Cloaked in Malice (22 page)

“Maybe for Paisley’s sake. To preserve her memories?” I suggested.

“That’s right. Her memories are rare and, therefore, sacred. What she has may as well remain untainted by rodent-infested tunnels.”

We made our way back up the stairs from the shack and ran through the tunnel, ignoring the squeals and odor.

“There’s more to sleuthing this one, Mad, than finding out who Paisley really is.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I did get us into the soup this time, didn’t I?”

“No, I’d say Paisley’s arrival did. Or my insistence on renting that boat, but not you, not in particular.”

I smiled. “We really do need to know who kidnapped Paisley’s mother. Who stabbed or shot her father, or whatever made his blood melt the snow.”

“It also matters who incarcerated her here,” Nick said, “though I vote for her grandfather. He was old and bound to die soon. Do you think he’s the locket’s Grover, since he had the other half with ‘Rose’ engraved on it?”

I bit my lip. “Paisley’s father might have been Grover. The courier Paisley’s grandmother met with on the Eiffel Tower could be Grover, though I think of him as White Beard. Whoa, suppose Rose was two-timing the old man with White Beard?”

“You’re complicating the issue,” Nick said. “Her husband met her there.”

“Met?” I asked. “Or followed?”

“Either way, we have to find Grover, dead or alive. And we need to know who Mam and Pap were, who they
worked for exactly. Did they steal the military caskets and the money themselves, or did someone they worked for?”

“It’s hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys. Your kind cut our boat loose, Alex said so. But I can’t help believing that somebody besides the Feds knows about this place, and they’re not on our side.”

“You got that right.”

“The mobsters?” I asked.

“We’re only supposing they’re mobsters, given their names. Forensics will give us answers about Schmooey, Louie, and Screwy.”

“You’re worse than Paisley with the made-up names. It would be funny if they
were
dogs, all wearing little red polka-dot bow ties.”

“Or horses,” Nick added. “Nah, they would have needed a bigger graveyard.”

We stopped in the nursery to investigate more thoroughly, and despite my better judgment, I opened every drawer and cubby in the place. “Glass baby bottles in a round metal holder that could be immersed in boiling water, tiny spoons, a little cup. Bibs.” I flipped through the generous stack. “Hel-lo,” I held up my find.

“It’s a bib,” Nick said.

“Well, read it, Sherlock.”

“‘Made in the eighties,’” he read. “So? You can write anything on a bib.”

“Trust me, in the thirties and forties, which this room screams,
they were painting fabric in Asia, not around here, not baby bibs. If they did write on baby clothes back then, not impossible, they would
not
have said ‘Made in.’ It sounds too crude for that time period, and they certainly wouldn’t have printed ‘the eighties.’ That’s like us figuring we’ll have kids in 2020 and printing it on a T-shirt.”

“Are we having kids?”

“Please, I’ve only been a life partner for a few hours. I thought if things went well in the next year or so, we’d think about a cute wheel-running-type rodent.”

“Slow down, Roadrunner. You’re moving a bit fast for me.”

“Makes ya’ dizzy, doesn’t it?”

He laughed, caught me around the waist, twirled me, and kissed the living life partner out of me. Visions of picket fences danced in my head.

In one of my spins, I kicked one of the open drawers to the floor, and I came to earth with a thud. Hanging over the back of the drawer was a pink little nighty.

“Oh, Madeira?” Nick called picking it up, as if he held a treat out for me.

I shook my head, clasped my hands together behind me, and backed away. “What can I get out of reading a baby nightie? Coochie coochie coo?”

“Here,” Nick said, picking it up. “I’ll hold you while you read it.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Okay, but hold me first, and then give it to me. The nighty, I mean.”

He playfully passed it to me. “Whoa,” he said from far away, “are you gonna pass out?”

I heard nothing but gibberish, but I could see the woman speaking quite clearly, her face pockmarked, her scars severe, no smile, oily fifties lipstick, and pin curls with bobby pin marks on each. Salt and pepper hair. No deodorant. I felt the little one do a nose wrinkle. “The woman who held her wore a high apron with apples on it over a brown feed sack housedress, and though she seemed to be mumbling a lot, I got parts of two words that sounded like
“privyetjolie.”

My legs started working again, around the time I returned Nick’s kiss. “Hey, that was a nice way to come back.”

“I pulled the gown from your grasp, tossed it, and tried the kiss. You scared me.”

“I
always
scare me.”

“Sorry. Get anything?”

I described the woman. “She called me/the child
jolie
, which, I think, means ‘pretty’ in French. There were a lot of other words, garbled, but I made one out pretty well.
Privyet
.”

“Maybe she meant ‘pretty happy baby,’ though
jolie
could also be a first name, but not for Paisley.” I covered my tummy. “I’m still nauseous.”

“No more clothes reading for you today, Ladybug.”

“Thanks, Jackalope, I’m kinda wiped. If you want to know the truth, being a little one is hard work.”

“Did you feel younger than outside the church?”

I thought about that. “Maybe, because she held me like a babe, but I felt as confused.”

He kept his arm around me as we crossed the nursery, and he made me go upstairs ahead of him. “In case you feel faint, so I can catch you.”

“I might fake it so you can catch me.”

“You think we can leave Paisley with your folks later and spend the night alone at my house?”

I looked coyly at him over my shoulder. “To discuss the case in private?”

“Yeah, that.” He slid his hands along my hips.

“I like.”

We stepped into the closet—the one Paisley found the inlaid box in—turned off the stair light, sealed the wall, turned off the flashlight, went for a last kiss, blinked at a sudden light, and came face to face with my brother.

Alex looked dumbfounded, then he raised his hands. “I’m not even gonna ask.” He shut us inside, but of course, the mood was broken.

I threw open the door. “Hey, bro, I remember when you were dating Trish. I could tell a few tales.”

“Alex, get a team in there,” Nick said on a chuckle, letting my brother off the hook.

“Why? To dust an empty closet for prints?”

Nick opened the movable door, and tilted his light toward the stairs. “There’s a nursery down there, baby clothes, crib, dressing table, the works.”

“So…you two were…sleuthing?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said, while Nick’s “absolutely” sounded so fake.

“We have got to get our stories right,” I said, shoving his arm.

Alex rolled his eyes and disappeared down the stairs.

Nick pulled me into Paisley’s old bedroom. “The thing is, Mad, I really would like to spend the night with you at my place, believe me, but for now, you
have
to get Paisley out of here.”

“Why?”

“They’re going to exhume the bodies, including those of the people who raised her, including her grandfather behind the shack. They need IDs, times, and causes of deaths, whatever the bodies can tell them. Paisley won’t be up to seeing any of it, especially not Bepah being exhumed.”

“You got that right. She may not have felt a connection to Mam and Pap, but despite herself, she thought of them as her parents. Is somebody prepared to take me and Paisley home?”

Alex appeared in the bedroom doorway, removing his latex gloves. “I just called for a forensics crew to get down there. Tunnel leads to an old shack—you knew that, right?”

“Right,” Nick said.

“Sis, I’ll take you and Paisley myself, and to make everything seem normal, I’ll go with you to New London, drive you to Mystick Falls, say hi to Dad, then I’ll go home for the night to spend some time with Trish.”

When we got outside, Paisley came running up to me. “I thought you left me.”

“No, sorry, sweetie. We were inside.”

“They’re gonna dig them up, I think. I don’t like the way it looks.”

“It’s okay,” my brother said. “I’m taking you and Mad back to Connecticut right now.”

Paisley began to tremble, and not a little bit, with a full body-quake kind of terror, so I drew her into my arms to console her.

Too late, I realized that my empathy had outweighed my prudence, just now, and I’d reached for the zenith of stupidity, her clothing against me. My self-recriminations, “dumb, dumb, dumb,” pounded like a hammer in my head as I shot into an eerily familiar spin.

I couldn’t pull away from Paisley to disconnect myself from her vintage outfit. I could only go with the rise and fall of the choppy sea beneath a small boat…as I watched the whirlpool made by a different waterspout waiting to swallow all onboard, unprepared to see what appeared to be Bepah throwing Paisley’s body overboard.

Twenty-nine

Above all, remember that the most important thing you can take anywhere is not a Gucci bag or French-cut jeans; it’s an open mind.

—GAIL RUBIN BERENY

Paisley had worn hand-me-downs today, I reminded the bit of myself left to me as the boat tossed me off my feet, and I had to catch my balance by grabbing one of those double-hook things, the rope around it smeared with blood. Rationally speaking, not easy in this circumstance, the back of the man’s head—perhaps Bepah’s—might be similar to, say, Pap’s, Tuna’s, Shmooey’s, or Jo Jo the Monkey Boy’s, for all I knew.

Rather than Bepah, I’d call him the body tosser, who could be any one of the dumb mob-name set, even the notorious Wart that Paisley inadvertently mentioned, real or made up. Who knew?

Wouldn’t it be a twist if Wart was the only
real
mobster?
Not so funny if Paisley and Wart, whoever he might be, were the brains behind the operation.

But what operation precisely? Money laundering, robbery, murder, drugs. I, as Madeira, momentarily, thought of the old abandoned nursery, and wondered if this hadn’t all started years ago with a baby-selling ring.

Too many crimes and too many suspects.
Undoubtedly, what was left of my mind ran amock and took the truth with it.

But really, most of the guys in the graves—however fake/real their doggie/mobster names—had been dead long enough for a sapling to grow into “the tree that ate Minneapolis.” Meanwhile, the arthritic hardwood on speed—a species of tree totally unknown to me—took sustenance, and thrived, on whatever, or whoever, rested beneath it.

Major tucking yuck!

Sucked suddenly deep into the shoes and the mind of whoever wore Paisley’s boating clothes, man or woman, I got a deliciously ugly urge to…kill.

Yes, I, as my host, pushed my attacker overboard, my face getting scratched, and judging by the blood dripping on the rail, and the sting on my cheek, I got
sliced
. The pain gave me as the killer the strength to get my enemy over the side.

Whoever this enemy had been, he or she got sucked down like a stone, the scream something I may never forget.

Oh, please let me be inside a different wearer’s body than Paisley’s. Had she been wearing Bepah’s shirt when I hugged her? Could I be reading someone else wearing Bepah’s shirt? Another man, maybe? I so did not want Paisley to be one of the killers.

Truth was, Bepah couldn’t drown Bepah. But Pap could. So why the gravestone?

I may have nailed something there but then the whirlpool sucked the boat close again, and I didn’t think I could keep it from going down, me with it.

I imagined the icy cold of the water as it swallowed me then the body I wore must have gone into shock, because I returned to Madeira. Shivering. Happy to be alive. Mind whirling.

Nick and I would need to arrange the events and connect them to a time line that would lead to the right perps, depending on when they lived and died.