“These are just random toys, not from the scavenger-hunt list. Treasures to a little boy, that’s all.”
“Right. You lucked out,” Werner said. “We couldn’t have entered stolen goods into evidence, anyway. Don’t try that again.”
I leaned against his shoulder because I was feeling tired and grateful. “I feel pretty stupid. Thanks for being so understanding.”
He rubbed my back for a minute, put a half a moment’s pressure against it—a wish of a hug, really—and let me go. I pulled away and sat straighter, but the imprint of his touch lingered. Caring, likely not planning his next promotion.
Werner capped the drainpipe and put it and the toys back in my purse, effectively breaking the moment between us.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Wake up Gothzilla,” he said, turning out the lights and making a motion for us to precede him up the stairs. “The whole Mystick Falls force knows your license plate, Mad. If Rhode Island decides to run it, you’re toast.”
“If they got the plate,” I said. “But, we took Eve’s car. So we may not need to cross that bridge.” I shook Eve, got her standing, and followed Werner. Eve walked into me in the middle of the upstairs hallway when I stopped short. “Where are we going?”
“I’m not driving you home now. What do you want to sleep in, a T-shirt or a button-down?” And then he deadpanned. “My bed or yours?”
“You’d sleep on the sofa for us?” I touched my hand to my heart.
Werner firmed his lips and sighed.
Eve hiccupped a giggle. She really did sound drunk.
I shrugged. “Eve will take the tee, and I prefer a button-down.”
He took us into his room. “Third drawer, Eve. Take your pick. Button-downs in the closet, Mad. Bottom drawer if you want bottoms. Sweatpants in there. Does Nick know what kind of trouble you get into when he’s away?”
“He didn’t have time to listen, said you’d be here for me if I needed you, and you are.” I threw my arms around him for a brotherly hug. “Thanks.”
He held on until I stepped from his arms and left with a purple-striped button-down on my way to the guest bathroom.
“New toothbrushes in the right-hand drawer,” our host called.
“’Kay, thanks.”
I stuck my head out the door. “Eve, are you teaching tomorrow?”
“It’s Saturday, but some of my computer students are competing in the International Collegiate Cyber Shield Competition. It has to do with protecting an ultra classified network infrastructure, and I’m their coach, so the short answer—too late—is ‘Yes, I am.’”
“Werner, can you take me to pick up Eve’s car around noon?”
“Sure.”
“How am I getting to the Avery Point campus, then?” Eve asked.
“You can take my Element.”
“Werner, can you bring me to Mad’s Element around nine tomorrow?”
“He can do that after he brings me to my shop for eight thirty, can’t you, Werner?”
“Sure, sis. Night, you drunken brats.”
Sixteen
Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.
—ANNE HOLLANDER
Saturday, I needed to play the pre-holiday—Valentine’s Day—sale game I’d advertised, so no time to think about the case, my stupid sleuthing trip to Bradenton Cove, or the formals I’d have to judge.
Dolly and Aunt Fee took the lunch crowd—usually much thinner—while Werner took me to pick up Eve’s car at Addy’s house.
“Mind if we do a drive-by of your crime scene?” Werner asked.
I shivered. “Must we?” I caught the whine in my voice as I shrank down into my seat while a wash of heat rose up my neck to fire my cheeks. I rolled down the passenger-side window. “Such a fiasco.”
“Trust me, you lucked out. Nobody’s looking for you. I know. I checked first thing this morning.”
“You could’ve called and told me. Set my mind at ease.”
“No, I thought you should stew for a while. No more straddling the knife-sharp edge of felonious sleuthing, Mad. Seriously. My protection extends only so far.”
“I hear you. You don’t have to yell.”
“I didn’t yell.”
“Your voice rose with every word.”
“Sorry. There are some things—and people—I get passionate about.”
What could I say to that? “You get passionate about me?” Okay, I was asking for it. There was something totally me, the essence of Madeira Cutler, that I liked about myself when I was with Werner. No show. No stand-by-your-Fed facade.
He gave me a double take and drove slowly, silently along the main road that fronted Bradenton Cove, so easily visible from up here. The shape of the driveway reminded me of an old-fashioned lock design, with the house and garage beyond it sitting in the circle at the top lock’s giant inverted U.
Along the road, a man of mature years out for a stroll, handsome and gray at the temples, hailed us with his cane.
“Scrap, scrap, scrap!” I scooted down a bit more in the seat. And then I decided I wasn’t made to be invisible. So I sat up and raised my chin.
“Good girl,” Werner said as he slowed and rolled down his window for the guy who’d come right up to it, like he wanted to chat. “There’s a flask hidden in my cane,” he said, with the man’s voice of the little tagalong boy who’d found someone hiding scavenger-hunt treasures in the stair-rail pipe of an old warehouse. “I keep lemonade in it. Day won’t let me have brandy.”
Day. Yep, same boy. Maybe the one coerced into hiding the box in my attic. “Were you friends with Dante Underhill when you were a kid?”
The man’s eyes filled. “He was my best friend. Died, ya know.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Wanna see my flask?”
I whipped my gaze to Werner. He knew the item had been on the scavenger list.
“Sure,” Werner said, looking appropriately interested. “Heard you had a break-in?”
The man nodded. “Thanks for watching, but nothin’s missing. Not even a real break-in. My Day says just a nosy intruder. He’s changin’ the locks. My brother, though, he was some big mad.”
“Who’s your brother?” I asked.
“Eric…McDowell. I’m Zavier.” He offered his hand to Werner, who shook it, then he came around to shake mine. “I still live here; I always lived here. Eric don’t.”
Zavier—also known to me as Tagalong, the unacknowledged brother of Councilman Eric McDowell—aka Grody. McDowell, a politician who’d break his arm patting himself on the back, had made my skin crawl from day one. That’s why he’d seemed familiar in my visions. I knew him in the present. I hadn’t placed him initially. In that first vision, he’d been so much younger—and scared. He’d legitimately seemed scared to death that Robin couldn’t swim.
When I thought about it now, his crumpled, grungy tux with the stench of drying-seawater-soaked wool—that could put him square at the murder scene. If there had been a murder.
Zavier, well, he was well over fifty years old now, but he didn’t see the difference between our Connecticut black-and-white and a Rhode Island cruiser. And he still called his father Day. Not Dad.
“So, no damage?” Werner asked him.
“Only the car,” Zavier said. “Day says somebody with a grudge against Corvettes took a sledge hammer to it.”
Werner gave me a quick, questioning glance.
I rolled my eyes at the exaggeration.
I heard a man in the distance calling to Zavier. “You’d better go in,” I said. So whoever was coming up the hill wouldn’t see us.
“Yes, ma’am. Come again.”
“Not on your life.” I rolled up my window. “Drive.”
Werner drove slowly away. “I get it now. A boy in a man’s body. No way he knew what he was doing back then. Besides, one of the scavenger-hunt items f
orty years later is hardly proof.”
“The cane and flask, yeah. He only took part in the scavenger hunt because his brother did. I just failed to find his stash. But you’re right, he didn’t know he was breaking the law, or that someone died that night.”
I hadn’t seen Zavier in the first vision, unless he’d stood back silently watching, the way he’d watched Tuxman toward dawn in the later vision.
I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t notice for a few moments that Werner had pulled up the drive to Addy’s house. “So you drove right into that garage?”
“With a cop on my tail, yeah.”
“Just when I convince myself that you’re nothing special, you do something to raise yourself in my esteem, you ballsy woman.”
“My being ballsy doesn’t emasculate you.”
He roared.
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“You have the opposite effect, and you know it.”
“I use my eyelashes to good effect.”
“Sure, come on to me at the house of a nice lady who thinks I’m your brother. You know, you could have found a psychopath living here instead of a new millennium Clara Barton.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” I took out the Vintage Magic shopping bag I’d brought and went to the front door.
Addy looked happy and shocked to see me. “You knew I’d come for the car,” I said.
“I didn’t know you’d be dressed like a million bucks,” she responded. “I had you pegged different.”
I guessed that my Gilbert Adrian black wool suit with purple trim and Todd Oldham purple-and-yellow spectator pumps kind of threw her. I looked down at myself. “I’m having a sale at my vintage dress shop today. Just took time off to pick up the car.”
I slipped the shopping bag into her hand. “I put a check for the gas inside with my business card, and I picked out a Fendi purse and a Ferragamo wool cape from my shop to say thanks. I hope you like them.”
“You didn’t need to—”
“I know. And neither did you. Stop at my shop someday, and I’ll take you to lunch.”
She remained slack-jawed on her stoop, my bag hanging from her hand, as she watched me back Eve’s car from her garage. I waved, and so did Addy, as I drove away, Werner right behind me.
He beeped as I turned onto Bank Street and headed home. Poor man was having a helluva day off.
The two-day sale exhausted me, but my mind stayed sharp. By Sunday night, I had concluded three things.
One: Eve and I had to try to find that mill or warehouse near the railroad tracks by the ocean. I already had an idea where to look.
Two: At least two of the scavengers had chosen abandoned buildings, my house and that mill, to hide their stolen property in. I’d ask Dolly and a couple of other circumspect seniors what buildings had been abandoned about forty years ago.
Three: I’d give Werner the pieces of fabric I’d read, though I wouldn’t call them petticoat pieces, of course. I’d bring them to him when I met him at the country club first thing tomorrow. Now that I had the psychometric visions they inspired, my personal set of clues, we could find out what forensics had to say about them. Of course, one would have butterscotch cat hairs on it. Chakra had found her way into the last horse-drawn hearse upstairs and had used the fabric to make something of a nest, along with other pieces of scrap fabric she’d snitched from beneath my sewing machines.
Werner was expecting the second piece. He might not notice right away that I was giving him two.
Especially since he hadn’t asked me to join him at the country club. Nor did I hint that I’d be there. I’d surprise him and give him the fabric my box had been wrapped in, which might make him more agreeable to my presence.
With my luck, he’d smell a rat. Or a cat.
Seventeen
For the country club: The goal is to create a polished outfit that’s a cut above your favorite casual look.
—HILLARY KERR AND KATHERINE POWER, WHAT TO WEAR, WHERE
I could meet Werner at the country club and open the shop later.
Oh no, I couldn’t. More Golden Jubilee costumes, from which I would choose the This Is Your Lifers, were being delivered first thing tomorrow. But really, did I need to be at the shop to accept a delivery?
I called Eve’s mother and asked her to open the shop in the morning. Mrs. Meyers seemed delighted and insisted on calling her own helpers, her choices being equal to mine. She’d get Dolly Sweet, who’d practically given me the building for my shop, and Dolly’s no-nonsense daughter-in-law, Ethel, less sprightly at 80 than Dolly at, 106.
Nevertheless, Ethel was a hard worker. She always OCD’d the place into neat perfection and annihilated every dust mote. Mrs. Meyers curled the customers around her little finger with her soft German accent and sweet personality. Dolly always made fun of them both before she disappeared into the farthest nook, the one called Paris when it Sizzles.
There, she and Dante rekindled a flame that defied the laws of physics.
I could sum up these special helpers into precise individual pet names: Neaty, Sweety, and Sparky.
In my absence, nobody could run the shop better, and they were all loved by my designer-vintage clientele.
I always hesitated to ask the ladies to work, because they wouldn’t take a wage. However, they knew that if they were keen on an item, I’d let them walk away with it, providing the purse, shoes, dress, whatever hadn’t been designed by Paul Poirot, or worn in Hollywood back in the day by Liz Taylor, Princess Grace, Vivien Leigh, or one of the Hepburns. You get my drift.
That kind of value vintage ran into the thousands, and the ladies knew it. You could usually only find those in a museum exhibit or on a state-of-the-art mannequin encased in bulletproof glass with an alarm system. But sometimes, rarely, I got lucky and found one for the shop.
Since this work trade-off had become something of a ritual during one of my sleuthing phases, my workers chose their payments fairly, and I always knew what else they liked, and therefore what to get them for holiday gifts.
I picked up coffee and doughnuts and then the ladies themselves around eight thirty the next morning. Mrs. Meyers and I let Dolly and Ethel entertain us by sniping at each other on the drive to the shop.
When we opened, they all looked to me for instructions.
“What?” I asked. “You know what to do.”
“No special displays to take down, put up?” Mrs. Meyers asked. “Nothing new to fold?”
“We can always refold the items her customers messed up.” Ethel sniffed in disdain for non-folders everywhere. “No special events to prep for, like upcoming holiday sales?”
“Oh, only one thing,” I said, so entertained, I’d nearly forgotten. “A shipment will be delivered this morning of pricey costumes that were worn to the country club’s fiftieth anniversary dinner dance in 1973. Leave them in their garment bags and hang them on the empty racks I’ve left behind the counter wall. If you don’t have enough racks, there are more behind Paris when it Sizzles. Just don’t open the bags. What’s in them doesn’t belong to me and isn’t for sale.”
They nodded and proceeded like guards to their posts, all except Dolly. She walked the wide display aisle that separated the front-wall nooks from those on the back wall, took a sharp right, and disappeared. “I’ll clean Paris,” she called behind her.
Yeah, right.
“Clean Paris?” Ethel scoffed. “That one gave up cleaning when she turned a hundred.”
Very few people, besides me and Aunt Fiona, knew the building was haunted, much less by Dolly’s scandalous lover. I’ve never even told Eve. She gets freaked when I read a piece of vintage clothing, because I sometimes speak in the voice of the person I occupy, unless I find myself floating somewhere nearby, watching. At any rate, Eve couldn’t take the knowledge of Dante; she’d run screaming from the shop and never return if she knew.
“It’s Dolly’s favorite nook,” I said. “Let her enjoy her twilight years.”
“She’s been enjoying them for two decades,” Ethel observed. “You’d think she’d like Little Black Dress Lane once in a while. She could chose what she’d like to be buried in.”
I bit my lip so as not to appear amused. “Her heart’s in Paris, don’t forget.” And I meant that two ways.
Ethel snapped a finger. “That’s right. Her brother went ‘home’ to Paris to live out his twilight years, and he took his granddaughter, Paisley, with him. Dolly was pretty bummed about that for a couple of months, but she’s planning to visit them in the spring.”
“That’s Dolly, always putting a positive spin on things and planning for the future.” I waved and left the shop.
Werner was getting out of his unmarked car when I got to the country club. “What do you think you’re doing here?” he asked.
“Sleuthing? I can help. I’m getting good at this.”
“No, you can’t. You can’t officially investigate a crime.”
“Why not? Castle does it all the time.”
“That’s fiction, Mad. This is real life.”
“Open your briefcase,” I ordered.
He did, and I took the two evidence bags from my Bonnie Cashin blue purse, and slipped them into his briefcase. “Now shut it.”
“There are two.”
“You weren’t supposed to mention it. This never happened.”
“Where did the extra one come from?”
“It was wrapped around the brass money box in my attic.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me with the box?”
“Chakra fell in love with it, and when I wasn’t looking, she stole it. I was still looking for it when I brought you the box. I wanted to see if she’d do the same with the second one. I used it for bait, and it worked. Thanks, by the way.”
“What I did never happened,” he said. “What you did—”
“Should never again be mentioned. Mistakes have been made; they will never be repeated.”
Tulle Death Do Us Part Page 10