Cloaked in Malice (16 page)

“He’s saying, Paisley, that psychics are widely doubted, and plenty of psychiatrists believe they’re disturbed.”

Okay, so we were trying to cast doubt on my abilities. Since I had my doubts about Paisley herself, on and off, I figured that was best.

“Nick,” she said, “I’m going to trust you to tell me what I can and can’t answer, once the investigation gets going.”

“Me and/or a lawyer,” he said. “Depending on the circumstances. Now, let’s get the devil out of here.”

Paisley didn’t move, so we stopped and looked back at her.

“Don’t you want to take a look at the files while you’re here?”

Nick turned to face her. “Files?”

She led us deeper into the barn through a door behind the freezers that led to what Nick and I knew to be a safe room, though it was much bigger than the one in Nick’s basement, where I had temporarily kept my shop’s furs in air-conditioned cold storage.

“This sort-of
portable
room just showed up one day, and I asked about it, but they were good, Mam and Pap, about changing the subject, so I never did find out how we got it.” Paisley used a keypad beneath a floorboard and the door opened, but
she
was the one who gasped. “Computers! A laptop and a desktop. They’re new, too, but then it’s been a year or more since I’ve been in here.”

“They’re on,” Nick said.

“And they’re reasonably new,” I said. “They have cameras on them.”

“The better to be seen,” Nick said, his thumb to his chin, his mind miles away, and then he “saw” us again. “Paisley, what did you expect to find in here?” he asked. “If not computers?”

“The area where this portable room stands used to be full of banged up old file cabinets, dingy olive green, with an ancient desk in the corner and shelves of dusty agricultural
books. No computer tables or computers; that’s for sure. So when this room showed up, I figured everything from that room got moved in here.”

“Did you ever look in the file cabinets?” Nick asked.”

“Of course I did. We kept important stuff in them. Don’t laugh. They had pig drawers.” She stifled a giggle. “Horse drawers. One for Rhode Island Reds. There were accounting books, of course. I never opened them. Each kind of animal had several drawers, detailing their health, sicknesses, cures, breeding, parentage, and, unfortunately, butchering, storing, and recipes for good eating. There were drawers for farming methods, specific crops, good crop years, bad crop years, and why, that kind of thing.”

Nick made another note. “There’s the state-of-the-art generator I knew must be hiding on the property somewhere,” he said.

“We should bring Eve back with us to look at the computers,” I suggested.

“That’s against the law.” Nick urged us out of the safe room. “Hacking into a computer would get us into so very much trouble. I mean—wacky theory, but suppose this farm belongs to the good guys?”

“Oh,” Paisley said, showing genuine relief. “Being one of the good guys would make me feel so much better about my growing-up years.”

“It really is time for us to leave now,” Nick said. “And for
me to get to a place where my phone works so I can call in reinforcements.”

“Wait,” Paisley said. “I want my grandmother’s dress. Bepah loved it and so do I.” She ran inside alone, which gave me palpitations.

“Is she not disturbing a crime scene?”

“One, we don’t know it’s a crime scene. Two, she might as easily have packed it and taken it the first time,” Nick said. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

Paisley emerged a few minutes later with the leather garment bag folded up and buckled like a handbag. “Ready,” she said.

For all we knew, she could have a weapon in there. I saw the suspicion in Nick’s gaze and he took his gun from his holster once more.

As we headed for the electric fence, I turned to Paisley. “How did you escape, since the electric fence was still live when we got here today?”

She pointed to the center of the fence. “See that tree?”

I gasped. “You went out on a limb, literally, knowing that you could fall on an electric fence?”

“Desperate is desperate,” she said, “and get this, by the time I got to the end of the limb, my weight allowed it to gently lower me to the ground, until it hit the fence, caught a zap, split where it sizzled, and broke. But I only fell a foot or so.”

“I call that extreme anxiety coupled with a high level of
stupid
hope,” Nick said, “and enough luck and ingenuity, if turned into energy, to light up New York City.”

Paisley moved her gaze from Nick to me, her brow raised in question. “Have I been praised or insulted?”

“Both,” he said.

She raised her chin. “See, I’m not so dumb after all.”

“I never said you were.”

We made our swift way back to the shack—Nick wouldn’t let us dally, and when we got there, he did that three-sixty look around again, focused like a cobra, ready to strike. “You’ve got ten minutes,” he told Paisley.

She surprised us when she took a pillowcase and filled it with almost every trinket she could find, including the small casket carrying the gold half-heart necklace, a silver candlestick, a poppet—a dry grass doll—which she fetched from beneath a mattress along with the most tattered copy of
Swiss Family Robinson
I’d ever seen. It wasn’t that much really, and it fit inside the garment bag’s front pocket.

I looked at Nick, again, but he shrugged. “Mementos,” he said. “She could have taken others and we’d never know.”

“Okaaay. So you can square that with the Feds?”

“If they ask for a time line, I won’t lie, but I won’t offer one if I don’t have to.”

“I’m ready,” Paisley said, carrying the garment bag—she’d put her own purse inside as well—and taking her cue
to move from Nick, who’d been pacing, stopping to listen, and getting the two of us all antsy.

He led us to the boat, practically at a run, but when we got to the dock—no boat.

Nick went to where he’d tied the rope. “I
thought
I tied it well enough.”

But then he lifted a piece of rope to show us. “It’s been cut.”

Twenty-one

Grunge [fashion] is synonymous with the condition of youth and stands for fear of the future…a feeling of helplessness.

—GERDA BUXBAUM

Somebody had been to the island today, while we were here, and they didn’t want us to leave. Alive?

My heart started running the Boston Marathon without me.

How would we get home, under the sticky circumstances? It seemed that we had two choices: swim back or scream. Neither would allow for dignity, and if we ran across another waterspout, the attempt could kill us.

Poor Paisley. She’d already fought to leave this island once, and she had
not
wanted to come back, but we talked her into it.

It wasn’t a matter of hating to hear Paisley say,
I told you so
. It was a matter of keeping her from feeling the raw
nerves that would come with the more frightening conclusions of our situation.

Only one choice left, then—be myself. “It would appear,” I said, trying to hide panic with sass, “that somewhere in Fishers Island Sound, some nasty, motley boat crew might as well be wearing an assortment of vintage selections from Vivian Westwood’s Pirates Collection.”

“It would, indeed, appear,” Nick agreed, going with my fake easy attitude. “And one can only hope that they are,” he added, “because appropriately dressed as pirates, they would be easier to recognize and arrest.”

And that would be
if
someone were inclined to look for us, which they wouldn’t be, because nobody knew we were here.

Nick threw down the severed rope, rose from his crouch, and came back to us. “Let’s get under cover of the trees, and circle the island while staying close enough to the water’s edge to spot any boats that might still be moored here.”

Paisley hiccupped, a hand over her mouth, leaving her wide-eyed worry front and center. The brave girl, however, lowered her hand and nodded. “Good idea. I’ve never taken a walk around the entire island in one shot before, and it’ll keep me from flippin’ out.”

“Glad to hear it.” Nick pointed our way and allowed us to take the lead. “I’ll be right behind you,” he assured us, “prepared for anything.”

Another hiccup.

So Paisley and I both knew that his shoulder holster was, once again, empty, his trigger finger tense and occupied.

“We should be glad he has it,” I said as I took Paisley’s hand.

“Glad,” she repeated. “Happy. Deliriously so. Grateful, actually, but I wish I’d said my prayers last night.”

“Say them now.”

She closed her eyes, kept walking, and tripped over a stump.

I giggled, and though her face flamed, she did, too. In her piety, she’d managed to diffuse my fear and turn this into just another walk along the beach.

“I had no idea that I lived in such a beautiful place,” she said, trying to convince herself.

I leaned closer. “Teets and Momo? What were they? Comedy show dogs?”

We fell over each other with a sudden bout of silent laughter. A release valve we so needed. When I turned to check on Nick, he gave me a thumbs-up. “Good job,” he mouthed, his expression encouraging enough to raise my spirits.

We were a team, Nick and I. I liked it, sort of. If we could fight criminals together, we might be able to make a deeper commitment. Buy a gerbil. Maybe…get it a wheel. Become a family.

Gerbils didn’t require rings, thank God, because rings
gave me the hives. I was beginning to think that Bepah had the right idea. Though he’d lost the
wrong
ring finger.

“Madeira, where are you? In your head, I mean,” Paisley asked.

“Going a little loopy, you?”

“Same. I’m redesigning my wardrobe. And I’m using new and different designs. Polka dots, and stripes, even. Non–feed sack quality. I’m comin’ up in the world.”

“You wild girl.”

“I think that’s from meeting you.”

Nick chuckled, but I didn’t take offense. I could scare the scrap out of him with my kind of wild, and he knew it.

“Paisley, why not let me custom design a wardrobe for you?”

“I’ve met Eve, remember? No buttons or jewelry made of copper gears, ’kay?”

“Just minimalistic
knock-’em-dead
, for your ‘let’s find you a bachelor’ party.”

“Wow, yeah, great idea.”

We’d made it nearly around the entire island, along deserted beaches and rocky sections of shoreline. No boats. I knew we were nearly done, because I saw the shack in the far distance. Unless it was a different shack. I turned to Nick, silently asking the question.

“Yep, that’s Granddad’s place,” he said, confirming my suspicion.

I released my breath in a whoosh, and we went back to the still-deserted dock.

Nick took a pair of binoculars out of his backpack—there went my super-spy-contacts idea. He skimmed a look over the water.

Paisley jumped from the dock to the sand, and walked into about a foot of water, getting her old jeans wet at the cuffs. “It took me weeks to sight a fisherman,” she muttered. “
Nobody
comes here.”

For my money, the tree that ate the cemetery told a different tale, but I kept my calculations to myself.

“Where did you stay until you found a fisherman?” I asked, speaking of adding one and one.

“At the farmhouse.”

I jumped, splat, into the shallow water beside her. “But you broke your exit tree.”

“I broke the first one. After that, I found two sturdy replacements. A horse chestnut for getting onto the property, and a gnarly old oak for getting away. They’re big suckers.”

“And once you were free to come and go, from the farm, I mean, you never came across your grandfather’s shack?”

“Nope. Never. Not until today. It was a shock, I’ll tell you.”

“We could tell.” I took a clandestine peek at Nick, and it worried me that he didn’t look any more convinced than I did.

Paisley shook her head. “Who would
care
to cut our rope?”

Nick looked at her as if she were clearly nuts. “You might be able to answer that better than any of us.”