by Ann Charles
I counted four rings. Maybe I needed to cruise by there tonight and try to catch Wanda in person. I hadn’t talked to her since …
“Hello?” a female voice interrupted my reminiscing.
“Hi, this is Violet Parker. I’m looking for Wanda Carhart.”
“This is Wanda.” Her voice sounded stronger than I recalled, less quavery and ready to shriek at any given moment. “I’ve been thinking about you lately, Miss Parker.”
Good, she remembered me. “Really? Are you considering putting your house back on the market?”
“No, that’s not why.”
Then what … “Oh, you heard about my boss.”
“Yes, that was a tragedy. But it was Prudence who put you in my thoughts.”
Besides Doc, Wanda Carhart was the only one around who “knew” Prudence. While Doc had relived Prudence’s death, Wanda claimed to have conversations with Prudence on a regular basis. I still wasn’t one hundred percent certain Wanda wasn’t experiencing figments of her own optical delusions. She had spent years with an abusive husband and a deranged son. Both were slain in a vicious double murder by her neurotic daughter who now spent her life behind bars. Wanda may have created a world full of fictitious characters to keep her company. I probably would have, too.
“Have you been visiting with Prudence again?” I asked.
Had Wanda moved back home to the scene of the crime—make that both crimes, the double murder and attempted murder? Wanda’s house had been the setting for my nightmares many a night.
There was a shuffling sound from Wanda’s end of the line before she whispered, “She’s my friend.” Her words made me shiver in spite of the September sunshine warming my skin. “Prudence tells me things.”
I hesitated a moment, then took the plunge. “What kind of things?”
“Things about bad people,” she whispered still.
“She thinks I’m a bad person?” I asked. What did I ever do to Prudence besides not believe she existed?
“Not you, the others.”
Others? How many others were we talking about here? “You mean like Lila and her friends?”
Lila had been engaged to Wanda’s son, but all along she’d been having an affair with Wanda’s daughter, Millie. Lila had manipulated Millie into murdering Millie’s father and brother, and then into attempting to sacrifice me. That demon-worshipping bitch had been bad juju. For both Wanda’s and my sake, it was a good thing Lila had fallen on her own knife.
“No, not Lila,” Wanda said, muffled now like she was cupping the mouth piece. “Or her horrible, disgusting friends.”
When Cooper had sorted out the details of the Carhart crime, he’d linked Lila to a group of demon groupies from down by Yankton. They all had shared a lovely tattoo of a goat head melting into a pig. They also had shared a book written in Latin with a lot of freaky pictures in it, including the aforementioned goat-pig drawing. After my near sacrifice, I’d grabbed the book before Cooper could bag it as evidence. It was the same book Doc now kept tucked away in his closet.
I leaned against the brick wall that divided Calamity Jane Realty from the back door of Doc’s office, wanting the feel of something solid at my back. “Who then, Wanda? Who are the others?”
Who were the bad people in Prudence’s world, besides the hooded executioners who’d slain her family and then brutalized her before slitting her throat?
“The ones who killed your boss,” Wanda whispered.
What? “The ones who killed …” I repeated under my breath, feeling dizzy all of a sudden. I bent over, letting gravity help get the blood to my head. “Wanda, do you know who killed Jane Grimes?”
“No, but Prudence does.”
“Ask her who it was.”
“She won’t tell me.”
Damn these ghosts and their cryptic conversations. “Why won’t she tell you?”
If Wanda said Prudence didn’t like her hat, I was going to throw my cell phone on the ground and jump up and down on it.
“Because she wants to talk to you.”
My knees wobbled. “Why me?”
“She said you are …”
I heard talking in the background, then hushed conversation, as if Wanda covered the phone with her hand.
Prudence said I was what? Losing my marbles? Sleeping with a medium? Hanging out in a historic opera house with a ghost whisperer? Seeing albinos?
“Miss Parker?” Wanda came back on the line.
“Yes? What did Prudence say?”
“I can’t talk right now.”
I growled in my throat. “How about I stop by later today?” I could race over there after my shopping trip.
“No, that won’t do. Could you come by the house tomorrow morning?”
I didn’t want to wait that long to hear what Prudence knew about Jane’s murder.
Wait a second. Did I really believe I could find out who killed my boss from a woman who had been dead for over a century? One who supposedly channeled her thoughts through Wanda Carhart, someone who’d recently experienced mind-blowing trauma and violent bloodshed, let alone decades of brutality at the hands of an abusive husband? I could just hear Cooper’s cackles of mad laughter when I told him where I had gotten my inside information.
“Sure, I could come by your sister’s house,” I said. “Where does she live?”
“Not my sister’s, come to my house. That’s where Prudence lives.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Whether I truly bought into the whole idea of Prudence or not, Doc wanted me to get him into the Carhart house. I needed to figure out a way to let him roam the place without Wanda present. That meant I needed to gain her trust, which in turn meant she’d give me her key.
“Okay, your place it is. How about nine-thirty?” That gave me time to drop off my kids at school first.
“Splendid, Miss Parker. Prudence and I will see you then.”
I could hardly wait. Stretching, I noticed a spider web in the corner of Doc’s back entryway, a small dead bee caught in the web. A fat, long-legged spider was starting to wrap him up for later.
“Violet!” Jerry called out from behind me, making me practically jump right up into the web.
“What?”
“Let’s roll.”
Grumbling behind my extra-wide smile, I followed him into the office, stopping by my desk to grab my purse.
“Where are you two off to this morning?” Mona asked, watching me swing my purse over my shoulder. Her face was lined with more than curiosity, but I couldn’t figure out what.
“I’m taking Violet to get a makeover.”
“Why?” she asked, eyeing my black knit shirt and red slacks.
“She needs a little smoothing around the edges before we put her up on billboards.”
“Billboards?” I gaped at him. “I thought you were only talking about marketing flyers.”
“I have big plans for you.”
Mona searched my face. “What about what Violet wants?”
Violet wants a job, I thought, and tried to hide behind a fake smile. “It’s fine, Mona. We’ll be back in a bit.”
I squeezed her shoulder in thanks and zipped out the back door.
My phone rang as soon as I stepped into the sunshine.
I pulled it out of my purse. It was Cooper.
“I need to take this,” I told Jerry. “I’ll be right there.”
I hit the answer button as Jerry zigzagged through parked cars toward his Hummer.
“Hello, Cooper. Did you call to yell at me some more?”
The detective grunted. “No, I actually called to apologize for yesterday.”
A small breeze could have toppled me. “You what?”
“I’m sorry for being so … so …”
“Rude and bitchy?” I supplied.
“Short,” he bit out.
What in the hell was going on? “Is someone holding a gun on you right now? Grunt once for yes.”
He chuckled under his breath. “No.�
��
“Wow. Okay. Apology accepted.”
“Now tell me why I should interrogate Tarragon’s wife,” he ordered.
I gave him a quick run-down of what I’d overheard yesterday at the opera house between Tarragon and his wife. I didn’t mention the paper with Jane’s picture on it in the bathroom trash.
“You’re sure it was Peter Tarragon.”
“Well, I’ve never seen him before, but his wife called him Petey and he said he was the director.”
“Okay. Did anything else happen?”
I debated on mentioning Dominick, but Jerry had started the Hummer and was waving at me out his window to hurry it up. Impatient much?
“No, that was it,” I said.
“Why were you in the opera house?”
“It’s a gorgeous old building. I took a tour of it with a friend.” I feared mentioning Cornelius’s name would set off alarms in Cooper’s head. “Then I needed to use the bathroom and ran into Tarragon.”
A little bit of fibbing there, but mostly the truth.
“All right. I’ll look into this some more.”
Jerry backed out of the parking spot and sat there watching me, idling, blocking anyone who might want to come through.
“I believe Jane and Peter’s wife go back a ways,” Cooper said. “She may have noticed something about Jane during practice the night of her death.”
Was Cooper actually sharing information with me? Holy crap! Was the world ending and nobody had bothered to inform me?
“Did Jane and Peter Tarragon get along?” I asked Cooper.
“I haven’t been informed otherwise.”
Jerry honked.
Damn him! Patience was not his strongpoint. I was really starting to see why Jane had divorced his tall ass. I held up my index finger, like I often did with my children.
“Are you going to add Mrs. Tarragon to your case board?” I asked.
Silence came from Cooper.
Dead silence.
Then it hit me. Oh! My! God! I’d mentioned his case board. The one hidden in his basement behind the locked door.
Shit, shit, shit!
Before I could make an even bigger explosion in Cooper’s or my world, I hit the disconnect button and cut the detective off cold.
Practically jogging, I rushed to Jerry’s Hummer, jumped inside, and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” slamming the door behind me.
My phone buzzed.
I stuffed it in the bottom of my purse, leaned my head back, and closed my eyes.
I was so fucked.
* * *
When I was a kid, my mother used to take me shopping and pick out pink, frilly dresses with darling little bows and hearts all over them. She’d buy me patent leather shoes and would style my blonde curls into a Shirley Temple-like do. Then she’d prance me in front of her friends and sisters like a miniature show pony and they’d “oooh” and “ahhh” all over me.
She never asked if I wanted to wear the ridiculous Pepto-Bismol costumes. She never listened when I said the lace was making me itch or the shoes were pinching my feet.
Her princess-in-pink parade finally came to an end the day I wore one of her fancy tufts of lace during a mud-ball fight with Natalie and her cousins. Mom came unhinged and sent me to my room, where I cut the muddy dress into pieces and then proceeded to butcher my curly mop. When my father came home and found me crying in the middle of a pile of tattered lace and blonde curls, he put an end to the family beauty show circuit once and for all with a promise to shave all of our heads bald if Mom didn’t stop.
After that, Mom took up quilting and won lots of blue ribbons at the fair. I let my hair grow back and wore jeans and T-shirts like all of the other kids. And we all lived happily ever after … well, until my little sister, Susan, made it her mission in life to take everything that was mine and make it hers, including my children’s father. The bitch.
Whipping into Aunt Zoe’s drive, I slammed on the brakes. The shopping bags on the passenger side of the Picklemobile fell to the floor in a jumbled heap.
Glaring at the bags, I growled under my breath. Mom and Jerry would have gotten along like two peas in a pod.
Criminy. A freaking pink satin suit.
I mean really, who was going to buy a piece of property from a real estate agent wearing that ridiculous outfit? Only Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, and that’s because he had to put up with living in Barbie’s pastel townhouse with that damned silly poodle of hers in order to get laid. Poor sucker.
The late afternoon sunshine still held court in the sky, but from a lower angle so that it shined directly into my eyes instead of over my head. Par for the course, I figured.
Natalie would have laughed her ass off over this whole mess, cracked a joke, and made me laugh, too. But Natalie still wasn’t talking to me, not even to text me back.
I grabbed the bag with the pink suit, along with the ones with the white cashmere sweater dress that my children were sure to stain by just looking at it, and the fuschia June Cleaver-style day dress. In the ad with June’s dress, Jerry’d probably want me holding a frying pan with bacon and wearing bright red lipstick.
Seriously, did Tiffany have to put up with this shit? Her ads said: Smart and sexy Realtor here to serve your needs.
Mine were going to scream: Blonde bimbo here for you to bang while you buy a house.
Grumbling all the way up Aunt Zoe’s front porch steps, I shoved open the front door, threw the bags on the floor next to the stairwell post, and stomped toward the kitchen to get a stiff drink—something hard and potent that would make me forget my afternoon in hell.
I walked through the arched entry to the kitchen and found Aunt Zoe and Harvey sitting at the table, hands hovering over her Betty Boop cookie jar.
“Holy shitballs of fire!” Harvey shouted loud enough to make me wince. He burst out laughing. “Hot damn, I didn’t know the circus was in town this week. Where’d you leave your red nose?”
Crap, I’d forgotten about the makeover Jerry insisted I get. I wrinkled my non-red nose at him as I headed to the fridge. “You bray like a donkey, old man.”
That only made him wheeze harder.
“Look at those eyelashes.” Aunt Zoe walked over to where I stood in front of the open fridge door. She grabbed my jaw and gently twisted it to one side and then other. “How do those even stay on?”
“They look like someone glued spider legs to her eyelids,” Harvey said.
“They’re a little long,” I conceded.
“A little?” Aunt Zoe smiled. “I can feel a breeze when you blink, child.”
“I just hope they don’t rip off my eyelids when I remove them,” I said.
I grabbed a cold Corona from the door shelf. That would work. I joined them at the cookie jar, stealing two chocolate chip cookies from Harvey’s pile.
“What’s with all of the goop on your face?” he asked.
“My boss took me shopping today.”
Aunt Zoe’s gaze narrowed. “You mean Jane’s first husband?”
Last night after supper, I’d told her and Harvey about who was running the show down at Calamity Jane Realty. They were now both up-to-date on most of the current happenings, except for Cornelius and his opera house ghost, the old albino portrait, Prudence possibly knowing Jane’s killer, and my slip in regard to Cooper’s case board.
I grimaced at the thought of Cooper and shoved a whole cookie in my big mouth, barely tasting the chocolate.
I’d received three very terse voicemails from the detective throughout the course of the day. Judging from the amount of swear words per message, it was a good thing I’d left the hills and him behind. After much thought, I’d decided the best way to handle Cooper’s current level of fury was to avoid him until after Christmas, or at least until he didn’t want to shoot me on sight.
“Remember how I told you Jerry wanted to try a new marketing idea,” I said. “Well, I’m it. He wants to use me to bring in more clients—especially
males.”
“Are you gonna pose in your birthday suit?” Harvey asked.
“Hell, no.”
“Gotcha,” he said, “just topless then.”
I reached across the table and pinched his forearm. “Would you get your mind out of the gutter, old man.”
“What? I guaran-damn-tee you’d get a bunch of new clients knocking down your door if you showed your hooters.” His gaze lowered.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Quit thinking about my boobs.”
“I’m not. I’m thinking about Beatrice’s and the names we gave them. One was called—”
“Stop right there,” I said, cramming a cookie in his mouth.
“How do you feel about being used like this?” Aunt Zoe asked. “Like you’re some piece of man-candy.”
Aunt Zoe’s feminist roots still held strong. She was one of my main influences and cheerleaders when it came to taking charge and being the sole provider for my children without needing to lean on a man for help.
“Jerry promised me today that all of the ads would be tasteful,” I told her.
“No cherry licking then,” Harvey said, “or bending over to pick up the newspaper in a little swishy cowgirl skirt?”
Aunt Zoe and I both wrinkled our noses at him.
He blinked. “What? I’m just trying to think outside of the box.”
“These ads are not going in Penthouse,” I said, stealing another cookie from the crusty old cowpoke.
“I was thinking more along the lines of some of those fancy men’s magazines with the sexy babes on the front,” Harvey said.
“So, they’ll be tasteful,” Aunt Zoe said, her arms crossed now, her eyes squinting in obvious distaste. “But you’re still being treated like an object.”
“I know,” I said, tipping back the Corona. I could have used a lime wedge. “But I need this job, and if it does bring in new buying clients,” something I was in dire need of at the moment, especially if Cornelius flaked out on me, “then it’s worth swallowing my pride for now.”
She nodded slowly, but her neck seemed stiff. “I don’t like it. You’re beautiful just the way you are.”
“I don’t like it, either, and you’re biased about my looks.”
