Tulle Death Do Us Part (20 page)

“Fee, Eve,” he said. “Don’t let her come to harm.”

“We haven’t yet,” Fiona said.

“They know what you’re gonna tell me, right?” he asked.

I nodded. “One or both of them always has my back.”

He turned to them. “Thank you. You don’t know how much I appreciate knowing that,” he said. “You know how she is. She gets on a case and forgets she’s not Wonder Woman.”

That cut a bit close to the bone. “Gee,” I said, tilting my head and furrowing my brows, “you mean I’m not?”

My protectors had the good grace to open ranks and let me in. They literally all turned toward me and invited me to join the conversation again.

I nodded my appreciation. “Lytton, does Robin’s brother have motive?”

Werner shifted gears in a blink, and if he felt any discomfort at the affection for me that he’d revealed, I saw no sign of it. He jumped right back on the case, firmed his lips, and nodded. “About two years after Robin was declared dead, Wayne, his paternal grandparents’ sole heir, inherited the family fortune. He got the docks, slips, warehouses, and more property than any one man could ever need. Since then, he’s turned a lot of it into condos and made millions more doing it.”

“Which is why double the inheritance worked so much better than half the inheritance,” I snipped. “Sounds like motive to me,” I continued, so glad he’d reopened the case. I didn’t know why I felt this gut-deep imperative to find justice for Robin, but her case had gotten to me like no other. Maybe it was because she hadn’t had closure, and neither had her family. Presumed dead. No body. No headstone to sit beside, no name carved in granite to trace and remember.

On the other hand, maybe the depth of my empathy is the precise reason her case became my universal mandate. Mine specifically.

I wasn’t really throwing Robin’s brother, or his wife, Wynona, to the wolves. Werner could easily disprove either of them as suspects, with my help, of course. What mattered was him looking for the reason she’d gone in the water that night. I wanted us to find the person, or persons, responsible. If in fact she hadn’t gone in on her own.

“I guess we need to investigate Robin herself,” I said. “I mean, suppose her life was unbearable and she jumped willingly into a storm-tossed sea?”

Truth was, I didn’t think Wayne had been among the people at the warehouse that night, though Wynona had. Unless Wayne turned out to be Snake, the slimy one, or even Tuxman, the one who’d hid his loot in the pipes of a ramshackle mill.

On the other hand, Wayne’s family had owned property on the docks, and we’d been in a dark seaside warehouse. Granted, the building had seemed empty and abandoned, but it wasn’t, because there’d been no mistaking the fish smell. Could Wayne or his wife have been the brains behind his sister’s drowning?

Well, not his wife. Wynona wasn’t married to him back then, but maybe she wanted to be and Robin disapproved, or she wanted Robin’s half of the money for herself as Wayne’s wife.

I mean, how could you make someone dive into the ocean in a storm?

But no one had used the word “dive” in the belly of the whale that night, had they?

One could force someone into the water. Or push them in. Most easily done if the victim is unconscious. Or dead.

“Since I reopened this case because of the box your building crew found, I wish I could invite you to question Mr. and Mrs. O’Dowd with me,” Werner said, “but I want them to know we mean business. So, I need to bring a couple of black-and-whites.”

I swiveled on my stool, away from and then back toward Werner.
“You will tell me about questioning the O’Dowds later? I can keep my mouth shut.”

“It’s true, she can,” Eve said. “Even when being tickled to within an inch of her life.”

Werner chuckled. “I’ll have to remember that. We have a lot to talk about tonight, Mad. Maybe it’d better be a sleepover.”

Eve perked up. “Like last—”

“Not you, Eve. Just Mad. Me and Mad.”

Butterflies took over my insides. This had started in third grade when he’d called me Glamazon and I’d called him Little Wiener. I wonder if we were attracted then. Yes, I’d maligned his manhood before I knew what manhood was. I was sorry for that, especially since the man’s kisses now made my toes curl. It might be difficult to keep a straight face tonight, under the circumstances, but I was gonna give it my Wonder Woman best.

“I’d stay and babysit the shop if you needed her, Lytton,” Eve said. “But, Mad, you shouldn’t be surprised if, while you were gone, I tried on a few of those gowns in the back.”

“If you tried them on and so much as popped a button,” I told my BFF, “I would do worse than tickle you. I’d double dare you to wear red to the Valentine’s ball.”

Eve gave me a snobby chin up, but she spoiled it with an eye twinkle.

I hooked my arm through Werner’s. “I’ll walk you to the car, Detective. So we can go over your interview strategy.”

Oh, I liked to bring out that grin of his.

One last thermonuclear kiss coming up.

I let myself into Werner’s house through the kitchen door—to the tantalizing aroma of a homemade Italian dinner—and a hunk who made me drool more than the food did.

I’d carefully chosen a strapless electric-blue Versace gown with a left-leg split, trimmed in black leather, like my fashion-forward Ferragamo booties.

“My God, you’re dazzling,” he said, shirtsleeves rolled up, dish towel over a shoulder, a stirring spoon in each hand.

“Nothing retro for tonight,” I said. “I’m making a fashion statement that I hope will take us from the present into the future. Screw the past.”

He dropped his spoons.

“Don’t! No kissing until after dinner, and after I’ve bared my soul.”

“Sounds ominous. Will we ever get to the kissing part?”

“That’ll be up to you.”

“Glad I’ll have a say in it. Can we talk while we eat—multitask, so to speak—get it all out there as soon as possible, let the kissing and disrobing begin?”

I laughed. How could such a hunk, such a strong-willed and, when necessary, hard-hearted detective also look like my own personal teddy bear? It would be difficult to keep my own ground rules.

We sat at the perfectly set round oak dining room table with Werner holding a meatball at the end of his fork while staring straight at my cleavage.

I took a deep breath, widening his eyes. “My mother was a witch,” I said.

He twitched, trying not to react. The meatball fell off his fork, bounced, and landed in his lap.

I bit my lip on a giggle as he retrieved it. “She was Wiccan, but she was also a natural. I’ve inherited several of her gifts. I haven’t embraced the Wiccan faith, but spells come to me in my sleep though I haven’t cast any. I participated in a ritual at my dearest friend’s funeral in New York and told myself I stood in my mother’s place. Aunt Fiona and I, we cleansed the shop, once a morgue, of negativity, Wiccan style, before I moved in.”

“Now can I touch you?”

“No. How do you feel about my paranormal ability? About me?”

“Horny. Wrong answer? I always knew you were special?”

I chuckled. “I’m psychic. Psychometric, actually.”

“You read objects?”

His knowledge surprised me. “In my case, it’s vintage
clothes. What I learn helps me sleuth. For some universal reason, my visions are always connected to, or they’re the origination of, my sleuthing. Like the wrapping around the box. It’s a petticoat piece that took me to the night the box was stolen.”

Werner threw down his napkin. “Damn it, Madeira, I knew you had an edge. You always know so much about the cases we’re working on.”

“Are you mad?”

“Exonerated. I feel exonerated. I’m not a second-rate detective. You’re a first-rate sleuth.”

I started to reach for his hand but then pulled back. “You don’t hate that I’m a natural witch, and psychic to boot?”

“I hate that we’re on different sides of the table,” he said.

“Aunt Fiona calls my readings universal mandates, like I’m supposed to help solve the mystery they bring me to, past or present.”

“Fee’s a wise woman. Did she suggest you tell me?”

“I learned that from my parents’ experience. My mother waited until after she and my dad were married to let him know about her abilities. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like Fee either, my mother’s sister witch, for years and years.”

“He’s sure changed his mind.”

“Yes, he has.”

Werner came around the table to sit in the chair beside me, his hands clasped so he wouldn’t reach for me. “I suspected you were psychic, which is why I didn’t want to know for sure where your information came from, though if you remember, I kept suggesting you had an edge.”

I sat straighter. “Yes, I remember.”

“I’m a bit psychic myself, though I’ve never admitted it to anyone, and I don’t want anyone in Mystic to know, which shows how much I trust you. It could ruin my rep as a detective.”

All I could think of was how psychic our children might be. Talk about premature.

He kissed his way from my wrist to my inner elbow, lips but no hands. “I think I’ve always known that you belong to me.”

Great, so he echoes my thoughts. “We haven’t exactly established that, yet.”

“We will, as soon as you let me touch you. Any other secrets you care to share?”

“Don’t you want to know what I’ve seen so far in the case we’re working on?”

“All I want at this moment is to take that dress off you.” He traced the leather at the lowest point of my plunging neckline, but he stroked nothing but fabric. Touching but not. Raising my expectations and shivering me to my Ferragamos.

With some bit of psychic communication, we stepped away from the table, and Werner swept me off my feet and carried me up the stairs to his room.

His bed had been transformed, covered as it was with wildly expensive bedding, the spread a cool Vera Bradley–type sea of paisley silk in cobalts and teals. Manly but sexy to the skin. When Werner threw back the comforter, he set me down on decadent electric-blue sheets. Real silk, not polyester fakes.

“I’m worried I might lose you in there,” he said. “Your dress is the same color.”

I silently opened my arms to him.

At three in the morning we nuked supper and ate from deep cereal bowls, sitting next to each other on the sofa, me wearing his shirt, my bare legs over his lap, again touching but not. When he picked up a meatball, I laughed the way I’d wanted to when he’d dropped the first, and he laughed with me.

The laughter made me think of my parents. Dad and Mom. Dad and Aunt Fee. And I reached for Werner again, so the food was forgotten.

I didn’t get to the shop until noon the next day. Not smiling like a calf-eyed puppy was a chore.

To give Eve credit, she said nothing snarky and let me lead the conversation. “We have to go sleuthing tonight,” I said.

“What about Werner?”

“He’s got a day of meetings that won’t end until after midnight, so I suggested he and I skip tonight. Make him wait.”