Cloaked in Malice (25 page)

Dante opened the door from the inside before I reached it, his grin reminding me how he’d managed to bring Dolly, and even a little bit of me, to my knees in that satinwood art nouveau bedroom of his. “Promise me you don’t open my door to just anybody,” I said, turning my thoughts for my own protection.

“I open it to you, and only you, my lady.” He bowed.

I shook my head. “How much energy do you have left from the day?” He needed to recharge regularly.

“It so happens, you had a lot of customers today so I gathered
plenty of new energy; I’m up to about anything. What would you like me to do?” he asked, his voice running smooth as honey.

“While it’s true that you can still turn a girl’s head, Mr. Top Hat and Tails, I’m off limits, got that?”

“You’re dressed like you want attention, just for the record,” he said, and tipped said hat. “Your wish is my command.”

“Good, then after I unbuckle this leather travel case, it’s going to turn into a garment bag, beneath which is a gown that I do not, at this moment, want to handle.”

“For obvious reasons,” he said, aware of my ability.

I turned the handbag into a garment bag and unzipped it with a pair of pliers—that’s how much care I took
not
to touch the designer beauty inside.

“Your turn,” I said, stepping back.

In little more than a year, Dante had acquired, and learned to control energy with quite a bit of talent. He made all the right moves, and though he might be appearing to lift the gown, as if from the bag, I noticed that, like me, he never made contact with the dress. It was all focused energy doing the work on his part, energy he’d been garnering from my happy, enthusiastic customers since I moved the shop into this place he could not seem to leave.

He laid the colorful Cassini on the fainting couch, stood back, scraped his nonexistent beard, and eyed the designer
gown, as if searching for some type of answer from the universe.

“Art nouveau bedroom,” I said. “Tiffany stained glass window behind your satinwood four-poster. Dolly on the bed wearing—”

“That?” Dante’s voice cracked as he stepped back and regarded me. “You touched that dress? You read it, didn’t you? How far did your vision go?”

“I got out just in time to keep my ability to look you in the eyes and not blush every time you show up.”

Dante fairly wilted. Then he perked up. “Wait, you were inside Dolly’s skin, right?”

“Right.”

“Was she pregnant?”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Men really do have one-track minds…which they took with them into eternity. “Let me see if I can remember what it was like being in her skin. It seemed to me that she was concentrating on you. Certainly she was joyful.”

A chair got pulled out for me to sit on. McShadow didn’t even make a pretense of using anything but his energy to complete the task.

He knelt before me as if I were in the family way. “It’s important that I know if she wanted me or ‘us,’ because if she wanted ‘us,’ then there’s a chance there was a—” He growled.

I’d never heard him that frustrated before.

“I hate that I had to leave her at a time like that.”

I lowered my gaze to catch his. “Dante, you really
wanted
to have a family with Dolly, didn’t you? If she did have your child, it’s really breaking you that you missed it, isn’t it?”

He gathered himself together and looked sheepish. “What can I say? Death mellows a guy.”

“Listen,” I said. “This peek at your vulnerability has helped me get a bit back into her skin, and I’m telling you, she wasn’t worried that she was expecting.”

“You’re sure?”

“Because I’m inside a wearers head and heart when I get a vision, I pretty much have to go where they went, feel what they did, and if they left something undone, or unsaid, I’m the messenger.”

“And you have no message for me?”

“Our Doll, she delivers her own messages, especially to you.”

He sighed. “You’re in their skin?” he said, standing.

Obviously he’d released his guilt, if not his paternal inclinations.

“So you
were
in Dolly’s skin while I made love to her—or near enough.”

“Too near,” I added.

Dante angled his top hat so it rested lower down on his brow. “Bet you were pretty turned on, hey?”

His paternal inclinations had left the building.

I rose and moved from the chair
he’d
brought me. “You know what, Dolly
was
pregnant, and she decided to
give up your child for adoption just before you set her on that bed.”

Dante paled. He trembled. He turned a sickly pale mauve—quite a trick if you don’t have blood in your system. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or his skills as a dramatic ghost. Still, if he hadn’t already died of a heart attack, I thought he might now.

Guilt shot through me.

I wanted to hug him but couldn’t. Didn’t dare. “That was so ruddy mean of me,” I said. “And it was an outright lie.”

“Mean, yes,” he said. “Swear it was a lie.”

“I tried to be as inappropriate as I felt you were just now, but I took it too far. Here’s the thing,” I said, relenting. “I did lie about a pregnancy. I’m sorry. New rules. You don’t screw with me, and I won’t screw with you.”

“Well, there’s screwing and there’s—”

“Going too far for a friendship to survive, Dante.”

Never having seen the serious side of Madeira Cutler before, my nearly ex-friend nodded. “My apologies,” he said in all sincerity. No bow. No sass. He was the Dante, his nerves rubbed raw, who showed his vulnerable side, this time without request. “What else would you like to know, Madeira?”

That’s better.
“Tell me what Dolly did with the dress she was wearing that night.”

“You know,” he said. “She could
really
have gotten pregnant
that
night.”

“Enough already! Look at this dress, McShadow. It’s an original Oleg Cassini, and it’s worth a fortune.”

“I’m looking. I’m listening.”

“Why? Why did Dolly give it away, and to whom?”

My cell phone rang, and it was Werner, so I picked up, though this wasn’t the best of times. “Answers, I hope, Lytton.” Oops, I let my frustration show. “Sorry, didn’t mean to bark.”

“I’m every bit as frustrated. I can only offer more questions, Mad,” Werner said, back to using my nickname.

“Hit me with ’em.”

“Dolly made a call to the State Department the night before she left. It was promptly returned. There had been other calls back and forth to and from that number sporadically over the years. The why is sealed, classified information. It’ll take longer to learn.”

“And? I can tell there’s more.”

“Her financials. She’s made several large deposits to a Parisian account, almost always coinciding with the calls.”

“And that account belongs to?”

“A minimum-security prison. I’ve got a call in to the warden now.”

Thirty-three

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.

—YVES SAINT LAURENT

Dante paced as if he needed a minute to get his thoughts together to answer my question.

As for me, I needed oxygen. What did Dolly have to do with a prison? A warden, a guard, or a prisoner?

Dante stopped in front of me. “That girl, Paisley, she showed you a baby picture, remember?”

I nodded. “I think the toddler in that picture was Paisley herself, possibly the night her parents were killed, but I can’t be certain, yet. That picture is what brought her to Mystic. You said Dolly’s brother owned the Mystic Photography Studio, right? But you were pouting and disappeared without elaborating.”

Dante winced. “Again, I apologize.”

“Accepted.”

“His name was Grover. Grover Wylde. Imagine, Dolly used to be Dolly Wylde, and she sure lived up to her name.”

I lowered myself to the foot of the fainting couch. “Her brother’s name was Grover?”

“Does that matter?”

“On so many levels, go on.”

“She was sixteen years older than him, so she became a sort of surrogate mother, like you did. Maybe she gave him too much, like everything he wanted, money included. Then he fell for that woman, Rose, I think her name was, from France. Sexy accent, nefarious motives. Anyway, she enticed him into taking pictures of the sub base, which I thought might get him into trouble. To Dolly, he could do no wrong, so when he wanted to get married, she gave that greedy French woman her favorite dress to marry Grover in.”

“When did they get married?”

“Dolly and I, we got all dressed up to go to their wedding at Saint Patrick’s Church. The pews were full, but the bride and groom never showed.”

“Not being at her adored brother’s wedding must have broken Dolly’s heart. I already knew that they took the pricey designer dress with them when they left town. That must also have hurt.”

“Aha,” Dante said, watching me closely. “Did you get more
than one vision from that dress? You saw Rose wearing it, too, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Yes, Dolly’s heart was broken, never over the dress, but over the loss of her relationship with her brother. Oh, she got a few early postcards, from all over the world, and then all communication ended—until my death, at least.”

“Dolly’s gone, Dante. I haven’t seen you to tell you.”

“You don’t mean she passed? Because if she did, she’d be here with me.”

I smiled at the attitude he must have carried his whole life. He epitomized the word “stud,” and everyone who knew him must have known it. Even in death, he was so certain of Dolly, and she of him, which made them maybe the luckiest pair going, dead or alive.

“Dante, my friend, I mean that Dolly walked out of here on Sunday, after you pointed out how much Paisley looked like her. She told me to keep an eye on Paisley, and she was serious.”

“I caught that,” Dante said, “which is why I thought Paisley was ours.”

“Your granddaughter, you mean?”

“Yes. For one of our own, I’d accept even so ancient a title.”

“Dolly hired a physician’s assistant as a traveling companion, and she went straight to Paris.”

“She’s looking for Grover,” he said. “It’ll kill her when she finds her brother’s grave.”

“Why so sure Grover’s dead?”

Dante stated the obvious. “He’d be ancient.”

“He’d be sixteen years younger than Dolly,” I said. “Longevity could run in the family.”

“Are you taking bets?” Dante asked. “Based on what looked to me like the nomadic life of an espionage agent, he probably died around the cusp of fifty, like me.”

“Did you tell Dolly about that theory?”

“Back when we were going together, you mean? No. I didn’t want to hurt her any more than she’d already been hurt. You know, I can still see Doll the way she looked back then, even the last time I saw her. Young, vivacious, and all mine.”

My heart rose to my throat, and a niggling of personal hope stuck there. “That was some big love you two had.”

“Have,” he said, grin cocky, one brow going up, dimple showing. “Present tense.”

I sure hoped I was on my way to having that with my new life partner. “What else do you know about Grover?”

“The last Dolly heard was from Paris, an announcement of their son Grover the Second’s birth. Expensive engraved paper, like they owned the world. No note. Not a ‘How are you?’ or a ‘Missing you’ or an inked-in ‘G.’ Dolly,
she kept turning that card over to see if she’d missed something on the other side, but it wasn’t there.”

“What happened to the Photography Studio?”

“Dolly closed it after it stood empty for six months or so. Last I knew, she kept his records and a stack of old uncollected photos in her basement.”

I made notes for Nick and Alex, peeked at Paisley’s little cloak in my Kors bag, and knew that I needed to learn more from it. I would try to be smart enough this time to look at faces, which I could not—‘scuse the pun—face at this point, after such an emotionally charged day and night.

“McShadow,” I said, “I’ve had it with clothes-reading vibes for the day. I need to chill. I’ll see what the cloak has to tell me tomorrow, when I can sort today’s psychometric jaunts into individual events. Right now, I’m headed for Nick’s.”