“DC called us, Nick,” Alex said, though I sure didn’t connect their call to Eve’s.
“And you called us, Jaconetti,” DC’s head guy said, “with the technical skill you employed to attempt to break the code on our computer.”
“I thought I failed to call you,” Nick said, “because I didn’t know the safe room and everything in it was ours.”
I shoved Alex’s shoulder. “Did you guys cut the rope on our boat?”
Alex hugged my shoulders. “We tried, but somebody beat us to it.”
“You brat.” I shrugged from his one-armed brotherly embrace.
“We didn’t know it was you, Mad. You heard the guys from DC and New York; they’ve been watching this place for years, waiting for somebody to make a wrong move. They thought yesterday was wrong-move day. Frankly, when Eve called me, I thought you got yourself in some soup again, and took my FBI partner with you. I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“I never get myself in her soup,” Nick stated, “for the record.” And snickers and throat clearing could be heard round the room.
Apparently Alex chose to ignore the double meaning. “Unless you dive in to protect Mad and the noodle, and hey, I’m not complaining. Thanks for being there for her, because if it weren’t for you, I’d be dragging her out of the broth all the time.”
Eve crossed her arms. “I suppose I’m the noodle?”
Nick knuckled his nose. “If the stew pot fits, Mey-ers.”
I huffed. “I object. You don’t even know how much I get into”—that didn’t sound right—“and stop talking about me as if I were a five-year-old.”
I turned to examine my brilliant designs of the night before.
“Which reminds me, Mad,” Alex said, “you and Fiona had better call home, because Dad’s going ballistic. He’s spouted quotes in the last two calls that even I never heard.”
Couple of the Feds chuckled as the contingent—ten men, who’d seemed like a hundred when they arrived—disbursed to begin what appeared to be a forensics-type search, most stepping from, and packing up, their protective gear for ease of movement. They all carried the kind of backpack that men who climb mountains do. Probably, because sometimes they got stuck on mountains, though Nick had never said as much.
Werner eyed me. “Madeira, I feel vindicated. I’m in good company. Great company. You drive all the men in your life crazy, even your father.”
My brother agreed, and despite that, I was so grateful Alex was here, I had to hug him again.
He patted my shoulder, his suntanned face ruddy in front of the men.
Nick pulled me his way, and Alex gratefully accepted my “life partner’s” rescue.
Did this mean I was in the soup again? You bet your Pucci, Rucci, and Gucci it did, for my money anyway. Life partner…I felt a case of the hiccups coming on.
“Why the doomsday gear?” Nick asked, and I buried my angst and waited for the answer.
My FBI hunk sounded pissed at the guys who usually watched his back, whose backs he’d watch, danger or no, the comrades he’d risk his life for.
“Assistant Director in Charge, Ray Scanlon, here, DC office,” the head man said, extending his hand to shake Nick’s. “People came here early on, years ago, but no one ever left, that our predecessors saw, or that we saw, except for the girl. When we confirmed that she was truly alone and no one came to meet her, we sent McCreadie for her.”
“Me?” Paisley squeaked. “You’ve been watching me?”
“McCreadie’s one of ours, then?” Nick asked.
“So, Jaconetti, tonight we prepared for the worst, suicide pact, deadly gasses, whatever, especially after we saw that one of you went down.” Agent Scanlon had neatly sidestepped both questions.
Conked out, more like. I cleared my throat while Nick gave me a warning look and cleared his. He didn’t want me to tell a superior that he’d fallen asleep.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“We’ve had an infrared on the compound the last few hours. We knew people moved around inside—three, then two. We just weren’t sure who. Our targets would have powerful weapons, and you know those suits, Nick; they would have protected us from just about anything.”
“Can somebody tell me who ‘they’ are?” Paisley asked. “Since ‘they’ raised me.”
“No, ma’am,” Scanlon said.
Twenty-six
Wearing this kind of costume is not something I fantasize about. It’s not natural, it’s not comfortable.
—JOAN SEVERANCE
Nick went to work with his team, showing them what we’d found and digging deeper—metaphorically speaking, without actual shovels, for the moment. Nick was, at this time, he’d explained, no longer my lover, my life partner, or even my friend. And my brother, Alex, he stopped being my brother. “Until we leave the island,” the FBI partners agreed.
Of course, I didn’t agree, but neither of them noticed.
They were Feds, Special Agents Cutler and Jaconetti, on-the-job partners in solving crimes, and I got their not-so-subtle warnings, albeit at different times, for me to “shut up” and if possible “disappear into the woodwork.”
Nick had nearly cracked a smile on those last words.
Assistant Director in Charge, Scanlon, DC office, as close to the head honcho as you could get, knew the code to the computer in the safe room and got Fiona online. Then Eve set Fee and my dad up face-to-face to Skype.
At first, I watched Fiona wind my dad around her little finger, the poor man. He’d been worried sick, and though he’d sit for a minute, he inevitably stood to pace—furiously, I might add.
I didn’t mind my huggy-bear father’s not-so-subtle promise, through Fiona, to beat me when I got home, as if he would, but when he got to making a promise that was clearly a double-edged threat/treat regarding Aunt Fiona, I got the hell out of Dodge.
He’d asked previously if I had left and Aunt Fee said yes without checking to make sure, she was so besotted with dear old dad, him being the only schmuck in town who didn’t know it, or wouldn’t face it.
I wished, probably weirdly, that Dante could get my mother to make a special appearance, a one-time-only visit to my father, so she could give him permission to love her best friend. But somehow, I didn’t think ghosts had that kind of clout or communication system.
Meanwhile, Eve and Assistant Director Scanlon had gotten into some geeky tech talk. I hadn’t seen her last conquest around in a while—I thought Kyle might be in Europe—but maybe it was time for her to make another capture, er, conquest.
Eve caught men like fish in a net, and the ones she didn’t want, she threw back. Worse, she told them as much, up front, and they liked her for it, promised to come back if she needed them.
She had dressed to rescue us with Aunt Fiona as a steamy punk goth with teal lipstick and fingernails, a pair of Sterling buckle boots, the yowser black sheer pants I made her tucked into them. Yes, sheer pants. I’d outdone myself with a cropped pant-length lining, and grommets that I connected, like a cross-stitch version of matching the dots with strips of leather. With them, she wore a black-striped, cinched, white corset top, her gold hooped earrings and cuff, both spiked. Such a zinger of an outfit. None of it left anything to the imagination as far as her figure went, and she liked it that way. Oleg Cassini would have loved Eve. He didn’t believe in hiding a woman’s figure either.
As for Scanlon, also a redhead, though more naturally so, I saw him as clearly her type with that scar across the side of his left eye, and the manly width and breadth of his shoulders and chest. He even stood a good foot taller than her, which Eve always adored.
When Aunt Fee came out of the barn, she spoke to Nick, who took her over to the second-to-last SUV in the line, and put her inside. Nick found Eve, spoke to her, and brought her my way.
“I’m gonna say good-bye,” Eve said. “I’ll get the shop open, if my mother hasn’t already done it, ’kay? That way we can keep selling outfits for
Dolly’s birthday party, and my mother and Ethel will have some help.”
I hugged her. “You’re a good friend.”
“Hah, this is the easy stuff. I haven’t seen you read one outfit,” she whispered, “and for that I’m grateful.”
Eve went over to get into the car with Fiona.
Nick gave a silent order: one finger in an arc from the car toward the gates, and the SUV left.
Aunt Fiona had had enough, and I didn’t blame her. I was glad she’d be with my dad, too.
Given my observations of the activity, I knew I had time to kill—er, bad choice of words—just time to spare, so I called Paisley from the vicinity of the house’s main kitchen, where the Feds had set up shop, so to speak. “Let’s take a walk,” I said, “since they’ve stopped grilling you for a bit.”
“Thanks, I feel like a bug under a microscope, with all these mad, macho men raiding my house, acting like it’s theirs, and throwing questions at me as if I’d killed Wart and his friends with my bare hands.”
“Wart? Who’s Wart? Do you mean Tuna, Smoots, and friends?”
“Whatever!” she said, raising her hands as if she gave up, then waving them in frustrated, exaggerated defeat. Defeat? The girl would beat up whoever dared step close.
I grabbed her hands, avoiding the rolled cuffs of Bepah’s old shirt, and held them together within my own. “Breathe,” I said. “Deeper. Another breath.” I understood her aggravation; I stifled a bit of my own at that point. “I get it.”
“Sorry for snapping.”
I stopped her from continuing her walk by not letting go of her hands, and I eyed the vast expanse of the fragrant wildflower meadow before us—lady slippers, black-eyed Susans, wild irises, orchids for heaven’s sake, all basking in the sun’s silent glory—as if The Fall of the House of Usher weren’t taking place behind us.
“The house you think of as yours, Paisley, and this farm, it might not be yours. You need to make peace with that. Everything here may be stolen, including the land. Cocomo, Tuna, Wart and the gang, they could have been your Mam and Pap’s cohorts.”
She started walking again, ahead of me, as if she’d tired of me. Then she stopped to wait, her look beseeching. “Mam and Pap raised me.”
“Sure, like you raise ants in an ant farm.”
She gave me a “nobody home” look. “I don’t get it.”
“You wouldn’t. Ant farms were normal when we were kids. Ants, rabbits, same thing. Your mam and pap raised you like they raised rabbits.”
“Hey,” she said, “they ate the rabbits.”
“That’s my point. Okay, so you were a little higher up the food chain, as far as they were concerned. But that’s about how much interest they took in you.”
She shook her head. “You don’t teach an ant or a rabbit to guard its virtue.”
“Okay, so your mam did have a bit of maternal in-stinct.”
Paisley thought about that. “She did. Only a bit, but it came in handy, like when I started my monthlies, and thought I was gonna die. Come to think of it, Pap even patted me on the head that night.”
“Were you all closer after that?”
Paisley huffed. “No…the next day I was an ant again, hopping around the farm in a parallel universe, not being spoken to or touched.”
“There you go. Sorry in advance, but they could have been your kidnappers.”
“Or they found me in the shack. Or I wandered away from the shack after Bepah…you know…and they found me. Bepah was old when he…” She stopped walking and talking, and her mouth firmed before speculation changed her expression.
“What?” I asked.
“I intended to say, ‘when Bepah took me in,’ but what I nearly said is, ‘when he rescued me.’”
“Just to be straight, Bepah is the old man with the missing finger, right? Your grandfather?”
“How did you know about his finger? You do read clothes.”
Where the Hermès did she ever learn about psychics? “I really don’t. You mentioned his finger a couple of times, just not how he lost it.”
Sure I was lying to her. Suppose, just suppose, that embedded DNA chip that forces her not to reveal anything—her words—was real, because how does she know about DNA or computer chips?—suppose her roots turned her into a chip off the old block, as in a spy or mob kid who joined the family.
A double agent, even.
I mean, in a covert CIA minute, her Parisian grandma would have thought nothing of trading a psychometric fashion designer for her own freedom.
Note to me: Ask Nick how spies get involved with mobsters, which of them would steal military caskets, and why? I mean, I already knew who’d steal the money.
Any and all of them.
Paisley and I turned to the sound of car horns being blasted. Whoa, Hummers and SUVs on parade. They must have commandeered half the New London ferries into federal service. A parade of black vehicles came honking through the gates—looking like a government funeral—an unending line of them, not to mention a dozen hearses and nearly as many coroners’ cars. Two ambulances and two K-9 units.
“Why the ambulances?” Paisley asked. “Nobody’s been hurt.”
“Maybe they’re afraid somebody will be.”
“Will be hurt…or killed?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “Because those are unmarked coroners cars, aren’t they?”
Why she’d know that made no sense to me.
“It makes no sense,” she said, eerily echoing me.
Did she have the talent to act dense on purpose, or simply the ability to revert back to her “I know nothing” childhood—with or without realizing it?
The federal investigators were, no doubt, planning to exhume bodies, from Scar to Momo, and every Tuna in between, no matter how much the area around that gnarly tree had been staged to look like a puppy graveyard. Though I so did not get the red dog bone with white polka dots.
Even I knew that those names could very well represent real dead mobsters. Well, not real dead, but real mobsters who are dead.
Maybe old Pap knew it, too, and he got his kicks by naming his dogs after the men who’d followed Al Capone into glory. Perhaps they were Pap’s idols.
But the entire scenario smelled…well…like whatever they were about to dig up would smell, and it all smacked of a setup.
I mean, dead Tuna—fishy, right?
My question, not that anybody would answer it: A setup by whom? The good guys or the bad guys?
Even I knew that nobody was talking to me.
This whole farm reminded me of a stage in a way, and it wasn’t the first time I’d thought that, but I was beginning to chew on the thought now. Coffin Farm seemed as far-fetched as everything else that had happened since Paisley Skye walked into Vintage Magic yesterday morning.
Madeira, are you sleuthing again? I sure in Hermès am.
Twenty-seven
Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
—ERIC BENTLEY
“Paisley, Madeira,” Nick called, coming up to us. “Where are you two headed?”
“Well,” Paisley said, “Mam and Pap are down in the clearing. I was going to show Mad where I buried them. Why?”
“Because one of the agents needs to ask you some questions. You’ll be talking to Assistant Director in Charge, Ray Scanlon, DC office, so pay him due respect.”
“Why don’t I just spit in his face, like you expect me to?”
Nick ran a hand through his hair. “I apologize. You were brought up here, where nobody had a title, and from what I’ve heard, nobody respected anybody either.”
Paisley expelled her breath with a frustrated lip ruffle. “You’re off the hook. But I understand the word ‘respect,’ and I would never offer him anything less,” she said, no longer quite as miffed that he’d doubt her.
“Coming, Mad?” she asked.
“No, Paisley, you go on up to see Scanlon. I’m supposed to
be grilling Mad, which I’ll do to the best of my ability, though we’ve never played FBI agent–suspect before, and I’m not sure she’ll behave.”
I considered his comment. “You gonna treat me like a suspect, Jackalope?”
“Yes, I am, Ladybug. New nickname, by the way?”
“New life partner, by the way?”
“Call it even?”
“Yes, sir, Jackalope, sir.”
“What’s a Jackalope?”
“Mythical creature, sir. Part jackrabbit, part antelope…and part a hole, is my guess. Some have more of the first two characteristics, and the third indicator makes only rare appearances.”
“You will, of course, tell me whenever that hap-pens.”
“I consider it my duty, sir,” I said as I got swept into his arms with a laugh and set back on my feet.
Paisley chuckled, too, as she left, but halfway to Scanlon, her entire demeanor changed, her back going ramrod straight, respectful persona in place.
Nick took my arm and led me in the direction Paisley and I had been going.
“Are you supposed to be fraternizing?” I asked.
“I’m grilling you myself, Ladybug, so I can have some alone time with you.”
“It was the solo shower I made you take yesterday, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“No. This really is business.”
“Monkey business?”
“FBI business. Jackalope, hey? You’re sure?”
“What? You don’t like it as much as Ladybug? I mean, I thought of calling you Firefly as a pet name, but that would be too obvious. And there’s Horned Toad or Cockatoo.”
“Mad, put the torture on hold. I need you to let me in on the clues you picked up when you got your vintage clothing visions. How many have you had and what did you learn from them?”
“Okay, truce. Let me see. I told you about Paisley as a little girl in the white cloak, right?”
“Some. As I remember, it was pillow talk, and we got distracted. Have you remembered anything new?”
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