Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  But it was a more appealing job than trying to fill in the accident report paperwork, and thinking about the damage that had been done to his beloved coupe during their last case. So he shoved them aside and left Stacy to the bar prep—and Penny to manage in his absence—while he bearded their inevitably surly cook in his kitchen.

  His life was busy enough, and Ginny was busy enough. He shouldn’t be wishing another researchtigations job would show up.

  But he was.

  2

  Ginny wasn’t familiar with Portland, so it took them another hour to navigate the surface roads, and find their destination, even with GPS.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Mallard. Welcome to the Pines.” The hotel she’d booked online and sight unseen ended up being a pleasant if bland four-story building just east of Portland’s city limits. It was a little run-down at the edges, but the older man at the check-in desk had a smile and a biscuit for Georgie, and the room was ready, so she could forgive things like beige-on-beige decorating and barely audible Muzak. Ginny approved. If she started getting more clients outside of Seattle, this could become a regular arrangement.

  Assuming that Georgie could handle being left alone in a strange place, anyway. Ginny really hoped she could, and not just because the security deposit wasn’t refundable in case of damage or unfortunate incidents.

  Georgie was clearly glad to be out of the car, sniffing everything from the lobby to the elevator to the hotel room from corner to corner, paying particular attention to the rug under the small writing desk.

  The room, as promised, was clean and large enough for Georgie’s crate to be set up in a corner of the room and not block access to the bathroom or closet. And it didn’t smell—to her nose, anyway—of any other dogs who might have stayed there before.

  “You going to be okay staying here, girl?” Ginny asked, setting up the travel crate, letting the dog sniff at it as well, until she was reassured that it smelled familiar and, yes, was her own. “Momma has to go to work for a few hours, but I’ll be back in time to walk you, promise.”

  When they were working a case, visiting sites, or questioning potential witnesses, Ginny and Tonica often brought Georgie: for all that she was a marshmallow personality-wise, her blunt-shaped head, strong legs, and broad chest gave her an intimidating appearance that could quell potential problems. Adding to that a strong protective streak, coupled with enough training that she wouldn’t do more than growl at someone unless given the command, Georgie was an effective problem-deterrent. But a wheelchair-bound woman in her seventies seemed unlikely to cause problems Ginny couldn’t handle by herself, with one hand tied behind her back and a pebble in her shoe.

  The crate approved, Georgie wandered into the bathroom, where Ginny could hear her lapping up some water from the bowl Ginny had set up, then the dog padded back out and curled up on her fleece bed in the crate, showing no aftereffects from her roadside upchuck. Ginny took out the new chew toy she had brought along as a bribe, and Georgie took it with her usual enthusiasm, settling back down to add some saliva and tooth marks to make it perfect.

  “Yeah, you’re not worried about being left alone in a strange place at all, are you? Tough girl, takes down bad guys and pals around with a pussycat, this is nothing.” Shar-peis, she had learned, were remarkably unflappable dogs. She couldn’t have chosen a better companion if she’d planned it, instead of unexpectedly falling in love at a sidewalk shelter display. “Maybe if the client’s a dog person, I’ll bring you along tomorrow, huh?”

  The thought made her slap herself, mentally, because she should have asked the client, when they were exchanging emails. Having a dog—especially one as unusual-looking as Georgie, with her loose folds of skin and piglet tail—was an excellent icebreaker. People seemed to relax around dogs—and if they didn’t, that told her something about them, too. But the information she and her new client had exchanged had been job focused, talking about what the woman wanted, and Ginny’s rates, and then arranging this visit to meet in person. Saying, “Hey, do you like dogs? Mind if I bring mine along?” hadn’t even occurred to Ginny.

  “Maybe I should put a photo of you up on the website,” she said now. “Would you like that, huh?”

  Georgie’s stump of a tail wagged now, as though she understood what Ginny was asking, but otherwise she seemed perfectly content to be where she was, barely even looking up when Ginny packed up her briefcase, gave her one final scratch, and left the room.

  In the elevator, Ginny checked the time—cutting it closer than she’d wanted, but still good—and then checked her briefcase again to make sure that she had everything she needed: tablet, cell phone, folder with brochures and flyers from places the client might want to consider for her party, and the printouts of the emails she and Mrs. Adaowsky had exchanged in case the unthinkable happened and her tablet ran out of charge. She was—as always—organized to a fare-thee-well. But not having Georgie’s familiar, comforting bulk leaning against her leg was weirdly . . . discomforting.

  “You don’t need a guard dog, Mallard; the woman’s hiring you to arrange an old girls’ reunion, not a gunrunner’s weekender.” That was her specialty: arranging things for people who didn’t have the time, energy, or interest in doing for themselves, from family vacations to baby showers to the one client who’d wanted her to organize his rather complicated dating schedule. Ginny grimaced at the memory: she’d charged extra for that one, on the “annoying client penalty” scale.

  But Mrs. Adaowsky sounded, at least via her emails, like a proverbial peach. Seventy-two, a retired teacher, who wanted to get her surviving college friends together for one last, as her email put it, “sedate hoo-rah.”

  Normally Ginny met her clients in a neutral third-party location—a coffee shop or café—or via a Skype or phone call. But her new client was hard of hearing, and had wanted to have a personal contact, at least for this first meeting. Which was fine—especially since the client was covering her travel costs, as an apology for the last-minute nature of the job.

  If Mrs. Adaowsky was a peach, then this job was a piece of cake, and Ginny almost felt bad about how much she was charging the woman. Almost. She got in the car, humming under her breath. Odds were, the worst thing that would go wrong was that the GPS screwed up again, she got lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and was late to the meeting.

  The GPS behaved itself perfectly. Ginny’s inability to shift lanes in time to hit her exit, though, cost her nearly ten minutes of backtracking. But there was on-street parking on the block she’d been directed to, and ten minutes late wasn’t too bad. Hopefully, the client wasn’t the sort to twitch over every minute like it was carved out of gold.

  “I’m terribly sorry—I completely missed the exit,” she said, practicing her apology out loud as she got out of the car, locked it, and looked for her destination.

  The address she’d been given turned out to be a pretty little house in a distinctly suburban neighborhood filled with pretty little houses, most of them single-story, with porches and tiny but tidy lawns. Old houses, she thought. Prewar, certainly; you could tell from something about the windows and doors. She liked architecture, but more in a “that’s pretty, that’s awkward” way, not being able to identify a particular style or decade.

  She found the right house number, and stepped up onto the porch, ringing the doorbell. It echoed inside the house, a warm tone loud enough that an older, deafer woman could hear it. But nobody answered.

  Maybe it took a while for her to get around, in a wheelchair. Ginny pressed the bell again after a few minutes, and for good measure used the heavy door knocker, too.

  “Hello?”

  She was late, but here. But her client wasn’t. Or at least, she wasn’t coming to the door.

  Ginny looked at the number on the door, then double-checked the address in her tablet. Right street name, right street number. She rang the doorbell a third time, and w
aited, then went back down the stairs to look at the house, hoping to see a curtain twitch, or some other sign of life.

  Nothing.

  “Great.” She reached into her pocket for her phone, and stopped, looking at the house again. “Wheelchair.” Mrs. Adaowsky had said she was in a wheelchair; that was why they had to meet here, because it was too difficult for her to get around. But there was no ramp to the front stairs, not even one of those temporary ones they used when someone had an accident.

  “Maybe there’s one around back?” It didn’t seem to make much sense to her, but she lived in a relatively new elevator building that had to conform to Americans with Disabilities Act standards—what did she know about adapting hundred-year-old houses? This was the right address . . . surely the woman had given her the right information!

  Maybe Mrs. Adaowsky had forgotten? Or she was somewhere she couldn’t hear the bell? Ginny called the phone number she’d been given, and waited. It rang three times, and on the third time she thought she heard an echo coming from the house.

  So she had the right location. But where was Mrs. Adaowsky? Ginny climbed the steps again and this time in addition to ringing the bell, she tried the door handle.

  It turned, and the door opened under her surprised hand. Huh.

  The phone was still ringing, somewhere in the house, and she pressed the END tab on her phone. Silence.

  “Hello? Mrs. Adaowsky?”

  She took a step in, and waited. Nothing stirred inside the house. The air was still and warm; if there was air-conditioning, it wasn’t turned on. “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Well, I was invited,” she said out loud, as though convincing a companion. “And the door was unlocked. Maybe she’s injured, needs my help?” That was a loophole the cops could use, wasn’t it? If they thought someone was in need of help? So it would probably cover her ass, too. . . .

  Why was she even thinking about cops? Paranoid, she was totally getting paranoid. The old woman might be in the bathroom, or taking a nap.

  “Hello?” Third time was the charm. She took another step into the house, looking around as she did. The décor was totally not what she’d expected, from the correspondence she’d had with the woman. She’d thought the house would be little-old-lady chic, full of overstuffed furniture and doilies, and fake flowers. Ginny knew that was a total stereotype but based on memories of her own grandmothers, not unfounded. Instead, the walls were painted a bland white, with a few framed photographs on the wall, and the floor was covered in wall-to-wall carpeting of a vague pale brown, the furniture obviously Ikea specials right out of the flatpack.

  In fact, she thought, it looked like every rental apartment she’d ever seen, not like an older woman’s well-lived-in home. Although—on closer look—the photographs were beautiful: scenes of mountains and vineyards, and busy city streets, all professionally framed. Mrs. Adaowsky had good taste. And maybe she’d had to refurnish everything to make room for a wheelchair. Ginny nodded. That made sense. Better to stay in your own home and get rid of some furniture than have to go into assisted living. That fit with the tone of the emails, too. Mrs. Adaowsky probably took no shit, and didn’t care what anyone else thought about her choices.

  The living room/dining area was one large open space, with the sofa and coffee table, plus a few chairs at one end and a long wooden table at the other. But instead of a table runner and fake flowers, or whatever she’d thought little old ladies left on their dining room tables, there were four laptops plugged into a power strip, and a massive, professional-quality color printer in the corner of the room, as though someone had decided to start a small business at home.

  Well, maybe she had. Maybe Mrs. Adaowsky was a total senior citizen start-up machine, and the furniture was gone not because of infirmity but activity. More power to her if so, and Ginny would feel better about working for someone with an actual income, rather than depending on Social Security and an iffy pension.

  But then where was Granny Go-Getter? Maybe those ten minutes Ginny was late had pissed the older woman off, and she’d gone for a stroll—a roll—to cool off? Or something else had gone wrong. . . .

  “Hello?” she called out again, all her previous doubts pushing against her wishful thinking. Her fingers twitched, and she rubbed them against the side of her skirt, nervously. This really didn’t feel good.

  She probably should leave. Instead, Ginny moved toward the back of the house, thinking that most household accidents happen in the kitchen or bathroom, trying not to think about the odds of encountering a little old lady facedown in the bathtub.

  A set of swinging wooden doors led her into the kitchen, a large, well-lit space that had made only token adaption to the twenty-first century. Ginny was pretty sure that the stove was older than she was, although everything was spotless. The refrigerator had a handful of takeout menus tacked to the side, and there was an impressive, industrial-looking coffeemaker on the counter, next to an electric teakettle, and several boxes of tea. It seemed more like an office kitchenette than a home kitchen. Maybe Mrs. Adaowsky didn’t like to cook, or her being in a wheelchair meant she wasn’t able to, or . . .

  Or this was the wrong house, despite her having the address written down and double-checked. Despite the fact that the phone number she’d been given rang here.

  The smart thing at this point—probably ten minutes ago, Ginny acknowledged—would be to backtrack, leave the house, go back to the hotel, and wait for the client to call her with an explanation and an apology for running late. That would be the smart thing to do.

  Instead, she kept going. A narrow door led to a cramped half bathroom, nothing but a plain toilet and a tiny sink. At the other end of the kitchen, a slightly wider door opened into what might have been a maid’s room at one point, maybe, but now looked like it had been repurposed into a photography studio.

  She blinked, and then looked again, but that first impression held. The space was painted entirely white, a sort of bland, nonreflective color, with a beige cloth covering the far wall. There was a single window, but it was covered with a blind the same muted white as the walls, making it appear almost invisible. There was a black metal cabinet against one wall, and a chair at the other, in front of the beige drape. That was the only furniture in the room. Curious, she bent down to see what was in the cabinet. The door opened easily, revealing a camera, lenses, and a tripod, all neatly put away on the bottom shelf, and on the top, a long, narrow plastic box. She knew she shouldn’t, but curiosity drove her to open it, revealing a stack of cards made of flexible white plastic, and a smaller stack next to it, with printing on them.

  “Huh.” She reached up to look at the smaller stack more closely, then frowned and went down the line, checking each one.

  When she’d been in college, someone down the hall had pulled in decent money making fake IDs for underage drinkers. He’d set up an oversized replica of a driver’s license, and the person buying it would stand in front of the display and have their photo taken, then he’d downsize the entire thing and laminate it. A quick glance by a bartender or bouncer wouldn’t have seen anything fake about it.

  These looked about a thousand times more sophisticated, but were pretty clearly fake. Unless the DMV in Oregon worked out of residential homes. “I know we’re outsourcing everything these days,” she said, “but that’s a bit extreme.”

  The sound of her voice echoed in the enclosed space, reminding her that she was poking around in a stranger’s house, and while making fake IDs might be amusing in college, it was still illegal. Whoever was involved probably would not be happy about finding her in there. And it was pretty clear by now that Mrs. Adaowsky was not at home, and odds were, this wasn’t her home at all.

  Right now, she was hoping the latter.

  Ginny replaced the card in the box and wiped her hand against the fabric of her skirt, then retreated back into the kitchen, tur
ning off the light as she went. Her nerves were prickling now, and the need to be out of the house overwhelmed her worry about her missing client. She would call again once she was in the car, and see if she’d misread their meeting place somehow.

  The bright lime-green paint of the kitchen seemed unbearably gaudy after the dimmer white of the smaller room, and Ginny squinted instinctively, turning to push open the swinging door back into the living room, when her entire body froze.

  She was almost a hundred percent certain that the body hadn’t been there before.

  3

  She’d never had to call 911 before. The dispatcher took her information, confirmed her number and location because she was using her cell phone with a Seattle address, then told her to go wait outside, and not to touch anything.

  She sat on the front porch, wishing Georgie was with her, for nearly half an hour before the ambulance arrived, a cop car hot on its wheels. To be fair, Ginny admitted it wasn’t as though the person inside was going to mind waiting, and she wasn’t sure she could have stood up steadily before then. The sirens drew a few people outside, staring at the house, and Ginny suspected there were a bunch of curtains being pulled aside in other houses. This might be the most excitement this block had seen in years.

  The paramedics pushed past her with their gear, followed by one of the cops. The other walked up to Ginny and—after identifying her—gave her a thorough once-over and motioned for her to come down off the porch. “You okay?”

  “For not-okay versions of okay, yeah,” she managed to say, and his mouth twisted a little in what she thought might have been a smile. He was middle-aged, with an odd mole next to his left eye, and an attitude that said he’d been on the job a few years too long, but his voice was gentle when he had her run through everything she’d seen and done that morning.

  He wrote down everything Ginny said, then glanced back at the house and asked her again, “And you didn’t touch anything?”