Poison Ivy

by Misty Simon

  And for once he looked sheepish. Where was the confident, ballsy guy who didn’t care about anything or the way it made him look? Oh, jeez, another facet found.

  Rising slowly to his feet, Ben gave me a lopsided smile and cupped my chin, leaning down to place a soft kiss on my forehead before heading in the direction of the second bathroom. “Morning,” he called over his shoulder.

  “And what, pray tell, was that, Miss Ivy?” From the looks of her, Bella was done in the bathroom, and as usual was stunning even after sleeping on a couch.

  “I am not at all sure, Miss Bella, but I’ve never been so turned on by a mere brushing of lips over my forehead. Not even when I had a major crush on the next-door neighbor boy and he touched my forehead to check for fever during babysitting duty.”

  “That’s a little sick, Ivy. Haven’t you had any hot moments in your life since a babysitter?”

  “The answer to that question is ‘not really,’ and you had to be there.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  As I walked the short distance to The Masked Shoppe, I fervently prayed everyone was as exhausted as I was after the long night and would not be waiting in front of the store to return their costumes. It was Sunday, after all, and the shop would stay open until seven tonight to accommodate everyone.

  Of course my life did not run in that kind of nice logical line. So, instead of the empty stoop I was hoping for, I came upon a crowd of people. In the center of that crowd was Kitty, and she, of course, was talking.

  “Well, folks, really, I expect Ivy at any moment. I know she’ll remember to come and open the store for all of you. Surely she didn’t get so drunk last night she would forget everyone was bringing back their costumes today. I wish I could do it for her, but she’s the boss and has the only key.”

  I couldn’t decide whether to call her a dirty name or throw her out in the street and tell her never to darken my frickin’ door again. I absolutely did not need this right now.

  But the old Ivy rose from deep inside and I kept my mouth shut. It was better to smile and get the job done instead of calling Kitty out before I even had a decent cup of coffee.

  I made a production of looking at the sign on the door and then at the watch on my wrist. “Hi folks, sorry I’m on time.” That got a laugh from a couple of people, though not from Kitty, who quickly transformed her scowl into the pleasant smile I was used to seeing on her narrow face. I’d always thought it was fake, and now I knew she could whip it out anytime she wanted to and it would look the same as when she genuinely smiled. If she’d ever actually genuinely smiled.

  The whole group of people trailed in after me and formed a line in front of the counter. I was thankful I hadn’t taken a chunk out of Kitty earlier. How on earth would I have survived this on my own? Also, a lot of the customers still only went to Kitty. I might have been anonymous last night and so everyone was nice to me, but in the cold light of morning, without my mask and flapper costume, it was business as usual, and that included several very dirty looks. It seemed people were not soon going to welcome me into their little town as I’d originally thought. I guess between being from California and the grumblings from locals that I didn’t deserve the shop since I’d never come to visit my aunt (Bella’s information), I continued as persona non grata. I still hoped that would change but was getting the distinct feeling I was tilting at windmills.

  Two hours and about sixty costumes later, I wasn’t sure how I had even survived with the help. We’d checked in so many costumes they were a blur of fur and masks and cloth. But, I thought, when I checked the sales for this, our busiest season, I would be pleasantly surprised by the amount of money we had pulled in.

  The bell rang and another customer walked in, this one with a pair of jet-black silk pants and a two-toned cape. He also had a genie costume in vibrant purple. I pulled Mr. Jorgensen’s receipt from the box on the counter and checked his rental agreement against his return. “Looks like everything is here, sir. Thank you to you and Doris for renting from us. If you could sign the bottom of the receipt, here at the X, you can be on your way.”

  Mr. Jorgensen was a farmer from the outskirts of town, and a wonderfully funny guy. He and his wife were in their fifties, and Doris sometimes came in to take advantage of my little back room.

  “Thank you, Ivy. The party was a good time until that poor woman was found. Did you hear any more about what happened?” His big hand held my pumpkin-topped pen like it was a fragile piece of china as he scrawled his signature across the bottom of the page.

  “Actually, that’s what almost everyone has been asking today. I don’t know anything more than what we saw last night.”

  “Yep, I hear the police force is keeping things pretty close to the vest. We haven’t had a murder in Martha’s Point in about ten years, and it has sure shook up the people around here. Did you hear how she died?”

  “Can’t say that I have, Mr. Jorgensen. You?” I couldn’t tell him I was actually the one who had found her. I’d been asked to keep the information close to my own vest, or rather the kicking jade green shirt I’d put on this morning, one of Bella’s hand-me-downs.

  “Nope. But I did hear they found blood on her top from a stab wound. They figure that’s what got her.” Tidbit passed on to the next grape on the vine, he left with a backhanded wave.

  I put Mr. Jorgensen’s costume on the rack behind the counter. Kitty stood next to me, helping another costumer, and I felt bone tired all of a sudden. She could handle things for a few moments. There was only one other person in line, and no one else in the shop.

  “I’m going to take some of these costumes to the back, Kitty. Holler if you need me.”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine, Ivy. Nothing I can’t handle on my own. You run along and have your break, and I’ll stay right here.”

  Take a deep breath and let it roll off your back, I counseled myself. I thought maybe I was too sensitive to her and this only proved it further. I needed to stop listening to her, and I also needed to remember who the owner was—me. No amount of her mouth was going to change that.

  So, ignoring Kitty and her catty attitude, I took the six outfits from the rack behind us, including Mr. Jorgensen’s recent returns, and walked into the back room. I sat down and spread the garments out before me. The genie costume and the pirate were in perfect condition. A little stitching on the hem would fix the princess outfit. Some kind of oil spotted the pumpkin costume, from the looks of the shiny spots on the green satin leaves around the throat. The werewolf looked okay, if a little matted. And the black pants from Mr. Jorgensen would need dry cleaning, as all the fabric outfits did.

  Then I picked up the cape. It was silky black on the outside and had a deep red lining. I inspected it as I did all the other costumes and almost missed the fist-sized stain on the tall collar. It was dry, and a deeper color than the red lining. It wasn’t greasy like the oil, or fruity smelling like the wine stain I’d found on another cape earlier. This stain was like a splatter of paint, but crusty. In fact, the only thing I’d ever seen like it was when I pricked my finger with a needle trying to fix a sleeve on one of the costumes and ended up bleeding on the damn thing.

  The thought stopped me cold. Blood? The image of Janice, dead in a back room of the Barn, jumped into my head, and I remembered the blood I’d seen coating Janice’s chest. I shuddered as I remembered Mr. Jorgensen’s comment about the blood on her body.

  A scary idea entered my head and I wondered what exactly I was thinking by even entertaining it for more than a single moment. Mr. Jorgensen couldn’t have killed Janice, could he? I had no idea if they even knew each other. And why would he have mentioned the blood if he was the one who had killed her and in the process had splattered some blood on his collar?

  He was an honest and good farmer, from what I’d heard and seen for myself, and I knew he wasn’t dumb. When he came in, he always talked with me and he seemed so nice. Could it be possible he was capable of murder? Then again, maybe my imaginatio
n was going wild and this wasn’t really blood. Or was it?

  Chapter Fourteen

  I couldn’t get the stain out of my mind the rest of the night. It could have been juice or punch, but when I’d scraped at the edges, rust-colored flecks came off. I’d never seen juice crust like that.

  It was freaky, and I wasn’t even going to try to handle this one on my own. So, first thing in the morning, I called the knight in shining armor...er, the sheriff, but got put right into his voicemail. O-kay.

  “Hi, this is Ivy Morris from The Masked Shoppe. I, ah, well, during my costume returns yesterday, I found one that you might be interested in seeing. I’ll hold onto it until I hear from you.” I left my number and prayed I was wrong. I really liked Mr. Jorgensen.

  An hour later, after washing yesterday’s dishes and cleaning up after the impromptu party from Saturday night with Bella and Ben, I decided to go to work. Surely the sheriff could figure out I was at the store if I didn’t answer the phone at the house.

  So I found myself behind the counter when the police came charging into the shop like I’d stolen the last doughnut at Mad Martha’s Milk and Munchies.

  “Ivy Morris?” The tall, older guy before me looked a lot different without his costume.

  “Yes, I’m Ivy.”

  “We’re here regarding your message. We rushed over as soon as we heard it. Do you have an office we can meet in to discuss this issue?”

  Well, that was certainly vague enough. I turned the store over to Kitty, who had shown up thirty minutes ago, and took the two officers back to the little cubbyhole I called an office. The embarrassing thing was I didn’t have enough chairs to seat my company. The office was only big enough for a desk, a bookshelf and one chair.

  “I’m sorry about the limited space,” I said, feeling about two inches high. What kind of business only has one office and room for only one chair in it? Something else I’d need to work on. Yay.

  “All we’re interested in is the costume, Ms. Morris. We don’t need to get comfortable here, but thank you for your concern.”

  He wasn’t so bad after all.

  “Well, Officer...” I left the title hang.

  “Now I’m the one who is sorry, Ms. Morris. I got ahead of myself. I’m Detective Jameson, and this is my partner, Detective Bartley.” An attractive woman wearing a great smoke-gray suit nodded her auburn head in my direction but remained silent. “Now that the introductions are out of the way, can we see this costume?”

  “Absolutely, Detective Jameson. If you’ll, um...” I gestured with my hand to get him to inch his way to the left so I could access the little closet on the wall. God, how mortifying. We scootched around each other and did this kind of funky two-step so I could get around him and open the door. I pulled the cape from the shallow enclosure and handed it over.

  “This is the costume. A gentleman brought it in last night, right before we closed, and I saw the stain. I figured it was punch or something and didn’t think much about it until I scraped at the stain and rust-colored flakes started coming off. I stopped right then and put it away to think about overnight. I didn’t want to do anything to ruin evidence, if that’s what it is. I hope I did the right thing?” Damn, there was the stupid lilt at the end of a sentence again. It drove me nuts and made me feel like a child looking for approval. Where was the brazen woman from Saturday? Truthfully, I think she took a hike when Janice died.

  The officers thanked me and left with the cape in a plastic bag with the store logo on it. Two seconds after I came back to the counter, Kitty was on me like a starving dog with a tasty chicken leg to gnaw on.

  “What were Tom and Debbie doing here?”

  It took me a moment to connect the names with the two detectives. When I did, I thought the name Debbie so did not fit the queen of fashion who had stood silently in my office with her bright red hair.

  I hesitated, not sure what exactly I wanted to say to Kitty. She’d been giving me weird looks since she’d shown up this morning, like I shouldn’t be here and yet I was. Actually the looks had started Saturday night when I saw her standing across the crowd from me over Janice’s body. I didn’t know what the deal was, but I had more important things to think about, things that had nothing to do with Kitty.

  “Well, the detectives were here to ask me a few questions because I was at the Barn that night.”

  “Hmmph, they didn’t have any questions for me,” she said, and I hoped she’d drop it there. Of course, that had never worked for me before. “I wonder what they wanted from you. Did they ask anything specific? They said something about a message you left them.”

  Shit! “Ah, that was about a, ah, piece of paper I found in one of the costumes that came in yesterday.”

  “Really, a piece of paper? What did it say?”

  I was totally in a huge, dark, deep hole of my own making and had no idea how to get back out. And then the phone rang. Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell!

  “Why don’t you get that, Kitty? I have a few things to do in the back, and then I have an errand to run. Do you think you can handle things for a little bit?”

  She nodded as she picked up the phone, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I wasted no time hustling into the boudoir section to unpack the new shipment of plus-sized lingerie I’d ordered to replace my dwindling supply. My little back room was certainly popular, and fortunately no one had stolen anything else.

  While I cut tape and unwrapped the plastic packets of bras and panties, my mind wandered into Ben territory. He hadn’t been at the house when I came home from work yesterday, not that I expected him to be, after I’d kicked him out. But he’d left me a message that he would be on my doorstep this evening, waiting to take me out to dinner. Yes, he’d called and moved the date up from Thursday to tonight. Woo-hoo!

  But then I had an attack of conscience. Should I be pursuing a relationship when my friend was dead? Was it uncouth (ooh, good word) of me to be trying to get into something with Ben when I’d vowed to find a killer? I didn’t have any good answers, so I called him back and told him no three times, and yet I was going out tonight. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he did it. Perhaps it was his powers of persuasion. Perhaps it was some odd form of over-the-phone hypnotism. More than likely, it was the fact I really didn’t mean any of my previous “no’s” and got tired of making him play the game.

  As I opened another box, a beautiful set of black lace panties and matching bra caught my eye. I still hadn’t decided what to wear tonight, as I had no idea where we were actually going. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t pick out something to satisfy my inner need to feel at least a little sexy.

  Picking out an outfit for tonight wasn’t actually going to be hard, since Bella had confiscated all my brown outfits and I now had about ten items hanging in my closet to mix and match. Not a spot of brown in any of them. The one brown thing I still owned I’d hidden from Bella and her kamikaze approach to emptying my armoire. It was the outfit I’d been complimented on at my last job. I couldn’t let her get rid of it.

  I walked over to the beautiful antique sideboard I’d moved into the boudoir last week to house some of the more risqué items we carried. I found out through talking with customers that nothing turned some women off from buying a beautiful and flowing nightgown in satin as fast as a life-sized vibrator for the lonely (or playful). But I used the top of the cabinet as a display area and draped a short baby-doll lace concoction over the ornate molding lining the back.

  Really, I was becoming more comfortable with the items we sold. I had even installed a buzzer and a separate cash register (modern, this time, so I could operate it without assistance) in the back so people could feel less conspicuous when purchasing their items. When a customer was ready to buy one of our “novelty” items, they pushed the buzzer, which sounded up at the front counter, and I would come back to process the transaction. It worked out nicely.

  And I was thankful the new lingerie had come in. I’d
placed an order with our online supply company, Sass and Lace, for rush delivery. They only sold to retail stores and were very gracious in getting the order to me as soon as possible. Phew!

  I looked at the slim watch on my wrist and almost jumped out of my skin. The day had flown by, and I still needed to run my errand. I hightailed it out of the shop with a backhanded wave for Kitty, and hit the street running, in a very sedate and dignified way, of course. It wouldn’t do for a proprietress to run like a hellion down the street where every current and potential customer could see her. But I needed to get to Bella quickly because she was doing my hair and nails for tonight.

  When I walked in the door to her shop, there was no ringing bell, and I envied her. What it must be like to not have to listen to an annoying bell all day. Bella was ready for me and led me right to a purple-cushioned chair.

  “Sooooo. Hot date tonight?” she asked.

  “No, not a hot date. Ben and I are simply going out for dinner.”

  “So, hot date. Come on, Ivy, get into the mood a little better. If I were going out with Ben, it would definitely be a hot date.”

  “Why don’t you go out with Ben?” I asked, truly curious. “I mean, you guys know each other, and you’re both intelligent, attractive, single people. What’s the deal?”

  “Puh-lease. Ben and I go way back, yes, but we know each other too well. Haven’t you ever had a male friend you were totally non-sexual with? I can’t even think of Ben and sex in the same sentence. Now you and Ben and sex I could probably wrap my mind around, though I wouldn’t really want any details.”

  “Ha, ha. You are a fountain of information.”

  “You want information? I’ll give you information,” she said, draping me with a slate-gray cape. “One time Ben decided it would be a good idea to do one of those ding-dong-ditch things where you ring someone’s doorbell and leave a flaming paper bag of dog poo on the doorstep for them. They’re supposed to see the fire and stamp it out with their shoe and in the process get dog crap on themselves and any other place within a few feet of the bag. Well, it’s an oldie but a goodie, and Ben wanted to try it on our homeroom teacher in eighth grade.” She paused to move around some things on the counter behind her. “He gets everything ready and scoops the poop, puts it in the bag, snakes a lighter from his mom, and goes to Mr. Seaver’s house.”