Cloaked in Malice (27 page)

“Has there been a break in the case?” Fiona asked before I hung up.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry for not telling you up front, I’m so freaked, but it’s Dolly. She’s on her way to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital from the airport, and Ethel is waiting for me to pick her up and take her over to meet the ambulance.”

“Dolly’s being transported by ambulance?” Aunt Fiona repeated.

“Yes, and that’s all I know. I promise I’ll get back to you and Dad as soon as I hear something more, or after I see or speak to Dolly.”

“Yes, dear, you go ahead. We’ll keep the vintage sale fires burning.”

Hopefully not, but her attempt to cheer me nearly made me smile.

I found Ethel waiting on her curb—literally balancing herself on that narrow ledge of cement, wearing her best black suit, a Chanel I’d talked her into—she who only wore housedresses. Not today. Today she was the definition of elegance, a tall, thin woman in black jersey, a bow-crossed handbag hooked around her arm, at the elbow, and black squash-heeled spectator pumps.

Definitely prepared for a funeral.

By the time I slipped from the driver’s seat to go around the car and help her in, she was sitting there, looking up at me, as if I were wasting time.

I leaned over to buckle her in, and she slapped my hand away. “I’m not five. What’s next, a sippy cup?”

Red-faced, I ran back around the Element, got in, and gunned it.

“That’s it, baby,” Ethel said. “Burn rubber.”

I gave her a double take. “This is a whole new side of you.”

“Well. I’ve wanted to send the old shrew to the moon a million times, but I’ve never worried that she’d get there without my help.” Ethel released half a sob, a sound that cut straight to my heart.

“Oh, sweetie, don’t do that,” I said. “You’re breaking me here. If a town’s rock foundation crumbles, what happens to us poor schlubs who’ve been building on that foundation our whole lives?”

I saw Ethel’s hard-won smile as she patted my hand, then the smile she’d reserved for the little girl in her lap whose mother had just passed. That caught in my throat, too, because
I
was that little girl.
Her
little girl some days.

Ethel cleared her throat, sniffed. “Dolly’s so…dear. Such a…special…pain in the ass.”

My own sob bubbled out sideways, having been crossed with a bark of laughter, so I sounded a bit like a mouthy frog with a speech impediment.

“Okay,” I said, “we gotta stop feeling sorry for ourselves. Um…I’m sleuthing. Trying to find Paisley Skye’s past, which you might not know. Help me with a few weird words, ’kay?”

Ethel straightened her shoulders, raised her chin, and agreed to help.

“Did you ever hear of anyone named Jolie?”

“Never.”

Just then I remembered the garbled adjective I’d heard a life-worn woman use in a basement nursery.
“Privyet,”
I said. “Have you ever heard that used to describe anyone?” I felt like I said it with a French accent, but that’s how I remembered it. “Do you think it might be a form of the word ‘pretty’? Like in another language?”

“Don’t know what it means, but it sounds Russian. Dolly knows a few Russian words, and she uses them when I tick her off.”

I nearly missed a stop sign, slammed on the brakes, and about sent Ethel through the windshield.

Gucci bless seat belts.

Ethel gave me a bland look as she settled back against the passenger seat. “That was fun.”

I pulled into a gas station on the corner. “Are you all right?”

“Your seat belt hugs harder when it’s tested. Down, boy,” she told it as she tried to unbuckle herself with trembling hands.

This time she let me lean over and unbuckle her, and she wagged a finger at me. “But
no
sippy cup.”

I dropped her at the hospital door a short while later, got out, and sat her on a bench. “Wait for me. I have to park the car then we can go in together.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, and don’t take candy from strangers.”

Russia. Nesting dolls. A Mam and Pap who could both play piano. A cemetery of clowns. Russian performers. Circus performers?

On my way across the parking lot, I called Nick. “Baby oh baby,” I said. “Do a search for Russian clowns who defected.”

“Are you and Werner drinking Dos Equis again in the middle of the day?”

“Middle of the morning, you mean. No, long story, and I have to get Ethel into the hospital and up to Dolly’s room, wherever in the hospital that may be, so take my lead and run with it. Russian clowns.”

“Thanks, baby oh baby. Be there soon as I can.”

I could still hear the smile in his words as I slipped my phone in my pocket. Ethel stood to meet me. “You just can’t go ten minutes without talking to that man, can you?”

“Who, Werner?”

She stopped and I walked into her.

“Sorry.” I took her arm. “Just yanking your chain. It was Nick, as you thought. Thanks to you, we’re now working the
Russian
clown angle.”

“Did you say ‘clown’?”

“You didn’t hear that from me. No, you didn’t hear it at all. That was a bit premature. Stupid really.”

“It was a bit
immature
.”

Okay, she was nervous, and the old girl did rude so very well, you had to admire her for it.

I gave Dolly’s name at the patient information desk, main floor, and they sent us to the ICU.

We rode the elevator silent and tense.

I got Ethel settled comfortably—well, as comfortably as she would allow—in the waiting area near the nurses’ station.

The nurse on duty asked my name and I gave her Ethel’s, too, after which she consulted her computer. “Mrs. Dolly Sweet; we’ll have to see how the next twenty-four hours plays out. It’ll be touch and go, I won’t kid you. But she’s terribly agitated, and we don’t think she’ll rest until she sees the person she’s been asking for. And without rest, well…”

“Go ahead, Mad,” Ethel called, clenching both fists on the purse riding her knees.

I looked at the nurse.

She checked her list again. “Mrs. Ethel Sweet, please follow me.”

Dolly’s favorite sparring partner followed the nurse down the hall shocked out of her mind, she was the one Dolly wanted to see.

“Oh, my God,” Ethel wailed. “The old Doll’s gonna die!”

Thirty-six

Women are most fascinating between the ages of 35 and 40 after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.

—CHRISTIAN DIOR

Did I feel left out? Yes.

Was I worried sick about Dolly? Yes.

Was I glad she asked for Ethel, instead of me? You bet your sharp-edged seam ripper, I was. Ethel had needed the contact. She’d been languishing at home in fear for days. She loved her PIA mother-in-law more than she let on, Pain In the Ass or not.

So did I, but since I expressed my love—rather than my disdain—vocally, and in other ways, my worry hadn’t been fashioned with pinking shears and common pins. I did not get pricked with regret every time I moved.

Still, waiting drove me crazy. I went to the window to look down on the parking lot and speed-dialed Nick.

“I’m coming, Ladybug. But we knew that a world of answers would break forensics-wise today. This one’s like a new-hatched spider egg,” he said. “I’m covered with tiny answers; they’re crawling all over me, forcing me to make sense of them.”

I shivered a trillion nonexistent spiders off me, but I got the reference. “Like what tiny answers? Just talk to me for a minute, so I can stop worrying about Dolly.”

“Why? How is she?”

“The next twenty-four hours will tell. I haven’t seen her. Ethel is with her. But that’s good.”

“How can I help?” Nick asked.

My hero.
“Give me a
plummy
little spider.”

“July 1944, a small plane transporting military caskets went down in Fishers Island Sound. Though the ones we retrieved from that cellar had been painted over, the barely visible serial number fits the manifest. I’m betting that only two washed up on Coffin Island—we have got to find that place a better name.”

“I’m with you on that one,” I said.

“I’m sure Long Island and Fishers Island got their share,” Nick continued. “At any rate, they were not stolen by Momo the red-nosed mobster or any of the other pups in Dogpatch.”

“That’s good. But, Nick? Why hadn’t they rusted?”

“Submarine paint.”

“Metal caskets. Electric boat. Transport plane in the vicinity, equals submarine paint. So how did the money get inside them?”

“
That
spider has not yet hatched.”

I sighed. “’Kay. I’ll take what I can get. Don’t worry about me. Just do your job.”

“You sure have a way of making a guy feel guilty,” he said, but my phone light had gone out.

I whipped around, squeaked in surprise at seeing him, stepped into Nick’s arms, and burst into tears.

I loved his lips in my hair, loved knowing they were his. “That happy to see me, are you?”

“That worried about Dolly. And yes, that glad you’re here.”

Nick grabbed a small box of tissues from a supply cart.

“May I?” I asked.

“You cry over a patient, they’re yours to use. I’m a Fed, I know these things.”

Ethel cleared her throat behind us, and we parted as if she’d caught us thirteen years ago in her backyard.

Her eyes were full to overflowing and my heart thumped a good one. I heard and felt it slap the side of my ribs, and echo in my head. But that didn’t bother me half as much as the seemingly endless time span before the next beat.

When my heart finally rebooted, my knees about buckled.

Had Dolly already left us? “No,” I whispered to a universe that ran my psychic life but would hardly listen to my plea.

“Not what I expected,” Ethel said. “Not at all. You and Nick can go in now.”

“Both of us?”

“Mama will play the boss until she has the last word. You know that.”

Despite Ethel’s emotion, those words sounded almost heartening,

Now that I’d steadied, I moved forward like a robot being driven by the pressure of Nick’s hand at my back.

Ethel didn’t follow. She sat where I’d left her when we got there.

Dolly looked small in the bed. Frail.

As I got closer, I stopped. “Dolly, are you wearing makeup?” Flirty Dolly, until the end.

She caught my hand and squeezed with way more pressure than I’d expected, though certainly she’d lost weight on
Dolly’s Wild Ride
.

Nick picked up her chart, glanced at it, and flipped to the next page.

The door to an adjoining room opened, and an old man came in. He made a slow approach toward Dolly’s bed with a cane and a twinkle in his eyes.

He kissed her brow, sat beside her, and she reached for his hand.

“Chérie,”
he said. Then he looked at each us.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Monsieur.”

Wooly knobby knits, at a hundred and four, and on her deathbed, Dolly Sweet had taken home a Parisian lover?

Dante would be crushed.

Nick gave the elderly man’s hand a firm shake.

I nodded from across the bed, concerned about a language barrier.

“Madeira, Nick,” Dolly said, the strength of her voice unexpected. “This gentleman is from the CIA. You need to sit down and listen to what he has to tell you.”

Nick returned her chart to its proper location, pulled a chair up to Dolly’s bed for me to sit on, but not without a “just between us” wink.

Why? Was she okay? Was
she
playing us?

It would be so like Dolly to bring us all to our knees for loving her.

Nick arranged his own chair on the opposite side of the bed from me, but on the same side as Dolly’s friend. He sat facing the gentleman and set his FBI badge on the bed between them.

Nick nodded. “Go ahead, sir. We’re listening.”

Thirty-seven