The floor outside the room creaked, and a man appeared in the doorway. “Who are you talking to?”
“Tony Baloney!”
Captain Tony Milano grimaced at being called by his old nickname.
“That's weird. I was just thinking about you,” I said.
“Of course you were.” He looked around the little girl's bedroom. “This feels familiar,” he said. “Me, you, the unicorn posters?”
I chortled. “I was a bit older than Sophie when we first met.”
“Sweet sixteen,” he said with a twist of a grin.
“That phrase always makes the person saying it look like a dirty old man.”
He frowned. “It's hard to believe you were ever that young. You were just a kid.”
“I was.”
He'd been twenty-three when my father had taken him under his wing. As a young rookie cop, Tony had spent a lot of time at our house, including family dinners. Back then, he'd been so cute with his bronzed skin, cropped black hair, and big brown eyes. He was always flexing the muscles he’d built up at the academy. In his tight black T-shirts, Tony had been a bigger star than every famous actor and singer rolled into one. I lived for those nights he came over to see my father because he’d always spend a few minutes chatting with me. I loved how he treated me like an adult, like an equal.
And now, whenever I saw him, he made me feel the opposite. Like a kid. Not equal at all. And so I tried to poke at him, calling him Tony Baloney among other things, just to get a reaction. The truth was, I just wanted to see him smile. I'd loved him once, and a part of me still did. I wanted to see him happy, sometimes. Despite the other part of me that wanted to see him miserable. We'd dated in secret, when I was twenty-three, right before I left town. It was only supposed to be a fling, an experiment, yet I resented him for closing the door to me when his girlfriend got pregnant. He married her, and they had three kids.
And now here we were, years later, still feeling the past.
The only difference was a bit of gray hair, and bigger problems.
He leaned against the doorway and looked down at me on the floor. “What are you doing here?”
“Checking on Samantha. What about you? Did someone call in a ten-fifty-nine?” That was the Misty Falls Police Department's code for incidents involving yours truly. I was somewhat flattered to have earned my own code.
He didn't even twitch. “Who told you about the ten-fifty-nine?”
“I heard Dimples use it with dispatch a few weeks back, when we were in pursuit of suspects.”
“You mean that time when you wrecked a perfectly good police cruiser?”
“Me? I wasn't the one driving.”
“Maybe you should have been.” He crossed his arms. “When are you going to give up on this private eye business and come work for the good guys?”
I felt my eyebrows rise in surprise. This was a new one. Usually, Tony tried to get me to stay far away from police business. Now he was recruiting me? I looked down at Higgins, who looked equally surprised. He'd paused in chewing his lettuce leaf to stare at Tony.
Tony was grinning, apparently pleased to have made me speechless for a moment.
“Captain Milano, you just want me working for the department so you can boss me around.”
“Please,” he said with a snort. “I may be slow sometimes, but I'm not an idiot. Nobody can boss you around, Stormy.”
Just my cat, I answered in my head. And my bossy redheaded roommate.
“Are you going to tell me why you're here?” I asked. “You're not in uniform, so am I to assume this is a personal call?”
“Not that it's any of your business, Miss Day, but I'm here to keep Ms. Sweet up to date on the homicide case.”
“Did you get a confession from Colt Canuso?”
“Do I look like I'm in a celebratory mood?”
“I can't tell, Tony Baloney. I haven't seen you happy in a long time.”
“Ouch.”
I shook my head and looked down at the guinea pig, who was casually distancing himself from a trio of suspicious-looking brown pellets on my jeans.
“I'm being pooped on,” I said.
“Don't be so dramatic,” Tony said with a sigh. “Fine. Since you were good enough to cooperate with the investigation, I can let you know there's been no confession yet.”
“No?” I smiled as I gently scooped up Higgins and set him back into his cage. Tony had misinterpreted what I'd said about being literally pooped on. Who knew a little dramatic hyperbole would work so well at getting him to loosen up?
“Canuso is sticking to his story that he was walking his dogs outside of town at the time of the murder. We are, however, very interested in Tanner and the other Canuso, the security guards.”
I closed the guinea pig cage and passed in a carrot stick between the bars.
“That would be great if it was one of those two,” I said. “Or both of them.”
“Anyone but your pal, right?” He uncrossed his arms and stepped into the room, where he looked large and masculine—out of place in front of the frosting-pink walls. “Is there something going on between you and Colt?”
“Yes, Tony. I'm sleeping with half the town.”
He snorted. “No need to overreact.”
“I'm with Logan,” I said. “Not with Colt Canuso, or Kyle Dempsey, or any of the other men in this town between the ages of nineteen and ninety whom you always assume I'm sleeping with if you happen to see me having so much as a two-minute conversation with them.”
He gave a nonchalant shrug. “I'm just looking out for you. You're like a sister to me.”
“Ew.” Suddenly, I wanted out of the small room. I got to my feet, and I couldn't resist giving him a bump with my shoulder as I moved past him, out of Sophie's bedroom.
He followed me to the bathroom and watched me wash my hands. The family's main bathroom was a mess, with towels on the floor, an overflowing laundry hamper, and what appeared to be a loose stack of used diapers forming a pyramid on the back of the toilet tank.
I whispered to Tony, “That's not a good sign,” and nodded at the diapers.
“No,” he said gravely. “I'm afraid I'll have to report this. We'll have a social worker pick up Sophie at the school. Any idea where the baby is?”
“At the daycare. I already called to check.” I pulled out my phone and gave him the name of the place and the address. “What about Samantha?”
We both listened for a minute. She was now rearranging the furniture in the living room, talking to herself a mile a minute. By the sound of it, she was having a better day than us. In her own mind, anyway.
I explained to Tony what Samantha had said to me at my store, about how the body in the tub hadn't been Michael's and he would return to reunite with her, and life would be wonderful because they'd be rich from the insurance money.
“If only it worked that way,” Tony said with sadness. “I'd fake my own death if I could.”
I smacked him on the shoulder playfully. “Don't even joke. You're the one person in this town who could get away with it. Plus you have access to all the bodies.”
He smacked me back on my shoulder. “So does Harvey Blight, the undertaker.”
“Blight? I thought he was the manager of Accio Bistro.”
“That's his brother, Howard Blight. The undertaker is Harvey Blight. Kind of an unfortunate name for the funeral business.”
“Kind of an unfortunate last name for any profession, really.”
“You would know.” He grinned. “Stormy.”
“Tony Baloney.”
He breathed in deeply and glanced around. “Well, are we going to stand here all day trading insults, or are we going to make some phone calls and finish tearing apart a victimized family?”
I stared at him.
He broke eye contact, looking down at his feet. He'd taken off his shoes before entering the residence, and based on the number of children's Band-Aids that were now stuck to his foot, he was probably r
egretting his choice.
“It's just dark humor,” he said. “We don't mean anything by it.”
“I know,” I said gently. “You can make amends by taking Higgins with you. He can play with your guinea pig, Harry Potter.”
He looked up quickly, wide-eyed. “You remembered the name of my kids' guinea pig?”
I could have told him it had stuck with me, thanks to the anecdote he told me about it going missing, and how it was named after the boy wizard because it had a white lightning-shaped marking on its head.
Instead, I said, rather ominously, “I know everything about you, Milano.”
Chapter 29
When I got home that Wednesday afternoon, I found a note on my front door. There were no words, just an arrow pointing to Logan's side of the duplex.
I walked over with the note in my hand, laughing to myself. He could be as cryptic as my father at times.
I let myself in and kicked off my shoes. “You summoned me?”
He turned around from his position at the stove and gave me the smile that could win over the toughest of judges, in spite of the dark beard so many people teased him about.
“You had a tough day,” he said.
“You heard about that.”
“My cousin called me, screaming that you were trying to take away her children. You wouldn't do such a thing, would you?”
I shrugged and went straight for the wine bottle on the counter. There were three glasses set out, which I found strange, but didn't question it.
“Those blond kids of hers are cute,” I said. “My devious mastermind plot was to kill Michael, drive Samantha insane, and then take her children for myself.”
He gave me a serious look, eyebrows raised. “There are simpler ways to get a couple of children.”
I nearly spilled the wine I was pouring. Logan and I hadn't discussed having children, let alone a couple of them. I took a sip of the wine and waited for my thoughts to coalesce. The scene at the Sweet residence had been intense. Even without the kids there, Samantha had been a handful, hurling dishes at Tony as soon as he told her a representative from Child Protective Services was coming by for a “quick interview.”
I'd locked myself in the master bedroom with the guinea pig for the better part of an hour, afraid to stay but more afraid to leave.
Samantha finally became more calm and agreed to be psychologically evaluated at the hospital. Some people came, helped her pack an overnight bag, and took her away. Tony and I did a quick check around the house before locking up. He agreed to take Higgins with him, informing me that I “owed him one” for taking temporary custody of the guinea pig.
Logan, being Samantha's cousin, had already heard about the afternoon's excitement from the opposite side—the point of view from which I was the evil enemy.
I must have been feeling guilty about something—perhaps how bad it looked for Samantha's car to be filled with merchandise from my store—that I gushed out the whole story in a stream of conscious rant, tripping over my tongue to make sure Logan had the full picture. The true picture. My picture.
I was pouring a second glass and still talking—I'd gotten up to the part about the Sweet family's next-door neighbor giving me royal hell for drawing crows to the street with food left out on the porch—when I noticed a third person quietly standing in Logan's kitchen.
She was younger than Logan, perhaps late twenties, with wavy auburn hair and big, doll-like hazel eyes. She was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a sleeveless T-shirt with no bra. She looked really familiar, like an actress I'd seen on TV a million times.
“You're up,” Logan said to her.
She made a gagging face. “Who can sleep with the smell of all that garlic wafting around?”
“Hello,” I said, offering my hand. It wasn't the first time I'd come over to Logan's and discovered some friend or client of his—often a husband who'd been kicked out of the house—was bunking in his second bedroom. It was, however, the first time it had been a pretty young woman whose name I didn't even know.
“Stormy Day,” she said. “I'm Jennifer.”
I shook her hand tentatively. “You mean Jinx?”
She gave my hand a happy squeeze, and her face lit up. “Ah! So, my big brother hasn't been keeping me a secret.”
“Yes and no. He doesn't talk about his family much.”
Logan's sister, whom everyone called Jinx, wrinkled her nose adorably. “Can't say I blame him,” she said. “Our family can be a bit trashy. And now poor Sam's getting her kids taken away, which is not unusual in the Sanderson family, I'm sorry to say.”
“It's only temporary,” I said. “Are you visiting for long?”
“I'm here for the funeral tomorrow, and then...” Jinx looked over at Logan, as though it was up to him.
He finished chopping and then swept a pile of chopped onions from a cutting board into the sizzling pan on the stove. The hot oil and veggies steamed noisily, filling the air with aromatics. Suddenly, I was so hungry, I felt hollow.
“As long as you wish,” Logan said to his sister. Looking at me with a twinkle in his green eyes, he said, “Though my landlady might slap a surcharge on my rent for extra use of hot water and utilities, as per our tenancy agreement.”
“She sounds like a tough lady,” I said. “A real dragon.”
“More like a tiger,” Logan said. “But I know how to make her purr like a pussycat.”
Jinx exclaimed, “Ew! Gogie!”
I smirked. “Gogie?”
Logan explained, “When Jinx was little, she couldn't pronounce my name, so she called me Gogie.”
“Or Logjam,” Jinx said. “I didn't know what a logjam was, but I must have heard it somewhere. That's what I called all jam. I used to eat a lot of peanut butter and logjam sandwiches.”
Logan shook his head. “This is all so boring to Stormy.”
“No, not at all,” I said. “It's refreshing. Logan never tells me any of these things. It's like I'm suddenly seeing a whole new side to him. A cute side.”
“I wasn't cute before?” He blinked at me.
I waved a hand at him, curling my fingers like a tiger's claws as I roared playfully. Normally, I wouldn't have been so flirtatious in front of someone I'd just met, but the wine was hitting my system, and it felt good to be silly after a rough day.
Jinx excused herself to get dressed for dinner.
I walked up to Logan and hugged him from behind.
“Mind the spatter from the stove,” he said softly, but he didn't push me away. He arched his back to lean back and give me a kiss. “Don't mind Jinx,” he said. “She likes to push people's buttons.”
She hadn't bothered me at all, so I had to assume he was simply warning me. I slipped my hands into Logan's pockets. “Sounds like a certain lawyer I know.”
He looked down at his pockets. “Are you conducting an investigation in there?”
“It's your fault for always having mints in your pocket.” I pulled out his roll of mints and took two.
“That won't go with the wine,” he said.
“I need sugar.”
“They're sugar free.”
“Why must you be so quarrelsome?”
“You would prefer a man who's spineless and jumps at your every command?”
I frowned, detecting a hint of acrimony in his question. I countered with another question. “How was your day?”
“I had to drive into the city and pick up my bratty sister from the airport.”
“And how was that?”
“Long,” he said.
I sighed inwardly. It was so like Logan to give me a one-word non-answer to any questions about his interior emotional life. Sometimes I wondered if he felt anything at all.
“Road trips can be fun,” I said. “You should have asked me to go with you.”
“You were busy getting Sam's kids taken away from her.”
“And her guinea pig,” I said. “Don't forget about Higgins.”
“Rele
ase me,” he said, looking down at my left hand, which was still tucked in his pocket. “I gotta put the pork in the stir fry.”
“It's right there on the counter.”
He breathed out audibly. “Stormy.”
I pulled my hand away and held it up in the air. “Fine. I'll give you some space.”
He frowned. “It's just that the pan is hot and there's oil spattering around.”
“No need to explain,” I said icily. “I understand. You've opened a nice bottle of wine, and you're cooking me a good meal. I can be grateful and give you the space you need to do it.”
I retreated from the kitchen, taking the bottle with me to the living room.
“You've got stuff all over your butt,” Logan said. “Is that a used Band-Aid? Don't you dare sit on my couch until you go clean yourself off.”
“Okay, Dad,” I said haughtily. Did he have to act so disgusted over a bit of lint?
I gave him a dirty look and sulked off to the bathroom.
Jinx was in the bathroom, putting on makeup with the door open. She nodded for me to come in anyway. She had her auburn hair pulled back with a clip and was applying liquid eyeliner. I hadn't noticed at first, but she had small wrinkles at the sides of her mouth, the kind of lines I associated with a young person who was also a smoker. She didn't smell of cigarettes, so either she'd quit or Logan wouldn't let her smoke around him. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if it were the latter.
Her auburn hair wasn't natural. The roots had a much darker tint, closer to the shade of Logan's hair. In the bright lights of the bathroom, the hair color wasn't flattering and gave her skin a sallow tone. But she was still a pretty girl, with the huge eyes and waifish look that was popular on young actresses lately, almost like a character in a Japanese comic book. I saw her resemblance to her brother in the way her eyes flitted between her reflection and mine while she smiled knowingly, as though we were the only two people who “got it.” We were in on the same joke and everyone else around us was just playing a role, background actors in the main story, which was us.
I pulled open the drawer and grabbed one of Logan's many lint rollers. Sitting on the carpet at the Sweet residence had resulted in a lot of objects being transferred to the back of my jeans, including but not limited to guinea pig cage confetti, bits of crumbled food, and not one but two children's Band-Aids.
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