Heart vs. Humbug

by MJ Rodgers

  “And I think I’m beginning to like you, Brett Merlin,” Mab said as she walked over to him and slipped her arm into his. She smiled up into his face. “So now what?”

  “Now you’d best get ready for the worst. Sergeant Patterson doesn’t agree with my assessment of this situation. He’s going to try to prove you did it.”

  “So it’s up to us to find out who really did. Who do you think was upset enough at your uncle to attack him?”

  “That may be the wrong question, Mab,” Octavia said, recovering from her initial stupefying surprise at seeing this new side of Brett.

  “Why the wrong question?” Mab asked her.

  “Sergeant Patterson said Scroogen’s wound was superficial. It seems to me that if someone really wanted to do Scroogen an injury, he would have inflicted a far more serious blow.”

  “Octavia is right,” Brett said. “This attack was far more likely an attempt to injure you, Mab, than my uncle.”

  “Because it was made to look as though I had done it,” Mab said. “Yes, I see.”

  “So maybe, Mab, what we should be asking is who dislikes you enough to try to cause you this kind of trouble?”

  “That can’t be right. Other than the Scrooge...sorry, I mean your uncle, I can’t imagine anyone disliking me enough to give me this kind of grief.”

  “Well then, let’s start with the basics,” Octavia said. “Who has keys to the greenhouse and this storeroom?”

  “The greenhouse is never locked. We want our members to feel they can come and go as they please to tend their gardens or just to sit on one of the corner benches and enjoy the plants and the controlled temperature and full-spectrum fluorescents that Douglas installed.”

  “This Douglas, is he a member of the Silver Power League?” Brett asked.

  “Yes. He engineered the climatic controls in our greenhouse, which are monitored through that computer over there. The greenhouse simulates bright spring daytime light twelve hours straight during the fall and winter. It can get so gloomy here in Washington during this time of year, what with so many overcast days. Many of our members find the greenhouse’s simulated light not only keeps the plants growing all year long, but also brightens their spirits.”

  “So anyone might enter the greenhouse,” Octavia said, getting back to the subject. “But you used a key to get into this storeroom.”

  “Yes. As I said before, the expensive computer system that controls our greenhouse’s climate is kept here, along with our stationery, office supplies and an extension telephone in case of emergencies.” Mab paused to point at the telephone instrument sitting on the desk next to the computer keyboard.

  “I can see putting the computer here, but wouldn’t your supplies be more accessible in the community center?” Brett said.

  “Constance, our designer, was quite adamant that the center’s open architecture would have been ruined by the addition of a storage room,” Mab replied. “Since we had to lock up the computer, anyway, it seemed to make sense to put everything needing security in this one room.”

  “Who has keys to this room?” Octavia asked.

  “Only members of the Silver Power League’s executive committee.”

  “So that’s you, John, Constance and Douglas, right?”

  “Right.”

  Brett crouched until he was eye level with the doorknob. He scrutinized it carefully.

  “Doesn’t look like it’s been tampered with to me. But to be certain, we’d better ask an expert.”

  Octavia moved over to the door and bent down to see for herself. “You going to ask Coltrane to come by?”

  “Unless you want to give A.J. a call.”

  Octavia read a solid professional respect in his silver eyes and a fluid personal amusement playing around his mouth.

  A sudden delicious tingling began in her fingertips and spread throughout her body as the realization hit her on a whole new level that her formidable adversary had become her ally.

  “You two can’t really think someone broke in here just to steal my gardening supplies out of this cabinet?” Mab asked.

  Her grandmother’s question had Octavia straightening up and facing her.

  “Broke in or let themselves in,” she answered. “How else could they have gotten them?”

  “But, Octavia, that doesn’t make any sense. No one knew my gloves or gardening tool were in here. I didn’t even tell the woman who asked me to look after her flower bed.”

  “You’re sure you told no one? Not even a word in passing?”

  “I’m sure. It was a favor I was doing for a friend. There was no reason to broadcast it.”

  “What about when you brought your gloves and the cultivator into the storeroom. Did someone see you then?”

  “No.”

  “Have you used your cultivator since you brought it down?”

  Mab shook her head. “I checked on the flower bed earlier this week and everything was fine.”

  “I saw some dirt on the gloves and cultivator.”

  “That’s because I had weeded my backyard berry bushes the morning I brought the tools to the center.”

  “Then that narrows down our immediate suspects to three people,” Brett said, “providing this lock wasn’t jimmied.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Mab said. “You’re not going to convince me that John or Constance or Douglas used my gloves and gardening tool to attack the Scrooge.”

  “Mab, they’ve all been pretty angry at the guy,” Octavia reminded her. “Maybe when one of them opened this supply cabinet and just happened to see your gardening tool and gloves, he or she didn’t realize who they belonged to. Maybe there was no intent for you to be blamed.”

  “Octavia, my initials are carved on the handle of that gardening tool. Whoever took it had to know it was mine.”

  “Unless whoever took it didn’t have his or her glasses handy. Constance is the only one who wears her glasses all the time. I’ve never even seen you put yours on unless you have to read or study something up close.”

  Mab shook her head. “We both know even if the person who took my gardening tool didn’t immediately see my initials, he still had to have known it and the gloves belonged to one of the members of the executive committee. No, none of them would have attacked the Scrooge like that, and none of them would have implicated another in the act. And that is the end to that.”

  “Mab, here you are,” Constance said as she stepped into the storeroom. “Douglas said he thought he saw you come in here. Is everything all right?”

  “Fine,” Mab said, turning to her.

  Constance was eyeing Brett suspiciously.

  “It’s all right, Constance,” Mab said. “Mr. Merlin is trying to help.”

  “You’ve been gone for such a long time, I thought—”

  “Sergeant Patterson just had a lot of questions,” Mab interjected quickly. “How is the cleanup coming?”

  “Douglas’s boys are finished with the pumping. It’s disinfectant time. Before we get started, we’re going to eat. There’s quite a spread set up. Plenty for all who are willing to work,” Constance added as she looked meaningfully at Octavia.

  “Octavia is hardly dressed for a cleanup job. My sweats are in the trunk of my car. Come, you can help me get them.”

  “What do you think?” Brett asked Octavia a few minutes later as they strolled together down the greenhouse path.

  He watched her glide over to a cushioned bench in the corner opposite the storeroom and slip onto its seat. He sat beside her, resting his elbows on the back of the bench.

  “A lot of the greenery is decorated with Christmas ornaments,” she said, pointing to the tiny golden balls and silver bells and the two miniature fir trees with lights looped around their branches. “They are distracting enough that someone might sit here unobserved.”

  “Still, even if someone sat here and watched Mab enter the storeroom carrying her cultivator and gloves, that person would still have needed a key to get in.”


  “Yes, it still comes back to who has a key, doesn’t it.”

  “What do you know about the other members of this executive committee of the Silver Power League?”

  “Not a lot, really. Except that they’re Mab’s friends. Which presents a major problem. Mab is loyal to the end. She’s not going to be much help in fingering one of them.”

  “Then it’s going to be up to us to find out which one attacked Scroogen.”

  She turned to look at him directly. “Are you really willing to help?”

  Brett found himself suddenly responding not just to Octavia’s question but to the accompanying warmth in her eyes. His palms began to perspire and the muscles at the back of his neck began to tighten.

  “He was my uncle. Of course I want to find out who attacked him.”

  She laid her hand on his arm. He felt his muscles immediately and involuntarily tensing beneath her light touch.

  “I’m sorry for the pain that his passing must have caused you and his family.”

  “Dole and I didn’t really know each other,” he heard himself admitting.

  “You were helping him for your aunt’s sake, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is she holding up?”

  “She’s been a lot better.”

  Her hand squeezed his arm. Then she released the pressure on his arm, removed her hand and looked away.

  “I can’t get over what an engineering marvel this greenhouse is. Did you notice the temperature and humidity gradations as you walked through? Douglas’s computer system must alter the heat and humidity for individual sections so that diverse plants can exist in a kind of blended harmony. Amazing.”

  He knew she had changed the subject to relieve any awkwardness he might be feeling. She had a highly developed and exceptionally appealing sense of tact. Exceptionally appealing.

  More and more he was becoming confused as to just who she was. And more and more he was becoming alarmed at how much he wanted to know.

  “So do I call A.J. or do you call Coltrane?” she asked after a moment’s silence.

  “Let me call Coltrane,” Brett decided immediately. “I pulled him off the case last night and it irritated him. He’ll be delighted to be given the go-ahead again.”

  “Why did you pull him off the case?”

  “After the sewage spilling incident at the community center, Dole fired me.”

  “Really? What a foolish move.”

  “Why do you assume it was a foolish move? How do you know he didn’t have cause?”

  “Brett, please, what cause could there possibly be to fire you?”

  Her remark had been made in an off-hand way with, obviously, no intent to praise. Brett found himself quite pleased by it, anyway.

  “Why would Coltrane be irritated at being called off the case?” Octavia wanted to know.

  “He hates to leave things hanging, questions unanswered,” Brett said. “Actually, I wish I hadn’t called him off last night. If he had had someone still following your grandmother, he would have been able to give her an alibi this morning.”

  “Thanks for believing in her innocence. And for telling her. It means a great deal to both of us.”

  She leaned over then and kissed him, full on the lips, taking him once again completely by surprise.

  Brett’s body responded before a single thought could register in his brain. His lips pressed eagerly, hungrily, against hers.

  She melted against him, her scent mixing with her pleasurable sighs in an intoxicating brew.

  And he drank her in, thirstily, encircling her in his arms, his muscles taut from his neck to his waist as desire coiled tight and deep inside him.

  She tasted meltingly hot and sweet, like a marshmallow suddenly thrust over a leaping flame. His lips moved over the soft fullness of hers again and again, unable to get enough of her feel and flavor.

  Her arms circled his waist. He could feel her breasts against his chest, as soft and yielding as the sighs escaping from her lips.

  Another total surprise. The woman who had warred with him so valiantly was answering his offensive with complete surrender.

  A heat burgeoned within him...and a need like none he had ever known.

  He pulled back, reeling at the roaring demand of it. His breath came out in ragged gasps. His muscles were so coiled in readiness, his want of her so deep, he ached.

  He knew he should get up and leave now. He didn’t even know why he had come. All he promised Nancy was that he’d find out how Dole had died. The autopsy being conducted right this moment would give him that answer soon enough. So what in the hell was he doing here?

  It was a stupid question. She was why he was here. He couldn’t get her out of his mind, not from the first, no matter how much he had tried to deny it. He wanted her so damn much—too damn much.

  And her? What about her? What did she want?

  She was sitting there staring at him with a flush on her face and an unfathomable expression in her deep blue eyes. She had responded to him totally. Yet now she seemed perfectly content just to sit there, one of those damn secretive smiles on her face, neither encouraging nor discouraging.

  It was maddening.

  He pulled her to him, breast to breast. He buried his head in the silk of her hair, drinking in the perfume of it and the feel of her until he felt drunk with them.

  “I never know what you’re going to say or do next,” he said. “Does everyone have this trouble with you?”

  “It depends on what kind of trouble they want to have with me,” she said. “So, what’s our first move?”

  “First move?” he repeated. By his figuring, they were way past first moves.

  “Yes,” Octavia said, looking and sounding perfectly serious as she leaned out of his arms. “There must be a logical starting place to begin to prove my grandmother innocent.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he answered like a man without a mind.

  Naturally, she was talking about business since he had assumed she was referring to their personal relationship. He should know by now that when it came to Octavia, the opposite of what he expected would always be what he got.

  For one crazy, impossible moment he found that thought tremendously exciting.

  His beeper went off. He dug it out of his pocket.

  “It’s Sergeant Patterson’s number. I can call him back on the car phone.”

  He rose and offered her his hand. She slipped both her hands into his as she stood, something else that he found tremendously exciting.

  At that moment he had no idea what he was doing or where he was heading. He only knew that with Octavia Osborne by his side, the answers would be nothing he expected.

  * * *

  ZANE COLTRANE BENT DOWN to eye the lock on the storeroom door, a small intense flashlight in his clublike hand. He was a dark, mammoth man, dressed in black, with an expressionless face and eyes like shadows. Octavia could picture him on the trail of an unsuspecting quarry, effectively fading into the background whenever anyone looked his way. She did not find the image comfortable.

  After a long moment of scrutiny, Zane rose to a standing position and addressed Brett.

  “No scratches or lateral grooves. It hasn’t been picked.”

  “Well, that answers that question,” Brett said. “So now we have just those three suspects I told you about earlier.”

  “And you want background checks on them all as soon as possible,” Zane said, his big, clumsy-looking hands deftly slipping the tiny flashlight back into his breast pocket. “I’ll put my people on it right away.”

  Zane turned to walk up the greenhouse path. A second later, he had disappeared out of sight, without a sound.

  “A.J. might take offense if I call her off the scent on this case,” Octavia said to Brett.

  “Dole was my uncle.”

  She nodded at the implication in his words. They left the locked storeroom door, walking along the path bisecting the plants. Octavia stole a loo
k at Brett’s face.

  “Something disturbed you about that telephone conversation you had with Sergeant Patterson earlier. What was it?”

  “The autopsy this afternoon was inconclusive.”

  “I see. So it wasn’t a standard medical problem, like a heart attack, that killed your uncle. Do they have any ideas?”

  “Not a clue. If the Seattle toxicology lab is backed up, there’s no telling when they’ll know. I had to call my aunt.”

  Octavia understood now why Brett had seemed so solemn since that call. He may not have been close to his uncle, but she suspected he had deep feelings for his aunt.

  “The most difficult thing sometimes is the waiting,” she said, trying to let him know she understood. “Even hard answers relieve the tension of not knowing.”

  She checked her watch as her stomach registered a growling complaint. “Just as I thought. I’m way overdue for lunch. Come on. I’ll treat.”

  “No one will be serving lunch this late, Octavia. Restaurants are preparing for dinner.”

  “Not to worry. I know just the place.”

  Octavia gave Brett directions to a tiny health food store in the back of a small neighborhood shopping center. When he stopped the car in front of it, he glanced over at Octavia with a wonderful look of disbelief on his face.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “They have a refreshment counter at the back.”

  Brett was still shaking his head when he came around to open the passenger door and take her hand to help her out of the car. She liked how automatic these courteous gestures were to him. In some ways, he struck her as a man out of his time. She liked that, too.

  “I never would have picked you to be a health nut,” he said as he closed the car door behind her.

  “Actually, I eat all kinds of foods. I’ve always found that what’s on the menu is far less important than what’s in the mind of the cook, haven’t you?”

  “I might if I had any idea what that means.”

  She laughed at the confusion in his voice.

  Once inside the store, Octavia threaded her way through the haphazard shelves, full of herbs and vitamins and minerals in every size and shape, to the small white Formica refreshment counter in the back. It was quarter-moon-shaped with just two bar stools. Behind the counter, a mural had been painted of a giant Santa sleigh, the racks of herbs made to appear like wrapped packages within it. Octavia found the effect charming.