Deadly Deceptions (28 page)

I looked around for an escape route and made two split-second determinations.

1) The car was too far away to offer refuge.

2) The old man was nowhere in sight, so I couldn't expect any help from him.

Dave clawed at me, frantic with fear, trying to climb on top of my head.

Holding him tightly, I stepped into the fountain, barely noticing the chill of the water as it bit into my legs. Gripping Dave in one arm, I used the other and both feet to climb the slippery statue in the center.

The rottweilers barked and snarled, their massive front paws on the concrete edge of the base of the fountain, their haunches poised to spring.

“Help!” I screamed. The statue was greased with mossy scum, Dave was wriggling in my all too tenuous grasp and I figured we had mere seconds before we slid down into the reach of those big teeth.

Out of the corner of one eye I saw a squad car screech to a halt at the edge of the park. A policeman leaped out, ran toward us. But someone else got there first. A man I didn't immediately recognize, being in a state of wholesale hysteria.

Tucker.

Reaching the base of the fountain, he grabbed the rottweilers by their collars and dragged them back. They struggled a little, but calmed when he spoke to them in a low, commanding voice.

The policeman huffed up, gun drawn. He spoke breathlessly into the radio mic on his left shoulder. “Eleanor,” he growled, probably addressing the dispatcher at headquarters, “you tell Purvis those demon hounds of his got out again, and they've run some poor woman and a little dog clean up to the top of the statue in the park fountain! If he doesn't get over here, pronto, I might just shoot the both of these mutts!” A pause followed, while I clung to the statue and Dave clung to me, whimpering now. I stared down at Tucker, so glad he was there, I couldn't even speak. “Yes, Eleanor,” the cop went on, “I
know
that I am the vice president of the Shiloh Animal Protection League. Call Purvis
now.
These dogs are a menace, and I mean to cite him good this time!”

Dave and I slid helplessly down the stone effigy.

Purvis's dogs growled ominously, but Tucker restrained them with ease.

Even with Tucker and the policeman there, I was afraid to climb out of the fountain. I was wet to the skin, which left my sundress see-through, since the fabric was so thin. It clung to me.

A person thinks crazy thoughts when they've nearly been devoured by rottweilers.

Here's what came to my mind.

Good thing I stopped by Nellie's for new underwear.

“M
OJE
,” T
UCKER SAID
, when Purvis had rushed over from his auto repair shop and collected his rottweilers, along with a loud lecture and a citation from the policeman, “you can get out of the fountain now.” He held out his arms to take Dave.

Sniffling, I buried my face in Dave's wet hide for a moment, clinging to him. Looking back, I think that was the moment he became my dog. We'd bonded for good, in a moment of peril.

“Moje,” Tucker repeated, his voice gentle and quiet.

I surrendered Dave, then climbed out of the water, dripping. I sneezed.

“I'm real sorry about this, ma'am,” the policeman said. His name, according to the tag on his uniform shirt, was Joe Fletcher, and he was dark haired and lanky, his features pleasantly rough-hewn. He looked to be about Greer's age, and I wondered if he'd lived in Shiloh long enough to know her.

I didn't get a chance to question him, but he gave me his card, which I passed on to Tucker.

With a nod to Joe Fletcher, Tucker slipped the card into his shirt pocket, put an arm around me, carrying Dave in the other one, and squired us toward a rented SUV waiting on the far side of the park. The driver's door was standing open—that's how I knew it was his.

When Tucker arrived on a Mojo scene, he was always in a hurry.

“Thanks,” I managed, shivering as a chilly breeze rolled up from the lake and made my wet clothes clammy.

“You need to dry off,” Tucker said, ever practical.

“I have some clothes in the car,” I said, referring to the Volvo.

“I'll get them,” Tucker promised.

He settled Dave and me in the SUV, cranked on the heat and sprinted across to the Volvo to collect my shopping bags from Nellie's. I sat shivering in the front seat of his rental, grateful the seats were leather, not cloth, watching the windshield fog up.

Once Tucker was back with the bags—he'd paused to pick my purse up off the ground by the fountain on his way back—we headed for the Lakeside Motel.

There, inside my room, Tucker started a hot shower and peeled off my wet clothes. I was sneezing again, and my sinuses were already clogging up.

“I thought this would be different,” I said.

“Me, too,” Tucker answered, grinning slightly. “Get into the shower. Your teeth are chattering.”

The water stung at first, but the steam was heavenly. Gradually the shivering stopped, but the old sinus passages didn't cooperate. About the last thing I needed was a bad cold—I had an investigation to conduct—but life, as John Lennon once said, is what happens while you're making other plans.

When I got out of the shower and left the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, Tucker had brought his stuff in from the SUV and dried Dave off, too. The dog was lying on the floor, cosseted in a couple of towels and the extra blanket from the closet shelf, with two mismatched eyes and his bent ear visible.

Tucker tossed me a sweatshirt from his suitcase, and I pulled it over my head. He'd turned back the covers on the bed, and I crawled in, miserable.

“I need to find Greer,” I complained thickly. “I can't be lying around nursing a head cold.”

Tucker leaned over me, pressing his hands into either side of my pillow, and kissed me on the forehead. I'd been up for a different kind of action entirely, but I knew, despite my protests, that it was going to have to wait. Along with a lot of other things—like tracking down my sister.

“You're sick,” he said reasonably. “Get some rest.”

“How could it have happened so fast?” I asked, whining a little. I figured I was entitled. “One plunge into a fountain, and I've got pneumonia?”

“It didn't happen fast,” Tucker told me sagely. “And it's not pneumonia. It's probably been coming on for a while.” He gave me another smack, this time on the end of my nose. “I'm going out for some stuff to make you feel better, and I'll be back before you miss me. In the meantime, try to rest.”

I nodded. My throat began to ache, and my eyes were burning. My head felt twice its normal size, stuffed with something dry and scratchy, like old work socks. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, Tucker was back, slathering mentholated rub on my chest. Again, not the kind of chest rubbing I'd had in mind.

“Brought you some chicken soup,” he said, once I was thoroughly mentholated. He propped some pillows behind me, and I sat up to sip the soup from a foam cup.

Emotion made my eyes sting again. If I wasn't careful, I was going to bond with Tucker, just as I had with Dave. Dangerous ground. Dave, being a dog, wasn't likely to reject me. Tucker, being a man, might do exactly that.

Sitting on the side of my bed, he rubbed my tears away with the pad of one thumb. There was no sound except for Dave snoring blissfully in the safety of his blanket and me slurping soup.

“Your timing is pretty good,” I told Tucker, my voice heavy with congestion. “If you hadn't come along when you did, Dave and I would both be in bloody chunks by now.”

“You're the one who saved Dave,” Tucker told me. He paused, his mouth tilting up on one side in one of those grins that always made me want to kiss him. “I've never seen anybody climb the statue in the center of a fountain before. Especially not with a dog in one arm.”

I smiled a little, though the memory made me shiver again. “Pure adrenaline,” I said, making a stab at modesty.

“Finish your soup.”

It was the kind with the short, stiff noodles floating in it—my favorite—but I didn't have much of an appetite. “When did you get to town?”

“Probably about five minutes before you headed for the top of that statue,” Tucker answered, rustling in a paper bag on the nightstand, bringing out a bottle of daytime cold medicine.

“Did you bring your laptop?” If I couldn't gumshoe, I could at least cruise the Internet. Maybe dig up some stray bits of information that way.

Tucker tested my forehead for fever with the back of one hand. “It's on the desk,” he said.

“Can I borrow it?”

He sighed. “Sure,” he said, and got up to retrieve the laptop. Just before setting it on my thighs, he pushed the button and it began to boot up.

“How are Daisy and Danny?” I asked while we waited.

“Fine,” Tucker said.

I knew he was hedging. “And Allison?”

“Scared,” he admitted. “Vince Erland's out of jail.”

“Helen told me,” I said, watching as Tucker turned the laptop around to type in his password. “You'll be glad to know she fired me.”

“Now, why would I be glad about that?”

“Because you didn't want me interfering in the case.”

He leaned forward, kissing my forehead. “Interfere all you want. God knows the
official
investigation isn't going anywhere.”

“Any improvement in Carmen's condition?”

Tucker's jaw tightened. “Yes,” he said. “According to her, she was working in the kitchen when she heard a loud argument in the front of the house, along with a scuffle. She went to see what was going on, and saw Greer shoot Jack Pennington. Greer was in a panic, and so was Carmen. Greer asked Carmen to drive her to a private airstrip, and she did. After that, she—Carmen, I mean—got scared and drove around in some kind of fugue state for hours. When she came to her senses, she was sitting in a cousin's driveway, with no memory of how she got there.”

“You found the pilot,” I deduced after absorbing all the Carmen info, watching Tucker through my eyelashes as I navigated to my Internet server's Web site and entered my password.

Tucker nodded. “He dropped Greer off outside Missoula. She had a rental car waiting, and took off right away.”

“Are the Feds involved?”

“Not yet,” Tucker admitted. “But it's imminent.”

I nodded. Typed Beverly Pennington's name into Google, tempted, as always, to try out the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button. I didn't really expect to find anything.

Imagine my shock when I did.

“What?” Tucker asked, evidently catching my expression. When I didn't answer right away, he moved around me and peered at the laptop screen.

Beverly Pennington had something like three hundred references on the Web. Even assuming that most of them were about people who just happened to have the same name, it was intriguing.

I quickly discovered that her maiden name was Quaffly, and since there aren't a lot of Quafflys out there, it was an easy leap to her high school's online yearbook.

“What do you know?” I murmured, stunned. “Beverly graduated from Shiloh High School. She was prom queen, head cheerleader…”

Tucker frowned at the screen. “Quite a coincidence,” he said.

“I don't believe in coincidences,” I replied. Beverly was some ten years older than Greer, but they must have been acquainted. “Did I mention that I stopped by Mrs. Pennington the first's condo on my way here, and a dead security guard told me she'd packed her bags and split in a big hurry?”

“No,” Tucker said, drawing out the word a little. “You didn't.”

I typed in “Molly Stillwell” next, but all that came up were the newspaper articles Beverly had given me. Molly had run away and left Shiloh far behind long before she could graduate from high school, but there were several undergrad pictures of her on the yearbook site and they confirmed what I already knew.

Greer and Molly were one and the same person.

I set the laptop aside and tried to get out of bed. Greer was hiding in the cellar of the Severn farmhouse—I knew that—and I had to get to her. I couldn't wait until I got over my cold, or for anything else.

“Whoa,” Tucker said.

“I know where Greer is,” I told him. “I tried to find the place today, but I couldn't, and then the whole Dave-and-the-rottweilers thing happened—”

“You're not going anywhere,” Tucker informed me. “Tell me where she is, and
I'll
find her.”

“Oh, sure. And you'll arrest her while you're at it! Or she'll see you and take off—”

“Moje, she's a
murder suspect.
”

“She's my sister!” I managed to wriggle past him, but when I got to my feet, I swayed. Whoa.
Way
woozy.

Tucker stood and steadied me. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“Okay what?” I demanded.

“Okay, we'll go hunt down your sister. Together.”

I felt for pockets I didn't have, since I was wearing Tucker's sweatshirt and nothing else. The map the old man in the park had drawn for me had probably been ruined when Dave and I plunged into the fountain, but it had been a pretty simple sketch, and I remembered it clearly.

“Let's go,” I said.

“What about Dave?” Tucker asked reasonably. “He's had a rough day.”

“He can come with us,” I answered, figuring that would be less traumatic for the dog than staying alone in a motel room.

I put on dry underwear and another sundress and we headed for Tucker's rental. The sky, summer-perfect only a little while ago, was dark with rain clouds, and the wind was brisk.

It figured.

We found the house after about half an hour of searching—a small, gray, gloomy-looking place, curiously black-and-white, like the shack in
The Wizard of Oz
before Dorothy steps outside into glaring Technicolor and realizes she's not in Kansas anymore. The structure was engulfed in weeds, and there were tire tracks in what passed for a yard, but no sign of the car that had made them.

“We should have brought a machete,” Tucker remarked as we made our way slowly through the grass jungle to a sagging front porch. “I keep expecting to run across a lost tribe of pygmies or hobbits or something.”

The sky rumbled again.

Dave had wisely elected to stay in the car, but he was peering through the windshield, his forefeet braced against the dashboard, probably willing us to come back.

I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Greer!” I called. “It's me, Mojo!”

The first spatters of rain began to fall, tapping at the tar-paper roof.

The deep grass rippled—maybe Tucker's pygmies/hobbits were stirring.

Thunder exploded overhead like a bomb, and I heard a faint yelp of dismay from Dave.

“I'm going in,” I said, eyeing the house with some trepidation.

“Hold it,” Tucker protested. “The floors are probably rotten. Let me go first.” With that, he skirted the hideout, heading for the back door.

I scrambled after him, hoping my cold wouldn't escalate to black plague.

Hoping to find Greer.

A rusted-out wringer washer stood at a tilt in the yard, next to a leaning clothesline pole. I tried to square the Greer I knew, living the high life in Scottsdale, with the girl who had called this place home.