Charmed Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  I liked her thinking, even if it made my conscience prickle. “Where did this note come from?”

  “Kitten’s mailbox, or so she said. She had it in the house and I picked it up when I talked with her.” Tinkie got back on the road and headed toward Bob and Kitten Fontana’s McMansion on the east side of town. “We’ll get the truth out of her.”

  “Can you confirm the gunshot was directed at Kitten?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve thought about that. She could be making it up. She and the truth seldom walk hand in hand. I’m partially convinced she wrote the note herself, but she did seem to be upset.”

  “What time did you make it over to Kitten’s last night?” I was thinking about the intruder at the manor. I’d given serious consideration to the idea that the person tormenting me was Kitten. The figure had been smaller than Bob Fontana.

  “I talked to her for a while. Maybe from eleven until one in the morning. She was upset and Bob was drunk.”

  Which meant that it couldn’t have been Kitten roaming around the manor. And Bob was drunk, so it wasn’t him. The person I’d seen was in full control of their faculties. “Where was the kid?”

  “I do have some questions about Corey’s whereabouts. Kitten said he was spending the night with a friend. I didn’t hear a peep out of him, which doesn’t really mean anything.” She frowned. “The house is huge. Maybe eight thousand square feet. Who needs that much space?”

  “People who hate each other?” It was no secret Bob and Kitten fought like cats and dogs. They got into it at parties, board meetings, church, on the street. Yet they seemed to pull in tandem when the chips were down in the business.

  “You know, one area we really haven’t looked into is Bob’s development deals.” I was thinking out loud. “What if all of this—the strange deaths, the thing in the woods, the fear that’s building in town—what if this is about him and not the witches?”

  Tinkie actually slapped her forehead. “Genius, Sarah Booth. The witches could be a diversion. I’d heard rumors that Trevor and Bob Fontana had been seen arguing back during the holidays, and everyone knows Bob has lusted after the Musgrove property for several years. What if Trevor brought in the witches just to mess with Bob and that’s what they were arguing about. I just assumed it was because of Kitten and her crush on Trevor. But knowing Bob, he’d be a lot more upset at losing the property than his wife cheating on him.”

  “But why kill Esmeralda?” She was a real pain in the patoot, but that didn’t warrant a death sentence. If I bumped off everyone who annoyed me, there would be no traffic jams in the Southeast.

  “What if Esmeralda was onto the development thing? She mostly wrote made-up gossip, but she had good reporter instincts. Cece told me that when she first started out in journalism, she was offered a job at the Charlotte Observer, which was one of the nation’s top papers at the time. She went with the International Report because the salary was six times higher. But she had the chops to be a great investigative reporter. Or that was Cece’s assessment.”

  I hadn’t seen that side of Esmeralda, but Cece would know. Before I could pursue my thoughts on calling the International Report, Tinkie stopped at the turn to the driveway of the Fontana’s huge home. All eight thousand square feet of it. Though we were still a hundred-plus yards away, I could see the full scope of the house. Truly I could murder someone on one end and people at the other end would never know. What a waste of space and air-conditioning. The house had none of the graciousness of the old Southern homes. It was a federalist box of a house with blunt, square wings on either side. It was hard for me to picture Kitten Fontana being happy here. I always envisioned the Fontana McMansion as something with a large front porch, rocking chairs, pots of geraniums, and a bit of old Southern charm. This house was cold and sterile.

  “Talk to Kitten about the gunshot,” Tinkie said. “I’m going to do some snooping around.”

  “Snooping where?” Tinkie’s sudden shift back into a kick-ass private eye was a bit alarming.

  “Bob has an office up on the second floor. I need to get in there and see if I can find his contracts for developments.”

  “You don’t think Bob has some alarms and safeguards?” I didn’t like the idea of Tinkie trying to break into Bob’s office like this. Oscar would kill me if she got caught—it might impact the bank’s role in financing future Fontana developments. I knew almost nothing about such things, but I did know enough that I should be the one poking around. Then I had an even better idea. “They’ll have to let Coleman in to search for the bullet since someone fired at Kitten.” I had another thought. “And why didn’t Kitten call Coleman instead of you and me?”

  “She said she’d already paid us, and the ‘bumbling sheriff and his deputy’ might destroy evidence. She said it was our job to investigate. She has a point. She has paid us.”

  “Okay, you talk to Kitten. I’ll search. That way the resulting crap won’t fly back on the bank and Oscar if I’m caught doing something illegal.”

  Tinkie’s expression shifted rapidly to sly. “If there is anything, she’s smart enough to destroy it. What if she wrote both notes and killed Esmeralda. Maybe there’s evidence.”

  “Keep Kitten distracted. If there’s anything to find, I’ll get it.” I nudged her shoulder. “Entertain her. She likes you a lot better than me.”

  “You have twenty minutes. I can handle her for that long. Then you’d better show.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Tinkie was really getting bossy. Normally we didn’t bicker about division of duties. We each had our strengths, and Tinkie was by far the superior handler of rich bitches with an attitude.

  She let me out of the car and I walked around the corner of the house to a backyard that included swim cabanas, a pool and whirlpool, tropical gardens, and what looked like a butterfly garden. Who knew Kitten could make plants grow. A beautiful orange and purple flower caught my attention, but I didn’t dillydally in the garden. I made haste for the back door. I could only hope I didn’t run into a maid or butler or some other servant. Tinkie would keep Kitten occupied but it was up to me to dodge the staff.

  The back door wasn’t locked—not unusual in Sunflower County even in this day and time. A world where dead bolts and barred windows was de rigueur for most of the country didn’t apply in Zinnia. We still lived in the haze of days when the county was a community. People looked out for one another. The home invasions, brutal robberies, killings for no reason, they weren’t part of Sunflower County. Not yet. It was coming, but not yet.

  I heard conversation in the laundry room, and I slipped past and made it to the kitchen. I found the pantry, and right on the top shelf was a box of dried black grapes. Not evidence, but enough to make me believe Kitten had authored my missing note.

  The sound of someone coming sent me darting up the servants’ back stairs to the second floor. The clock was ticking and I didn’t waste time looking at the portraits hanging on the walls, though I really wanted to inspect them. I’d heard of a service that painted “royal ancestors” for wealthy people with no bloodline. A cursory glance as I passed showed me portraits of men and women in rich brocades, velvets, and ruffs—no doubt to hide double chins. The people depicted should have come from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I had no evidence, but Kitten and Bob seemed to be the kind of people who worked hard to create a family heritage that didn’t exist. Some people had to have a pedigree, even when it was fabricated. These were the same people who thought an American Kennel Club pet had more value than a pound pup.

  As much as I wanted to photograph the paintings for later study, I hurried past, checking doorknobs until I found Bob’s office. I entered quietly and froze. Bob Fontana was sprawled on the floor, unmoving.

  “Oh, crap.” I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. Kitten had called Tinkie about a gunshot. Maybe Kitten really had heard something. She’d called us—and failed to check to make sure Bob wasn’t hit. Heck, maybe she’d pulled the trigger h
erself. It wouldn’t be the first time a spouse killed a spouse and tried to blame it on a stranger. Tinkie was her alibi. That’s why she’d called Delaney Detective Agency and not the police. Damn! She was smarter than I’d given her credit for.

  I inched toward the body. I needed to see how he’d died. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone only to realize I’d never found it. I couldn’t photograph the body, but I still had to look. And I had to call Coleman. People were dropping dead all over the county.

  I knelt beside Bob. He lay on his stomach, sort of. One leg was curled beneath his body and his arms were flung wide, the right side of his face smushed into an expensive Turkish carpet. Some vile effluvium leaked from his mouth.

  I reached to his neck to feel for a pulse, and to my surprise, the body was still warm. I was about to withdraw when Bob snorted and flung an arm over, whacking me in the face. He rolled with great force and his hand hit me so hard I fell backward on my butt.

  Bob snorted another big snore, then cut loose a fart that shook the window panes.

  And I held my breath, hoping he didn’t wake up. Kitten hadn’t been lying about one thing last night. Bob had been on a terrible bender, or else he was a narcoleptic. The vodka bottle beside him seemed to support Kitten’s contention that he was drunk. But at least he wasn’t dead.

  As I crab-crawled away from his body, I finally realized the room had also been trashed. Maybe Bob had been hit on the head when he surprised someone searching his office. Someone with the same idea I had.

  He ripped another simultaneous snort-and-fart, flopped over again, chewed a little bit, and sank into a deep sleep. The good news was that I could now search the office and no one would be any the wiser if I dumped over a few drawers. Bob wouldn’t hear me, and with the mayhem already around, no one would be able to tell I’d been there.

  Bob had a bank of filing cabinets in the far corner and some of the drawers were open, folders spilled over the carpet. The disarray was much like the state I’d found in Trevor’s rooms. Someone had also gone through his files. That was too coincidental not to have meaning.

  Blueprints of houses, illustrations of buildings, and maps of subdivisions were everywhere. Some were schematics for plumbing and wiring, others showed the layouts of the houses. I was tempted to just grab up everything I could and dash out of the house. That wouldn’t work, though. I needed to search more thoroughly, and I only had ten minutes left on Tinkie’s clock. Not to mention the snoring beast on the floor might surface to consciousness at any moment.

  Aunt Loulane had always told me that death was the great equalizer—that we were all reduced to dust and bone. Alcohol had the same effect. Too much of it brought even the most dapper men and beautiful women to sordid heaps of flesh and flatulence.

  While the blueprints were interesting and probably contained a lot of cost information that clients would love to know, I didn’t see anything that tied Trevor, the witches, or Musgrove Manor together. Maybe I was barking up the wrong tree.

  I hit a file filled with receipts. My fingers fumbled because I was stressed by the ticking clock. I pilfered through them as fast as I could, stopping at one from Lisbet Bradley, the broker for Arlington Woods subdivision who was now in prison, dating back two years. If I recalled, she would have been in prison on the date of the invoice. I reached for my phone to snap a photo of the receipt only to be reminded I’d lost the dang thing. I’d truly come to rely on technology, something I’d vowed to avoid. There was no other way than theft. I folded the receipt and put it in my pocket. I’d figure a way to return it later.

  I swallowed my impatience and anxiety. Bob had files on top of files. It would take a forensic accountant six months to slog through all of this. And I had about six minutes. I found another folder marked Art. Curious, I opened it and saw only a list of names. I took it, too. What the heck. None of it looked promising, though.

  I was about to give up when Bob rolled over again. “Stay away,” he mumbled angrily. “Don’t touch it.”

  I looked around to see what he might have been defending in his stupor. This room contained none of the vintage family portraits. This office was modern and new, clean lines on the desk and other furnishings. The only thing out of place was a gorgeous oil painting of a tree. The morning sun cast a strange glare on the painting and I had to move to another location before I could clearly see it.

  It took me a moment to discern Kitten Fontana in the beautifully contoured limbs and trunk of the old cedar, but she was there. The painting was a masterpiece. And Kitten had shaped herself into a beautiful swirl of trunk. This was one of the series that the witches had been talking about. The nature series where each nude woman assumed the posturing of a particular tree.

  “Stay back!” Bob abruptly tried to sit up. He shook his head to focus his eyes, and I knew I had to leave. It wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught and having to explain why I was upstairs in his office. As much as I hated leaving mostly empty-handed, I did. While Bob fought gravity and gas, I eased out the door and down the hall.

  Five minutes later I knocked on the front door and waited for Kitten to properly let me inside. “Where have you been?” Kitten asked, looking out the door as if I might have a legion of demons with me.

  “Tinkie got mad at me and put me out of the car about a mile down the road. I had to walk. She’s going to pay for that.”

  Kitten laughed. She really liked that answer. “I didn’t realize Tinkie had such good taste.”

  “Funny har har,” I said. “Where’s my partner?”

  “Morning room.”

  “Lead the way.”

  16

  I endured Kitten’s obnoxiousness for about ten minutes before I was ready to lock and load—or leave, which seemed the better option. I really didn’t want to shoot her. Well, I really did, but leaving was less messy and wouldn’t require a call to Coleman. Tinkie was ready to go, too. We only had a few questions left to ask. Since I knew Bob hadn’t been shot, we still hadn’t found any evidence of the gunshot that had set our entire adventure with Kitten in motion.

  “Where did the bullet enter the room?” I asked. I didn’t see any broken windows, no sign that someone had violated the Fontana castle with a lead slug.

  “Oh, it didn’t come in the house.” Kitten shrugged. She rang a little silver bell on the table beside her chair. When a maid silently appeared, she ordered a mimosa. When the maid left, she looked at us. “Oh, would you like one, too?”

  “No, thanks.” Tinkie and I spoke in unison as we often did. “We’re working,” Tinkie added. “We wouldn’t want to take your money and your alcohol.”

  “So where were you shot at?” I pursued my goal like a dog with a bone. “If you want us to investigate, we have to examine the scene.”

  “I didn’t say I was shot at. I said I heard a shot. The bullet was outside. I heard the shot.” She pointed at her ear as if I needed sign language for clarity.

  “So how did you know it was directed at you?” I wasn’t confused, she was nuts.

  “No one else lives around here for miles. The shot had to be directed at me or Bob and Bob was binge drinking. I’d been out in the gardens. Most people love Bob, but they have no idea what a sloppy drunk he can be. Anyway, I figured the bullet was meant for me.”

  Between the two I had no doubt Kitten was the target. Suddenly I wondered if she knew about Esmeralda’s death. I didn’t think Tinkie had told her. Coleman hadn’t released the story to the news media yet. No one really knew but the paramedics, Doc, the witches, and DeWayne. It would be interesting to witness Kitten’s reaction. She and Esmeralda were frenemies.

  “What do you make of Esmeralda’s death?” I asked.

  Kitten’s superior smile slipped only a fraction. “What are you talking about?” Her gaze darted to Tinkie and back to me. She was either very good or very innocent.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. She was murdered last night. Thrown from the third floor of Musgrove Manor.” I was st
retching the few facts I had into a story that Coleman might not recognize.

  Kitten started to rise but fell back, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her. “She went for that damn painting.” She spoke before she could govern her tongue. She all but clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “What painting?” I asked.

  “Oh, the one she and Trevor bickered endlessly over.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “It was the same old, same old all the time. He’d say he sold it, then tell her he had it back. She’d go to get it, and he wouldn’t have it anymore. He toyed with her. Boring, actually.”

  The maid entered with a tray and her drink. Kitten took the champagne flute and speared the maid with a glare. “Get two more for my guests.”

  She intended to loosen our tongues with alcohol. Even so, I wouldn’t object. But only one. I had a long day ahead of me.

  “So Esmeralda died of a fall?” Kitten asked, swirling her drink. “I’ll bet she didn’t see that one coming.”

  “Maybe it was a fall.” I shrugged innocently when her gaze snapped up at me. Two could play at nonchalance.

  “She did or she didn’t die from falling. Or maybe you just don’t know.”

  “Maybe.” It was like poking a snake with a broom. Not really smart but fun. How far could Kitten lunge when her fangs snapped down?

  “I am paying you good money and I am getting nothing for my investment. How did Esmeralda die?”

  “Grow up,” Tinkie finally said. “You hired us for our detective skills, not to brown nose you into a good mood. Doc isn’t sure how Esmeralda died, but he’s going to find out. She had that same look of horror on her face as Trevor. There is definitely something going on at the manor, but we can’t say yet it if originates with the witches or someone”—she paused and stared at Kitten for a pregnant moment—“who is trying to frame the Harringtons. Say, someone who might kill a friend just to hang that death around the pretty Harrington necks.”