Tulle Death Do Us Part Read online

  He tilted his head, and I guessed that was the most positive response I could expect, given the circumstances. We hadn’t talked much, if at all, since Nick and I got back together. And I’d missed this special old friend, but I couldn’t tell him that.

  Not that I’d actually dumped him. We were never an item. We’d just had some…special events…together. Memorable ones. When Nick and I became godparents to my sister Sherry’s twins, my family sort of pushed us together. It suited for a while, until Nick practically lobbied his way into feeding his adventure bug…again.

  “Again,” I said. I’m ba-ack, I did not say.

  Since I couldn’t seem to give our memories, including one thermonuclear kiss, the slip stitch, I kept them shoved deep at the back of my mind and rarely took them out to examine.

  “We both know the past is the past,” I said, and he nodded. “But the future holds promise. And our taste buds don’t change.” I pulled a Dos Equis from a recyclable shopping bag and set one bottle in front of him, one in front of me. This, too, came from yet another previous sleuthing experience we shared. One of our earliest ones.

  His eyes brightened, but his fists clenched. Fighting with himself. “I’m not supposed to drink on the job,” he said, sotto voce.

  “It’s after six, and I’d think working from home should have some perks. Besides, did I hear a no?”

  I cupped the back of my ear. “No?” I saluted. “I’m looking for a negative, Detective, sir!”

  He gave me a half smirk, and with a satisfied nod I shut his blinds.

  He raised both brows.

  “So people don’t see you drinking on the job.”

  He flipped on the desk lamp, and I hung the jacket of my dress in the room’s closet, since he made his “office” in a main floor bedroom.

  When I turned back to him, he’d already tipped back his bottle, his throat working convulsively.

  “That’s a mighty thirst,” I teased. Mighty fine throat work, too. Oh, oh.

  “Sweet,” he said, eyeing me.

  “The beer?” I asked. Or me? Okay, Cutler, stop flirting. He’s more than a rebound guy, he’s a friend. Don’t use Werner to punish Nick. But the truth was, I meant every word. Myself. I was being nothing but myself.

  “The hat,” he said, rising and indicating the chair across from him.

  I nodded. “I thought you’d make fun of the one with the feather.”

  “I would have.” He didn’t sit until after I did, and even then he watched me with speculation for a bit too long to be comfortable.

  I sat and clutched my gloved fingers before me on the desk—a nervous, guilty giveaway—and to make matters worse, I leaned forward as if this were just between us. I guess I was doubly skittish. Hiding evidence—sort of, maybe—and seeing my not-quite-ex again, one-on-one, empty house and all that. Was he my ex? Yeah. Imagine that.

  This would have been more professionally played at the station. I sighed and jumped in with both aerodynamic feet. “What if I might have evidence of a crime?” I asked.

  Werner sat back, picked up his beer, and waited.

  “If I gave you the evidence, would you let me help you solve the crime?”

  “If? Ever hear the phrase ‘obstruction of justice’?”

  I copied his posture to the letter. “If there was a crime,” I said, leaning back in my chair a bit, “the statute of limitations has long run out on the scenario I have in mind.”

  “Some investigations warrant being reopened,” he said.

  “What if an incident was neither recognized as a crime nor investigated in the first place?” I wasn’t talking about the seemingly obvious robbery of the country club. I had other pleats to fold, like throwing him off the scent with the scavenger hunt, and then looking for a talented team swimmer from Vassar named Robin. Oh! I should ask Eve if she can find Deborah’s swim team listed anywhere. Maybe they won a meet, a championship, something to get them listed in a newspaper. I needed Robin’s last name.

  “What do you have up your sleeve?” He rubbed the stubble on his chin, a whole day’s worth of five o’clock shadow. He hadn’t bothered to shave this morning.

  I liked his big-bad-bear look. Dicey news for my currently muddled and crush-like mindset. “Does it look like I could hide anything in these tight sleeves?” I asked.

  “Speaking of tells.” He took a quick, imperceptible inventory from my winged heels to my tease of a toque. His gaze slid once up. Once down. Then he folded his arms. “You think you know how to distract me.”

  “This suit is from the fifties, though the pencil skirt is too tight for rock and roll. I’ll admit,” I said, “I’m aware that you like to see a girl in a skirt more than slacks. You once demonstrated your reasons quite well. I chose the outfit in hopes of sliding us past our, well, past”—best not make it “torrid past”—“and putting us at ease during a business discussion.” I tilted my head. “And maybe I wanted to dredge up a memory or two, the playful ones. So sue me.”

  He made a sound fit for a grumpy grizzly. “And maybe you want to get back at Nick for putting his Mystick Falls house up for sale.”

  I actually felt the color drain from my face as I gripped the side of Werner’s desk. “His house is for sale?”

  Sir Galahad to the rescue. He handed me his bottle of Dos Equis, because mine wasn’t open yet. I took a thirsty swig and let him hold a wet towel to the back of my neck. “I could kick myself for letting that one out of the bag,” he said.

  “How long’s it been for sale?” I asked, eyes closed. “He just told me this morning that he’d left the country.”

  “I thought you were building the third-floor apartments because you knew—”

  “Weeks? I’ve been prepping construction for weeks—Nick’s known for weeks?”

  “You were so happy about raising your roof. Maybe he didn’t want to—” Werner raised his arms in defeat. “I am stepping away from this. Talk to your brother, Alex.”

  I patted my brow and cheeks with the cool cloth, gently so as not to lose my makeup. “I will. Thanks. I don’t suppose you’d like to dance a little rock and roll, get me out of this slump?”

  “With you on the rebound? No way.”

  “See, I only suggested that to make you smile, and you grumped instead.”

  Werner resented his half smile. I could tell. “I remember our rocking and rolling,” he said. “It was fun. All of it.” He sat, slapped his hands on his desk, and pushed himself up, tossed his bottle in the trash, and opened the blinds.

  I got it. He’d just put period to any kind of intimacy between us, especially the sharing of memories.

  “What’s your game, Mad?”

  “I called Nick, and found him on the other side of the world, because I…need help. You know what he said? That you would be here for me if I needed you. He trusts you to be my go-to guy.”

  Werner grumped again, looked out the window, put his hands behind his back. “Your Fed’s not as smart as I thought.”

  “He’s not my Fed anymore. We’re off again.” I neatened Werner’s desk a bit, moved anything tippy aside, then I set the travel bag between us.

  “What’s in there?” he asked, turning.

  “I have no idea. I didn’t want to open it alone.”

  Still standing, he peeled the Vuitton’s soft leather top back to reveal its contents, engraved plate facing his way. I grabbed Eve’s camera by its straps from my shoulder bag and snapped a pic. “I’d like to report a robbery,” I said, proud to sidestep Werner’s misgivings and my rocky start to rewinning his trust, because I suddenly knew he mattered more than I realized. “I’d like to enter this into evidence.”

  “A cash box?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, we found it today when—”

  “I heard.”

  “You let me squirm all this time and you knew we found something in my attic?”

  “I like watching you squirm, a rather entertaining sport. Your rare insecurity…charms me. Makes
me feel manly. I wanted a minute to savor. Congrats on the third floor, by the way.”

  He liked watching me wriggle? What a stinker, but I couldn’t tell him so if I wanted his help. “I’ll be glad when it’s done so I can move in.”

  “You’re leaving your father’s?”

  “Dad and Aunt Fee need to be alone at her house. Alex is buying the old Cutler tavern.”

  Werner’s range of expressions morphed three times fast: pleased, wistful, blank. And in a blink, blank won. “I used to expect you and Nick to set up housekeeping.”

  I barked a laugh. “Not our style, especially when we live in different countries.”

  The silence ran long, the pounding of my heart echoing in my head. My cheeks warmed to a blaze.

  Werner’s lack of opinion—while I could imagine what it might be—forced me to admit that my relationship with Nick, especially our living arrangements, shouldn’t be up for discussion. Not now. Especially not with this man, who held a strong jolt of power over me.

  What mattered is that Nick and I were off again. He was selling his house. Why did that make me feel less like a loser and more like a winner? I suddenly felt…free? Wholly so.

  Really? Free to do what? Was I so flighty that I couldn’t commit? Why did I care that I couldn’t? Because of what Lytton Werner thought of me?

  He opened his drawer for a cigar, caught my disapproving eye, and threw it back. “No Commitment Maddie, that’s you.”

  “Scrap!” I focused sharply on his face. “Don’t go there.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t think either of us is ready for the truth here.”

  And what did that mean?

  Nine

  “The time has come,” the Walrus said,

  “To talk of many things:

  Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—

  Of cabbages—and kings—”

  —LEWIS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

  “Your new apartments,” Werner said, bringing us back to the subject at hand and out of the danger zone.

  “Right. I’m really excited about them. I’ll put the other two up for lease and become a landlady. Dolly’s talking about taking one. She says Ethel stifles her sex life.”

  Werner choked and opened the beer sitting in front of me. After he took a long sip and caught his breath, he grinned. “I want to be her when I grow up—the male variety, of course. Most hundred-and-six-year-olds can’t utter the word ‘sex.’”

  He gave me a swift peek at the lady-killer grin I’d been missing without realizing it.

  I grabbed another cold beer from the bag, took the cap off, and touched it to my warm cheek. “Me, too. Exactly like her.” Out of nowhere, we clicked bottles. A truce, and I didn’t know which of us had instigated it. Must have been spontaneous, which often gets us into trouble.

  Holy zipper foot, I so needed his kind of trouble.

  “Why do you think this was stolen?” His question, as he perused the brass box found in my attic, took us to safer ground.

  I scoffed. “You think somebody bought it from the country club and hid it in my attic for several decades?”

  “You have a point,” he said. “But what makes you think it was there for decades?”

  “If it didn’t get left there the night the body drawers got ransacked, it has to be decades. Because I haven’t had a break-in since I bought the building except for that one incident, and even then it wasn’t a break-in as much as a walk-through. I mean the place was wide open. Any way to find out how often Dolly’s unoccupied building was broken into over the years? Or if it was burglarized when it was a funeral parlor–carriage house or before that when it was the old county morgue?”

  Werner hit a few keys on his computer, which sat on a table that formed an L off his desk, to move from his document to an official-looking legal database that needed a password. Once in, he checked what looked to be a national register. “No break-ins on record back to around 1985, when we first got computerized.”

  He hit speed dial on his phone. “Billings, send an officer down to the old records room to check Mad’s building in all its incarnations. See if and when it’s ever been broken into. If ever, how many times, dates, and details, please.”

  I bit my lip. “You’re right. It could have been put there anytime since 1923, when the country club opened.” Not true, strictly speaking, but Werner didn’t know that it had been stolen the night of the country club’s Golden Jubilee. “It could have happened when either Dante or his father was in charge.”

  Werner looked up from his computer. “Dante?”

  Werner doesn’t know about my psychometric gifts, that my mother was a witch, or that the late Dante Underhill, undertaker, had been cursed to live in his carriage house—aka my shop—for eternity. Which meant that he didn’t know I could talk to Dante the ghost, either, or that Aunt Fiona could, as well as Dante’s old flame, Dolly Sweet, age 106. Good thing we weren’t a couple, Werner and I. I’d have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.

  “Dante’s one of the former owners of my building. The undertaker Underhills. Dante, the son, took over after his father passed.” I tried to look innocent, realizing I shouldn’t act so familiar with a dead man. “Dante’s the one who died young and took the Underhill line with him, left Dolly his fortune and his building. And she sold the building to me…and told me all about him.” There, that should explain my knowledge.

  “Ah,” Werner said. “I remember now. Dolly’s infamous secret love affair…which everybody knew about.”

  I chuckled. “That’s the one. I’m always finding papers with his signature. Upstairs, some of the open struts have his name carved in them. I think he hung around upstairs at the funeral chapel–carriage house as a kid, with a jackknife. He’d carved the horse stalls, too, before they became my dressing rooms. Sometimes, I think I can hear the young Dante playing tic-tac-toe with a friend on the raw wood upstairs.”

  Werner sort of grunted. Then he slipped on a pair of latex gloves to examine the box. “Why don’t you know what’s in it?”

  “I wanted a witness as to what’s inside when I opened it, but before we try, I’d like permission to take pictures of whatever we find.”

  “I don’t see why not, unless it’s a secret map to the Federal Reserve bank. The average ordinary shop owner would have kept this, you understand, and kept her mouth shut, à la finders keepers.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It’s not that you’re extraordinary, Mad, just weird.”

  “Thanks.” I wondered if that was to establish our non-romantic relationship up front.

  Werner pushed the box my way, and I had this ticked-off urge to pick it up and hit him over the head with it.

  Werner’s eye twinkle said he could read me better than I thought, so I closed my expression and tried to blank my mind.

  He’d love causing me a good pout. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Go ahead,” he said, gruff, annoyed, probably because he could no longer read me. “Open her up.”

  “Okay.” At first, the contents didn’t surprise me, stacks of hundred dollar bills, most quite crisp and with dates that probably gave us a better bead on the year. I’d actually thought of it as a cash box a time or two.

  I lifted the back bin, where checks were usually stashed in typical cash boxes, though most such boxes weren’t made of brass. “This one must have been specially crafted for them,” I said. “Ack. No check, but I found a couple five hundred dollar bills back here. It’s U.S. currency, I think, dated in the forties. Oh, and beneath is a one thousand dollar bill; a red one. They must be forgeries. What have we stumbled on?”

  He handled the odd bills, examined them, held them under the light, and I went around the desk to examine them as closely.

  “They might be real,” he said, looking at me. “I believe that the U.S. had legal tender in those denominations once.”

  “How do you know?�
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  He looked at me like I asked a lame knock-knock joke. “Degree in law enforcement?”

  “Oh, you mean, like, Forgery 101?”

  “That’s about the scope of it.”

  The smallest bills in the box were fifties, but there weren’t many, and I had to remove an antiqued brass tube about the size of the bills to get to them. But the small box inside the cash box turned out to be more interesting than the bills. It was outlined in—rubies, I believed, not garnets—on the outside, with a second row of sapphire chips to make a double dotted line around the outside top of the box. I lifted the cover on the pricey container, though where it was hinged made it more of an oblong box than a tube.

  I caught my breath when I saw what it held, not that I saw the object, because it was wrapped in a petticoat piece, a much smaller one than I already had.

  Both of us still wearing gloves—and a good thing—I removed the fabric wrapping, which did the job that tissue might have in protecting the object, and I gasped.

  Werner whistled. “Is that real?” he asked.

  I ran my gloved finger over the small, flawless shoe, covered in what appeared to be diamonds. It had a flat top that started at the vamp, extended to the top of the heel, and overlapped the slightest bit at the back. I lifted the overlap and saw the shoe was hollowed out. “Is this a snuffbox?”

  Werner appeared flummoxed. “It sure looks like one. Those can’t be diamonds covering it,” he said. “No matter how real they look.”

  “If they’re not,” I said, “they’re better than the best fakes I’ve ever seen. And the weight. Here, hold it. Feel how heavy it is.”

  He held the snuffbox in his palm and tested its weight. “You once said you knew diamonds,” he pointed out.

  I remembered the case and the victim.

  “Our belief systems can be tested,” I admitted. “I’m not as smart as I once thought I was.”

  “I think our Maddie’s maturing into Madeira.”

  “Don’t tell my father, or anyone else for that matter, if you think you like my real name.”

  Werner shook his head. “Given the dates and sizes of those bills, I’d say the dazzle on this snuffbox is more than likely to be diamonds.”