Tulle Death Do Us Part Read online

  “’Fraid not.”

  “Where the stairway used to be. I wasn’t in your vision.”

  I flashed my light in a circle beneath the opening in the ceiling.

  “Oh,” she said.

  I flashed my light into open-ended pipes first.

  Mice skittered around us, all cautious-like, until Eve screamed and screamed some more and threw a pipe against a wall, which caused brick dust to rain around the periphery of the room…and all the rodents to disappear.

  I clamped one hand over her mouth and the other around her throwing arm. “Way to bring the police, Meyers,” I whispered near her ear.

  Above my hand, her eyes were wider than dinner plates. Okay, I’m exaggerating. “Can you shut up now?” I asked. “No more throwing?”

  A nod. The circumference of her eyes narrowed to the proportions of a saucer, yet still worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

  “Rats!” she snapped.

  I nudged her arm. “You expected good housekeeping and a hot toddy?”

  She huffed. Then she did a little boot-scootin’. “To keep them away,” she said.

  I sighed. “Forgot to specify: Be quiet. Wish I had a camera, though. You had that tantrum because of a rat in a pipe?”

  “No, that pipe had a whole tenement thing going on. They multiply like poor families in walk-ups during the Depression. At least three families and sixteen pink erasers shared one hovel.”

  “Pink erasers?”

  “Newborn ratlets.”

  I snorted. “Scarred for life, are you?”

  “Yes, you major pain in the butt seam.”

  “Sorry. Here, check this pipe.”

  She emitted a toned-down squeal. But she accepted it, placed it on a three-legged table, took a racehorse-at-the-gate pose, and shined her flashlight inside.

  Her release of breath and recovered stance said it was empty.

  “There’s something in it,” she said. “Just there, wrapped in something, I think.”

  I flashed my own light in there. “I definitely see filthy pink in two places.” My first inclination was to bang the pipe against the floor to dislodge whatever was at the top end of the pipe, the T joint end. But I worried about noise and possible breakage, so I figured I’d get it out at home, or in the shop when I was alone, so I slipped the fat pipe in my liquor store bag I’d brought instead of my Coach bag.

  Eve gasped and started dragging me away.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “No, someone’s coming,” she whispered.

  I heard voices in the distance. More than one. An argument in whispers. A man and a woman, maybe. Hard to tell with whispers. Could be two of either. Or more of a gang.

  I smelled chocolate, and I knew I should follow the scent.

  I grabbed Eve’s arm and turned her. She came and sniffed, and we jogged toward the scent, ending up in a closet with the half door hanging by a hinge. We could just barely still hear them.

  “This is stupid,” one whispered.

  “Take it out of the stair rails,” someone different whispered. “You know where you put it. The police are nosing around. Throw it in the drink.”

  So one of the people had to be Tuxman, the guy whose voice I hadn’t recognized the night he hid his loot in the stair-rail pipe.

  “We could have done this in the morning,” Tuxman replied.

  “And risk being seen?” The second speaker’s voice made me think of the man/woman/mechanical-voice caller Dolly had spoken to.

  In our hiding spot, the chocolate scent drew us down low, beneath a lower shelf, where a piece of outside wall was missing. Getting out meant bellying our way through slowly, in perfect silence, but we did.

  It seemed to take forever.

  I didn’t recognize the dock we came out on, but I did recognize the name of the fishing boat ten feet away. The Yacht C.

  “Is anybody here?” We heard Tuxman call.

  I pulled Eve along, onto the boat and out of sight. We looked around, but it was empty. “In my second vision,” I said, “I heard the Yacht C named as a hiding place.”

  “Your visions are starting to tick me off,” Eve said.

  “You take lookout, make sure those thugs aren’t coming here to look for more of the hidden items they scavenged. I’ll look to see if I can find more of the missing items.”

  Eve shrugged.

  “At least it’ll keep us busy until it’s safe to go back to your car.”

  “Why is it always my car, I’d like to know?”

  “Because mine has the name of my shop on it.”

  “How bloody convenient.”

  Noise continued coming from the warehouse, so we couldn’t leave. I found no hidden treasure but a bunk that I chose not to examine too closely.

  Eve came to join me. “I just heard a car. I think they’re leaving but we should wait awhile to make sure.”

  “Good thinking.” We sat, straight up. Eventually, we leaned against each other, waiting until we would feel safe to go home.

  Raucous laughter came from nowhere and had us sitting at attention again. Noise and movement. Salty language. Three or more men.

  The moon shone on my watch. Four in the morning.

  Eve slapped my arm back and forth. “They’re going fishing!” she whispered as the motor started.

  “Zeke, bring the supplies below,” a man said.

  “Yes, Cap’n.”

  We scrambled, found something like a trapdoor, and ended up in a stinking but empty tank-like area, where we huddled in a corner, with Eve dry heaving and me trying not to join her. Fortunately the motor drowned her out.

  Eventually we must have gotten used to the smell, because suddenly daylight was hitting us in the face.

  “Ah, daylight,” Eve said, but her joy was short-lived, as the hold then filled with crushed ice and squirming, jumping, stinking fish of all kinds, some with legs.

  We stood and screamed, but nobody heard us.

  A rogue lobster, a granddaddy, grabbed at my hair, and ended up with a claw full. A crab looked Eve right in the eye.

  She slapped it away with a fish. “They’re dying, you know.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not in the water anymore. They’re dying around us.”

  We screamed our throats raw, and when the fish stopped sailing in, everything went quiet.

  Our rescuers did not take kindly to our presence on the trawler. As a matter of fact, “salty” became a mild description of their reaction. The blankets they gave us did not help warm us. Not only didn’t they get us out of there fast, they intended to wait till they got their quota for the day. They even called the police on us.

  “How rude,” Eve whispered for my ears only.

  “Tell the Mystick Falls police that it’s Maddie Cutler,” I said.

  The captain did as I asked. Then it was, “Yes, Detective,” and “No, Detective.”

  He hung up. “There’s a missing persons bulletin out on you two.”

  “At least somebody missed us,” Eve said.

  “Not until they found your car near a murder scene.”

  Twenty-five

  My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.

  —HENNY YOUNGMAN

  The dock showers reminded me of a tenter’s campground—rough, damp wood—but the captain insisted, and the generous spray worked three ways: stench removal, revival, and warmth. Even the generic soap smelled like a bouquet of wildflowers. Frankly, we went in stinking enough to pass the high mark on the barf-o-meter.

  When I finished, though I never wanted to step from the steaming heat of that water, I peeked around the shower curtain and found that my clothes had been replaced with a navy jumpsuit and a gunmetal gray towel, both clean, but rough enough to sand a boat deck. Evidently, fishermen do not believe in fabric softener.

  The jumpsuit’s fish-shaped patch proclaimed me a member of the boat’s crew. “Zeke,” as it happened, was embroidered beneath the larger Yacht C on the patc
h. When I opened the door to my shower cubby, I came face-to-face with Gus, aka Eve, my BFF.

  “Boy, these suits are rough,” I said. “They abrade the nips something fierce, don’tcha think?” I turned to leave the showers, and came face-to-face with Werner.

  He kissed me senseless, being careful not to abrade the nips further, the dear. When he stepped away, it took him a minute to compose himself. “Just when I think I want to beat you,” he said, “you make me want to make love to you.”

  “What changed your mind?” Eve asked. “Not that I’m not glad.”

  “I heard about you being covered in fish.”

  “So, we amuse you?” I said, getting some extra mileage off the warmth filling me over his tender care and his thermonuclear kiss.

  “You infuriate me!” he thundered.

  “Sheesh, you nearly knocked us back to the showers with the force of that roar.”

  “After two hours of sleep—”

  “Speaking of last night, how’d it go at the country club?”

  “They had their lawyers, plural, what do you think? I had to request a subpoena to get those pictures and one to search the club, though I’m most interested in the basement. But don’t think you distracted me from my tirade, Minx.”

  I tried to look innocent as I plucked the sandpaper fabric away from my sore nips.

  Eve snickered.

  Werner swallowed. “Two hours’ sleep, like I said, and I’m called out of bed because Eve’s car’s been found at a murder scene. I cringed with every corner I turned in those rat-hole mill buildings, afraid I was gonna find one or both of you with nooses around your pretty little necks. The very necks I so often want to close my hands around. Except that one of them now means more to me than my own skin. Something like that sobers a man.”

  I shivered, from cold and relief. “You’re sending mixed signals, Detective.”

  He growled.

  I stepped back. “So,” I said, trying to keep from placing a hand on my hip. This was no time to poke the tiger. “You were worried about us.”

  “You scared the living tar out of me!”

  “I calculate that as another seven-point-nine shout on the Richter,” I said, though my voice had trailed off at his warning look.

  Werner gave me the evil eye while he handed Eve his cell phone. “Call your mother, then let Mad call her dad.”

  I stamped a foot. “You told them we were missing?”

  “Don’t start with the accusations, because I can trump you, baby.”

  He so could.

  “I, unfortunately, believed that someone stole your car, Eve, and the two of you were home safe. But to answer your question, Madeira, in proving that fact to myself, I inadvertently told your parents you were missing.”

  “How long ago was that?” I began calculating my father’s stress level. “I mean, how long have you been looking for us?” I asked while Eve calmed her mother.

  “Eve’s car was called in as abandoned around two, the patrolmen took a look around, found the dead body, and now it’s ten in the morning.”

  I raised a wait-a-minute finger and dialed Fiona’s house. She picked up, sobbed when she heard my voice, then my dad was shouting at me, making threats that gave me the warm fuzzies. He loved me, he said with all the wrong words. What got to me was his voice cracking during the disjointed tirade. “I love you, too, Daddy. Fiona, too.”

  “Don’t let them come down here,” Werner said. “It’s a zoo.”

  “Wait there for me. Be home soon,” I said. “Our house, okay?”

  I gave Werner his phone back, and because I didn’t want an emotional response to become Werner’s reason that I should stop sleuthing, I ran with the crime. “What did they find? Who got murdered? How? When? Where? Why?”

  Werner slipped his phone onto his belt clip and looked up. “You really should get a job on the force.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not a compliment. That was a nice way of saying ‘Stop freaking sleuthing!’”

  “I’ll try,” I said, in the same way a kid says they’ll try eating peas. It’s so far off, you can be truthful about trying, sort of. “Who got murdered?”

  Werner cupped his neck, indicating that I was, to him, a lost cause, but his eyes said different. “We’re not sure yet,” he said, “whether to call the death a murder or suicide. Forensics will have to step in. The victim left what looks like a suicide note.”

  A murder staged as a suicide, I said to myself, remembering the voices we’d run from.

  “You know that besides your fishing boat, there’s a luxury yacht also called the Yacht Sea,” Werner said, changing the subject. “Which makes your little jaunt of last night a bit fishy. Visionary info?”

  Eve huffed. “You told him?”

  Werner eyed her until she shivered. Then she straightened. “Detective, we heard voices, so we ran,” she said. “The boat looked like the best hiding place. The only hiding place. We figured we’d give it time, and we fell asleep. Next thing, the crew’s onboard and talking about stowing something below, so we duck into the hold.”

  I shrugged and nodded. “You know the rest.”

  Werner looked from one of us to the other. “We will, in future, discuss your antics of this night in depth,” he said.

  Not if I could distract him. “Go on,” I said as we reached his car. “Where did you find the victim? I need names, details.”

  “We found him on the floor beside a broken ceiling beam attached to a chunk of ceiling with a noose around his neck. Preliminary exam shows that he died before the noose was slipped around his neck.”

  He? I shivered. “How’d he die?”

  “Blunt force trauma to the head.”

  “It would have taken someone strong to lift a dead weight and slip a noose around it,” I said. “And you haven’t told us who it was or what the suicide note said.”

  “Wayne O’Dowd died in that brick hellhole tonight, a printed confession clenched in his cold, dead hand.”

  “That’s suspicious,” I said.

  “It’s printed with his printer. Here’s something equally suspicious. On his computer screen at home is a blog entry. He was the Mystick Falls Masque.”

  “Ohhh,” I said. “Trying to get justice for his sister’s death. That makes so much sense.”

  “You would think so, but the note said he took his sister, Robin, out on the Yacht Sea and threw her overboard for her inheritance.”

  I gasped. “That note lies!”

  “I personally think so, too, and we don’t know if Wayne or his murderer wrote his last blog entry, but it said the investigation was at an end. The Phantom Masque signed it ‘Over and out.’”

  “Dead out,” Eve said.

  Twenty-six

  Today, fashion is really about sensuality—how a woman feels on the inside. In the ’80s women used suits with exaggerated shoulders and waists to make a strong impression. Women are now more comfortable with themselves and their bodies—they no longer feel the need to hide behind their clothes.

  —DONNA KARAN

  We drove in silence for a bit, my mind running a marathon, Werner sitting beside me in the backseat, Eve up front with Billings. “Detective,” I said, “who on the old police report is recorded as having said they were with Robin when the rogue wave took her?” I asked. “Who’s telling the truth? Any of them, or not even the suicide note?”

  “My guess is, none of them.” He handed me the rolled-up morning paper from his pocket.

  I opened it and gasped: “Zavier McDowell arrested for 1973 death of Robin O’Dowd.”

  “You arrested Zavier?”

  “He confessed, Mad.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I wanted to, for all the wrong reasons, but I was up to my neck in paperwork until the call on Eve’s car came in. Then we found a dead body in the same vicinity, which made finding you two my top priority.” He grabbed me around the neck and pulled me against him, his kiss a testament to
his worry. I reveled in it and gave as good as I got.

  At a light, Eve fake gagged. “Cut it out!”

  “I thought you hated Nick, not Werner.”

  “Nick left you too often. Werner demonstrates his affection too often.”

  “You’re jealous,” I said on a chuckle.

  I nearly pulled away from Werner’s hold, until I realized he’d been more than a little worried; more anxious than any detective should be when searching for a possible second body.

  “I don’t know who leaked Zavier’s confession to the press,” Werner said, finally letting go, “but Councilman McDowell and his lawyer were there, and they brought a couple of doctors and his live-in nurse to say Zavier couldn’t have done it. Then the poor man ups and says he did.”

  I read the short article, zeroing in on pertinent details. “‘Robin O’Dowd’s 1973 death was reopened this week in the wake of newly unearthed evidence…No additional details provided…Detective Lytton Werner declined comment’…yada yada yada. ‘Anyone with information about the case is being asked to contact the Mystick Falls Police Department.’”

  “It’s nothing but a puff piece,” Werner said.

  “Enough to do Zavier some damage,” I said. “Tell me he’s not in jail.”

  “Right now he’s refusing bail.”

  My head came up. “Well, there’s got to be a story there, but at least he’s safe.” I released a breath. “Now, with Wayne’s confession, we have two killers?”

  “And two deaths,” Eve said. “But one solved.”

  “If we believe Wayne’s confession,” I added.

  “As I see it, we’re back where we started,” Werner said. “Robin O’Dowd’s death is as much of a mystery as ever. The confessions cancel each other out, along with the original conclusion. Hey, what were you two doing down at the docks? That car wasn’t parked anywhere near the Yacht C.”

  Eve squeaked, the brat, at about the same time her mother and my parents flew out my father’s front door.

  I was smothered in hugs and love, all of us swallowing convulsively. I had been scared, both at the mill and on the boat last night, plus my nips were practically raw from wearing a sandpaper suit without a bra. And every hug made it worse.