Whiskey and Water

by Nina Wright

  I would label this a courtesy call. My purpose: to ask Felicia if there was anything I could personally do to make her life easier while Druin was on the market. Meanwhile, Jenx—posing as my intern, if anybody asked—would get the dogs out for a little stretch and see if they pointed her anywhere. Before we left Vestige, Jenx had made sure we had two leashes.

  Since it was late Friday afternoon, I drove as fast as the law allowed, hoping to reach Druin before the official start of the weekend. En route, I filled Jenx in on the cleaner’s story about how he knew Twyla. Jenx grunted a few times but showed no real interest. I wondered if she’d already known what I just found out.

  At five minutes before five o’clock, I turned onto Internet Way, the private drive leading to Druin. We found the guard house unoccupied and the security gate closed. So we waited. I rolled down my window and smiled patiently at the video camera whose little red light glowed. Finally, the speaker box atop the gatepost crackled, and a voice I thought I recognized as Ryan’s, the new receptionist’s, said, “May I help you?”

  This time I told him the truth, more or less. At least I didn’t claim to be Officer Scarlett Cruise of the Michigan State Police. I admitted that I was Whiskey Mattimoe from Mattimoe Realty, here to pay a brief courtesy call on Felicia Gould.

  “I know she’s here,” I added quickly. “My agent Odette Mutombo just showed the property, with Ms. Gould’s cooperation. I want to follow up on that. This will take only a few minutes.”

  Ryan was gone so long that Jenx grew antsy. I suspected that she was hatching alternate schemes for accessing the property.

  Suddenly Felicia herself was on the line. “To what do I owe this surprise visit on a Friday evening, Ms. Mattimoe?”

  I repeated my story about the courtesy call, adding that I was in the neighborhood anyway to check on another listing. Felicia’s reply startled me.

  “Who’s in the car with you?”

  “My . . . intern. And my dogs. They go everywhere with me—the dogs, not the intern. Although the intern is with me today. She’s making a mid-life career change to real estate, so I’m showing her our listings. She won’t need to come in with me, though. She can stay with the dogs.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Felicia said. “Leave the dogs in the car, and bring the intern in with you. I can give you only a few minutes since I have dinner plans. Pull all the way around the front of the house to the first side entrance. I’ll meet you there.”

  When the security gate swung open, I accelerated; the gate closed behind us.

  “’Mid-life’?” Jenx asked. “I’m your age.”

  “But you’re in law enforcement, and that’s a high-risk profession.”

  “So’s your biz. . . .”

  Since it was Friday at five, I figured García the security guard had gone home for the weekend, wherever home was. Had he loved Twyla? Did he kill her? What was their relationship?

  Jenx gasped when the chateau came into view. “Damn straight I’m going inside! I’m not missing a chance to see this joint.”

  She then shared Plan B: After a brief look-around inside, Jenx would excuse herself to go back out to the dogs while I finished my chat with the chatelaine.

  To my surprise, Felicia was waiting for us on the stone patio alongside the house. And García was with her. Stonily they watched us exit the vehicle, me on the far side. I hadn’t quite managed to close my door before all hell broke loose. Abra and Norman bounded out my side, almost knocking me over. García charged Jenx, who—to my astonishment—produced her service revolver, presumably from a pocket in her overalls. I saw why; García had a gun in his hand. Dogs barked; shots were fired; I dropped to the ground. Suddenly I realized that too many dogs were barking. Had someone loosed the attack pack on us?

  “Get back in the car, Whiskey!” Jenx bellowed. “Call 9-1-1!”

  Crouching on the other side, I shouted, “Are you all right?”

  Between the howls and snarls of Abra and Norman, and the aggressive oncoming chorus, I didn’t have a clue what was up. Maybe Jenx had been hit.

  “Get in the car!” she repeated. “And lock up!”

  I did. Once inside, I could see what was happening although I could hardly believe it: Leaping and snarling, Abra and Norman had pinned Felicia against the wall of the chateau; meanwhile, Jenx was holding García at gunpoint on the ground. And coming straight at us, like a low swarm of black flies, was the attack pack.

  My sweaty hands fumbled with the phone. I tried twice to hit the three magic digits. The way my life was going, I needed 9-1-1 on speed dial. When I reached the County dispatcher, I gave my name, location, and a one-sentence summary of the crisis. I was relieved she didn’t ask what I was doing at Druin because I no longer knew.

  Another gunshot rang out. This time it wasn’t Jenx or García. Between my vehicle and the oncoming pack stood a young man in a yellow shirt and khakis aiming a rifle at the sky. He needed to fire it only once; the pack of dogs reversed their course, curling away from me in a perfect U-turn. The young man followed them at a trot.

  Instantly I relaxed. Even though I didn’t understand what was happening, I assumed that Jenx and the good dogs had the bad guys under control. I smiled to think of Abra as one of the “good” dogs.

  Within moments I heard approaching sirens. In my rear-view mirror I watched two Lanagan County sheriff’s cruisers screech to a halt. As the deputies stepped out, weapons at the ready, Jenx holstered hers and flipped open her badge case. Since Abra and Norman were still barking, I could catch only fragments of what Jenx said: “Realtor . . . murder . . . missing children. . . . “ I assumed I wasn’t really the subject of that sentence.

  Abra and Norman had not yet grown tired of cowing Felicia Gould, probably because they were doing it in shifts. One sat howling while the other lunged and snarled; then they switched roles. The sheriff’s deputies got García up off the ground and had him spread his arms and legs against one of their cars. I assumed they’d do the same with Felicia Gould as soon as they could figure out how to call off the dogs.

  One of the officers got on his radio, and Jenx used her cell phone—to call Chester, as it turned out. Still in Brady’s cruiser, he provided the necessary command to “turn off” my dog and her boyfriend. Chester and Jenx decided that I needed practice bossing Abra, so the actual task of delivering the command fell to me. Reluctantly I left the sanctuary of my vehicle and did my civic duty. The command worked. Instantly the dogs seemed to lose interest in the chatelaine. They yawned, stretched, and sniffed each other’s behinds.

  Then the side door to Druin opened. The young man in the yellow shirt and khakis emerged, sans rifle. Felicia shot him a ferocious glare, which he ignored. Flushed and sweaty, he approached the sheriff’s deputies and animatedly told them something I couldn’t hear.

  Felicia and García were loaded into the cruisers, and the dogs were stowed in my car. Jenx brought me up to speed. Ryan the receptionist was the guy who had turned back the pack of dogs. New to his job, he’d seen a few things that troubled him, and he’d just now shared them with the police.

  “Something’s going on in the wine cellar,” Jenx said.

  “Renovations,” I offered.

  “No. Something illegal. Something involving kids.”

  My jaw dropped, and I felt the blood rush away from my brain.

  “Easy,” Jenx said. “The kids are okay. Gould and García have been keeping them there since they removed them from Twyla’s house.”

  Soon the State Police arrived, along with a bilingual sheriff’s deputy; they headed into the chateau. I didn’t leave till they came out again, carrying two infants and escorting nine small children into the slanting evening light. Among them I recognized the smiling Pablo, who had tossed the rock at my car. There was also a fat black Labrador retriever.

  I learned that Felicia, and sometimes García, often drove the same kind and color vehicle I did. That might explain why Twyla cringed whenever I pulled into her driveway. Or why
Pablo wanted to break my windshield. On second thought, Pablo was probably just being a boy.

  As for the Labrador . . . Jenx explained that he was a good dog used for bad purposes. Used, as I had wildly guessed a few days earlier, to lead and quiet the kids.

  The Druin pack dogs were silent now. And my canine passengers were asleep, their silky golden bodies intertwined on the backseat.

  * * *

  If Vivika Major herself wasn’t famous, her internet company was. As soon as the public got a whiff of what had gone down at Druin, Fox News and the entertainment channels couldn’t get enough. Their headlines screamed “Dot Com Breeds Kid Scam.”

  Two days after Felicia’s arrest, Chester brought his dogs to Vestige for a play date with my dog, who wasn’t interested. Ever the thoughtful guest, Chester provided doggie treats and human treats. The doggie treats did interest Abra, and the human treats were a hit with me. I’d never tried imported pesto potato chips with white-grape soda before. Knowing my kitchen pantry as he did, Chester wanted to ensure we had something to snack on while watching the latest Druin updates on TV.

  According to the Fox News reporter, a stunning Asian woman who could have made my grocery list sound dramatic, the Druin scandal had started like this:

  “Soon after graduating from Stanford Law, Felicia Gould and Vivika Major launched their first internet company, a search engine used by physicians and academics. Major expanded their applications and client base, leading to an initial public offering (IPO) five years later. Gould’s niche was international finance; she found the overseas money they needed to keep growing. For nine more years, they enjoyed an unprecedented boom, expanding into video-editing software, children’s entertainment, and foreign language translation.”

  “Hot markets,” Chester agreed. “Cassina’s investment portfolio includes them all.”

  The reporter continued, “Then, in August 2003, Felicia Gould was in a near-fatal car crash and spent eighteen months recuperating.”

  Chester gasped when the screen filled with images of Felicia lying in a hospital bed, a dazed expression on her face, arms and legs in traction.

  “How sad for her.” he sighed.

  “Insiders claim that while Major remained loyal to her cohort, she stopped viewing her as vital,” the reporter said. “By the time Gould was able to resume her career full-time, others had been hired to what she did best. No longer an empire-builder, Gould was relegated to a string of low-stress jobs. The chatelaine post was the last in a long line of professional insults.”

  “But you said she was a good tour guide, right?” Chester asked me, his eyes shining.

  I nodded, signaling with a finger to my lips that I wanted to hear the rest of the story.

  “Gould struggled to accept her lesser role in the companies she had built, as well as the fact that she had sacrificed her child-bearing years to a career now in shambles,” said the reporter. “In early 2006, she stumbled upon an unlimited growth industry: private foreign adoptions. Facilitating the smuggling of babies and toddlers from South and Central America into the U.S. seemed the perfect marriage of her myriad international contacts and her keen understanding of immigration law. Or how to bypass it. The children she placed were orphans. The parents she served were wealthy and desperate. Were the matches to everyone’s benefit? Yes. Were they legal? No.”

  Chester stared at me. “Why is it a bad thing to help people make a family?”

  Since I had no ready answer, I deferred to the Fox News reporter. She went on, “Felicia Gould offered impatient affluent Americans a shortcut to the family of their dreams. And she made lots of money doing it. Perhaps that was her motivation: to close the gap between Vivika Major’s income and her own. Or perhaps her goal was more personal: to build families while secretly running a lucrative business right under Major’s nose. Inside her heavily armed fortress.”

  Chester and I listened intently as the reporter explained that Felicia Gould hired young women like Twyla to pose as mothers and act as mules. In fact, the reporter profiled Twyla and her boyfriend Efrén Padilla, who got her into the business; he knew people who knew people, folks who made good if illegal incomes doing things “on the side.” Padilla went by the name García, and sometimes Twyla did, too. García, who already had a history in the court system, proved more than willing to talk to the cops as part of a plea bargain.

  The reporter then cut to an interview with García, who looked on TV exactly the way he’d looked when I saw him at Druin—except that, instead of a security officer uniform, he now wore prison orange.

  García explained that Twyla’s part-time cashier gig at Food Duck was just a cover to establish credibility in Magnet Springs; her real work was taking care of kids in transit and assisting with their pick-up and delivery. She wasn’t supposed to have more than two or three children at a time.

  “But Twyla never could do math. She mis-scheduled and ended up with eleven kids,” García said.

  The camera cut back to the reporter directly addressing her audience. “And eleven children was too many in an unfortunate and conspicuous setting, where landlord and neighbors paid close attention.”

  I gulped.

  “When Twyla Rendel reported to Felicia Gould that she was on the verge of eviction, Gould took radical action,” the reporter said. “Rendel had been known to say too much to outsiders, and Gould didn’t trust the young woman’s emotionalism. So she ordered García to move the kids to Druin, where—as chatelaine—she could ensure their temporary seclusion.”

  Now the camera returned to the interview with García, who said, “Felicia told Twyla to pack the kids’ things in trash bags and bring them to a meeting place near Vanderzee Park. The belongings would go to the kids, she said, and Twyla would have a new assignment in Chicago. I met them there and drove off in Twyla’s car, still loaded with the bags. Felicia was dressed like a man. She told Twyla to get into her boat, VLM 8. The plan—or so she said—was to ferry Twyla to a rendez-vous with some guy who would take her to Chicago.”

  The reporter told her viewers, “For Twyla Rendel, the only rendez-vous was with Death. In a shallow, tree-sheltered inlet near Thornton Pointe, Felicia Gould struck Rendel in the back of the head with a shovel and then strangled her with nylon anchor line. She tossed the body overboard. Meanwhile, García followed instructions to strew the contents of several of Rendel’s trash bags along the nearby beach, which was devoid of swimmers due to a riptide alert. Gould intended to simulate the aftermath of a riptide. As she had planned, Rendel’s body rolled in to shore near the scattered trash.”

  Back on camera, García explained that he had been sent to Twyla’s house to remove all evidence connecting her to Druin. I knew he’d missed the tabloid note that I later found.

  But Felicia Gould had made a bigger error: she forgot to check Twyla’s pockets before disposing of her body. The reporter speculated that panic must have seized the chatelaine when she realized Rendel’s corpse could offer damning evidence. That was why she later drove to the beach and checked the body herself.

  Chester said, “Felicia underestimated Abra and Norman. They can recognize and remember a Human Female, especially one who’s up to no good.”

  I nodded. Disguised or not, Felicia remained connected in the dogs’ minds to the new-dead woman on the beach at Thornton Pointe. Although Chester was a fine canine translator, we would never be sure we had the whole story; after all, we had a species gap. Apparently, Felicia was nasty to the dogs, and that’s something they never forget. Being a sight hound, Abra recognized HF even in a speeding boat.

  Vivika herself posed almost no threat to Felicia’s operation, despite the kids being stashed in the wine cellar. The mogul didn’t wander around Druin let alone enjoy its myriad rooms and features. Paranoid about business security and a pathological workaholic, she had no emotional investment in her real estate.

  Felicia, however, had everything at stake. She tried various means to discourage Odette and client from viewing the
property, including letting loose the dogs. It all backfired, and in the end Abra and Norman looked like heroes. Hell, they were heroes.

  * * *

  Chester convinced me to host a modest holiday bash at Vestige. It was July Fourth, and I had a lot to celebrate. Fenton was slated to close next week on Cassina’s cottage. He was still interested in Druin, too, as a retreat center. But he wanted to postpone that decision until his “permanent spouse” returned to Magnet Springs. In the meantime, Odette would no doubt find additional qualified prospects to drive up the bidding.

  I hadn’t yet been back to bed with the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt although Fenton had offered several invitations. The more I thought about it, the more married to Noonan he still seemed. And that couldn’t be good for my karma.

  Avery and the driver were still dating. I would have let MacArthur work for Mattimoe Realty even if he hadn’t taken her off my hands. On my most cynical days, I wondered if Avery was blackmailing him. She and the twins now spent most days and nights at his flat in a lavish wing of the Castle. Maybe MacArthur had dirty secrets that only Avery knew. Or maybe he liked his women big, loud, and nasty. More work for the cleaner. . . .

  The sun was setting over Lake Michigan, and I was sitting on my top deck, a Killian’s in my hand. Chester had just replaced Hal Gruen’s black Stetson with a brand-new white one “because Hal’s one of the good guys.” My diminutive neighbor was showing Hal how to serve hors d’oeuvres.

  A horn blared, and Fenton emerged from his pickup, accompanied by Norman, who bounded toward Abra. She lay at my feet, munching Hal’s newly discarded black hat. On the deck below us, Prince Harry yipped happily and chased splint-free Velcro in circles. Now a resident of Chester’s retrofitted rooms, the shitzapoo was making an amazing recovery. Holding his little head high, he carried his personal trainer, Floozy.

  Jeb plopped down in the deck chair next to me and flashed his famous dimpled grin, the one that used to make my heart melt.