“That’s worse than ‘Mr. Snuggly’?” Olivia murmured. The cat gave her a disdainful look.
The Rev left without any more words, taking Diederik’s hand again as if Diederik were a three-year-old instead of . . . Well, how old was he? Olivia watched the ill-assorted pair as they went to the Rev’s house, presumably to put Diederik in the bathtub. She said, “You figure he’s eight years old?”
Fiji frowned. “Last night I thought he was a lot younger. His clothes flapped on him.”
Bobo shrugged. “I think he might be as much as eleven.”
Fiji was returning Mr. Snuggly to the basket. “I’d believe eleven,” she said. “And today his clothes are tight.”
Joe said, “I wonder how old he’ll be tomorrow.” And he left without adding to his statement. They all stared after him.
“I wonder what he knows,” Fiji said.
Olivia, bored with the conversation, said, “I’ve got to go over to talk to Manfred. I’ll call him first.” She went down to her apartment to get her cell phone.
When it was in her hand, she was tempted—once again—to call Lemuel.
But she didn’t.
8
As he’d been instructed, Manfred was waiting at his back door to let Olivia in. She’d run across the side-by-side driveways and reached the door so swiftly that some reporters weren’t sure they’d seen anyone. Manfred was able to close and lock the door behind her before any of them could make a move.
“Boy, am I glad to see you. Uh, can I get you a drink or something?” Manfred’s first impression was not reassuring. Olivia the Deadly seemed irritated and tired. He had hoped for Superwoman, but he’d gotten something less. He tried to conceal his dismay.
“Yeah,” she said. “Some water would be good.”
They sat at the little table that he’d crammed into the kitchen and regarded each other steadily. “The Rev has appointed me to get you out of this,” she said, not making any pretense at sounding happy about it.
“Why? I mean, he and I aren’t exactly buddies.”
“He has this kid staying with him. Diederik. There’s some big mystery about him.” One corner of Olivia’s mouth dipped down wryly. There was always a mystery. “The Rev doesn’t want reporters anywhere around this kid, is what I gather. So he wants them gone. The quickest way to do that is to solve your problem.”
“Do you think . . .” Manfred trailed to a halt.
“That I can do it?” Olivia smiled, not troubling to make it a socially acceptable smile. “If anyone in Midnight can and will, it’s me.” She regarded the psychic. “You know I have skills, right?”
“Ah . . . I figured. But.” He floundered for a moment. “The thing is, Olivia, your skill set, as far as I know, is kind of drastic.”
“Awwww . . . squeamish?” The shark smile was very much in evidence. Olivia was enjoying being herself.
“Yes,” Manfred admitted. “More than you, anyway. I hope we can find a way to solve this problem without doing anything . . . undoable.”
“I was never as young as you.” She looked away for a long moment before turning back to say, “I’m going to do this whether you approve of it or not. This is a town issue, not just your problem. So tell me what’s happened.”
Okay, this is what I’ve got to work with, Manfred told himself. “Arthur Smith was here this morning right on the heels of the newspeople. Lewis Goldthorpe’s accused me of stealing jewelry from Rachel. My client who died,” he added. “And as it turns out, she might not have died of natural causes. But they haven’t gotten all the bloodwork results back yet.”
“What do they suspect?”
“Arthur asked a lot of questions about her water bottle. I got the impression that he’d been told it might have had something in it that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Something you didn’t drop in?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t make a joke of this,” he said. “You know I didn’t. And I’m pretty scared, in case you couldn’t tell.”
Manfred expected her to say something cutting, but instead, Olivia simply nodded. “Okay, then the first step is to determine where Lewis has stashed the jewelry he says you stole. Because we’re going to assume that he’s hidden it. Why do you think he’s doing this? And where do you think he’s put it?”
“I’ve had a couple of hours to think about it. First, Lewis is crazy. But he’s also devious and shrewd, at least according to Rachel. She talked about him a lot. Lewis and his problems were the main reason she was so hung up on keeping contact with her dead husband.”
“Which you were glad to help her do.” Olivia didn’t exactly sneer, but Manfred thought it was a close thing.
“Yes,” he said evenly. “I was glad to help her. And it was easy to reach him. He was more accessible than a lot of spirits.”
Olivia’s mouth crimped in a skeptical line. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go along with that. To get back to the subject. Why does Lewis have such a hard-on for you?”
“First, because he never liked Rachel to spend money he thought she should leave intact for him. Second, because a lot of the advice Morton gave her was about curtailing Lewis’s schemes. And she followed that advice. Third, because Lewis became convinced I was angling to marry Rachel.”
Olivia raised a questioning eyebrow.
“No, of course not,” Manfred said. He tried a smile. “Rachel was a sweet woman, but she was older than my mother. Not my thing.”
“So you believe Lewis has stolen this jewelry and pinned it on you to get even. Also so he can sell the jewelry, I presume?”
“I believe Rachel hid it to keep Lewis from stealing it from her. That’s what she told me.”
“So she didn’t have it with her at all. When are you supposed to have gotten this jewelry?”
“Lewis is alleging that Rachel had it in her purse because she was going to get it appraised. He maintains that I rifled her purse before I called the front desk for help.”
“I was in the lobby when she dropped her purse,” Olivia said.
Manfred stared at her. “You were?”
“I helped her pick up everything. Me and some other people. And there was nothing like a jewelry case in there. So I know you’re telling the truth. I’m going to assume you didn’t even touch her purse?”
“No,” Manfred said firmly. “I did not.”
“I also assume the police tested it for fingerprints and didn’t find yours.”
“I assume the same thing.”
“Since she told you she’d hidden the jewelry—what did she have, by the way?”
“She mentioned diamonds and rubies, I think.”
“Okay, so she told you she’d hidden it from Lewis. Where might she have done that? It would almost certainly be at her house. When people hide things, they want to keep them close.”
“Since she’d been sick and she’d been staying close to home, that would be my guess, too. I hoped she would get a safe-deposit box, but I don’t think she did. She wouldn’t have said ‘hidden’ if she’d put the jewelry in a bank. She would have told me it was safe.”
Olivia nodded. “So, it’s in the house. You’ve been there, I hope?”
“Yes.” Manfred clearly didn’t recall the visit with any enthusiasm. “I didn’t want to go, but after our first face-to-face session, she insisted I see where Morton had lived.”
“Surely that’s pretty unusual?”
“Oh, absolutely. Usually, people are at least a little embarrassed about going to a psychic. But not Rachel. She wanted me to meet her family. She was so excited about being in touch with her husband again.”
Olivia had a strange half smile on her face. “So you actually met the family?”
“Yeah, I told Arthur Smith about it. I met Roseanna and Annelle, the daughters. I admit I was worried about what they’d thin
k, that they’d picture me as some kind of gigolo. Lewis made a huge deal out of not meeting me. That time.” He told Olivia about the time Lewis had come pounding on the door during his next session with Rachel. “So after I met him, I wished I hadn’t. And let me point out that while I was at her house, the daughters didn’t bring their husbands or children. Again, I don’t blame them. They didn’t know what I’d be like.”
“That’s fascinating,” Olivia said insincerely. “What I really need to know is the layout of the house.”
“It’s big,” Manfred said. That had been the thing that had struck him most forcefully. He had never been in a house that large. “It’s six thousand square feet, she told me. It’s two stories. It’s in a long, narrow, lot. There are surveillance cameras on the front yard and the backyard.”
“Gated community?” Olivia had brought a small notepad, and now she was writing in it.
“Oh . . . no. It’s in Bonnet Park, like Vespers is. But the neighborhood where Rachel lived is really old and snooty. Her house is set back from the street, with tall hedges on both sides between it and the neighbors. There’s a swimming pool in back, below the terrace.”
“Can you draw me a layout of the ground floor?”
Manfred thought about that. “I think so,” he said. “I didn’t go in every room, of course, but I did kind of a sketchy house tour. Once she got me there, Rachel wanted to show me every room. It was awkward . . . for everyone but Rachel.”
Slowly, Manfred drew the plan for the ground floor, with many erasures. It contained the formal living room, a dining room, a family den, the kitchen and pantry, and a game room, plus two bathrooms; one off the game room, and one between the kitchen and the family den, with a doorway onto the hall. “The terrace and pool are off the French doors in the family den,” he said, “but there’s also a hall that runs the length of the house and leads right out to it. Of course, that’s where the pool house is, to the right of the swimming pool. There’s a U-shaped driveway out front for visitors, and a driveway that goes all the way behind the house for family. I guess there’s a garage back there. I forget.”
“You have a good memory,” Olivia said.
“I’d never been in a house like that.” He could remember how impressed he’d been and how he’d struggled to look as though he took all this absolutely for granted. He remembered, too, how hard all this space and opulence had been to reconcile with Rachel Goldthorpe, who had been such a comfortable woman to be with, just like any grandmother he’d see at a church or a Denny’s.
“Okay, what about the second floor?” Olivia looked at him expectantly.
“I’m sketchier on that. I just walked through really quickly. I didn’t want to scare the daughters, so I was paying more attention to having a good conversation with them, telling them a little about my own family, trying to put them at ease.”
“Someday I’d like to hear about that,” Olivia said.
“When you tell me about yours, I’ll tell you about mine,” Manfred said. Olivia gave him a very hard look, and he knew he’d hit a nerve.
“Do the best you can with the second floor,” she said, pointing at the pad and paper.
So Manfred tried. “Okay, you go up the front stairs . . . then you reach a landing, and turn, and up more stairs. There’s the open area over the entryway, which is two-story, and the first room on the right you come to is Lewis’s room—when he was a kid. It has its own bathroom. The girls’ rooms are next, and there’s a bathroom in between ’em. Of course, they’re not being used now. The other side of the hall is kind of the grown-up side. First, there’s Morton’s office. Or maybe she called it a library? It has a little bathroom. Next to it, and huge, is the master bedroom. I just peeked in there. Some of the windows overlook the side of the house, and there’s a balcony, a big one, overlooking the pool at the back and the pool house. Where Lewis is staying now.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Two years, maybe. It was the first time I’d been to a client’s home, and the first set of one-on-one readings I’d done on my own.” He smiled, a little wryly. “And in case you haven’t picked up on it, I was really stunned by the size of the house. I’d never seen anything like it.”
Olivia’s expression was completely neutral as she looked down to the floor plans he’d drawn. Even without touching her, it was easy for Manfred to tell that she’d grown up in a house that large, or larger. She said, “The bigger the house, the more hiding places.”
Manfred gave himself a moment to feel smug. He’d called that one—her voice was the voice of knowledge. “I’m sure you can pare down the possibilities,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“When you’re hiding something, you want it under your surveillance, right? That’s human nature. As you said earlier, she’d want to keep it close. She would hide jewelry in a place she dominated. Since Lewis had moved back, that would be a limited number of places.” Manfred shrugged. “I know she liked to garden, so it’s possible she hid ’em in the yard, but given her poor health in the past few weeks, I’d probably give up on everything else before I started looking outside.”
“So noted. Her bedroom would be the most likely, since she would be fairly sure he wouldn’t come in if she was around. He’d be in the kitchen pretty often, getting a drink or a snack. The downstairs hall bathroom would be out, since he’d use it regularly. Not the dining room or the formal living room downstairs. I’d put the probabilities in this order: her bedroom, her bathroom, Morton’s office next door, then the kitchen, then the other downstairs rooms, then the empty upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms, then outside in the yard.”
Manfred nodded. “That all makes sense. So what do we do?”
“I break and enter,” Olivia said. “If I get lucky, we’re home free. If not, I’ll do some reconnaissance. Based on that, I’ll make a plan. I don’t think Lewis would accuse you if he were in possession of the jewels. They’d be part of the estate, and he’d get at least a third of the value of them in due course, if she divided her assets into three parts. I’m sure Rachel did hide them, as she told you, and I’m also sure he hasn’t found them yet. But you can bet he’ll try, when he realizes you really don’t have them. Maybe he’s just blaming you for their disappearance so he doesn’t have to share them with his sisters.”
Without further words, she was up and at the back door. She cracked it slightly and peered outside. No one had come into the backyard; evidently the sheriff’s threats had been effective.
“You know,” she said over her shoulder, “the easiest way out of this would be to kill Lewis.”
“I’d much rather you didn’t,” Manfred said.
Olivia raised one shoulder and let it fall. “All right.” Just as quickly as she’d arrived, Olivia departed, vanishing up the steps and into the side door of the pawnshop like smoke.
9
The Rev strode down Witch Light Road, Diederik at his heels. The boy was washed and groomed. Joe smiled from his shop window. It had been a long time since he’d been around a person so young, and he found it made him feel happy. The Rev was making his usual beeline to the Wedding Chapel and Pet Cemetery at his usual time.
Hurrying out the shop door, Joe caught up with the ill-assorted duo just as the Rev mounted the steps to the chapel. “Good morning,” he said, and the Rev turned to give Joe a brisk nod. Diederik smiled. He looked like a different child with his hair brushed and his clothes clean, not to mention a scrubbed face. “Fiji?” Joe said, and the Rev nodded stiffly.
“She came by last night with some clothes for the boy,” the Rev said. “They seem to fit.”
“I like them,” Diederik said. He had a marked accent, though Joe wasn’t sure where he’d acquired it. Not Spanish or Russian, the two accents Joe knew the best.
“Rev, I wondered if you could spare Diederik this morning,” Joe said, carefully. “Chuy and I could use som
e help in the store, and we’d enjoy having a visitor.”
The Rev considered. “He’s under my care,” he said warningly. “You know what that means.”
“Yes, sir, I know,” Joe said. “And we will protect him as though he were our own.”
The Rev nodded. “Then keep him close and call me if anything arises. I will come by for him.” With no further ado, the older man in his rusty black turned his back on them and entered the chapel, the weathered brown door closing behind him with a thunk.
Diederik looked up at Joe. The boy seemed a little worried.
“You haven’t met my friend Chuy,” Joe said. “You’ll like him. Our shop is back this way.” They walked west on Witch Light Road, and then across it to the north side.
“Chuy, look who I brought with me,” Joe called as they came in.
“Good,” Chuy said. He was bent over the manicure station working on a customer. Joe was not too surprised to find that Fiji was getting her nails done, though that was a rare occurrence. “Chuy, this is Diederik,” Joe said formally. “And you remember Miss Fiji?”
Fiji just happened to have brought a basket of muffins and a thermos of orange juice with her. When she offered some to Diederik, his whole face lit up. “We had oatmeal at the Rev’s house,” the boy said in his oddly accented English. “It was fine,” he added politely. “But these are very good. And thank you for my clothes.”
Fiji smiled. “Glad you like the muffins and the clothes.” Chuy was painting her nails a creamy light orange, and after Diederik had consumed a muffin, he came close to watch. He was fascinated by the process. “Does your mom get manicures?” Chuy asked.
“I never saw her do that,” the boy said. He looked suddenly, profoundly unhappy.
“How old are you, Diederik?” Fiji said instantly, trying to erase the unhappiness.
“I am not as old as I look, but we grow up faster than . . .” The boy hesitated. “Most people,” he finished.
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