by Alex A King
Neither did I, actually. For all I knew the jar seller’s motivation for being on Merope was benign. If the woman on the ferry was the seller. If she was even on the ferry to begin with it.
One-handed, Leo scrolled through his phone’s Contacts list. He wandered off, talking into the phone in a low voice. When he came back, he was grinning like he’d just performed magic. He nodded to the sea behind me.
“Problem solved.”
Sure enough the big boat was turning back. It was a miracle—no, it was cop magic.
“What did you say?”
“That there’s a bomb on board and it’s going to detonate at any moment.”
“Really?”
He laughed. “No. I asked nicely.”
“You monster.” I couldn’t keep the grin off my face.
“Here’s your ferry. Wherever you’re going, come back soon and come back safe. I have plans for you.” The way he said it I knew those plans involved nudity and lots of it.
Oh boy.
With a grin, Leo nudged me to the ferry, which was lowering its gangplank. There he stayed, arms folded, watching as we pulled away. Given that my quarry—if she existed—couldn’t exactly flee before I had a chance to question her, I didn’t get in any hurry to quit watching Leo watching me until he was a speck on a slightly bigger speck. He was kind of amazing. Too bad we were on different pages, in completely different books. To him I was in fiction, while he lived between the sedate and sensible pages on the reference shelf.
If she was aboard this ferry, I figured it would take me time to find the woman who had sold Roger Wilson his allegedly defective jars. Today was one of my luckier ones. I spotted her sitting on the top deck, one arm around the cardboard box I recognized from Wilson’s countertop. She had frizzy hair of no particular color and the kind of skin that turns orange if you wave a bottle of spray-on-tan around. She and her padded overcoat took up two seats, and she was rooting around in a white paper bag crammed full of loukoumia, evidence of the sugary feast sprinkled over her chin like she’d recently rolled out of a party at Tony Montana’s place.
I sat next to her. “Nice box.”
No eye contact. Her head didn’t so much as swivel. She was fixated on the view, which from this angle was wet.
“Thanks,” she said with the kind of posh British accent that always sounds polite, even when the speaker is telling you to jump in a lake while performing sexual acts upon yourself. “I made it myself.”
“You make empty boxes?”
“How do you know it’s empty?”
I wiggled the jar out of my bag and waved it under her nose. She made a grab for it but I was faster. The jar vanished back into my bag.
“I do believe that belongs to me,” she said.
“If it’s yours then why do I have it?”
“You’re keeping stolen good from their rightful owner—me.”
“Roger Wilson said it was flawed.”
Her face turned a squeeze of lemon more sour. “It’s perfect. That awful man wanted something for nothing. I’m a businesswoman, not a charity.”
“So you came to Merope to claim your property?”
“Maybe.”
“I know you did, so you can cut the crap.”
“Do you know what these sell for?”
She told me. I raised an eyebrow, then another to match. The price of knickknacks was out of control.
“People really pay that kind of money for your jars?”
“These happen to be hand-carved Himalayan salt jars. It takes me hours to make each one, and there’s always the chance it will crack. It’s like cutting diamonds. Once they crack they’re no good. Your friend claimed the last jar was sub-standard, so I sent him a replacement. Then he went ahead and had his bank yank the money back anyway. What is that if it’s not theft?”
“Oh, it’s absolutely theft, and Roger Wilson is a real tool, I don’t disagree with that.”
“He’s not your friend then?”
I snorted. “No. What did he say when you showed up at his house?”
“I never saw the man. When I arrived at his home the door was open and no one was home.”
“When was this?”
“This morning. I arrived yesterday afternoon.”
Yesterday afternoon. Roger Wilson had met his crummy end on the Cake Emporium’s floor in the morning or the previous evening.
“Do you have any proof? A plane ticket, maybe.”
Folds tightened around her eyes. “Why?”
“Roger Wilson was murdered yesterday.”
She rolled her eyeballs at the sky. “I cannot imagine why anyone would want to murder such a lovely man,” she said dryly. “Here.” She reached into her bag, slapped a paper envelope into my hand. Sure enough, possibly at the time Roger Wilson was drawing his last breath, Marcia Smith, no middle name, was touching down in Athens. Unless she was a time traveler—I didn’t see a Tardis lying around, which ruled that out—she couldn’t have killed him. At worst the only thing she was guilty of was box theft. Nobody cared about a stolen box, least of all me. Put one box in a room and it’ll breed. Bam! More boxes.
“Okay, so you didn’t kill him. But why steal an empty box?”
She shrugged and took her time answering. First she had to dig through the white bag and place another cube of loukoumi in her mouth. I drooled a little.
“I panicked,” she said when the confection was a memory. “It was my first time walking into a stranger’s house that way. I saw the box, grabbed it, and ran. It wasn’t until I reached my hotel room that I realized the box was empty. I thought about going back for the jar but I was afraid His Arseholiness had called the police. When I was at the house there was a body on the ground, and I was worried the police might think I’d done it.”
A sea breeze poked its cool fingers into me. I shivered inside my coat. “Was it a woman, maybe?”
“A woman, or a small man.”
“Dark hair.” I waved the ends of my ponytail at her. “About my height? Wearing this jacket?”
She scoffed down another sweet cube, powdered sugar snowing down her front. “Now I remember you,” she said. “You were there at the house. All this time I have been trying to figure out where I had seen your face. You were passed out. Dead or drunk, I thought. Obviously not dead or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Someone whacked me over the head.”
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t see anyone else there, either, so don’t bother asking.”
A bead of sweat appeared on hairy strip between her nose and lip. Then another. Followed by more. Marcia Smith had a whole tsunami going on.
“Really. Not even someone swinging a broom around? Or a big stick?”
“Look, all I saw was you, and I figured I would let you rest in peace, however you got that way.”
“How considerate,” I said.
“Is that sarcasm?”
“Yes.”
“It’s so difficult to tell when it’s an American doing it.”
Ha. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. You were standing between me and what I thought was my merchandise. I panicked, so I whacked you with that broom.”
“You suck.”
“Like you wouldn’t do the same thing if you were in my shoes,” she said. “Now give me my jar.”
There was no good reason for me to keep the thing. Roger Wilson didn’t need it. Wilson was a dirtbag who would never stiff online retailers ever again. But something stopped me from slapping it into her hand. This wasn’t over yet.
“Tell you what,” I said, “for now I need this.”
“Why?”
“An investigation, of sorts.”
For the first time she looked more interested in me than the loukoumia. “Keep talking.”
“When I wrap things up I’ll send it back to you.”
She chewed on that a moment. “I want a deposit. When I get the jar, you get your money back.”
“Deal.”
&
nbsp; I gave her my credit card and watched her slide it through a card reader attached to the top. When she was done, Marcia Smith had left me several hundred euro poorer. The sooner I could send the jar back to her the better.
After that, there was nothing for me to do except stay on the boat until Mykonos. From there I could turn around or catch the Athens-bound ferry. With Marcia crossed off the suspect list the trail went cold until I could talk to Kyria Fasoula. I had questions and no real way to get answers. Roger Wilson was a turd but he was a turd who didn’t make waves. Anyone with a good reason to kill him had managed, miraculously, to restrain themselves. I suspected sorcery or supernatural willpower.
With my suspect list down to one incapacitated suspect currently out of my reach, I focused on the other mystery in my life: the invisible force making a nuisance of itself. I needed Betty and her encyclopedic knowledge of the paranormal and other things that went bump, day or night. Either she’d be able to pin a species to the force or she could steer me in the right direction.
Athens it was then. Then, merry old England.
I had a couple of hours to kill in Mykonos, so I found a kafeneio and drank coffee until I got bored of all the semi-naked and completely naked men on the beach who didn’t care that winter was on its way.
“You want company?”
I looked up from my phone. The man was naked except for a strategically placed crocheted sock. He pointed to the sock with both hands. “You like? My yiayia made it for me.”
I ignored him. He was young. He was gorgeous. He was dead. The last thing I needed was ghosts from Mykonos traipsing over to Merope to beg for favors and talk my ear off.
Several hours later, I was on a plane to Heathrow, grateful that international travel came with plenty of leg room and those deliciously hot towels delivered periodically. At Heathrow, I rented a car and set off for the address Sam had given me, out into the nowhere. England’s nowhere was pretty and green.
Driving in England was a downright sedate affair compared to Greece. People mostly obeyed the road rules, and even those who didn’t still acknowledged that there was such a thing. I saw zero donkeys, no goats, and hundreds of ghosts. Many of Merope’s dead citizens eventually moved on and stayed gone. Here they liked to hang around, taking leisurely walks through the countryside.
I passed through villages where the roofs were thatched and the buildings were a warm brick that made me consider abandoning Merope and its cool whites and blues. Everything was charming, even the hissing geese that wanted to murder me when I stopped to buy a sandwich, which turned out to be a single slice of flaccid ham with tasteless cheese between two thin sheets of white bread. I tried bribing the geese with bread, but they were gastronomically superior and refused to make eye contact with the crusts I tossed to them. They wanted my soul and several pounds of my flesh, and chased me back to my car like feathered hounds from hell.
A half kilometer down the road they gave up and continued their reign of terror in the village. I drove on, until my phone’s GPS told me to take the next right down a narrow ribbon of weather-bleached blacktop. The road wended for several kilometers through a tunnel of trees. I barely saw sky until I broke through the other side, emerging in a clearing with a grand mansion stuck in the center. The road turned to brick, forming a loop around a fountain and leading up to the house. The gardens were pruned and cultivated to aristocratic convention.
This couldn’t be where Betty lived, could it? There was no mailbox, but then I lived on an island where addresses were usually directions and descriptions, not numbers.
My GPS said yes.
My GPS was never wrong … except for that one time it told me I could ride my bicycle from Merope to Delphi without the help of a boat.
I parked in front of the big house and carefully stepped out of my compact rental, hoping my boots were clean enough to touch the dirt. Betty was easygoing and never bothered about my boots coming into her shop, but places like this usually came with butlers who had very strong opinions about things such as footwear and what might be stuck to the soles. I climbed a wide set of steps to the palatial porch, although on a place this fancy probably the porch had a more impressive name—most likely something French. No doorbell—too gauche? Instead, the tall doors were home to a brass lion, gripping a heavy ring in his mouth.
I knocked.
Time passed. Nobody answered. Not even a judgmental butler. I jiggled the door handles. Locked.
The place felt abandoned. No, not abandoned exactly. Poised. As though it were crouched and waiting.
Betty was an unusual woman. Her shop was strange and otherworldly. Therefore reason suggested her home—if this was her home—might also be outside the norm. I walked the grounds, hoping to find something, anything, that might unlock this mystery.
Some help would be nice right about now, Betty. Betty?
Nothing.
Betty had said she was tied up at home, busy, unable to open the store. Even this close I couldn’t get through to her. Something was up. Something hinky.
What now?
Betty was turning out to be a good friend, and if she needed help I wasn’t about to abandon her.
Should I break a window? The mansion had a lot of them, tall and expensive looking in their stone frames. I winced at the thought of what it would cost to replace one. Insurance on this place must be a nightmare.
What if I casually picked up a rock, and while I was inspecting it, the rock flew out of my hand and hit the window? That could happen.
Right. To a kid, not a thirty-one-year-old woman who knew better.
I walked the grounds and considered my choices. Finding things was my business. If I couldn’t find it, chances were good that thing or person couldn’t be found. Therefore, if there was a way in, I could—and would—find it.
The grounds were fairy tale pretty with fountains and flowers and little arbors. Behind the house, beyond the manicured gardens, dense hedges rose from the ground, in what appeared to be geometric patterns.
Oooh, a hedge maze. I’d always wanted to try a hedge maze.
A dog barked.
I swung around to see an Irish Wolfhound sitting alongside a bank of rose bushes, eyes alert, ears pricked, totally dead and see-through. That didn’t stop me turning to mush.
“Who’s a good girl?”
Soundlessly, the hound’s tail beat the ground. She jumped up and loped over to me. I tried petting her but it was hopeless. She was nothing more than cool mist where there should be dog. The dog didn’t seem to mind. Now that she had my attention she was more interested in the mansion. She trotted around the vast grounds to the bottom of the great stone steps. Stopped. Pointed her nose to the brick.
I crouched down alongside her.
Salt.
A ring of salt stretching in both directions, and if I wasn’t mistaken, encircling Betty Honeychurch’s home.
Salt. Why? Was she trying to keep something out? Something in?
Nose to the salt, the dog barked.
Even the most suspicious person never went wrong trusting in a Good Dog. So with my new pal watching on, a big grin on her fuzzy, transparent face, I scuffed the salt with my boot until the line was snapped in two.
Immediately the front doors flew open and Betty was there, beaming. She was in her dressing gown and slippers and even from here I could tell she smelled like buttered toast with marmalade.
“You flew all this way! I hoped you would but you never know with people. Tell that friend of yours, that Sam, there’s a year’s supply of cake and other goodies heading his way just as soon as I get back to my shop. You both did us a great service today and that will not go unrewarded.” She padded down the steps and threw her arms around me. “You’re real and you’re here. My goodness, you’re a sight for sore eyes, luv.”
Overwhelmed, I blinked a few times. What had just happened? “Sorry it took so long. I’d still be wandering around, wondering what happened if not for your dog.”
The dog in question thumped her misty tail against my leg.
“Would the dog in question be an Irish Wolfhound?”
I nodded.
“That’s Duchess. She was my best friend when I was a wee slip of a thing. Not that I ever grew much. Best dog to ever walk the earth. I miss her every day, but I feel happier knowing she’s still here with me, even if I can’t see her.” Betty looped her arm through mine. “Come on then. Are you hungry?”
“Starving. That’s some commute you have. I bet you have an amazing amount of frequent flier miles.”
Betty laughed. She sounded like bells. “There are faster ways to travel. It doesn’t take any time at all.”
“Transporter technology like Star Trek?”
“I’m more of a Dr. Who fan myself—David Tennant makes my ticker go pitty-pat—but the answer is something less technological, more woo-woo, you could say.”
My ears pricked. “A woo-woo mobile?”
“In a manner of speaking.” We stepped into a grand foyer that could easily fit my entire apartment. I was surrounded by polished wood, rich marbles, sedate yet financially extravagant art, none of which I recognized, in colors my eyes struggled to perceive.
“Humans are not the only creators or curators of art,” Betty said, following my gaze to a painting which seemed to squirm as I tried to get a fix on its subject matter. “Cross your eyes.”
I did as she said. The painting came into focus.
Butts. It was butts.
“The artist was obsessed,” she said. “There must have been a memorable bum-related incident in his youth, if you ask me. Childhood so often creates the strangest people.”
She steered me down a hallway between two sets of curved stairs that climbed to the second floor. “How do you fancy some chocolate cake and coffee with a healthy splash of Irish whiskey? That ought to make you feel downright human again after all the traveling you’ve done today.”
How could I turn down an offer like that?
I couldn’t.
But I had questions. All the questions. Like, what was this place? Who—or what—were Betty and her brother? If salt could keep them trapped in their own home then they definitely weren’t a hundred percent alive and human. And who was that strange man who’d come to the Cake Emporium for cakes, the one in the chiton?
