by Norah Wilson
“Er, perfect doesn’t describe it, Mrs. P. Thank you very much.”
“Me next, me next.” Elizabeth jumped from her seat — left hip banging into Craig, right hip banging into Cal (oh, she was good) as she scooted around the table to me. She handed me a small, red envelope. The familiar Bombay Spa logo was a dead giveaway in the top left hand corner. “It’s a gift certificate,” she gushed even before I had it open. “For a free massage.”
Dylan pffted a spray of beer onto his chin.
“It’s signed by Mrs. Pipps and everything!” Elizabeth said. “It cost me a whole week’s worth of tips. Oh, Dix, I hope you’ll come.”
I had to smile. First of all, there was no way in hell this was Ms. Pipp’s signature — too flowery, too large and loopy for such a crisp, efficient woman. Secondly, there was no way in hell the young Ms. Bee would be spending a week’s worth of tips on anyone but well, the young Ms. Bee. Thirdly, in faint print at the bottom of the certificate it read ‘display sample only’. Okay, now I had to smile widely. There was no way I would be going back to the Bombay Spa unless I had to for a case some time. Certainly not as Dix Dodd. And Elizabeth knew it.
“Thank you, Elizabeth. That was very kind of you.”
“Well,” Elizabeth said modestly. “It’s not much, but it’s the thought that counts.”
“Damn right,” Cal said.
“Double damn right,” echoed Craig.
Moving quicker than I’d ever seen these guys move, both reached to pull out Elizabeth’s chair as she returned to her seat. She smiled, sweetly, at them both, then slowly sat her butt down.
“This is from the judge and me, Dix.” Rather than rise, Rochelle handed the package to Dylan who handed it to me.
Rochelle was famous for her gifts. This had to be something spectacular. More Rolling Stones tickets? I knew they were touring again! It was a small package — hey maybe it was an iPod.
I tore open the package and held up — “Underwear?”
Rochelle and Mrs. P roared with laughter, smacking their hands dramatically on the table as I held the black, sequined thong thingie and clenched my butt cheeks tighter just thinking about it.
“Well, someone’s been talking,” I said, looking accusatorily at Mrs. P.
“Sorry, honey. Cat’s out of the bag. I cleaned your room, remember? It’s not green and tasselly like that other stuff, but its kind of … you.”
“Does Judge Stephanopoulos know about this?” I asked, trying — and failing miserably — to sound severe.
“Hell, she picked them out.”
Again, Mrs. P and Rochelle cracked up. Actually, now half the bar was laughing out loud, as I slowly lowered the underwear back into the package.
“Not in a million years can I imagine myself in this,” I confessed.
“I can,” Dylan said, waggling his eyebrows.
Eye waggle notwithstanding, he wasn’t laughing like the others. Smiling? Oh, yeah. But not laughing. Suddenly, it seemed like he’d moved closer, even though he hadn’t changed positions. I could feel the warmth radiating off his thigh, so close to mine. And even though it still kind of scared me, I let myself feel him close. And it felt pretty darn okay. He pushed his other parcel toward me.
Okay, I was getting the drift of this little gathering. Theme related — mementos of my tryst with the Flashing Fashion Queen. So when I examined Dylan’s parcel, feeling along the square edges and sharp corners, I half knew what it was before I had even opened the framed picture.
“Dirty picture, Dylan?”
“Fine art, Dix.”
It was the front page of the yellow legal pad that I’d been using the day that Jeremy Poole, decked out in drag as Jennifer Weatherby, had walked into my office. The tight little circles were there. The web-footed duck tracks I’d drawn as a subconscious reaction to the Flashing Fashion Queen’s use of the word “floozie”. (Hey, that’s just how my brain works. But say it fast five times yourself and see if it doesn’t sound like something that might come out of an inebriated Donald Duck). But now another part of that well-doodled legal pad caught my attention. The ladders. My eyes stung as I realized these were not ladders to nowhere that I’d been drawing. No, these open ended steps were ladders to anywhere.
“Ladies, and gentlemen,” the DJ, said, “Six Shooters karaoke night begins! Any brave souls willing to open the night with a ballad? Maybe one of the ladies?”
The DJ looked hopefully around the room. Hopefully, then desperately, anywhere except where Dylan Foreman sat beside me.
“Guess that’s my cue,” Dylan said. “My public awaits.”
I cringed. He really had no clue how bad he was. “Dylan why don’t you—”
He stood, kissed me on the cheek. “You can open the cards now, Dix.” He straightened, then made his way to the waiting microphone and the increasingly unhappy looking DJ, walking with the easy, confident swagger of a rock star.
“Put on my usual, Charlie,” Dylan said to the DJ.
This wouldn’t be pretty.
I opened the business card box, pulled one out of the neat row, and held it up for inspection, not unaware that Dylan was watching me closely as I did.
I read:
Dix Dodd, Private Investigator.
There’s power in the truth. Let Dix Dodd empower you.
I looked to Dylan who, with a nod and raised eyebrows, sought my reaction. I raised my drink in a toast to him.
“To the future, Dix,” he said in the microphone.
“To the future, Dylan,” I replied. Though of course he couldn’t hear me over the din of the crowd. But he smiled, so I knew he’d read my lips.
I smiled back.
Oh boy.
~~~~~*~~~~~
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To read an excerpt from FAMILY JEWELS,
the next Dix Dodd Mystery, please scroll down.
About the Author
N.L. Wilson is actually Norah Wilson, award-winning author of romantic suspense and paranormal romance novels. However, since the Dix Dodd series is about as far away as a body can get from the intensity and angst of my other stories, I figured I should try to signal the difference. She also writes young adult paranormal with writing partner Heather Doherty, under the name Wilson Doherty.
Norah lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada with her husband, two adult children, a Rotti-Lab mix, and five rats (the pet kind).
Also available from this author:
GUARDING SUZANNAH, Book 1 in the Serve and Protect Series
SAVING GRACE, Book 2 in the Serve and Protect Series
PROTECTING PAIGE, Book 3 in the Serve and Protect Series
NEEDING NITA, A free Novella in the Serve and Protect Series
LAUREN’S EYES, Winner of the Dorchester New Voice in Romance Contest
(sensual romantic suspense)
THE MERZETTI EFFECT
NIGHTFALL (coming soon)
(sensual vampire romances)
As Wilson Doherty (writing team of Norah Wilson & Heather Doherty)
THE SUMMONING: Book 1 in the Gatekeepers Series
ASHLYN’S RADIO
(YA Paranormal action adventure & YA Paranormal Romance)
Norah loves to hear from readers!
Connect with her online at:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/norah_wilson
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1053773212
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1361508.Norah_Wilson
Norah’s Website: http://www.norahwilsonwrites.com
Wilson Doherty’s Website: http://www.writersgrimoire.com
Family Jewels: A Dix Dodd Mystery
Copyright © 2011 Norah Wilson
Excerpt
Things were looking up.
Since solving the case of the Flashing Fashion Queen, business had been booming for this PI. Though I’m not one to rest on my laurels, no matter how entici
ng laurel-resting may seem, every once in a while I just had to put my feet up on my desk, link my hands behind my head and lean back in my chair to savor the feeling. And I only fell over the first time. Damn chair.
The publicity generated from that infamous case had drawn so much business our way, Dylan Foreman (PI apprentice extraordinaire and hot as hell to boot) and I were extremely busy. Crazy busy. Stagette-with-a-host-bar busy.
True, most of our work still involved digging up dirt on cheating spouses, but we’d been handed some other work in the last few months. We’d found missing relatives and missing poodles. Deadbeat dads and surprised beneficiaries. We’d been hired a few times to do background checks on potential employees for big corporations. Oh, and I got one call from a B-list celebrity client who had us chasing all over Southern Ontario looking for his 19-year-old son who’d gone AWOL with his dad’s credit cards. Naturally, the client had wanted the kid found yesterday, but he wanted it done on the QT. Dear old Dad hadn’t wanted to involve the police, nor his estranged wife, or her new hubby, or the kid’s current girlfriend or last girlfriend, and holy hell, not the last girlfriend’s older brother, and especially not the media. So we had to track the son of celebrity down the old fashioned way — knocking on doors, asking the right, carefully-put questions of the right people. And, of course, by tapping into my trusty intuition. (Okay, granted, when chasing a 19-year-old male, maybe hitting the strip clubs didn’t exactly take a lot of intuition, but we still had to pick the right clubs.)
Also, Dylan and I had done a fair amount of business locating lost loves for those who still pined away for them. Apparently, in some cases, absence does make the heart grow fonder. Or stupider. Lost loves are lost for a reason, in my humble opinion.
“You’re too cynical, Dix,” Dylan would tell me whenever one of those lost sweetheart cases came our way and I voiced this sentiment.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I do have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to men. Or a big bit of a chip. Or a great big chunk of firewood. But, once burned….
Suffice it to say that while Dylan still had a streak of the hopeless romantic in him, I did not. Nada. And at the agency, I was still the bearer of bad news to the clients on the way in the door, and Dylan was still the sympathetic ear and shoulder to cry on on their way out. But that was one of the things that made us so perfect together.
I mean, so perfect working together.
And the best part of our growing business since the case of the Flashing Fashion Queen — we moved the Dix Dodd PI Agency! Nothing fancy, nothing too pricey — just a step up from the bottom-of-the-barrel rental we had before. Fewer broken bottles in the parking lot. And a few blocks closer to my mother’s condo where I lived while she was in Florida. (I still didn’t have a condo of my own; things weren’t booming quite that well yet.) We were still in Marport City, of course, with no plans to relocate to a bigger center. There was enough under-the-covers action for undercover work in this berg. We were just doing it from a better address now.
We’d bought ourselves some new equipment and furniture. Cozier seats in the waiting room, and my personal favorite, a high-tech honey of a coffee machine. That puppy not only ground the coffee beans and delivered the coffee into an insulated carafe that kept it fresh and hot for hours, but — oh, bliss! — it also delivered frothed milk in 10 seconds flat.
Dylan’s indulgence? A voice changer. We spent the better part of an afternoon working the kinks out of that machine — calling people up and saying “Luke, this is your father” in our best Darth Vader voices. But who knows? A voice changer might come in handy some day for more than just freaking out the guy at the comic shop (especially with the caller ID we spoofed!).
We also got newer phones and computer telephone call recording software, which we run on our newly upgraded computers. And I had to place a whole new order for business cards. The ones that read
Dix Dodd, Private Investigator.
There’s power in the truth. Let Dix Dodd empower you.
The business card had been Dylan’s design. Dylan’s words. I still get a little choked up when I think of it. His pursuit of the perfect motto for the agency had, by turns, driven me crazy and kept me sane during the Flashing Fashion Queen case when it looked like my future might involve stamping out license plates in a federal correctional facility for women. But enough of that.
We also bought a fancy copier/printer/fax machine that sounded like a tweety-bird when a fax came in, replacing a slow-as-death desktop printer, a perpetually moody copier, and an ancient fax machine that squealed like a cat in its death throes. I hated that old fax machine, and no matter where I was in the former office (hell, if I was in the bathroom down the hall) that squealing sound would make me cringe. I’m talking nails-on-a-chalkboard cringe. This new machine was top of the line! It had all the bells and whistles — and a gigantic paper tray I wouldn’t have to fill again for six month. Not to mention virtually unlimited fax capability. No more 50-page memory limit.
Not that I’d ever gotten a fax that long. But if such a monster did come in — hell, if ten of them came in — I was now ready for it.
So it was a bit of a thrill when the fax tweeted these days and started punching out the pages faster than the speed of … well, the speed of my old fax machine.
Usually I got that little thrill. But not always.
And definitely not the day I got the fax from Sheriff’s Deputy Noel Almond of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. I groaned. “What is it this time, Mother? Skinny-dipping in the seniors’ pool again? Prank calls to the local radio station saying you’re the original Bat Girl?” Probably not the latter; Mom had already done that twice. For Pete’s sake, she was seventy-one! Couldn’t she knit something? And would it kill her to sit in a rocking chair once in a freakin’ while?
I leaned back in my chair, blowing out an exasperated sigh. But as I looked over the pages, I sucked that sigh right back in on a gasp.
My mother, Katt Dodd, was under suspicion in the matter of the theft of stolen jewels. Lots of them. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. That was bad. But it wasn’t the worst of it. That first paragraph was just the opening jab. The second paragraph of Deputy Noel Almond’s letter delivered the punch: mother was a person of interest in a man’s disappearance.
That was the second time I fell over in my chair.
Which is exactly where I was when Dylan walked into the office — flat on my back, shoes up in the air, eyes pointed toward the ceiling, head sunk to the ears in the plush carpeting.
“Trying a new yoga position, Dix?”
My gaze shifted from the ceiling to Dylan’s grinning face.
“No,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out just what we should pack for Florida.”
I accepted a hand up from Dylan, righted my chair, and handed him the faxed pages I still clutched. And watched his laughing eyes go serious.
Thus began the first time I’d ever pressed my PI skills into service for family. And not just any relative. My mother. My MOTHER!
Of course, I dubbed it the Case of the Family Jewels.
+++
“What’s a seven-letter word for fire-rising bird?” Mrs. Presley asked from the back seat.
“Phoenix, Mrs. P.” Dylan answered, not missing a beat.
But I could have gotten that one. Not that it was a competition between Dylan and me. Much. Not that we were keeping score. Out loud.
“OE or EO for phoenix?” asked Mrs. Presley.
“OE,” I shouted. That should count for something.
Dylan gave me a grinning sideways glance.
I bit down on a grin of my own.
A few months ago when we worked the Weatherby case, we’d fallen into bed together, literally. Not that we’d had sex. Well, not sex sex. Still, there’d been a little tension between us for a while after that. We were getting back to normal now, though. Well, as normal as it got when your male apprentice-slash-assistant is smart, sexy, tall and handso
me, incredibly good-smelling and funny. Oh, and young. Did I mention young? All of 29.
“And a six-letter word for highest point? Fourth letter’s an M.”
“Climax,” I shouted, half turning in the seat and oh-so-proud of myself.
“No,” she said. “No, starts with an S….”
“No fair. You didn’t say—”
“Summit!” Dylan didn’t turn in the seat. Which was good considering he was driving at the moment. He did, however, cast me a wicked grin. “But I like your word, too.”
“Try this one.” The seat squeaked as Mrs. P shifted her position.
I heard the tapping of the pencil on the seat behind us. This time, I’d be ready. Dylan tightened his hands on the steering wheel beside me.
“Eight letters. Close and often passionate relationship….”
“Cybersex!”
Dylan snorted a laugh. “Could it be intimate, Mrs. P?” he said.
She looked down at the paper. “Why, yes … yes it could be intimate. Thanks, kids. I think I’m good for now.”
“Anytime, Mrs. P.”
For the record, I liked my answer better.
I sank back in my seat. The moment silence prevailed again, my mind drifted right back to that fateful fax from Deputy Almond that started this odyssey.
The fax had come in late yesterday afternoon, and we’d left early this morning, grabbing a drive-thru breakfast and supersizing our coffees. We’d swung by the office and picked up all the fancy new PI equipment we might need. Then we’d picked up Mrs. Jane Presley.
Of course, driving wasn’t my first choice. I’d wanted to jump on the first flight. But Dylan, in that damnable voice of reason of his, had persuaded me we’d be better off driving. Mother wasn’t in custody, so we didn’t have to be in a hair-on-fire hurry. Plus it would give me the chance to return my mother’s BMW, or Bimmer, as she called it. And as I, too, quickly learned to call it. She refused to let me drive the thing until I stopped calling it a Beemer, which apparently is reserved for BMW motorcycles.
