Murder Melts in Your Mouth (7 page)

From the porch, I called to the twins, Harcourt and Hilton, who came outside holding flashlights ghoulishly under their faces. They told me they'd brought their sleeping bags and would remain in the barn until morning. They were catching mice, but they hoped for bigger prey. I decided not to brave the darkness to see what doomed vermin they had in mind. Although I didn't want to be alone, the twins weren't exactly comforting company.

In the living room, Lucy lay sprawled out on the sofa in a bathing suit, sleeping soundly. There was no sign of her imaginary friend, but I found myself peeking into the other chairs just the same. My niece had an unnerving ability to convince everyone of her friend's existence.

I pulled a Spider-Man comic book from Lucy's sticky hands and turned off the reading lamp. Toby came in and threw himself down on the floor beside Lucy. Leaving a cashmere throw nearby in case she got cold in the night, I took Maximus up the stairs to my bedroom.

It felt cozy having Libby's children around.

The events of the last few years had me starting to believe I wasn't meant to be a parent. A miscarriage in the spring had devastated me, and any minute my biological clock was going to start ticking. Loudly. Maybe, I thought, I needed to learn to make myself happy by playing surrogate mom to the children of my sisters now and then.

I left the chandelier turned on in the front hall just in case Lucy woke in the night and wanted to find me. I noticed another bulb had burned out. The steps creaked ominously under my feet, and I wondered if the crack in the hallway plaster was a little longer than it had been this morning. The old place was falling apart faster than I could afford to fix it.

I'd inherited the farm when my parents took a powder. While they avoided extradition in the Southern Hemisphere on the beaches of one luxury resort after another, I struggled to pay their back taxes and keep the old Bucks County farmhouse from crumbling into a heap of stones, frayed wire and rusting pipes, not to mention the rampant mildew in the cellar. Emma had inherited the Blackbird art collection, and Libby received all the good family furniture, so I had moved the furnishings from my Philadelphia condo to the farm. The result looked a bit sparse in the big, rambling house, but at least the few rooms I did use were comfortable.

It was hotter upstairs, so I opened as many windows as I could. Old paint had sealed some of them permanently closed, but I managed to get some cross-ventilation going between my bedroom, my bath and the large dressing room I used as a closet. I could hear a soft breeze whispering in the oak trees as I shoved up the sash on my bedroom window.

The baby was teaching himself to stand by holding on to the furniture, but tonight he was cranky from the heat and didn't feel like playing. A bubble of drool seemed to constantly quiver on his lip, and I wondered if he might be teething.

I gave him a quick bath in my tub to cool him off, then put on a fresh diaper and pulled a clean cotton shirt over his head. The shirt was imprinted with the message,
MOMMY'S LITTLE DEMON
.

I hugged Max. To me, he was an angel.

Earlier in the summer, I'd brought an old playpen upstairs for the weekends when Libby needed a break and sent Max to stay with me. He seemed content to bed down in his home away from home for another night. I gave him his binky.

“I don't know the periodic tables, either,” I told him.

From around his mouthful of pacifier, he said, “Da!”

With a smile, I turned off all the lights except the bedside lamp and left him alone. I heard him babbling and kicking at the musical mobile while I ran a bath for myself and undressed.

I flipped off the light and lit a lemon-scented candle. Usually, I read a book in the claw-foot tub, but tonight I didn't have the concentration. I dropped the novel onto the rug and tried to let the water ease the heat and tension out of my body. It didn't work, of course. As soon as I closed my eyes, I began to stew.

How had it happened? How had Hoyt Cavendish gone over the railing of Lexie's office balcony? I tried to imagine the scenario—all the various employees and clients moving through the offices like bumper cars in a chaotic carnival ride.

Tierney Cavendish rushing down the stairs. Scooter Zanzibar blundering into the restaurant, looking suspiciously rattled.

And I tried to remember who I'd seen in Lexie's office as the police established their crime scene. Brandi Schmidt in her wheelchair, yes. And the eccentric Elena Zanzibar. But who else had attended that shouted meeting in Lexie's boardroom? My father?

And Lexie herself, of course. But who else?

I heard a scraping noise and opened my eyes.

“Max?” I called.

The baby crooned some nonsense back to me, but he sounded sleepy.

I closed my eyes again.

Downstairs, Toby gave a halfhearted bark. Then I heard another sound. A bump on the porch roof. And a noisier thump.

Just outside my bathroom window.

I sat up in the tub and reached for my towel. In five seconds, I was out of the water and dripping on the rug.

The curtains twitched and a familiar voice spoke from the porch roof. “Are you decent?”

“No,” I replied. “As a matter of fact, I'm not.”

“Great,” said Michael. “I'll be right in.”

He climbed through the window—quite an operation for a long-legged man with big shoulders. When all six feet four inches of him arrived in the bathroom, he grinned—a vision of curly black hair, a beaten-up face and a body most women would give up their shoe collection for. Then he leaned back out through the curtains and stretched to retrieve a package he'd left outside. When he dragged it in, he said, “I brought dinner.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“I am,” he said, with a smile that turned his eyes very blue.

He leaned down and kissed me.

Michael Abruzzo never failed to take my breath away. I closed my eyes, felt my toes curl and my belly contract with the kind of desire that wasn't decent in the least. The kiss was meant to be a cursory greeting, I knew, but it lasted just a half second too long to be taken lightly. I wanted to fling my arms around his shoulders.

But that meant dropping my towel.

M
ichael broke the kiss as if he'd suddenly remembered we weren't supposed to be on a kissing basis anymore. He all but wiped it off his mouth with the back of his hand. He said, “Sorry.”

I pulled my towel tighter and tried to act as if ex-lovers dropped through windows every day. “I thought you decided we were history. Why are you climbing my downspouts at this hour?”

“Because Rawlins is on the back porch talking mushy on his cell phone. I didn't want him to think I had come to compromise his aunt. Plus those creepy twins are in the barn, aren't they? I'm still afraid they'll throw a net over me and use me for evil experiments.”

“Michael—”

“Relax,” he said. “This isn't a change of heart. I thought you could use some company tonight. I heard somebody important died today.”

“How did you hear that?”

“I have my sources.”

Michael had unsavory contacts on both sides of the law. His information was usually more accurate than the local newspapers, but in my worst moments I imagined his reports came from dirty cops and gangbangers—people he saw in the course of his everyday life of crime.

With a wry smile that told me he guessed what I was thinking, Michael tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear and lingered there, searching my face—perhaps to decide if he should stay or go.

He made a choice and said, “Put on some clothes. I brought Chinese.”

“I don't think this is a good idea.”

“Dinner, you mean? Did you eat already?”

“N-no.”

“I figured. So we'll eat. And we'll skip the dessert, I promise.”

If I was not mistaken, I heard a six-pack of beer jingle under his arm, too, as he went out to my bedroom, leaving me to dry off and slip into a soft T-shirt and loose boxer shorts. As I hung up the wet towel, I took a quick look at myself in the mirror. My cheeks glowed pink—whether from the summer heat or his kiss, I wasn't sure. I shook my hair out of its clip, then changed my mind and wound it up into a tight bun instead. If he truly wanted our relationship to be over, the drowned-librarian look was best tonight.

I tiptoed into the half-light of the bedroom and found him bending over the playpen. The baby spit out the binky and smiled up at Michael, gurgling with delight to see his familiar playmate.

“He stinks,” Michael said.

“I just changed him!” Exasperated, I leaned down and checked. Yes, Maximus needed another diaper. “For heaven's sake,” I muttered.

Like most men, Michael suffered instant ignorance once a nearby female had been notified of the stinky diaper. He went over to the bedside table, blithely opened his brown paper bag and began to pull out various white cardboard containers of Chinese food.

Grumbling, I located another industrial-strength Pampers and the packet of supersized wipes, then plunked the baby on the bed. Max wriggled around to get a better view of our visitor while I cleaned him up. When I turned to reach for the fresh diaper, he managed to kick himself over onto his stomach and made a break for the edge of the bed.

I grabbed Max and flipped him on his back just in time to get a spray of baby pee up the front of my shirt.

Michael laughed, and Max let out a triumphant giggle at his new trick.

“Just what I need tonight,” I said. “A couple of troublemakers.”

“That's us.” Michael scooped up the baby once he was freshly changed.

I dug a clean tank top out of a drawer and went into the bathroom to change out of the wet T-shirt. I washed my hands and took another look at my hair in the mirror. I decided I didn't want to feel like a drowned librarian after all. I shook out my hair and combed it fast.

When I returned, Michael was tucking Max back into the playpen. The baby gave one howl of protest and then rolled onto his stomach, binky forgotten. He rubbed his nose and went to sleep.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “For me, he'd be awake for hours.”

“I promised him a beer later. Want one?”

Actually, a cold beer sounded heavenly. Michael read my thoughts and pulled a bottle of Yuengling from the six-pack. He twisted off the cap and handed over the beer, giving me an involuntary glance up and down.

I did the same to him. For some reason, he didn't look wrung out with heat exhaustion like everyone else I'd seen that day. In fact, he appeared to be comfortable in his jeans and the well-worn dark T-shirt that clung to his muscled chest and very touchable shoulders. But then, Michael was more at ease in his own skin than anyone else I'd ever known.

It was one of the things I appreciated most about him. I had a long list. But we seemed to be capable of sustaining only a few weeks of happiness together before one of us decided we weren't compatible.

This time, it had been Michael who decided we needed to be apart. For reasons I hadn't figured out yet, he said we should go our separate ways.

I had misgivings about the reliability of Michael's moral compass, of course. And the local newspapers always breathlessly reported innuendo about his family. Loan-sharking, illegal gambling, stolen cars and a tangle of other felonious crimes in New Jersey and Philadelphia were always being linked to the Abruzzo family. His cousins were in jail. One of his brothers disappeared a couple of years ago and was presumed murdered. And Michael seemed to slip in and out of police custody with catlike ease, while the press predicted it was only a matter of time before he went back to jail for some crime or other.

My resolve to distance myself from him always crumbled to the complex sort of attraction between us, however. The pull of lust was strong. It was the magnetism between the broken parts of our souls that truly drew us together, though.

The lost baby had bound us more tightly than I could have imagined.

Maybe this time our split was for real, though. Michael seemed to have mastered his self-control.

He gave me a gentle push to sit down on the bed and made his voice sound casual. “I like spicy food on a hot night, don't you? What'll it be? Shrimp? I got some of those sesame snow peas you like so much, too. The plastic fork is for me. I still can't use those damn chopsticks of yours. And here are some noodles.”

I hitched myself to the middle of the bed and sat cross-legged while he sorted through the food. When he kicked off his shoes and climbed up beside me, I found myself tamping down a smile. He crossed one long leg over the other, relaxed into the pillows and dug into the spicy noodles.

“Thank you, Michael.”

“Hey,” he said with a shrug. “The first thing you do when you get upset is stop eating.”

I wanted to shove the food aside and climb into his arms. I wanted to bury my head in his chest and listen to the steady rhythm of his heart. Tonight I needed some human contact. But I kept my distance. His body language told me to stay away.

In the silence, we heard a car start outside, and crunch slowly out the gravel driveway. Rawlins, going to see his new girlfriend.

Michael said, “Tell me what you know.”

Startled, I said, “What?”

“Who's the dead guy?”

Michael enjoyed talking about crime the way most men discussed baseball scores. And since neither of us wanted to talk about our relationship, murder made a much safer dinner conversation.

“Hoyt Cavendish,” I said. “He is—he
was
a philanthropist. He gave away millions. He's been very generous these last couple of years.”

“Is he another one of your blue-blooded relatives? Did his grandfather make a fortune exploiting the working poor?”

“No,” I said tartly. “Hoyt came from California, I think, and married one of the Slossen heiresses, who were very Old Philadelphia. Their great-uncle invested in some kind of farm implement, I think. The Slossens descended from the
Mayflower
, so Hoyt's background is unimportant.”

Beneath his lazy eyelids, Michael's blue eyes gleamed with amusement. “Her pedigree trumps his, huh?”

“Yes. It was probably thanks to her connections that he became a partner in the Paine Investment Group, working with Lexie's father, helping people take care of their investments.”

“That sounds more lucrative than farm equipment.”

“Hm,” I said. “Well, he was part of our—a part of the social scene. After his wife died, he announced he was semiretired and became a philanthropist. He presented a Stradivarius to a violinist just a few months ago. It was a very moving gesture.”

“He started giving his wife's money away?”

I frowned. “I don't think she was quite that wealthy. He must have done well investing. He's been giving away monster sums of money.”

Michael forked some Chinese food. “How did he die today?”

“A fall from a balcony. Brandi Schmidt—a woman who'd been with him shortly before he died—said he committed suicide. But I think he was murdered. Pushed off the terrace outside Lexie's office.”

“Anybody else around when he took the swan dive?”

“Yes, of course. Lots of employees. And clients. It was a Who's Who of Philadelphia. Even Elena Zanzibar was there.”

“Who?”

Of course Michael wouldn't know a woman famous for perfume and makeup. “She owns Zanzibar, the cosmetics company. She's astronomically rich. And it's possible her grandson, a movie actor, might have been in the office, too. He's Chad Zanzibar.”

Michael shrugged, indicating he'd never heard of Chad, either. “How well did you know the dead guy?”

“Hoyt? Only a little. He and my father were friends a long time ago.”

Michael slurped some spicy noodles and spoke around the mouthful. “Was Cavendish one of the chumps your father fleeced before he took a powder?”

I used the chopsticks to finagle a snow pea from the cardboard container. It was no secret that my parents alienated many of their former friends when they fled the country. They had begged, borrowed and essentially stolen money from many generous people to fund their flight from assorted tax collectors.

“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “But it's even worse than that. Daddy had an affair with Hoyt's wife.”

Michael choked on his noodles.

I tossed him a paper napkin. “It wasn't just a one-night stand, either, but a long-term, very adulterous relationship.”

“Wow.” He rubbed his chin with the paper napkin. “I didn't think people climbed out of your family tree to do that kind of stuff. What did your mom have to say about it?”

“Nothing. The affair was acknowledged, but never discussed.”

With a grin, Michael shook his head. “I'm the bastard son of a mobster and an Atlantic City showgirl. Believe me, growing up, I heard a lot of discussion about affairs. Mostly at high volume and with dishes flying. Once my old man put a whole lasagna through a television during
The Price Is Right
. My mother knocked his front teeth out for that one.”

I knew Michael had been raised by his father's wife, in fact, not his own mother. But Michael's upbringing had been very different from my own. That subject was old news.

I said, “Mama looked the other way. After all, Daddy wasn't going to leave her. And Hoyt's wife wasn't going to drop everything to be with my father, either.”

“How did it end? A duel with swords and blindfolds?”

“Of course not. It was over as quietly as it started. Except Hoyt stopped speaking to Daddy, of course. It was a terrible shame, because they'd been good friends until then. Members of the same clubs, that sort of thing.”

“And now Cavendish is dead.”

“Yes.”

And my father was back in town. Once again I wondered how he'd disappeared from the coat closet. My father had probably made a lot of fast getaways in his lifetime, but this one looked highly suspicious.

Before I could decide whether to tell Michael about my father's return to American soil, Michael spoke first. He helped himself to a shrimp and passed the container to me. “Tell me about the picture. Somebody punched a painting?”

“You're very well-informed, aren't you?”

“That part was on the news. Even made CNN.”

I doubted the news media was Michael's only source of information, but I accepted the shrimp container. “Yes, the Vermeer in Lexie's office was damaged. It was so shocking to see, Michael. Vermeers are extraordinarily rare. I still can't believe a man who gave away a Stradivarius would do such a thing. He must have gone crazy.”

“How valuable is the picture?”

“All the pieces in Lexie's collection are worth a fortune. But the monetary value isn't the real issue. Not to Lexie. Yes, it's astronomically valuable. And—it's important to her. I guess that's why Hoyt defacing it was all the more horrible. Lexie was devastated.”

“Why is this one such a big deal to her?”