by Sharon Pape
“You again,” Cirello said when he saw Rory. He tucked his weapon into a shoulder holster under his jacket. “What is it with you and dead bodies?” Hobo growled, a menacing rumble deep in his throat, as if he remembered the detective had wanted to send him to the pound.
“Hobo found the deceased about nine a.m., before any of today’s visitors had a chance to come through here,” she said, ignoring Cirello’s question. “I checked him for a pulse, but I didn’t check his pockets or disturb the scene in any way.” Most cops would have appreciated her input. She wasn’t at all surprised to find that Cirello was barely paying attention.
“I see you kept the mutt,” he said, shaking his head as he pulled on latex gloves. He hunkered down next to the body. “Has the owner of the place been notified?”
“I didn’t want to leave the scene until you arrived. I’ll do it now.”
“No need. My partner will find him. You know the deceased?”
“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure from this angle.”
Cirello searched the man’s pockets. All he came away with was a thin wallet. He straightened up as he rifled through it. “Matthew Dmitriev,” he said, pulling out a driver’s license. “Ring a bell?”
“I know the name,” Rory said, “but I never met him.” She’d heard the name for the first time that morning when Gil Harper hired her to find out who in his company was involved in industrial espionage and sabotage for the competition. Matthew was Harper’s CPA, and Gil had wanted her to meet with him about the sabotage.
“That’s it?” Cirello asked, as if he suspected she was holding out on him. Despite Rory’s antipathy for the detective, if he’d been with Homicide, she would have felt obligated to tell him everything she knew. But since he wasn’t, she didn’t intend to say anything more until Leah arrived.
The detective’s eyes narrowed. “How is it you know the name?”
Okay, she was going to have to answer that question or flirt with an obstruction-of-justice charge. And Cirello was just the guy to make sure it stuck.
“Gil Harper told me Matthew worked for him.” There, that should be enough to keep her out of jail. She glanced at her watch. It wouldn’t be too much longer before Leah made it there. Meanwhile, two more patrolmen had arrived, and their row in the maze was getting crowded. Cirello told them to walk the rest of the maze to see what they could find.
“Just don’t touch anything,” he shouted after them. One of the men raised his hand to indicate he’d heard the warning. Rory had a feeling he would have preferred to use four less fingers. Cirello’s attitude had probably made him the darling of the precinct.
“Is that him? Is that Matthew?” Gil Harper had just come around the bend accompanied by Danny, Cirello’s younger partner. “Oh no, no, no.” Gil was wild-eyed and ashen, a very different man from the one Rory had been with less than an hour earlier.
“Rory?” Gil’s voice seemed to be brimming with unasked questions. He searched her face as if he might find an explanation there.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. But his focus had already shifted back to Matthew. She exchanged a low-key greeting with Danny, surprised to see that he was still with Cirello. If she’d been saddled with the nasty curmudgeon, she wouldn’t have lasted a week. Maybe there was some secret perk to being Cirello’s partner. Like maybe he made the best barbeque or fudge on the Island. But somehow Rory doubted it.
“Mr. Harper,” Cirello said, without bothering to introduce himself.
“How can I ever tell his mother?” Gil was mumbling. “She’ll be devastated, destroyed. He was all . . .”
“Mr. Harper,” Cirello repeated, impatience sharpening his tone. But it was as if a wall had sprung up around Gil, insulating him from Cirello’s words.
Danny stepped closer to him. “It’s okay, Mr. Harper,” he said gently. “We’ll take care of notifying the next of kin.”
Gil turned to him and nodded. “Thank you. Please let Anya know we’ll take care of all the expenses, anything she needs. We’re here for her. She and Matthew,” his voice cracked, “like part of my own family, since Matthew was a little kid.”
“When did you last see the deceased?” Cirello asked, still using his naked-light-bulb approach. Rory wasn’t surprised to find that he hadn’t learned any compassion from the time he’d spent with his younger partner.
Gil’s brow furrowed, and he seemed momentarily lost. Danny didn’t try to rush him, but Cirello was turning an interesting shade of angry, and the muscles in his neck had started to bulge.
“I . . . I’m not sure,” Gil stammered finally. “A week . . . a week or so ago?”
“Maybe you could finish the interview in Mr. Harper’s office?” Rory suggested. Standing this close to the body had to be making it harder for Gil to concentrate.
Cirello glared at her. “Believe it or not, Ms. McCain, I’m quite capable of doing my job without your assistance.” Rory clamped her jaw shut before she could say something she was bound to regret. She didn’t want to make the situation worse for Gil or Danny. “In fact, there’s no reason for you to even be here,” he went on. “You and that dog belong on the other side of the police tape.”
From behind his partner’s back, Danny gave her a sympathetic shrug. Rory knew he couldn’t help her out. She was no longer with the police department, and Cirello had every right to banish her from the crime scene.
“You heard me,” Cirello snapped at her. “Take that mud-caked fleabag and get out of here.” The words were barely out of his mouth when his knees suddenly buckled under him, and he pitched forward onto the ground, landing on top of Matthew. One of the uniforms tried to help him up, but he waved the man off and scrambled to his feet on his own. “Which one of you jokers pushed me?” he demanded, glaring at each of them in turn.
“Nobody,” Danny said, looking equally surprised. “No one touched you.”
“Someone slammed me in the back of the knees hard enough to send me flying. I’ll find out eventually, so whoever did it might as well man up now.”
Rory had a pretty good idea who was responsible, but she had no intentions of sharing that bit of knowledge. “Maybe it was one of those microbursts they talk about on the Weather Channel,” she suggested.
“Localized at the back of my knees? What kind of fool do you think I am?” he shot back at her as he brushed the dirt off his suit.
“There’s actually a new phenomenon they’re calling a marshaled burst,” she said, trying to keep a straight face. The other policemen were looking at one another with raised eyebrows, but even if they thought she was nuts, they all chose to remain silent. If their emperor was naked, he wasn’t going to learn the truth from them.
“I thought I told you to get out of here,” Cirello growled, having apparently chosen her as his scapegoat for lack of a better candidate.
Rory placed her hand on Gil’s arm again. “We’ll talk soon,” she told him as she led Hobo past the patrolmen. “Try to stay out of drafts,” she called over her shoulder to Cirello. She knew she was baiting the beast, but she couldn’t help herself.
Chapter 2
Rory and Hobo waited outside the maze and beyond the police line for Leah to arrive. The small throng of people they’d barreled past on their way into the maze had grown into a substantial crowd. The haphazardly parked police cars were visible from the street, beckoning to passing motorists like a sideshow barker trying to fill his tent: come one; come all. Find out for yourself what’s going down. Is it a robbery? An assault? Perhaps even a murder? Be the first among your friends to learn the truth. No charge. Plenty of room for everyone. Come on in.
By the time Leah arrived with her partner, Rory’s mud-caked appearance had fielded enough curious stares and whispered comments to last her a lifetime. Leah’s reaction was the last straw. “Don’t you dare,” Rory warned her when she saw the surpri
se and amusement light up her friend’s police-business face.
Leah bit her lip, but a moment later, when she opened her mouth to speak, a giggle escaped. “What happened?” If she was trying to sound concerned, she was failing miserably. Her partner, Jeff, wasn’t having much success either.
“Are you all . . . all right?” he managed, before clamping his hand over his mouth.
“Sure, I’m just fine,” Rory said. “Isn’t getting a cold mud bath, being dragged through a corn maze and finding a dead body on everybody’s list of most fun days ever?”
“Sorry,” Leah murmured, trying for an expression that was more in keeping with a friend’s distress and a murder investigation. “Can you catch me up?”
“Of course not. I only waited here, shivering, because I love being laughed at.” Rory paused to take a deep breath. “Hey, I’m sorry too,” she said. “This hasn’t exactly been my finest hour. Make that hours.” She gave Leah a quick recap of events up until the time Cirello threw her out.
Leah put her hand on Rory’s arm. “You go on home and take a hot bath. I’ll talk to you later.”
“No way. I’m heading over to that Channel 12 News van that just pulled in to give them an exclusive.”
Jeff’s eyebrows nearly rocketed off his forehead, sending Rory herself into a brief fit of laughter.
Leah shook her head. “You are so bad.”
***
Hobo had fallen asleep in the backseat as soon as Rory started the car’s engine. At times like this, she wished she could trade places with him. Zeke had gone home after they left the maze. As he’d put it, “Makes no sense usin’ up my energy to hang around and hear you rehash what we already know.” Rory hadn’t argued the point. The prospect of a peaceful ride home was too tempting to pass up.
When she turned onto her street twenty minutes later, she noticed Eloise Bowman standing at her front door. She groaned loudly enough to wake Hobo, who’d been in such a sound sleep that he had a befuddled look on his shaggy face. Since Eloise had her back to the road, Rory batted around the idea of speeding away before she was seen. But where could she and Hobo go in their present condition? If they went to her parents’ house or to her aunt Helene’s, they’d certainly be welcome, but Rory was too weary and miserable to answer their inevitable questions. She felt positively snappish. Of course that didn’t bode well for a visit with Eloise either. Under normal circumstances, Rory was quite fond of her elderly neighbor and grateful for her help in finally discovering who’d murdered Zeke. This just happened to be the worst time she could have picked for a visit. Come to think of it, why was Eloise out alone? Where was Olga? The Bowman family had hired the woman to keep tabs on their matriarch, who had an uncanny knack for slipping out of the house and showing up on Rory’s doorstep. Eloise’s doctors may have diagnosed her with “diminished capacity” as a result of her stroke, and her family might consider her daft, but Rory knew they were all missing a huge piece of the new and improved Eloise puzzle. As a result of her stroke, Eloise had picked up the ability to communicate with spirits on the other side of the veil.
While Rory sat there weighing her options, Hobo, no doubt curious as to why they were stopped in the middle of the road, started clambering over the center console to reach her. He made it halfway through the narrow opening, scratching her hand and shoving his muddy face into hers, before she could stop him. “Okay, hold on; we’re going home,” she said. She really didn’t have a choice in the matter anyway. How could she drive off and leave Eloise outside unattended? There was no telling what might happen to her or where she might decide to go next. Besides, she’d probably risked life and limb sneaking out of her son’s house to bring Rory a new message from the other side.
Eloise turned around when she heard the car pull into the driveway. When she saw Rory, her cheeks filled up with a smile. Her white hair had been allowed to grow to chin length in an attempt to make it more manageable than the wild tufts that used to stand at attention across her scalp. The result was somewhat successful. On the right side, her hair was mostly smooth and curled under at the ends, but on the left, her hair was mashed against her head as if she’d just been sleeping on it. She was wearing a long, white summer skirt with a Yankees windbreaker and boots.
Rory grabbed Hobo’s leash, and the two of them jumped out of the car and ran up the walk to the porch. She wanted to get Eloise into the house before she caught pneumonia, but Hobo had his own agenda. As Rory was trying to unlock the front door and steer Eloise inside, Hobo insisted on giving her an exuberant welcome. For a crazy couple of minutes, the three of them went around in a circle tangled up in the dog’s leash as if they were playing a strange version of Ring around the Rosie. Worries about pneumonia were quickly replaced by more immediate concerns of brittle bones shattering. By the time they all made it inside, Eloise’s white skirt was smeared with mud. Eloise didn’t seem to mind. In fact she’d been laughing with delight throughout the whole vaudevillian routine.
Rory banished Hobo to the backyard, hoping he’d roll around in the grass and dislodge some of his dried mud. Now to get Eloise back to the Bowmans. Rory settled her at the kitchen table with a bowl of black-cherry ice cream, a tried-and-true method of keeping her happy and stationary. Then she called the Bowman’s number. Jean Bowman answered the phone breathless and distraught.
“She’s here and she’s fine,” Rory said instead of “hello.” They’d developed their own shorthand with regard to Eloise.
“Oh thank goodness,” Jean responded, with a shaky sigh of relief. “She and Olga both fell asleep watching a movie. Olga woke up a minute ago, and she’s so hysterical I could barely understand what she was trying to tell me. I’ll send her right over.” Jean thanked Rory and apologized for what was at least the thirtieth episode of “Where Is Eloise?”
For the moment, she was wearing a dreamy look of pleasure as she spooned ice cream into her mouth. But when Rory joined her at the table, she stopped with the spoon in midair, and her sparse brows bunched over her eyes. “Everything happens for a reason,” she intoned solemnly. “There’s more to your marshal Drummond than you know.” Then her face relaxed and she went back to eating her ice cream.
The remark caught Rory by surprise. When she’d finally learned that Zeke blamed himself for the deaths of the young girls who’d been killed by his escaped prisoner she’d thought she understood all the darkness he carried in his soul. Now Eloise was telling her she didn’t know everything.
“What do you mean?” she asked urgently, trying to snag a bit more information before her elderly neighbor reverted to her childlike demeanor.
Eloise was busy scraping the last of the ice cream from her bowl. “Can I have some more?” she asked, hope dancing in her eyes.
It was already too late. Eloise the medium was gone. With a frustrated sigh, Rory picked up her bowl and set it on the floor for Hobo to lick. “Olga is coming to get you,” she said, trying to keep her irritation in check. It wasn’t as if Eloise was consciously trying to drive her crazy. “You can have more ice cream next time.” At that moment the doorbell chimed. “See—there she is now.”
“Pistachio?” Eloise asked fervently. “Next time can I have pistachio?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rory promised, helping her to her feet.
“I don’t like Olga,” Eloise muttered, wrinkling her nose and pouting as Rory marched her to the front door. “Olga’s too bossy. And I haven’t even see Marshal Drummond yet.”
“He’s not here right now,” Rory told her, praying he didn’t suddenly appear out of the ether. She opened the door, never happier to see Olga’s broad face.
***
In the end, the bath turned into a shower. It was a simple matter of expediency. She could take Hobo into the shower with her, but two of them in the tub would never work. Whatever the combination of breeds that had given rise to Hobo, there was definitely no waterdog among t
hem. As much as he’d enjoyed wallowing in the mud with the pigs, plain old water had always been anathema to him. By the time they stepped out of the shower, all Rory could be sure of was that they were cleaner than when they’d stepped in. The exact degree of cleanliness no longer mattered.
Once Hobo was out of the water he shook his coat vigorously, spackling the small bathroom with murky water. Another project she’d have to tackle later. She let him out of the bathroom so she could dry off and dress in peace. The floor space in there was limited, and with four legs, he’d taken up the majority of it. She was just pulling on a fresh pair of jeans when the lights flickered.
“I need a minute,” she called out. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
There was no response, but she hadn’t expected one. Unless Zeke had a problem with her request, he’d be waiting in the kitchen. They’d worked out their living arrangements to her satisfaction, and for the most part, the marshal abided by her rules. She drew on an old, fleecy-soft sweatshirt that always made her feel warm and cosseted, added a pair of socks, ran a comb through her short hair and padded down the stairs to the kitchen feeling like herself again. Hobo and Zeke were already there. Hobo was lying near his food bowl with big, pathetic “I’m starving” eyes, even though he’d already had breakfast and wasn’t due for dinner until the late afternoon. Romping with the pigs had apparently left him famished.
The marshal was at the table with his chair tilted back and his dirty boats propped up on the glass tabletop. There’d been a time when that would have drawn outrage from her, but she no longer had to remind herself that his boots weren’t actually there. Good grief, they were becoming like an old married couple.
“That’s an entirely better look for you,” Zeke said as he pulled his feet off the table and set the front legs of the chair back on the floor. “The mud wasn’t really you.”
“Thanks,” Rory said, wondering if he’d been watching Project Runway or some other fashion programs when she wasn’t home. She scooped a cup of kibble from the bin in the pantry and poured it into Hobo’s bowl. The dog stood and sniffed the kibble without enthusiasm. “That’s all you’re getting for now,” Rory told him, “no matter how cute you are.” With a sigh of resignation, he started eating.