Now I was getting impatient. Who the heck was this guy and how dare he claim our house was his house? If this was some sort of convoluted joke—though again, I stress, plastic surgery just to prank someone is far and away well beyond elaborate—someone was going to have to pay for stirring me up like this.
So I crossed my arms over my chest and looked this crackpot right in the eye with my best stern face. “Look, I don’t know who you are or what kind of sick game you’re playing, but Crispin Alistair Winterbottom is dead, and this is my house. It’s easy enough to look up at the Department of Land Records right here in town. So why don’t you go do that and get back to me when you have some solid proof of alleged ownership?”
He sucked in his cheeks, and oddly, when he did, it was exactly how I imagined my Win would look when he grew impatient with me. “Oh, I assure you, this is no game, Stevie Cartwright. I am Crispin Alistair Winterbottom, and this is my home, and I fully intend to prove such. Until then, take notice, I don’t know how you got your hands on my house, my money, but prepare to pay back every dime you’ve stolen from me—including the cost of these borderline garish renovations you’ve perpetrated!”
“Garish?” Win squealed with indignant outrage. “Box this nutter’s ears, Stevie! Box ’em but good then send him on his way!”
I waved a hand at Win, trying to get him out of my ear, but I didn’t need to bother shooing him away. Phony Winterbottom pivoted on his heel, barreled back down the steps and made a graceful exit to his car.
An Aston Martin, I might add—a black one with yellow rims.
“That’s my car! Did that son of a backside scratcher steal my car?” Win yelped in utter outrage.
There was lots of very inappropriate language at that point. Words I didn’t even consider my cultured Spy Guy knew. But he used them, and he continued to use them in the ensuing days.
But since that day, we hadn’t heard from Fakebottom, as I’d begun to call him. Not a peep. And I was glad. I had no explanation for his existence. I almost think his uncanny resemblance to my Win was too creepy for my head to wrap around.
Nothing about his showing up out of the blue made sense. Nor did his claim he could prove he was Winterbottom. Even if something as outlandish as plastic surgery was involved to make himself look exactly like Win (and let’s be realistic here, folks. That kind of plastic surgery only exists on soap operas), there was DNA and fingerprints to consider.
So while it lingered heavily in the backs of our minds, we went right on living, and from time to time discussed the absurdity of it all—neither of us able to come up with a feasible explanation as to why he looked so much like Win. We speculated that Fakebottom had likely gone away because he really couldn’t prove he was Win. Doing that would mean he’d have to come up with some DNA, and that was simply ludicrous, given Win’s background at MI6.
He assured me MI6 had not only his fingerprints but plenty of DNA to spare, should push come to shove. So we filed it in our Impossible folder and moved right along.
Though I admit, I’ve secretly stared at that picture of Miranda and Win in the privacy of my bedroom a hundred times since Fakebottom showed up, and it freaks me to the ends of the earth and back how identical he is to my Spy Guy.
But we were in the midst of enjoying a lovely summer, with plenty of tourism at Madam Zoltar’s, picnics on the water every weekend, nights spent with a bottle of wine on the back patio, now totally renovated and sparkling with Chinese lanterns, Bel buzzing about in the evening sky and Whiskey at my feet.
Life was really good and I was pretty content. Probably more so than I had been my entire life—even as a witch.
Which brings us to today—two months later.
When life got very, very ugly-complicated, and there was plenty of discontent to spare…
Chapter 2
It was a sweltering August day in Eb Falls. We were experiencing the beginning of a reported weeklong heat wave, something we’re not used to here in the Pacific Northwest. Even the breeze from the Puget was sluggish today. Still, boats dotted the horizon with colorful sails, windsurfers dipped in and out of the fairly calm waters, and with the mountain as its backdrop, even the heat didn’t deter from the water’s beauty.
Except for one thing…
I’d just received a summons to appear with legal representation at the law offices of Keck, Flittenbaum and Morrow, on behalf of Crispin Alistair Winterbottom.
So much for the impossible.
As Whiskey, Bel, Win and I wandered along our private stretch of beach on the Puget, I forced myself to focus on this latest disaster and not relive my last nightmare, where I was sinking to the depths of the Sound in my car while a madman tried to kill me. I fought this battle every time we took walks along the shore. So far, I was winning.
In indignation, I shook the letter I’d grabbed at the mailbox before our walk under the hot midday sun. Whiskey splashed after the tennis ball I’d tossed, caught it, and took off at breakneck speed down the shoreline with Bel clinging to his back, while I ranted.
“It’s been two months with no word from this Fakebottom! What’s he been doing all this time?” I yelled, grateful for our privacy. “We got complacent, my friend. We should have popped the lid on that can of worms and started investigating him the moment he showed up in his designer duds. Just who does he think he is?”
“Well, Dove, he thinks he’s me.”
I flapped the letter in the woefully small yet frightfully muggy breeze. “You know what I mean. Still, we haven’t spent a lot of time discussing the fact that he looks exactly like you, Win. Plastic surgery and Russian revenge aside.”
In fact, Win hadn’t even truly acknowledged that fake Win and real Win were identical. Nor had he asked if I believed anything this man claimed. Which, I’ll admit, I found pretty wonky.
We have a great deal of trust between us, Win and me. He’s saved my life three times to date with his spy moves and ghostly secret agent man instructions. That alone instills a bond. But his trust in me is based on my having shared all my darkest secrets—almost everything of note in my past—including the worst nightmare of my life, when I’d lost my witch powers to a vengeful ghost.
But I knew little about Win’s life prior to his death. Still, I kept a tally of facts I’d collected in my head. He was British, in his thirties, and ungodly rich. I guess the spy business pays well. In life, he’d been a spy for MI6 and he’d worked under deep cover. He had one lunatic cousin named Sal who was now dead, courtesy of me.
His parents were both deceased, with no other living relatives to speak of. He’s had some seriously crazy-cool spy adventures he often uses as examples in order to help me when I’m in a bind—the kind of bind where a killer holds me hostage or chases me with a gun.
He knows all manner of torture and escape—some too hideous to repeat. He’s been to almost every country known to man. He was once wildly and, according to him, foolishly in love with another spy named Miranda, whom he claims owned the house we now live in until it was put back on the market after she was declared dead, and Win bought it, in all its dilapidation. The purchase occurred just before his death, which is why the renovations were handed down to me.
Oh, and he speaks seven languages fluently. I think that’s everything.
It troubled me something fierce, the details he wouldn’t share with me. For instance, why he believed Miranda was the one who’d killed him. What purpose had it served for her to take him out? Had she been in some kind of deep-cover mission, where she was supposed to trick the British spy into falling in love with her then whack him?
Questions—I had a million, believe that.
But I didn’t rock the boat much. I’m a firm believer in time. Whatever happened to Win with Miranda, it was clearly painful for him. Sometimes painful memories aren’t easily shared—especially from a man who’d spent a good portion of his adult life keeping secrets.
My hope was, in time, he’d reveal all—or I’d pry it out of
him. It could go either way. But there again was the trust between us. I trusted he’d eventually tell me, and as crazy as this sounds, I didn’t at all doubt Fakebottom was, indeed, a fake.
“Garish renovations. I have every mind to hunt this imposter down in his dreams and turn them into nightmares!” Win raged, interrupting my thoughts.
“Stop getting your boxers in a twist. He said borderline garish. Which means almost, but not quite.”
“Really, Stephania, is that any less of a slight?”
“You know, I can’t believe that’s what bugs you the most, Spy Guy. He’s not on board with your decorating but it’s no skin off your nose that he wants to steal your house?” I made scales out of my hands to demonstrate the imbalance of his priorities. “I say stealing your house outweighs insults about what color your curtains are, any given day of the week.”
“It’s our house, Stevie. And lest ye forget, he has my Aston Martin!” Win ranted, endlessly insulted by his precious car in the hands of an imposter.
“Now that does rankle a little,” I replied in mock disappointment. “I can’t believe he got his grimy hands on it before I was able to figure out where you’ve been hiding it all this time. So back to the Aston Martin. How do you even know it’s yours, anyway?”
“How many 2014 sixtieth-anniversary edition Aston Martin Vanquish convertibles, black with yellow rims, do you see zooming about here? None, I say—because it’s a custom paint job I commissioned.”
“I don’t know any Aston Martins at all, but la-de-da. Aren’t you fancy, Mr. Custom Paint Job? Maybe he’ll get a ticket for driving too fast in your fancy European sports car.”
“Not the point, Stephania,” he growled as I finally caught sight of our private dock in the distance.
“Which is exactly my point, Win. Your possessions aren’t what’re important here. Who cares about your Neanderthal rich-boy-spy car and your garish decorating skills when we’re about to lose our house to Fakebottom?” I shouted, making my way over the rocks toward the spot where Dana Nelson had left our small rowboat tied to the dock, exactly where I always left it.
He’d borrowed it for a very hot date just last night. Dana—or Officer Rigid, as I called him—was head over heels in love with Sophia Fleming, a newer resident to Ebenezer Falls of only eight months or so, I’m told.
She worked at the library and she was positively lovely. Not just her personality, which was quiet and maybe even a little introverted, but physically, she was a knockout. More dark, thick hair than a Pantene commercial and beautiful almond-shaped green eyes in a tiny heart-shaped face.
I envied the way she moved; her petite frame floated, rather than walked like the rest of us average Joes, and she always had a smile on her face for all her patrons.
Chester, my surrogate granddad of sorts, often opined if he were thirty years younger, Dana Nelson wouldn’t stand a cow’s chance at a fasting, because Chester would’ve locked her down with a ring by now.
To say Sophia was as crazy about Officer Nelson as he was about her was an understatement. Every time their eyes met, and they often did, as Dana had become a frequent visitor of the library these days, I mentally heard angels sing.
Their sweet courtship was that powerful, and it often made me yearn for someone who felt that way about me. It also made me wonder how Eleanor Brown felt…
Eleanor worked at the Ebenezer Falls Diner as a waitress for her aunt, and it was beyond obvious she secretly crushed on Officer Nelson. From the way she made sure his eggs were specifically over medium to the care she took in demanding Baron, the short-order cook, make Dana’s bacon crisp.
Hers was an unrequited love—one she was either too shy or too hurt by his relationship with Sophia to pursue, and in more ways than one, I understood her predicament.
Eyeing the boat off in the distance, I sighed. The rowboat wasn’t much to look at, truthfully, with its peeling paint and battered oars. But it was fun to hop in with Bel and Whiskey, and anchor to the dock and row in circles while we shared a picnic lunch.
Anyway, Officer Nelson had asked to borrow it to take Sophia out last night. He didn’t say what he was planning, but Win, Bel, and I were almost certain he was going to propose, from the look of his sharp suit and the twinkle in his usually stern eyes.
“Stevie?” Win prodded.
“Sorry. Lost in thought there. I think the sun fried my brain. Which monetary item were you kvetching about again?”
I was rethinking this little venture I’d proposed on a day like today. I guess I’ve acclimated again to the cooler weather of the Pacific Northwest after leaving the relentless heat of Texas, because just the few steps I’d taken had me sweaty and uncomfortable.
“The Aston Martin.”
“Right. The unimportant item in comparison to a roof over our heads.”
“Bah! How can you possibly say my Aston Martin isn’t important, Stevie?”
“Because we can’t live in the Aston Martin, Win.”
“I don’t know. I think I could manage,” he teased with less tension in his tone.
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I clenched my teeth. He couldn’t just sweep this under the carpet anymore. We couldn’t pretend it never happened, like we had these last couple of months because we’d figured Fakebottom had disappeared after we didn’t hear from him. Now that he was back, I was the one here on this plane that had to deal with him.
“Listen, I need you to tell me what we’re going to do about this, Win. We need to take action. We need a plan. I have to go to Seattle next week to meet with him and his lawyers. This isn’t the time to be worried about your car. What you should be worried about is that ridiculously expensive wood-fire oven in our kitchen. So let me give you a visual.”
“A visual?”
“Uh-huh. It’s the one where Fakebottom is cooking frozen pizzas in it while he admires his view from the kitchen that took you almost two weeks to decide on the color of the fixtures alone.”
“Fixtures are important, Stevie. They’re the backdrop, the coup de grâce of the bigger picture,” he said sheepishly.
“They’re going to be your swan song if you don’t tell me what to do next. Talk to me about who this guy could possibly be. Have any theories? Ideas?”
Win sighed. “Well, it’s obvious he’s an imposter, Dove.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that, but that’s all you’ve said. You haven’t theorized, you haven’t said boo about this guy coming out of nowhere and laying claim to your riches.”
“That’s because I have no answer, Stephania. None. I admit, he looks exactly like me, and I don’t know why or how—or how he could possibly prove he’s me in a court of law. I’m confounded, and that’s not something I feel very good about.”
I sighed in sympathy, hoisting the picnic basket I carried with our light lunch higher, knowing how hard it was for Win to watch this all play out without being able to do a dang thing to intervene.
“Well, that’s at least a deeper insight than the complaining you’ve been doing over the state of your car. So what do we do about this meeting?”
“You contact Luis Lipton to represent you, of course. You tell him what’s going on. He knows you. He knows how you came about all this money. You also contact Davis Monroe, who handled my will and such. He has my death certificate and all the pertinent details of my will. That’s all the proof you need.”
Luis was the attorney who’d represented me when I was accused of Madam Zoltar’s murder, and Davis was the attorney who’d handled all of Win’s assets after his death. “Isn’t Luis a defense attorney? How can he represent me in a property dispute?”
“Lipton is an everything attorney because his large retainer says such.”
Right. I always forget how rich Win is—er, I am, and how that appears to make all things possible.
“How is it remotely imaginable this guy can prove he’s you? Didn’t you once tell me a Google search would only tell me you were a mild-mannered grade-school teacher? Was
n’t that your online cover or something? Did he assume that identity? If he’s pretending to be you, how does he explain a schoolteacher driving an Aston Martin? I mean, assuming that’s the identity he’s stolen. Wait! Did you use your real name as your spy name?”
“When I signed up, of course I did. I had a code name, though.”
As the sun beat down on me in all its sizzling heat, I began to poke him for more answers to add to this compartment of puzzle pieces I’ve been collecting where he’s concerned. “Really? Like what? Popsicle? Icebox? No, I bet it was something really distinguished, like Crushed Ice, right?”
“Crushed Ice, Stevie? How is that at all distinguished? It sounds like a bloody rapper.”
My shoulders slumped. “I was riffing on your last name. You know, Winter-bottom—popsicle. Like things that are cold.”
“Zero Below,” he muttered with a hangdog tone. “Zero for short.”
I giggled and spun around, almost tripping over my flip-flops. “Hah! So, Zero—or do you prefer Below?”
“Stevie…”
“Okay, sorry. So the question was, did he assume your average everyday fake online persona?”
“How could he? It was strictly on paper. Had anyone checked those credentials, they’d find there were no real credentials. It’s all made up. I have no certificate stating I’m a school teacher—my online persona just claims I do. It’s rather like the supermodel in an online chat room. She can claim she’s a supermodel all she likes when no one can see her, but were one to actually research to see if she has any valid proof she’s a supermodel, they’d find nothing. But MI6 handles everything. I’m sure they were careful.”
Closing my eyes, I stopped walking for a moment, turning away from the sun. “Well, whether you like it or not, we have a mystery to solve, pal, and we need to figure it out before next week, when I have to face the firing squad. Imagine me explaining to a bunch of suits how I came upon eleventy-billion dollars virtually hand-delivered by you. ‘It went like this, Mr. Attorney. I met a ghost, and that ghost needed my help. He offered me stacks of cash if I’d help him find who killed his medium buddy, Madam Zoltar.’”
The Old Witcheroo Page 2