Nearly Departed in Deadwood (40 page)

      “No. He said he’d call.” Her smile seemed wistful. I wanted to smear brownie goo all over it. “He’s such a great guy. Do you think I should wear a white dress at our wedding?”

      I inhaled latte. Harvey snickered as I coughed and gasped. Aunt Zoe watched us both with a gunslinger stare. Natalie’s smile faltered.

      The phone rang.
Thank God!
I practically ran to it. “Hello?” I covered the mouthpiece and coughed off to the side.

      “Hello, Violet Parker.”

      I cringed mentally. “Hi, Jeff. What’s going on?”

      “I heard about last night.”

     
Already?
It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours yet. “How?”

      “It’s a small town.”

      “So I’m told.”

      “You sure add excitement to this place, Violet Parker.”

      “Thanks.” I think.

      “I’m calling to see if Kelly can stay over there tonight. I need to be in Spearfish at dawn and her mother is too busy with her girlfriend to watch her.”

      “Sure.” After identifying Wolfgang’s charred remains last night before Doc drove me home, my worries about Kelly’s psychosis had faded. Although, not entirely. “Jeff, is Kelly okay?”

      There was a hushed pause from his end.

      I continued, “With her therapy ... well, after her therapy ... assuming she is done with therapy,” I took a breath, untied my tongue, and started again. “I saw the collage of Missing Girl pictures in your bedroom when I was there last.” Another lie, but if Doc hadn’t showed up, I would have seen it, so close enough.

      “Right, that.” Jeff’s voice sounded tired. “The counselor thought it would be a good idea for her to put that together.”

      “Did it help?”

      “I don’t know.”

      There was one other question that I cringed at the thought of asking, but now that I knew Jeff wasn’t the kidnapper, I needed to hear the answer. “Why did you throw a garbage bag of Emma’s stuff in that Dumpster at Jackpot Gas-n-Go?”

      “Wow, you don’t miss much, do you?”

      I waited quietly, hoping I hadn’t pushed too far.

      “Emma had been staying at our house the weekend she was kidnapped. With all of the commotion after she disappeared, everybody forgot about the clothes and sleeping bag she’d left at our place. By the time things had quieted down, Donna and I didn’t know what to do with the stuff. A few weeks later, Kelly built a weird little shrine with it all in her bedroom, along with candles and pictures, and I knew I had to get rid of it in order to help her move on with life. If Kelly had seen that stuff in the trash, she would have flipped out, so I just bagged it and took it to the gas station.”

       “Oh.” Here I’d conjured up a much darker, more sinister explanation. My father would tell me there was a lesson in this—something about not sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. “How is Kelly now that you got rid of Emma’s stuff? Is she moving on?”

      Another pause. “I’ll be straight with you. If you’re asking if I think Kelly has some nutty hang-ups still, then yeah, I do. But she hasn’t cried herself to sleep since she started spending time with your kid, and she’s eating again instead of just picking at her food.”

      My heart twanged for both Jeff and Kelly.

      Jeff cleared his throat. “I think Addy has done more to help Kelly through this bullshit than that lousy hundred-bucks-an-hour counselor.”

      “Good,” I said, smiling for the first time since waking up. I was done grilling Jeff. “Do you want me to pick Kelly up, or are you going to drop her off?”

      “How about I bring her by around five today?”

      “Sure.”

      “Great. Thanks. Oh, and—”

      His hesitation lasted so long I thought he’d been disconnected. “Yeah? Hello?”

      “I was wondering if you’d like to go out on a date sometime. We could get a burger, maybe see a movie.”

      Yikes. How was I going to dodge this bullet? Jeff was not only the father of my daughter’s best friend, but also my client; a man whose wife left him for another woman;
and
a guy who’d worked up the nerve to ask me out in a nice, non-prostitution-like manner. This required some expert-level pussyfooting.

      “How about we sell your house first, then we’ll try a date?” That seemed safe with less than a week until I lost my job.

      “You mean like go out to celebrate?”

      “Yes.”

      “Okay.”

      “Goodbye, Jeff.” I hung up and turned to find three pairs of eyes drilling me.

      “Was that Kelly’s dad?” Aunt Zoe asked.

      Natalie leaned forward. “Did he just ask you out?”

      Harvey grinned. “How much are you going to charge him for sex?” 

      “I have to go to work now.” Grabbing my latte from the table, I nodded in their general direction and darted.

     
Chapter Twenty-Six

      I called Detective Cooper with Aunt Zoe’s cell phone on my way to Calamity Jane’s. “You have some questions for me?”

      “Yeah. You said something about Mr. Hessler having traveled to San Francisco last week.”

      “Right.”

      “Did he ever mention his departure airport?”

      “No. I just figured it was Rapid City.” Public airports didn’t exactly grow on scrub bushes on the prairie. The next closest was four hours away.

      “Hmmm. Did he mention a particular airline?”

      “I didn’t ask. Why?”

      “We’re having trouble finding any record of him flying out of the area.”

      Maybe he hadn’t left. I thought about Sherry Dobbler, the girl in Spearfish who’d escaped a kidnapper’s clutches. Had Wolfgang stuck around and tried for one more girl? Or had that been his way of distracting the police, like Aunt Zoe had predicted, keeping the heat off him for a while longer?

      “You said you’d talked to him once while he was in San Francisco.” Detective Cooper’s voice cut through my thoughts.

      “Yeah, he called from his cell phone just to see how things were going.” Also, to offer to take my kids on a date. Thank the stars that never happened.

      “That was it?”

      “Yes.” No need to expound on my gargantuan gullibility to the detective.

      I pulled into the parking lot behind Calamity Jane Realty, parked three cars down from Doc’s Camaro (parked in my spot, as usual), and killed the engine.

      “Did you remember any background noise during that phone call with Mr. Hessler? Any city sounds? Anything at all?”

      I remembered the beep-beep-beep of something backing up. “Just some construction sounds. Can’t you check his cell phone records?”

      “We’re looking into that.”

      “Did you ask Ray Underhill why he had all of those Missing Girl signs in the back of his vehicle?” I’d tattled on Ray during the post-inferno interrogation.

      “Yeah. He claims they were detrimental to his realty business, so he took it upon himself to remove them before they scared off buyers.”

      Damn. Ray had to be the biggest asshole this side of the Mississippi.

      “Are you available tomorrow for lunch?” the detective asked.

      My breath caught. “Are you asking me out on a date, Coop ... I mean Detective Cooper?”

     
Christ!
Was I in heat and didn’t realize it?

      His laughter left my cheeks burning. “No, Miss Parker. I’m thinking about relocating and need a real estate agent. Uncle Willis says you’re helping him sell his ranch.”

      Uncle Willis? Oh, right, Harvey. “Of course, an agent. Sorry.” I pulled out my organizer and flipped to tomorrow’s page. Where had all of these wanna-be clients been a month ago back when they could have saved my job? “Do you want me to meet you at the station?”

      “No, I’ll pick you up in front of your office at noon.”

      “Okay, noon it is.” I penciled him in and realized he’d already hung up on me. Nice. He’d learned his manners from his uncle.

      I locked the Bronco and crossed the heat-soaked parking lot to the back door, my headache easing as the tag-team of caffeine and aspirin beat it into submission. Jane’s office door was closed when I passed, light spilled out from under it. I paused inside the office long enough to drop my purse on my desk and wave at Mona, who pointed at me and frowned while she talked on her phone. She must have heard about last night, too.

      I heard the toilet flush behind me and beelined out the front door before Ray saw me or Mona had a chance to corral me.

      Doc’s front door was unlocked. I deadbolted it behind me. Mr. Nyce and I had some shit to hash out, and I didn’t want to be interrupted until I was satisfied.

      I strode through the empty front room, my boots clunking across the scarred wood floor, and headed down the short hall. A doorway to my right led to a bathroom. The one to my left opened into a small room lined with mostly-empty, wall-to-wall bookshelves. An overhead bulb was the only source of light, an upside down five-gallon bucket the only seat.

      It was here that I found Doc standing next to a ladder that was attached to tracks in the ceiling and floor. He had a thick book open in his hands. His cargo shorts and T-shirt beach attire left a lot of olive skin available for admiring. The scent of his woodsy cologne teased my sinuses ... and libido.

      I leaned against the doorframe. “Hey, Doc.”

      His forehead furrowed, he closed the book. “You should be home resting.”

      “Good to see you, too.” I nodded at his book. “What are you reading?”

      He held the book up for me to see. I read aloud, “
Ghosts of Deadwood’s Past
.”

      Doc dropped it on an empty shelf. He stared at me, his jaw clenched, his gaze guarded.

      “Anything about the Hessler family in there?” I asked.

      “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

      “I don’t.”

      “In spite of what you told the police Wolfgang said about his sister haunting him, telling him to kill you?”

      I shrugged and spun the copper head of one of the snaps midway down my dress. “The man murdered little girls, mummified them in his bathtub, and stored them in his root cellar. He was a Grade-A wacko. The voice he thought was his sister’s was probably one of the many in his head. You know, like that
Sybil
movie.”

      “You mean Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

      The name rolled off his tongue too easily. My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, that.”

      “So, in your theory, it was another personality in his own head that instructed him to kill the one he loved in order to quiet the voices?”

      “Yes.” That sounded about right to me.

      “Had he succeeded in taking your life, do you think he’d be free of the voices now?”

      “Of course not.”

      Doc rubbed his stubble-covered chin. The raspy sound filled the small room. “So, was this other personality encouraging him to commit suicide?”

      “What do you mean?” I was going to need another latte to keep up with Doc if he pursued this subject much further.

      “Well, would you say that Wolfgang loved himself more than anyone else?”

      “Probably.”

      “You two had only one date prior to last night, right?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “So the chance of him actually falling in love with you after just one date is probably slim.”

      My neck heated. “You may not realize it, but I can be pretty charming when I try.”

      “You don’t have to try.”

      I skipped over his comment. “Wolfgang told me when he saw my picture on my Realtor postcard, it was love at first sight.”

      “You believed him?” His tone had a hint of incredulity.

      “Well,” I said, sputtering, indignant, “my hair was down and looked damned good in that picture.” I didn’t share the small detail about my hair being just like Wilda’s. It wouldn’t have helped my cause.

      Doc grinned at me.

      “And I was probably a little high on lighter fluid fumes at the time he said it, but yes, I did believe him.” He loved me in his own twisted, incestuous way.

      He nodded, then gave me a thorough once-over from the floor up, pausing on my open neckline. “You look great in green.”

      “Are we changing the subject now?” If so, I’d prefer to turn the spotlight away from me.

      “It appears so.” His gaze dipped to my feet. “Those sure are sexy boots.”

      I tried to push aside the memory of the last time I’d worn these boots and found myself alone in a small, dark space with Doc, but my gut quivered anyway. Straightening my shoulders, I plowed forward. “Do you really believe you can see ghosts?”

      His focus returned to my face, his eyes darker than usual. “No.”

      “Oh.” He derailed me before I could get up a head of steam.  “But I thought—”

      “I can sense them.”

      “Come again?”

      Crossing his arms over his chest, he said, “You heard me.”

      “Sense how?”

      “Well, the only way I can describe it—and you’re going to think it’s crazy—is that I can smell them.”

      He was right, it was crazy. “Smell? What do you mean?”

      He touched his nose.

      “You’re purposely being evasive,” I accused.

      He shook his head slowly, squeezing the back of his neck, staring at the floor. “It’s complicated, Violet. The best way I know how to explain it is that it’s an odor, only more, but not in the usual sense. It affects me in ways that I don’t understand—yet, but I’m working on it.”

      I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that.

      He blinked and looked over at me. “Do you believe me?”

      I hesitated. This was Doc, my client, my white knight, my friend, but I couldn’t lie to him. “I don’t think so.”

      “Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. You’d think I was deranged.”

      “Wolfgang was deranged. This is just a little ... nuts.”

      His lips twisted into a wry smile. “Right. Can I trust you not to mention this to anyone?”