Kelly rolled her eyes. "Of course you'd think that."
Little did she know. If he wasn't charged with murder, just theft and kidnapping, Stan might get out of prison someday. And I'd be there, waiting, with a rusty car battery and a couple of jumper cables that wouldn't be used on his car.
* * *
The doorbell rang bright and early the next morning. I answered to find Ava standing there and invited her in.
"Why aren't you in school?" I asked before I realized what I'd said.
"I'm helping with the funeral," Ava said simply.
"I'm really sorry about your dad. He died saving my life, you know." I led her to the couch, and we sat down.
She nodded. "I know. It's okay."
I stared at the little girl.
"I don't know about that," I mumbled. Then I bribed her with ice cream and cats. She accepted both.
"Why did you stop by?" I asked.
"I just wanted to say I was sorry for what happened to Kaitlyn at the parade."
She was sorry? Her father died, and she was sorry?
"You don't have to apologize. I know you knew your dad had her. Kaitlyn is okay." I remembered the look on her face when we were asking the girls about Kaitlyn's disappearance.
The little girl looked at me curiously. "You did?"
I nodded. "I figured it out. Later."
"Mommy is sad," Ava said.
I put my arm around the girl. "I'm sorry she's sad. And I'm really sorry you're sad."
She looked up at me. "It's okay. Daddy and I weren't close."
This confused me. "Yes, but he was your daddy. I know you'll miss him."
Ava shrugged. "He was my stepfather. I didn't like him much. But the best part is that he saved you."
I had no idea how to respond to that. These girls were amazing. Sometimes, they were mature beyond their years. Other times, they wanted to set fires where they weren't supposed to. It just depended on the day.
Ava and I chatted aimlessly for a few more minutes. She put in a request that we have a meeting at the local gun range, but I suspected one or two other Scouts put her up to that. Finally, her mother pulled up out front, and she left.
I shelved the idea of arming a bunch of trigger-happy little girls and steeled myself for a trip across the street. It was time to talk to Rex.
Dealing with armed little girls would be a cinch compared to this.
* * *
Rex opened the door and ushered me inside before I had a chance to knock. Leonard was taking up the whole couch and wagged his tail so hard he knocked over a lamp on an end table.
"I really need to do something about that." Rex sighed. "It's the third lamp he's broken this week."
So far, things were looking up. He'd let me into his house without complaint and was talking amiably. I took that as a good sign.
Leonard came over and shoved me onto the couch with his nose before climbing into my lap. He was so large, I couldn't see around him. Rex began to laugh, and I relaxed. Okay. This was going way better than I'd thought.
"Leonard, down." Rex pointed at the floor
The dog dutifully jumped down and proceeded to sit on my feet with his head in my lap. I started scratching behind his ears.
"You're training him," I murmured.
"He already had some training." Rex sat down next to me and ruffled Leonard's fur. "This is a smart dog."
Leonard belched in agreement.
"By the way," he said. "I got a call to pick up a dining table and chairs today. Apparently, you've been shopping for things you don't need?"
"I…uh…thought we could…" What could I say? He had me dead to rights. "Okay, I bought it to get info from Victoria."
Rex said nothing. He just stood there with his eyebrows raised, which made me feel terrible.
"I'm so sorry about all of this," I blurted out. So much for being smooth. "I didn't mean to mess things up."
My fiancé leaned back and studied me. "You didn't exactly mess things up. But you don't seem to have much respect for my job."
That hit me like a cannonball to the chest. "I do! I really do. It's just that I get so caught up in all the excitement."
He nodded. "I know. I've been thinking about that. I understand that it was hard for you to leave your job. But you're a civilian now. I'm the detective. And unless you want to go to the academy and study to become a policeman…"
"I can do that?" I jumped in before he could finish. "That might be fun! Then we can work together! I've got lots of ideas! Hey, we can be a husband and wife crime fighting duo!"
Rex raised his hands. "Merry, stop. If you'd let me finish, I'd have said that there's only one detective job here in town. We couldn't work together."
"Oh." That kind of knocked the wind out of my sails.
"If we're going to get married…" he said.
If?
"…you're going to have to let me do my job," Rex said.
"I do want to get married," I grumbled.
"And I know that Riley has offered you a job as a private investigator," he continued, "but I don't want you to take it."
"Why not?" I had no intention of taking Riley's offer, but I wasn't sure I wanted my husband telling me what I could or could not do.
He ran his hands through his dark hair. He looked frustrated. "First of all, you probably won't be investigating anything other than cheating spouses and insurance fraud claims. I'm not sure you'd like that."
Hmmm…that did sound creepy.
"Secondly, I don't want you working against me if we did investigate the same thing."
I sighed. Leonard took this as an invitation to climb into my lap again. For a smart dog, he didn't seem to realize that he wasn't the right size to be a lap dog. Rex ordered him down, and with a whimper, he turned around on the rug forty or fifty times before lying down and falling asleep. Too bad I couldn't teach the cats to do that.
"Okay," I said at last.
"Okay?" He frowned.
I nodded. "Okay. I won't take Riley up on his offer."
Rex's right eyebrow went up, but he said nothing.
"And," I continued, "I won't get involved in your cases." That hurt to say. "But I'm not sure about the Historical Society job."
At long last, my fiancé nodded. "It won't come open until after the first of the year anyway."
I thought about my conversation with Susan. "But I won't rule it out."
Rex smiled and pulled me against his chest. Relief flooded over me.
"I still need to do something, though," I mumbled. "Maybe I could apprentice with your sisters. Think I'd make a good taxidermist?"
Laughter rumbled in his chest. "No. I don't. We'll find something for you. I promise."
As my fears drifted away, I realized how lucky I was. I had a wonderful fiancé, two weird cats, an amazing best friend, and ten precocious little girls who were literally up for anything.
My life was close to perfect. Now I just had to fight my nature and stop investigating murders.
I was 99% (well, maybe more like 89%) positive I could do that. After all, it wasn't like murder happened in this small town every day.
Okay, so maybe it did. But odds were things would be quiet from here on out. It wasn't like Who's There was the murder capital of Iowa.
Right?
* * * * *
MARRIAGE VOW MURDER
a Merry Wrath Mystery
by
LESLIE LANGTRY
* * * * *
CHAPTER ONE
"What do you mean, there's a body in the front pew?" I asked my best friend and matron of honor. (BTW, that title has nothing to do with prison or knights in shining armor. I checked.)
My wedding was set for tomorrow, December 28. With the rehearsal dinner later tonight, Kelly and I thought we'd get a jump on decorating the church—which meant she was decorating and telling me I was doing it wrong. We'd only been there one hour before she sprung this on me.
Kelly's face had gone a little g
reen, which was odd, considering the fact that she was a nurse. "I think it's the florist."
"The florist is dead?" That didn't seem like good news. "Did he drop off the flowers first?"
Kelly's jaw dropped. "Merry!"
"What? We paid a fortune for those flowers!"
Okay, maybe she had a point and I was being a tad insensitive, but I was running on wedding stress—a stress I found strangely similar to armed-showdown-in-an-Estonian-alley stress or hand-over-the-photos-to-a-dwarf-dressed-as-an-astronaut-with-a-flamethrower-while-standing-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff-in-Peru stress.
My to-do list was ridiculous. I followed Kelly to the front of the church, and there was elderly Lewis Spitz, my florist, lying there, with a knife sticking out of his chest.
"Another murder in my vicinity." With a heavy sigh, I took out my cell.
My fiancé was also the town detective. He was wrapping up a few loose ends at work before the wedding tomorrow. Now he'd have a murder to deal with.
Officer Kevin Dooley, a mouth breather and paste eater I'd known since kindergarten, arrived alone, with his arm elbow deep in a bag of pork rinds.
I looked behind Kevin and asked, "Where's Rex?"
The officer's expression resembled a lobotomized amoeba. "He's not at the station. We've tried to get hold of him. He's missing."
I hadn't heard anything more than grunts from this guy for three years. He finally strung more than one word together, and it was to say my fiancé had gone missing? I pulled out my cell and called Rex. After five rings it went into voicemail.
"He's here somewhere," I said as I turned on a tracking app I'd recently installed on our phones.
And, no, it's not Find My iPhone (although that is useful). It's a special CIA app I'd hacked that takes things to a whole new level. It can tell you where someone is, what they're wearing, and what they're eating—an unfortunate addition, as Rex has discovered I like to eat Oreos in the parking lot of one of the local grocery stores.
In this case, however, the app was a bust. There was no signal at all. Nothing indicating Rex's location or even his existence. I called his twin sisters and his parents next. Nobody had seen or heard from him today.
When had I seen him last? Last night when we had pizza at my house—a quiet moment for just the two of us, his dog, and my cats before the chaos to come. I tried calling him once more without luck.
Fortunately, my dress for the rehearsal was hanging in the dressing room. I was still wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and boots—which would be better for running around in the snow. Why we picked December for a wedding was beyond me.
"Where are you going?" Kelly called out.
"I'll be right back," I shouted over my shoulder as I tore up the aisle.
This had to be some sort of miscommunication. Maybe Rex was working on a surprise for me. I did love a good surprise. So why were my spy-dy senses tingling as I drove to his house a few blocks away?
By the way, everything in Who's There, Iowa, was a few blocks away. In fact, the town motto for decades has been You can go anywhere in Who's There in five minutes. Inspiring stuff that never convinced anyone to move or locate their business here.
As for Rex, until I knew more, I was going to keep a lid on my fears. Fears that included the idea that he'd gotten cold feet and run off…or that he'd been held up by some last-minute detail.
Leonard, the Scottish deerhound, greeted me at Rex's house with a confused look and excited tail wag that cleared the coffee table.
"Rex!" I shouted as I ran through the home.
His car was in the garage, but he wasn't. I kept calling his name. There was no answer after a very thorough search that included the cupboard under the sink and the bathroom medicine cabinet. Why? You can never be too sure. Once, in Japan, I found a man living in the bathroom wall. He wasn't a spy but a weirdo with a medicine cabinet fetish. His name was Ted.
I ran across the street to my house as I called his cell for the fifth time. This time, it skipped the rings and went straight to voicemail. Which meant he was either "declining" my calls or his phone was switched off.
The cats looked suspiciously at me as if to say whatever was wrong must be my fault. They didn't even help me look, which made me wonder if they were covering for him. They weren't. Rex wasn't at my house either.
I called Kelly, but she told me that Rex hadn't checked in or shown up. In fact, his sisters, Randi and Ronni, and his parents were there and worried.
"Get back here soon!" Kelly whispered into the phone. "Randi is setting up a dead otter nativity! Between that and the dead body in the first pew, Pastor Brown is not happy!"
Randi and her twin sister, Ronni, were taxidermists here in town. Since I'd met them last spring, I'd been the doubtful recipient of many dead animals in bizarre dioramas. The two short, plump women created anthropomorphic taxidermy—animals posed like humans, doing human things. It was disturbing at first, but over the last several months I'd become numb to the absurdity of it all. Pastor Brown, on the other hand, would be new to this.
"Have Mom handle it," I told her. "I've got to find Rex."
She agreed and hung up before I could respond. My mother, Judith Czrygy, was a senator's wife and was the only one who could say no to the twins in a way that seemed like an overwhelmingly enthusiastic "yes."
For the next twenty minutes, I drove past every parking lot, business, and home in Who's There, Iowa. I checked every store and restaurant we'd ever been too. Kelly texted that no one at the hospital had seen him. My fiancé had simply disappeared.
Where was he? Now the fears started creeping into my head. Rex wasn't the type to get cold feet and run off. I knew that, and yet it shot to the top of my anxiety list. No, he wouldn't do that. Rex was a responsible adult. If he'd wanted to call it off, he wouldn't have waited until the day before. We would have discussed it a while ago. My fiancé was thoughtful, smart, and mature, and he didn't hide from his concerns.
Which meant he was either lost or abducted. And since Who's There is a small town of maybe eight thousand people, getting lost wasn't an option. Granted, he could've gotten lost in the maze of gravel roads and cornfields that surrounded us in every direction. One time, when I was in high school and detassling corn for the summer, they bussed in some kids from Des Moines. In spite of just having to walk from one end to the other of a row of corn, they got lost and were missing for five hours. We found them in the next county in an unfortunate town called Pig Belly, at the also unfortunately named Tastee Dog. They were dazed and had no idea where they were but had filled up on soft-serve ice cream and corn dogs instead of calling anyone.
Which left one alternative. Rex had been kidnapped or worse. Most small-town cops didn't just disappear. But this police detective had a problem…me.
I had enemies. Up until three years ago, I'd been a spy—a field agent with the CIA. I'd infiltrated drug cartels in Cartagena, spied on the Yakuza in Tokyo, and fought off the FSB in a dark alley in Moscow. So, when the vice president "accidentally" outed me to get back at my dad, a powerful player in the Senate, I changed my name from Fionnaghuala Merrygold Wrath Czrygy to Merry Wrath and moved back to my hometown in Iowa to hide out until I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
Most of the people I'd spied on were in prison or dead now. But it was possible that someone had found out who and where I was…and wanted revenge. Bile rose in my throat as I broke out in a sweat. Was that what happened?
I shook my head to clear it. Get ahold of yourself, Wrath! This wasn't an international conspiracy! Rex always said that most abductions were by someone the victim knew (and then there were always aliens). But who would that be? And then it occurred to me.
I had one more place I could check. And it was the last place I wanted to go.
* * *
"Where is he?" I demanded as I stormed into the office in the strip mall.
Riley looked up from his computer. "Where's who?"
I folded my arms over my chest and narrowed my ey
es. "Rex. Where is he?"
My former CIA handler grinned smugly. "You don't know where your intended is? Aren't you getting married tomorrow?"
"What did you do with Rex?" I asked in clipped tones so he'd know I meant business.
He held up his hands defensively. All smartassery gone. "What are you talking about?"
My spy-dar told me he was genuinely confused. Riley Andrews was telling the truth. I slumped into a chair and told him everything, from the body in the pew to my search. He listened and even had the grace to look concerned. Riley had been jockeying for my affections over the past three years. When he retired to open a private investigation firm in my hometown, I'd decided to avoid him like a Russian figure skater with leprosy and a spitting problem.
He'd even offered me a job.
I'd turned him down.
"I have no idea where he is, Merry." Riley held up his hands defensively. "I swear."
Riley seemed genuine. His blue eyes were wrinkled with concern as he ran his hands through his wavy blond hair. He was so different from Rex. Where Riley messed with my head, Rex respected me. While Riley was a womanizer, Rex was a one-woman man. The two men couldn't be more different.
I threw my hands up. "Then where is he?"
"Are you sure he's missing?" my former partner asked. "Maybe he told you he was running to Des Moines for something and you forgot?"
I thought about getting indignant, but Riley had a point. In my retirement, I'd become forgetful at times. Had Rex said something about an errand today? I ran through our conversation last night but came up empty, mostly because we'd been talking about my favorite subject—junk food.
"He left his car in his garage," I said. "And he doesn't have a squad car. Which means he didn't go to Des Moines."
"I don't think the police will consider him missing until he's gone twenty-four hours," Riley quipped.
Merry Wrath Mysteries Boxed Set Volume III (Books 7-9) Page 39
