Cloaked in Malice (15 page)

“Because of a resemblance?” Nick asked, looking at me as if I had two heads.

“Zany zigzag stitch, I’m a sleuth, I’m not God.”

Or…Dolly saw little Paisley Skye and took the obvious step seeing her called for. Dolly may be a spy herself—wouldn’t that be a hoot?—and coming face to face
with Paisley was a sign she should
move
on something. Like alerting the French authorities…or the money launderers.

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the fact that Dolly
knew
a spy, once upon a time, and she lent said spy—possibly a fellow agent—a dress to get married in.

I chuckled but felt like Humpty Dumpty, cracked and ready for poaching.

“Do you think Dolly could be a spy?” I asked Nick, pulling his face close to mine.

He chuckled, moving his teasing lips against mine. “Like you said. A sleuth, not Houdini.”

“Did you get a chance to talk about what you
saw
, Madeira?” Paisley asked, returning with three pieces of peanut butter fudge, offering one to each of us.

We watched her eat her own, but we left ours on the nightstand, and when I got up, I slipped them into the wastebasket, for later forensics retrieval.

“Everything
I
see, if you care to know, Paisley?” Nick asked. “Spells concern. You might have been smarter never to leave here.”

“But if I hadn’t, I would never have met the two of you,” she said, backing into the den off her room. “You’re my best friends.”

That was the saddest commentary on a young girl’s life I’d ever heard. We’d known her two days.

I gazed out the front window, because for the life of me, I couldn’t let her see how sad that made me. “Hey, the
sun’s going down. Let’s look around outside before we leave.”

Paisley agreed, so we followed her around the yard, lagging behind so we could talk. I think she knew, and maybe she trusted that we had her best interests at heart.

I wished I could say that I totally trusted her to put our best interests first.

Nick ran a hand through his hair. “I need to get an FBI forensics team out here. I should already have called it in.”

“So call it in.”

“I don’t want to hurt Paisley by turning this into a crime scene, but there’s no way around it. Thankfully, only the three of us know the sad details of her past, and nothing we know so far is illegal.”

“About Paisley,” I qualified.

“About Paisley,” he agreed, checking his phone. “Great, it’s dead. Yours?

I checked. Nothing. “Mine too.”

Never mind. We’ll use the marine radio when we get back to the boat.”

Paisley showed us Mam’s and Pap’s graves, and Spotsylvania’s as well, while in the field beyond them, a turkey buzzard sat on a scarecrow’s head.

“Your scarecrow is dressed like a clown,” I observed. “So out of sync with your lifestyle.”

Paisley got the hiccups. “I know, but Pap loved clowns.”

“Did you see many out here?”

“None, but Bepah used to paint them, too.”

“Like he painted your grandmother’s Oleg Cassini wedding gown?”

“Can you show us his paintings?”

“I wasn’t allowed to believe in my Bepah—you’re right,” she said, her gaze snapping up to Nick’s, shocked speechless for a minute. “I
was
brainwashed.”

She crossed her arms, hugging that old blue plaid shirt, took three steps away, and came back. “One day, after drawing pictures of a gown, I asked Mam if she were a painter, what would she like us to do with her paintings after she died.”

Paisley licked her lips. “Mam looked at me for a long, uncomfortable time, then she said if she painted, we should bury her paintings with her. I was satisfied with that answer then. But now, now, for the first time, I take that to mean they buried my grandfather’s paintings with him.”

“You remembered more than you let on, and Mam suspected it,” I said. “She even warned you away, with that long look, from letting it go any further than her.”

“I hate this place.” Paisley walked over to the clown scarecrow and kicked it over. “Even when I asked the question, I didn’t understand the point of it.”

I couldn’t look at Nick. We hadn’t talked exhumation, however necessary. But those paintings might help. Change of thought. “Paisley? Where are all the slaughtered animals?”

“In freezers in the barn.”

I looked at Nick. “Had freezers been invented when this place was built? I mean, given its Depression shingles and well house?”

He slipped his hands into his pockets and gave an attempted innocent shrug that came off as a gun being cocked, metaphorically speaking.

I let the obvious answer go. “I am not opening any freezers,” I vowed.

Nick winked. “Why, what are you afraid of?”

“I think you know.”

“What’s a dead body or three?”

Paisley laughed like he told a joke. “Oh,” she said, “speaking of cemeteries”—which we weren’t—“you have to see this. They used to tell me not to go back here. They said I might fall in an old well, but after they died, I did a lot of things they said not to. It’s soooo spooky.”

I started to follow. “Like the rest of this place isn’t spooky?” I stopped dead.

Nick chuckled and kept going.

When the turkey buzzard made a gagging sound, I realized that a spooky cemetery had more to offer than buzzard sick.

At first I thought Nick and Paisley were looking at a big old tree with a lot of grass around it, but it was fenced in, and the grass grew only inside the fence, like it had been ordered not to cross the fence.

I saw a badly spelled sign planted in front of the tree centering
the circular graveyard: Man’s Best “Frend”, in black paint within the design of a red and white polka-dot doggie bone. The gnarled roots of that old tree told a morbid story, and frankly, I could empathize with the sick sound that buzzard made.

Paisley tilted her head, as if her childlike self was arguing with her adult common sense, and neither won. “Did you ever see headstones growing into a tree before?” she asked. “Kinda funny, huh? Not to mention those old dogs’ names.”

I examined a bounty of headstones, some leaning, some bowing, all looking as if they were being strangled and uplifted by the tree’s gnarled roots, the gravestones’ corners or bottoms embedded in the natural curvatures of the wood.

I was instantly worried that the rough, engraved names, one on each stone, though simple, spoke nothing of a man’s canine friends but of an honest man’s natural enemy, the kind of greedy, heartless creature that commanded power and struck fear in the prudent: “Scar, Tuna, Smoots, Teets, and Momo.”

Twenty

People used to complain to me all the time, “I can’t even hear you sing because your clothes are so loud.”

—CYNDI LAUPER

I was leaning toward the fact that even though Pap couldn’t spell “friend,” he could have spelled “mob” if not “Mafia” or plain old “hit men.”

“What silly fake names,” Paisley said on a chuckle. “They’re worse than mine and they’ve always made me laugh.”

“I thought you never went here until after your Mam died?” I asked.

“Okay, so I disobeyed her every chance I got, so sue me. It wasn’t much fun growing up here, ya’ know?”

I felt like an idiot, especially when Nick gave me a warning look. “Paisley, these names are neither fake nor anything to laugh about,” Nick said, checking his phone again,
without success. Then he did a slow three-sixty, his gaze fixed on distant points, up into trees, across the farmyard, down toward the meadow, and beyond the electric fence.

He scanned the area so intently, he made me wonder if he might not be wearing some kind of secret long-range contacts that only the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security knew about. I mean like teeny built-in spyglass or binocular contacts.

Okay, so I had a dangerous imagination, but this place fired it like nothing in my previous life experience.

Without warning, Nick sprinted to the open fence, closed it, located a keypad behind a fairy door in a tree stump, of all the weird things, and reversed whatever he’d done with the stylus to get us in, thereby locking us in.

“I’m not sure I like this,” I said, standing beside Paisley, a goodly distance away from Nick.

“Why?” Paisley kicked a rock. “I lived to talk about it. Even to come back to it.”

Yeah, and how stupid are you for coming when you knew what this was like, and how stupid are we for following you here?

“The fence is electrified again,” Nick said when I met him halfway, leaving Paisley in my dust.

“I pretty much figured.”

“You really think those dead dogs are mobsters?” I asked him.

“They’ll need to be exhumed,” he said, his back straighter
than it had been. “We need to leave as soon as possible,” he suggested. “After we check the freezers.”

I shivered despite the August sun.

“Wait,” Paisley said, reaching us, her chin coming up. “Your voices carry. You don’t think those are dogs in the cemetery. How can that be? I never heard or saw anyone here, except Mam and Pap.”

Nick tried his iPhone again. “You must be a heavy sleeper,” he said, distracted as he tried walking around and holding up his phone, a regular cliché of a com-mercial.

“I
used
to be a heavy sleeper, but since Mam died, I can’t sleep for anything. The night she died, I had the creeping shakes all night. I was sick, too, but the night sickness has gotten less severe over time.”

Nick and I looked at each other, communicating the obvious without words.

“They gave you something to make you sleep,” Nick said, stepping into the barn, where we found more glistening stainless-steel Sub-Zero freezers than the appliance section of Sears. State of the art, I might add.

“Were these here when you lived here?” I asked Paisley.

“Yep, they just showed up one d—”

Nick eyed her. “You’ll need to have a checkup back in Mystic, to be sure they didn’t use substance controls beyond a sleep aid.”

Paisley hiccupped and shivered, despite the sun, sea breezes,
and her grandfather’s blue plaid flannel shirt “I’ll get checked out for my own sake
and
for your investigation,” she said, “because that’s what this is now, right? I mean. Six dead whatevers, or whoevers, with stupid names.”

Stupid names. I had to agree with her. “You don’t remember having pets with those names, do you?”

“No, but I don’t remember much of anything before the shack, and after, for a while. Maybe Smoots and company were pets who died before I got here?”

“The dog, you do remember, was Spotsylvania. Bit too many syllables, don’t you think?”

Paisley closed her eyes and released a slow sigh before she opened them and gave us a blank look that spoke volumes. What
could
she say?

“Right,” Nick said. “If each of you would grab a freezer door, open it, and stand
behind
it, I’ll check the contents. You can do it together if you want, and I’ll tell you when to shut them.”

In one way, I didn’t like
not
being in the know; in another, I appreciated Nick’s silence as he examined the contents of the freezers that Paisley and I revealed.

“Okay,” he said. “Close those doors and open the next two.”

Paisley, like me, looked only too happy to stay
behind
the doors.

Nick took quiet notes, bless him, poker face in place, though I thought his lips held too firm a line for comfort.

When we’d finished, he thanked us but said nothing more.

“I’m afraid to ask,” I said when we met him in the barn doorway.

“Then don’t. The less anyone knows, the better.”

“But Madeira knows more than anybody,” Paisley said, “because I’d swear she got something from the clothes.”

“Sorry if I don’t believe that kind of thing,” Nick said. “I’m a doubting Thomas where psychics are concerned. And even if it were true, which is impossible,” he added, “a psychic reading is usually skewed toward the reader’s limited knowledge. Telling the authorities about what someone may, or may not, know psychic-wise would probably get you and her a psychiatric evaluation, if not a long-term stay on a psych ward.”