just found out my mom has cancer, so I have to go home to live with her. He wasn’t willing to let me just be a day maid. I’m going to have to help with the bills for my mom. I would really appreciate it if you’d at least think about it.” She turned to leave and I put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m going to have to be. Darren doesn’t think he wants to let me go, because he’s so used to me being around I’m like that automatic vacuum cleaner—useful, quiet, and a tool.”