Better Off Dead in Deadwood (34 page)

He pointed at the door to the South Dakota room. “Go, Parker.” His voice sounded like he’d been gargling with rock salt again.

“Always good to see you, Tiffany,” I lied with a parting nod, and then I remembered Cornelius and the hotel situation. “I need to talk to you about the hotel sale.” Tiffany represented the seller on that deal. “How about I call you later this evening with the details?”

Her big, bright smile returned, her mode flipping from sexpot back to real estate agent. “Sure, Violet. I’m having dinner with an old friend, but I’ll be done early.”

It had better not be Doc, or I was going to go all Godzilla on him and fry his jewels with my laser eyes.

With a wave goodbye, and a mumbled “good riddance,” I clomped across the waxed wooden floor toward the room reserved for South Dakota books and information.

Cooper followed me into the room and shut the door behind him, leaning against it, caging me all alone with him and his temper.

I tried to find a positive thing to say. “Your nose is looking better.”

His chin twisted slightly, his eyes narrowing.

“What?” I asked when he remained silent, hiding my trembling hands behind my back.

“Handcuff you?”

“Well, you did.”

“Yeah, and then I threw your ass in jail. What the hell were you playing out there?”

“Chess. She’s trying to take my queen.”

“I’m no queen.”

“You know what I mean.” I crossed my arms. “Listen, if you want her to be your agent, just say so and I’ll rip up our contract. I promise it won’t hurt my feelings.”

Okay, that wasn’t completely true. Even though working with Cooper was like stringing a barbed-wire fence without leather gloves, he was still MY barbed-wire fence. She could go find her own.

“We’re not ripping up any contracts.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t want her to be my agent.”

“Then why didn’t you tell her that?”

“I don’t have to. It’s none of her business.”

I rolled my eyes.
Men!

“Now can we cut to commercial on this soap opera and focus on the task at hand?” he asked.

“What task? In case you don’t remember, you didn’t converse with me on the phone, you just ordered me about, as usual.”

“Quit your whining, Parker. Here’s the deal. Peter Tarragon called me this morning and told me that his wife has been taking depression medication for a few months.”

Helen was on depression meds? Was that why she was crying in the women’s bathroom at the opera house?

“I need you to tell me in detail everything you know about Helen Tarragon.”

“Is that an order?”

He sighed, leaning his head back against the door. “Will you please tell me what you know about Helen?”

I chewed on his request for a moment. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“Do you promise not to yell at me?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Or handcuff me again?”

The ridges down his cheeks softened. “I thought you liked it when I handcuffed you.”

“I like it about as much as you like it when I take your gun and shoot at albinos.”

That hardened his face right back up. “No yelling and no handcuffs. Now spill it. We need to get down to the bottom of this damned mess with Jane.”

I pursed my lips, not liking his tone at all. If we were going to start sharing information, he needed to soften up a bit.

“Spill it,
please
,” he corrected.

“Everything?”

He nodded and so I opened my mouth and let ‘er rip, starting with when I heard her sobbing in the bathroom. I went on to tell about her fight with Peter, and then repeated the details from when I ran into her again in that lower hallway. His facial expression rippled and flattened like a sheet in the wind as I shared details.

In the end, I even threw in what Aunt Zoe had shared about Jane’s past and what Zeb the Zombie had told me at the store, making Cooper pinkie swear that this last bit of information could not be used in court or shared in a report.

He refused to hold up his pinkie, but gave me his word he’d keep it to himself.

When I finished, I raised my eyebrows and asked, “What do you think? Did Helen kill Jane, or is she just a pawn?”

“I think you’ve got chess on the brain,” he said, opening the door.

“Wait!” I called as he started to leave.

He paused and looked back.

“I thought we were going to share information and figure out who killed Jane.”

“The only things I agreed to were not to yell at you or handcuff you.”

“What? That’s not fair. I showed you my cards.”

“I thought we were playing chess, not poker.” When I glared, he pulled out his wallet, flipping it open and holding it out to me. “You see this?”

“Yeah, it’s a tin star. I’ve seen them many times before packaged with cowboy hats and plastic pistols.”

“This means that information only needs to flow one way, towards me.”

“You’re such an asshole, Cooper.”

He tipped an imaginary hat at me. “Until we meet again, Parker.”

I grabbed a magazine from a nearby rack and threw it at the door as he closed it behind him.

Chapter Eighteen

Friday, September 7th

When I opened my eyes the next morning, two realizations hit me at once. The light flooding in my window was brighter than it should be for seven o’clock and something was clucking in my closet.

A glance at the clock confirmed my anxiety was for good cause—I’d overslept by forty-five minutes. My cell phone’s technical difficulties seemed to now include its alarm feature.

Dang it!

“Addy!” I scrambled out of bed and stuck my head out into the hall. “Come and get your chicken!”

Back in my room, I slipped on my robe, shooed Elvis from my closet, grabbed some clean underwear—a matching set today, since I’d be hanging out with Doc—and closed the bedroom door behind me.

“Addy!” I called from the top of the stairs. My stomach rumbled in excitement at the smell of pancakes drifting up the stairwell.
Pancakes?
Aunt Zoe must be having a Betty Crocker moment.

“I’m coming, Mom, sheesh!” Addy tromped up the steps, still in her pajamas.

“Don’t you ‘sheesh’ me, Adelynn Renee. You know that chicken is supposed to be locked up each night, not roosting in my closet … again.”

She walked by me grumbling under her breath about chickens getting no respect.

“And get dressed for school!” I hollered after her then raced down the stairs to corral Layne. When I found him, he was already dressed and sitting at the table, fork in hand, digging into a stack of pancakes covered in powdered sugar and strawberries. Aunt Zoe sat opposite sipping coffee, her plate left with just sugar and syrup residue.

“You’re late,” Harvey said from his spot by the griddle. Wearing one of Aunt Zoe’s ruffle-lined Betty Boop aprons, he looked extra grizzled this morning after yet another night on the couch. He shoved a plate full of pancakes in my hands, sprinkled on the sugar, and then dumped a ladle full of strawberries over the top.

“I don’t have time for food,” I told him.

Harvey pointed a spatula at me, giving me the evil eye under a crinkled caterpillar eyebrow. “Eat. I’ll take the kids to school this morning.”

Oh, well then … I grabbed my fork, sat next to Layne, and dug in, swallowing a couple of sweet bites before looking up at Aunt Zoe. “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

“I peeked in and you were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to bother you. Did you take a sleeping pill last night?”

“No.”

I tried to remember what I’d done last night after talking to Doc. Oh, right, I’d lain in bed and cursed at the ceiling, frustrated with Cooper for not answering any of my questions about Jane and Helen Tarragon after all I’d shared with him. At some point, mid-rant, I’d fallen asleep.

I stopped eating for a moment and realized what had changed. “I had no nightmares.”

That was weird. I hadn’t had a nightmare-free sleep since I’d spent the night at Doc’s house weeks ago. Hmmm. Maybe things were going back to normal. Or maybe my brain was too exhausted even to try to scare the crap out of me anymore. Either way, I’d had a full night’s rest. Add to that the stack of fresh pancakes in front of me, help getting the kids to school, and a date with Doc, and I suddenly felt like swinging my feet under the table. Life was good.

If only our date weren’t in a haunted house with a ghost who kept trying to get chummy.

Aunt Zoe watched me eat for several seconds, her face pinched in thought. “Did anything happen yesterday that might have contributed to eliminating the nightmares?” she asked.

I chewed on her question and a mouthful of pancakes. What had happened yesterday? Let’s see, I’d received a warning from my boss, chatted with a zombie, conjured up a freaky-ass dream at the cemetery, and spilled my guts to Cooper, who might be dating my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Nope, each one of those things should have spurred more nightmares, not gotten rid of them.

“Not that I can think of,” I told Aunt Zoe.

Harvey cleared his throat, catching my attention. “Did you pay a ‘social visit’ to your ‘financial planner’?” he asked, making the quote marks in the air while winking at me.

In other words, did I go to Doc’s and get laid? I scowled at the dirty old buzzard. “No, Harvey, I did not.”
Unfortunately.

He shrugged and went back to cleaning up the griddle.

I noticed Layne’s eyes on me and chuckled at how he was practically inhaling his pancakes. The poor kid needed a parent who could cook something other than fried eggs and tomato soup from a can. “Slow down, Layne. You’re going to choke.”

He made a show of eating in slow motion.

I reached over and messed up his hair. “Did you get all of your homework done last night?”

He’d been busy with his nose buried in a book called
Deadwood’s Dead: True Tales from the Living
while I helped Addy with her two-page essay about the book
Treasure Island
, one of my favorites that she had neglected to read for class.

“Of course, Mom.”

Layne was my studious child; Addy was the stubborn one. I’d love to take credit for Layne’s interest in all things brainiac, but he’d gotten that from his father. Addy was filled to the brim with my genes, except for the color of her eyes.

“That book you were reading about Deadwood—was it for a report you have to do?”

He shook his head. “I’m trying to see if the rumor Doc told me about Wild Bill is true.”

Doc? “When did you talk to Doc?”

“At the library yesterday.”

It appeared Deadwood’s library was a popular hangout these days. Had I just missed Doc? Was that why Tiffany was there? Were they doing something together in the South Dakota room? Why hadn’t Doc mentioned on the phone last night that he’d seen Layne at the library? Was it because he was hiding that he’d been there with Tiffany and Layne had caught them?

Whoa! Back ‘er down there, Ms. Cray-cray.
I shoved another bite of pancakes in my mouth to keep from asking my son if a pretty red-haired lady had been there with my boyfriend.

Doc had not given me any reason to distrust him so far. It wasn’t his fault that my history with men rivaled the Badlands in terms of rockiness. Besides, this time felt different. I was older, Doc was far from my typical picks, and I wasn’t letting the sun rise and set on his attentions. Although I wouldn’t mind letting the sun rise and set while being on the receiving end of his lust-filled attentions.

With the ugly, green-headed beast in my head chained up again, I asked Layne, “What did Doc tell you about Wild Bill?”

Was it anything to do with someone trying to rouse Bill from his Mount Moriah beddy-bye with candles and blood? I had yet to tell Doc about my tongue-ripping merriment with Cornelius from yesterday. Some stories were better explained with animated hand gestures.

“He said it’s rumored that Wild Bill is petrified due to the calcium carbonate in the soil he was originally buried in, but Doc thinks it’s more likely he was mummified or fossilized.”

While chewing, I tried to imagine what a petrified century-plus old body would even look like. I’d lay my bet on Bill being a dusty old mummy.

Addy raced into the kitchen, dressed for school with her chicken under her arm. She set Elvis outside the back door and turned to me. “Mom, can I stay over at Kelly’s tonight?”

It was a Friday night, but … “You didn’t read the book you were supposed to for school, remember?”

“Awww, come on, Mom. That’s the past, let’s just move on with our lives and find happiness in love and forgiveness.”

Aunt Zoe chuckled and stood, squeezing my shoulder as she passed me on the way to the sink. “Your mother would be proud of her for that one,” she told me with a wink.

“Good try, Addy,” I said, pushing my empty plate away. Emulating her hippy grandmother was not going to help her cause. “I’m sorry to punish Kelly by keeping you away from her, but you have a book to read.”

“But I have another book to read and write about for next week.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to skip TV this weekend, too.”

An explosion of whining and foot stomping followed. After I’d said my piece, I headed upstairs to get ready for my date with Doc and Prudence. I heard Harvey’s pickup rumble away as I stepped from the shower.

When I got back downstairs, Aunt Zoe was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant she was out back in her glass shop, so I grabbed my purse and left. The fewer people who knew what I was up to today the better. I’d especially made sure to cover my ass with Jerry, leaving him a voicemail that I was showing a house to a client this morning and would be in sometime after lunch. Not exactly a lie, since I’d be
showing
Prudence to Doc in a
house
.

Doc was leaning against the trunk of his Camaro behind Calamity Jane’s when I chitty-chitty bang-banged into the parking lot. Dressed in a dark maroon flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of faded blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots, he was just a Stetson hat short of throwing his leg over a saddle and riding off toward the horizon.