Deeply, Desperately

by Heather Webber

  Slowly, Leo stood and held out his hand. “Thanks, Ms. Valentine.”

  I didn’t offer mine. “If you don’t mind …”

  He laughed. “Guess you had enough for today, eh?”

  I was still a little dizzy from his reading. It always took a few minutes to shake off the lingering effects of a vision. “A little. But please call me if you think of anything else.”

  “Yeah,” Preston said. “Call her.”

  He smiled, squinted at us. “You two aren’t related, are you?”

  We both snorted.

  “Us?” I said. “No. What makes you think so?”

  True enough, we were both blondes, though mine was more of a natural honey and hers was straight-from-the-bottle platinum, but that’s where the similarities ended. I was five inches taller than her five foot three and probably a good forty pounds heavier, as I didn’t think she weighed more than a hundred pounds. Her eyes were an inquisitive blue, mine were smoky amber. She had Kewpie-doll lips, while mine were wider, plumper. I had a long nose, a heart-shaped face, eyes that turned slightly downward. Her nose was upturned, her face a perfect oval, and her eyes were just a hairsbreadth too close together.

  “Just something,” he said.

  “Only child,” I added, just for further clarification.

  Preston shot a look at me I couldn’t quite interpret, then quickly dropped her gaze to the ground.

  Odd. Very, very odd. Where were her jaunty remarks? Her ribbing? It was unlike her not to take a stab at teasing me.

  “Maybe it’s just ’cause you squabble like siblings,” Leo finally said.

  Okay, the squabble thing I could see.

  Leo crossed to the door, stopped, and looked back at us, a serious spark in his eye. His hands twisted nervously. “I loved my wife, Ms. Valentine, I really did. But my heart never let go of Joanne. I’m not getting any younger. If she’s able and willing, I’d like my last days to be spent with her.”

  Throat tight and unable to say anything, I nodded.

  Preston reached for her notebook, scribbled away as Leo turned left into the reception area at the end of the hall. My phone buzzed again.

  “You gonna get that or do you like the vibration?” Preston tucked her notebook and pen into her bag. She hauled it onto her shoulder.

  “You’re very charming,” I told her. I pulled out my phone, checked the message. It was from Marisol. RECON 1 PM. DONT BE LATE.

  I was due to meet her downstairs in fifteen minutes, which didn’t give me any time to run upstairs to SD Investigations to tell Sean about my meeting with Leo.

  Preston blatantly read over my shoulder. I quickly cleared the screen.

  “Recon, huh? Reconnaissance? Sounds exciting.”

  “Good-bye, Preston.”

  “Maybe I should come along? Is it for a client?”

  “Good-bye, Preston.”

  My phone vibrated in my hand, an incoming call. I checked the ID screen—Aiden Holliday, a Massachusetts State Police detective lieutenant. Through him I’d become a police consultant helping to solve missing person cases—mostly cold cases but some current ones as well. Was there a new case?

  Or did his call have something to do with the strange letters I’d been receiving?

  I’d have to keep wondering. A conversation with Aiden wasn’t something I wanted to have in front of Preston. I let the call go through to voice mail.

  “Not going to answer?” she asked. “Rather rude of you.”

  “Good-bye, Preston.”

  She leaned against the doorjamb, smiling. “C’mon, you can tell me.”

  “What?” I asked, biting back a sigh.

  “Fruit of the Loom, right?”

  She must have seen the murderous look in my eyes because she quickly said, “I’m going, I’m going.” Halfway down the hall, she looked back, over her shoulder. “But I’ll be back.”

  I didn’t need the reminder.

  2

  Thirty minutes later, I was reconnoitering with Marisol. I glanced around nervously as we tiptoed down the spacious corridor that linked four nearly identical loft-style condos. No one seemed to be around on a Wednesday afternoon, but we couldn’t be too careful.

  We didn’t want any witnesses.

  “ ’Twas two weeks before Christmas and all through the house—”

  “Will you stop it?” I asked, my whisper harsh. “Someone will hear you.”

  9 × 6 is 54.

  In times of stress, I turned to solving simple math problems in my head. For some reason it soothed my troubled mind like nothing else.

  Marisol Valerius stopped short, and I bumped into her. Glancing up at me, she said, “Where’s your holiday spirit?”

  “You shouldn’t be so giddy. I’m pretty sure breaking and entering is a felony.”

  “Lucy, Lucy,” she tsked. Her brown eyes danced as she slid a key into the lock of unit 4A, twisting the knob and pushing open the door. “It’s not breaking and entering if we have a key, now is it?”

  “I’m pretty sure it is.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “One of us has to be reasonable here.” I quickly closed the door behind us while she disabled the beeping alarm, punching in the code we both knew by heart.

  “You didn’t have to come along.” Her sleek black bob shone as she swung her head from side to side, taking in the living room.

  I’d known her since we were three, had been best friends with her since the age of five. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for her. “As if I had a choice.”

  “You could have stayed downstairs in the lobby.”

  “If Em finds out …” I said.

  “She’ll thank us.”

  After Marisol picked me up at the corner of Beacon and Charles, she dropped the bombshell: she was on a hunt for irrefutable evidence that Joseph Betancourt was a “cheating, slimy scuzball who needed to be exposed before the wedding.”

  Joseph, aka the cheating, slimy scuzball, was due to marry our best friend Emerson Baumbach on Valentine’s Day.

  “Look, just look,” Marisol said in disgust.

  Everything was neat, tidy. Hard not to be with the minimalist style. There was a streamlined L-shaped couch, a sculptured coffee table, two chrome chairs. Dark hardwood covered the floors. The fixtures were black and chrome. On the wall was a hideous piece of art I’d never seen before: all red squares, silver rectangles, oblong purples, and yellow circles with dots in the center. I squinted. Those circles looked a lot like breasts. And those oblongs … My eyes widened.

  “What?” I pulled my gaze from the suggestive painting. Aside from exhibiting some seriously bad taste in art, the place was immaculate.

  “It’s two weeks till Christmas and there’s not a Ho Ho Ho to be seen.”

  I opened my mouth. Marisol spun my way, a finger jabbing the air. “Don’t even.”

  I blinked innocently. “What?”

  “Make a comment about my love life.”

  She knew me too well. “I’d never!”

  And she was right—there wasn’t a single sign of Christmas. Cheery, I mused sardonically, thinking of my cottage, which looked as though Christmas had exploded inside. It was my favorite time of year.

  “You would so.”

  “How is Butch these days?” I asked, following her into the sparkling kitchen, which was smothered in black granite and stainless steel. Butch was her latest boyfriend, a match made in a roundabout way by my grandmother, Dovie.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “The fact that he looks like Matt Damon is really the only thing he has going for him. We don’t really have anything in common.” Marisol closed one drawer, opened another. “Maybe I should make an appointment with your dad.”

  My father’s matchmaking had a 98 percent success rate. It was all in the auras. Every person carried with them an aura that is invisible to most people, but not to Valentines. And though we loved to play up the Cupid theory, truth was, the ability to read au
ras is a type of ESP—just like my ability to find lost objects.

  But our clients didn’t know about the auras. Neither did Marisol or Em. I could hardly imagine how they’d react. They were still getting used to the idea of me being psychic, something they’d learned only recently. And I couldn’t tell them about my father’s secret—the family had decided long ago never to tell anyone for fear of being labeled a fraud. Only a select few outsiders, like my father’s longtime valet and family friend Raphael, knew. The Valentines simply wanted to make matches and … make a lot of money. It wasn’t by luck that my father, the King of Love, was one of the richest men in the country. He loved being a minor celebrity, though a recent brush with the dark side of media attention had dampened his enthusiasm a bit.

  “Are you really ready to settle down?” I couldn’t see her married or with kids. Never mind owning a minivan, a complete set of Calphalon, or one of those enormous jungle gyms that could house a small family under its rock wall.

  She opened kitchen drawers, shuffled through takeout menus. “Who said anything about settling? What’s wrong with just having a companion? Shacking up, maybe?”

  I should have known. Marisol was marriagephobic. “Nothing, I suppose. But people do like to get married. Settle down.” Softly, I added, “People like Em.”

  And me, though I didn’t say it. I was fighting against Cupid’s Curse as it was—making finding true love virtually impossible. There was certainly no need to tempt the fates as well. As of right now Sean and I were happy and taking it day by day. Did I want more? Absolutely. But I also knew better. Not a single Valentine marriage had ever survived Cupid’s Curse—not even my parents’, though they pretended otherwise in an effort to keep the public from finding out that the King of Love himself couldn’t keep a marriage together.

  Marisol pulled a notepad from the drawer. “No one would be more thrilled than me to see Em settled down and happy. But he isn’t the man for her.”

  “He” being Joseph. Marisol never referred to him by name, simply because she had never—ever—liked him.

  “I mean, look around,” she continued. “There aren’t even any Christmas cards out. Where’s the tree? You know how Em likes a big tree.”

  They certainly had the ceiling height. Twelve, fourteen feet. “Maybe they haven’t gotten around to getting one yet.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes. “When are you going to come around?”

  “I’m thinking never. Joseph seems like a perfectly … fine man.” He was no Sean Donahue, but I kept that to myself. “Em is happy. We should just tiptoe right back out that door and—”

  “Em doesn’t know happy. And I can’t believe you’re as blinded by him as she is.”

  I laid a hand on her arm. “But how do you know he’s not good enough? Em’s never said a bad word about him.”

  “Look, Lucy, do you ever just get a vibe? A feeling? Down deep?”

  “Do you remember who you’re talking to?”

  “Okay, then. You should know. There’s something just off. I can feel it.” She held up the notepad. “There’s a phone number indented.” She found a pencil in one of the drawers and started coloring over the numbers—a trick straight out of a Magnum, PI rerun.

  She was utterly and completely convinced that Joseph was up to no good. I could either walk away from all this, dismissing her gut feeling, or I could trust her—just like I asked people who didn’t entirely understand my abilities to trust me.

  Put like that, I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. “Can you read the number?”

  Pulling out her cell phone, she nodded and punched in the seven digits. She put the phone on speaker so I could hear.

  A female voice said, “Spar, reservations.”

  Marisol didn’t miss a beat. “Sorry, wrong number.” She hung up and looked at me. “See?”

  She did have a point. Spar was an ultratrendy bar in the Back Bay and known as one of the biggest meat markets around for up-and-comers. I didn’t point out that Joseph probably took clients there—as an executive banker, he was out to impress potential business partners and a trip to Spar would be just the thing for a certain clientele.

  “He’s probably been out living it up while Em was working twenty-hour shifts at the hospital.”

  “But what about now?” I asked. Em had quit her job as a pediatric intern and was planning on going back to school for an early-education degree. “Em doesn’t start classes until January. She’s home all the time now.”

  Marisol strode into Em and Joseph’s bedroom. I stopped at the door. There was no way I was going in. I looked around. Minimalist in there too, with only a bed and two nightstands. On Em’s, there were two picture frames. One held a black-and-white engagement photo of her and Joseph, looking all demure and sophisticated. The other was a picture of Em, Marisol, and me, about seven years old, sitting on a beach blanket having just eaten red, white, and blue Popsicles. Our arms were linked so tight it looked as if we were never planning on letting go of each other. We were all grinning ear to ear, teeth missing, our lips smeared in red and blue. We hadn’t a care in the world at that point, not really.

  And now here Marisol and I were, breaking and entering Em’s home. Something like this could cause a serious ripple in our friendship with Em—if she ever found out.

  She could never find out.

  “Sure, but she’s so wrapped up in planning the wedding—Aha!”

  Marisol came out of the bathroom, carrying a box of Trojans in the air like a trophy.

  “I think we should go,” I said, peeking over my shoulder. I was quite sure GUILTY was stamped all over my face.

  “Hidden behind a stack of washcloths in his vanity.”

  I closed my eyes, counted to ten.

  “Em’s been on the pill since she was sixteen,” Marisol pointed out.

  I cracked open an eyelid. I’d forgotten. “Maybe they’re old.”

  Marisol checked the expiration date. “Nope. New.”

  I hadn’t even known condoms had an expiration date. I should probably learn things like that if I wanted to take my relationship with Sean to the next level. “Okay, so what now?”

  “Now,” she said, a wicked gleam in her eye, “we get serious.”

  As if breaking and entering and poking through your best friend’s private life wasn’t serious. Slightly afraid of the answer, I asked, “What do you have in mind?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, but I’m going to need your help.”

  3

  Taking a deep breath, I raised the collar of my wool peacoat against the bitterly cold December gusts blowing through the streets of downtown Boston. Marisol had dropped me off at the corner, and I trudged, head down, against the cold, toward the Valentine, Inc., office.

  The three-story brick building, sandwiched between similar brick buildings on touristy Beacon Street, had been owned by my family for years and years. The Porcupine, a small restaurant leased by Maggie Constantine, occupied the first floor; Valentine, Inc., the second; and the third floor was leased to Sam Donahue, Sean’s brother. In the past, their private investigation company, SD Investigations, had provided discounted services to Valentine, Inc., in exchange for a break in the rent, and now Lost Loves was one of SD Investigation’s biggest clients.

  Beacon Street was crowded for three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I noticed the shopping bags in people’s gloved hands and winced. I’d been working so much I hadn’t bought many Christmas presents yet.

  I glanced in the windows of the Porcupine and wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Raphael inside manning the cash register. He’d recently begun to date Maggie, the Porcupine’s feisty owner—a match nearly five years in the making. By the color of their auras, my father had known they were destined for each other but had bided his time until they figured it out for themselves.

  Technically Raphael still worked as my father’s right-hand man, but lately he’d been spending more and more time at the Porcupine, helping Maggie with day-to
-day operations.

  I pushed open the door, breathed in delicious scents of sautéing garlic and onion.

  Raphael beamed when he saw me. “Uva! You’re a sight for these old eyes.” He came around the counter and wrapped me in a hug. Raphael gave the best hugs—and had been giving them to me since I was three years old.

  After my parents secretly separated twenty-five years ago, my father had moved to his penthouse in Boston and hired Raphael to take care of his life … and me. Dad liked to swoop in to lavish me with love and praise, or lecture about impudence and attitude, but hated all the in-between. When I was little, board games bored him. Homework drove him to the liquor cabinet. And any talk of proms, boyfriends, makeup, or school events had him running for the door. He left that all to Raphael—who hadn’t minded a bit.

  “Hardly old, Pasa,” I said, using my special nickname for him.

  Raphael was on the shorter side of five ten, with crinkled olive skin, dark eyes, and salt-and-pepper hair, more pepper than salt. Recently he’d started growing a mustache and beard, and I couldn’t get over the change. I wasn’t a fan of the look, but Maggie loved it.

  My opinion lost out in that battle.

  “Mmm-hmm. You wouldn’t be biased, Uva?”

  He’d been calling me “Uva,” Spanish for grape, since the day he chaperoned one of my school field trips when I was five years old. I’d thrown a tantrum on the deck of the Mayflower II and turned as purple as a Concord grape. Not long after I began calling him “Pasa,” Spanish for raisin.

  Raphael had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. There were photos of us together making Play-Doh cookies when I was three, of him waving to me as I stepped on the school bus my first day of kindergarten (my mother was a firm believer in public education, much to my father’s dismay), at my sixth grade, eighth grade, and high school graduations. As best I could recall, he’d never missed an important event in my life. Not a single one.

  I loved him more than I could ever express.

  I sat at the lunch counter. “Hardly.”

  “Coffee?”

  “I’d die for coffee.” I couldn’t feel my fingers. If this weather kept up, it was going to be the coldest winter on record.