Never Tease a Siamese

by Edie Claire

  "The only thing that’s important," Nikki growled, "is putting nails in Dean Murchison’s coffin. Him and that witch of a wife of his. They killed Ms. Lilah—I’d bet my life on it!"

  Leigh paused a moment. "But you said you didn’t think Dean would kill his own mother."

  "Well, I changed my mind!" she railed. "The two of them killed her and now they want Jared to take the fall while they walk off with all her money. And I say: over somebody’s dead body!"

  The phrase sent a little chill down Leigh’s spine. Partly because she was standing not a dozen feet from where Mrs. Murchison had, only last night, had the life choked out of her—and partly because she had no doubt that Nikki meant every word she was saying.

  "This is garbage!" the woman raged, emptying out the last of the papers. "The latest will in here is from 1982. The rest of this crap looks like she’s had it in here since she was a kid. Cat pictures, stories about cats. Who the hell cares?"

  Leigh sifted hastily through the piles of paper. Nikki was right. It looked as if Lilah hadn’t put anything in the box in more than a decade. It also looked as if the box had once served as her personal memento trove—full of the kind of things everyone has that they don’t want anyone else to see, yet can’t quite part with, either.

  "When did Albert Murchison die?" Leigh asked pointedly, poring over one of the wills.

  "I don’t know!" Nikki answered gruffly. "Sometime when Dean was a kid."

  "This was the last will she needed to hide from him then," Leigh muttered. Whether Lilah and Albert ever had a joint will, or whether Albert only thought they did, Leigh didn’t know. But Lilah had been quite insistent in the 1982 will that her cats be generously provided for in the event she should predecease her husband. And the legal document attached, which to Leigh’s untrained eyes appeared to be some sort of prenuptial agreement, made that seem quite possible. The fate of the couple’s young son, however, was mentioned more as an afterthought. "Well, how do you like that? Dean had to split it with the cats even way back then."

  "It doesn’t make sense," Nikki said to herself. She had scooted back to lean against the wall of the closet, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere in space. "He and Rochelle had to be looking for her latest will."

  "I’m sure they were," Leigh responded, anxious to take advantage of the other woman’s quixotic state. Perhaps it would make her talkative. "Dean probably remembered that she kept wills in the box and figured maybe she would have a copy here. But she didn’t, because after Albert died she had no need to hide her copies anymore. She probably just left the box there because she had no particular reason to move it. Presumably, her later wills were all similar anyway—providing for both Dean and the cats. It was only recently that she decided to cut him out altogether." She cleared her throat. "And admit to the world that he wasn’t her biological son."

  Nikki ceased staring into space and focused on Leigh. "She knew she was going to die," she said self-importantly.

  Leigh’s pulse quickened. "She did?"

  Nikki nodded slowly. "She never admitted it to me, but I knew. I made the doctor appointments; I submitted the insurance papers. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with her—it was all medical mumbo jumbo to me. And she seemed fine, except for a few bad headaches. But she started getting all philosophical on me. Talking about everything in the short term. Met with the new lawyer; didn’t breed any more of the cats." She let out a long, heavy breath. "I knew, all right."

  Leigh leaned in. "Did Dean know?"

  "I think so," Nikki answered shortly, her eyes once again flashing with anger. "I think she told him the night before she left for New York, when they had that huge fight. Jared could hear them yelling all the way out in the garage apartment."

  "Did she tell him he wasn’t her son?" Leigh asked breathlessly. She didn’t think Nikki had any idea how important the timing was. Whoever was responsible for sending the threats to the clinic had known about the missing heir before the will was read. Had Dean?

  Nikki shook her head again. "I didn’t hear anything like that. All I heard was a bunch of screaming about money. I thought it sounded like she told him he wasn’t going to be rich and that he needed to get over it and start planning otherwise. She did a lot of bragging about how she had started out with nothing and did just fine." She paused. "He was like—really, really, POed."

  "Was Rochelle there?" Leigh asked quickly.

  "No."

  "When Rochelle was in the house on Friday and stole this key—did she have time to get in the box, too?"

  Nikki was thoughtful for a moment. "You mean, could she have actually found the real will and then taken it?"

  "No," Leigh answered slowly. "I can’t believe Ms. Murchison would let this box sit idle for twenty years and then hide a new will in it. Nor does it make any sense that Rochelle would have stolen twenty years' worth of wills instead of just the top one. But if she did, she would have had to replace everything in this cabinet just perfectly afterwards."

  Nikki scooted forward and looked at the disheveled piles of linens she had created in her search. "No way," she decided. "She wasn’t out of my sight anywhere near long enough to pull that."

  Leigh smiled to herself. "Then Number One Son probably swallowed the key before she got a chance."

  After a moment’s pause, Nikki’s face reddened, and she rose with a jerk. "What difference does that make?" she asked angrily. "You’d think Ms. Lilah would have left some clue in this stupid box about who her real kid was, wouldn’t you?"

  Leigh blinked. "I thought you didn’t believe she had another child."

  Nikki rolled her eyes. "I didn’t. But now I wish she did. I’d love to wave the proof right under Dean’s snotty little nose and watch him walk away without a dime. Better yet—get locked up for murder, too."

  Leigh didn’t respond, but began neatly compiling the scattered papers and photographs, not one of which featured a human. It was no use trying to convince Nikki that Dean wasn’t responsible for the threats, even though she was more sure than ever that his shocked reaction to the news of another heir at the will reading had been genuine. She also seriously doubted that he had killed his mother, but no way was she arguing with Nikki about that.

  "Would you mind if I take these papers to Detective Polanski?" she asked hesitantly, rising with the box in hand. "She’s a good friend of mine, and she’s on Jared’s side, I promise."

  "Whatever," Nikki answered shortly. "They’re not doing me any good." She looked past Leigh to the mounds of linens behind her. "You forgot something."

  Leigh turned around and noted a yellowed paper corner sticking up from behind a fold of sheet. She pulled it out.

  "An empty envelope," Nikki announced with a snort. "Now that’s worth keeping."

  Leigh held the envelope up to the chandelier in the hall. "It’s not empty," she corrected. Without giving herself time to think better of it, she opened the back flap, which pulled up without tearing. It appeared the envelope had never been sealed; rather, the glue had simply stuck a bit with age.

  So Lilah could open it and look inside it once in a while, she thought to herself. She wondered again, briefly, where on earth Warren was. Why hadn’t he followed her upstairs, and why wasn’t he stopping her from opening this envelope now? It certainly seemed like the sort of thing he should do.

  Oops. Too late. She peered down into the yellowed recesses of the envelope, and her breath caught. It was hair, just as she had suspected when looking at it in the light. But she had feared it was only cat hair.

  It wasn’t. The soft strands of wavy, dark hair were most definitely human.

  "What is it?" Nikki asked, leaning forward. Her eyes widened, as Leigh was sure her own just had. "Get out!" she exclaimed. "You think this could be her real kid’s hair?"

  Leigh smiled to herself. "Maybe."

  Nikki’s army cut was too short to judge natural curl, but the color was a perfect match, and it was all Leigh could do to resist holding the sw
atch up against the other woman’s head. One thing she knew for certain. If Nikki Loomis was indeed Lilah’s biological child, she had been kept completely in the dark about it. Because if she did know, she would not have wasted a second pulling the inheritance out from under Dean.

  But how on earth had Lilah expected her to find out? There was no letter left with the will; no letter in the memento chest. Could she have left something else that Nikki hadn’t found yet?

  "I suppose even if it is, it doesn’t help much," Nikki said with discouragement, referring to the hair in the envelope. "Baby hair looks different anyway."

  Leigh’s brow furrowed. Her pregnancy guides didn’t cover newborn hair, and her knowledge of babies in general was sketchy. Her cousin Cara’s baby had been born with gorgeous strawberry-blond hair and still had gorgeous strawberry-blond hair. But then, her cousin never did anything by the book.

  "Oh?" she asked encouragingly.

  "Sure," Nikki answered. "Newborn hair usually falls out, and when it comes back in, it can be a different color. You know how blond Jared is? Well, Wanda said when he was born, his hair was jet black."

  Leigh seized the opportunity. "Wanda?"

  "My mother," Nikki said offhandedly. "We always called her Wanda."

  Leigh took the plunge. "She was related to Mrs. Murchison somehow, wasn’t she?"

  Surprisingly, Nikki rolled her eyes again. "They were distant cousins or something. Who cares?"

  Hearing what were probably Warren’s footsteps coming up the stairs, Leigh started talking quickly. "Oh, I just wondered if you knew Mrs. Murchison before—I mean, before you got this job…"

  It was a risky maneuver, and Leigh acknowledged that she was only half sorry Warren was on his way. Predictably, Nikki’s face took on a tomato-like hue, and her fists clenched tight. "You want to know how I got this job?" she said severely. "You and everybody else in the nosey little burgh? Well, yes, my mother had something to do with it. Are you happy now?!"

  Leigh attempted an apology, but got cut off.

  "For your information, my mother, who did practically nothing else for me and Jared her whole miserable life, found out when I was just eighteen that she was dying of ovarian cancer. She was worried about what would happen to us, as she damned well should have been! So she went on her knees to her rich, nasty relative and begged her to give me and Jared any kind of job that would set us up anywhere but in that god-awful apartment with Bill and Red. And if you think Ms. Lilah did it just because she felt sorry for her, you didn’t know Ms. Lilah!

  "She interviewed me like I’d come straight off the street. She wasn’t even half serious about the whole thing! So I told her exactly where she could cram this stupid job of hers, and she smiled that evil smile of hers and told me I was hired! Of course, once she saw how much Jared and I liked her cats—and how good he was at cleaning things—she changed her tune pronto.

  "So," she finished, her voice still rising, "while we may have got these jobs because of Wanda’s deathbed guilt attack, you’d better believe we’ve kept them by working our stinking butts off!"

  Leigh swallowed. Such a tirade was, she had learned through long association with Maura Polanski, best left uncommented on. Warren, who had at least an equal amount of experience with irate females, had stopped a few paces short of Nikki down the hall, and was waiting politely until she stopped screaming.

  When Nikki noticed him, she took a breath. "And where have you been?" she asked suspiciously.

  He offered a disarming smile. "I heard Jared calling for you after you had gone up the stairs."

  Nikki’s eyes sparked with alarm, and she started to move down the hall. "Is he all right?"

  Warren stopped her with an extended arm. "He’s fine now. He wanted to clean out the litter boxes on the first floor, but he was a little nervous about coming up from the basement. So I carried them down for him."

  Nikki’s flushed face developed a bit of a glow. She smiled back. "Thanks."

  Leigh threw her husband—who would not touch Mao Tse’s litter box with a ten-foot pole—a warm glance. He could be so sweet. It was one of the benefits of marrying a reformed geek.

  His eyes moved to the box in Leigh’s arms. "So," he began, "what have you two been up to?"

  His tone was pleasant enough, but the look he gave Leigh indicated that the ice under her feet was thinning.

  "Nothing," Nikki said brusquely. "Can’t find squat to put Dean away. But you’d better believe I won’t give up."

  The doorbell rang, and Nikki let out an anguished groan. "Whoever the hell it is, tell them to go away!" she ranted as she started down the stairs.

  Warren turned quickly to Leigh. "Did you—"

  "No!" she said defensively, clutching the chest a bit closer. "I didn’t say a word. But I did get this box open, and it might have something in it that Maura will find useful."

  He appeared only minimally appeased. "Let’s get out of here before you do something else I’ll regret. My credibility with Mo as your keeper is falling lower and lower—"

  "You damned well better let me in!"

  Leigh and Warren both headed toward the sound of the shriek, whose source Leigh could easily guess. From the top of the stairs they could see Nikki in the foyer, standing her ground with her hands on her hips. Framed in the doorway was a frothing Rochelle, complete with neon-green midriff shirt, hot-red bike shorts, and three-inch heels. The security guard stood to one side of the door, looking from one woman to the other uncertainly.

  "You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here," Nikki responded coolly.

  "I’ve got nerve!" Rochelle shrieked again, her heavy shoes clunking on the tiles as she stepped forward. Leigh felt shivers up her arms as two Siamese leapt up the stairs and brushed by her leg; others scattered radially in all directions. She started to move forward, but Warren’s arms quickly grabbed hers.

  "Stay out of it!" he ordered. "The guard’s there."

  "I’ve got nerve!" Rochelle continued mercilessly. "Am I the one who’s trying to bilk poor Dean out of all his money? Am I the one who was so upset when they found out his mother wasn’t really dead, they killed her anyway? Well? Am I? Am I?"

  Nikki’s eyes narrowed. "Probably."

  Rochelle let out a short, piercing scream, but stayed where she was— which might have had something to do with the fact that the security guard had pulled out both his cell phone and his night stick. "You and that idiot brother of yours are not going to get away with it," she continued, her tone deepening. "We don’t care if you are Lilah’s daughter. We’ll fight you every step of the way. And if we lose anyhow, we’ll slit both your throats. Got it!"

  "That’s enough!" the security guard interrupted in a thin, nasally voice. He struggled to dial his cell phone. "You’ll have to leave now, Miss."

  Nikki had remained still as a statue, except for the heavy breaths that visibly wracked her thin chest. "What did you say?" she asked, her voice deadly calm.

  "Oh, come off it," Rochelle snapped, taking a small step backward in deference to the nightstick. "Who else could the woman’s real kid be? You’re the one Lilah paid a fortune to sit around and do nothing all day. You’re the one she set up to live in this huge old house forever. You’re the one whose brother gets to hang out over the garage for free. She gave you everything, you witch—and it wasn’t because you’re so damn good at rubbing her corns!"

  For a moment, Nikki didn’t speak. The security guard put an arm in front of Rochelle to push her back out the door, but before he had touched her, Nikki waved him away. She took a step closer to Rochelle, biceps bulging. "I don’t know where you came up with that crock of bull, you moron, but you’re dead wrong. I’m not Lilah Murchison’s missing brat. But somebody else out there is, and now that you’ve killed Ms. Lilah—that person’s way to the money is free and clear. Stupid move, wench."

  The security guard was looking distinctly uncomfortable. Perhaps union unrest was more his forte—but two pint-sized females on the verge of a ca
t fight appeared not to be his idea of a good time. He stepped in between the two women and began backing up towards the door, pushing a resisting Rochelle one step at a time.

  "I didn’t kill her, and you know it!" Rochelle hissed over the guard’s shoulder. "You can’t protect that retard forever!"

  Leigh winced.

  Nikki sprung.

  The next few moments involved flying fur—literally—as Nikki vaulted over the guard’s shoulder and landed soundly on a screeching Rochelle. All three fell to the tile floor in a heap, scattering tufts of cat hair in every direction.

  "Nobody…calls…my…brother…that!" Nikki bellowed between breaths. She struggled to a sitting position on top of Rochelle’s prone middle, pinning her victim's arms with one hand and jerking her head by the hair with the other.

  Rochelle’s hard heels banged on the floor as she flailed. "Get off me!"

  "Say you’re sorry!"

  The security guard sat on the floor a few paces away, rubbing his head. He had taken a worse tumble than the other two, and apparently did not feel obliged to intercede again—perhaps because the person signing his checks was on top.

  Warren groaned. "Oh, for the love of—" He moved swiftly around Leigh and headed down the stairs, but his intervention, thankfully, did not prove necessary. Just as Rochelle spat out a panicked apology, Nikki’s small body lifted straight up into the air.

  "No, no, Nikki," Jared admonished firmly. He had both hands around her waist, keeping her squirming feet a good foot and a half off the ground. "No fighting, Nikki. You promised me no fighting, Nikki."

  His sister growled, but gradually stopped squirming. "All right, all right!" she conceded at last. "I’m finished. Put me down, Jared."

  He did.

  "Now, you!" ordered the security guard, pointing a skinny finger at a still-angry, but considerably chastened, Rochelle. "Get out. Now! If you don’t I’ll have you arrested for trespassing. Do you understand?"

  Rochelle opened her lips—which were a shiny lavender today—but closed them again without saying anything. She rose to her feet, threw Nikki a malignant glance, pivoted awkwardly on her heels, and walked out the door.