Cloaked in Malice (31 page)

I expected Dad to join me any minute on the Bank Street sidewalk, across from my corner shop, while on Main Street, I noticed one odd duck whose Armani suit might
as well be made of flashing neon. He
so
stood out from the crowd.

I leaned against Mystic Pizza’s dove grey clapboards, sipping hot coffee, while my building took on the brightening glow of dawn’s early light.

Eve Meyers, my pixie-cut strawberry-blonde BFF, a Steampunk Goth computer genius snapped pictures of the scene with a tech-forward camera that could do everything but pipe a seam.

My former morgue cum funeral-chapel carriage house, a study in lavender and sage would look positively poetic right now, except for the swarm of construction workers crawling over it like ants at a cupcake picnic.

Judging from the salty funk in the air, low tide and dawn arrived at the same time this morning.

Catching the same breeze, Eve, in Blahnik booties and a black corseted jodhpur jumpsuit, of my design, wrinkled her perfect nose. She had an eye for two things: photography and men in hard hats. Unfortunately, the crew kept their eyes on her, too. She’d nearly been banned from the site twice now. My workers had the injuries to prove it.

“Wish I could rent one of your new apartments,” she said, since my new floor would accommodate three.

I raised a brow, and she shrugged.

Her parents came from the old country. Sure, Eve shocked
them with her attire, and changing hair colors, but she loved and respected them too much to leave until—in their perfect world—after a “traditional” wedding when she’d move to her husband’s house. But given her allergic reaction to tradition, she’d probably never leave.

Not that she couldn’t catch a man; she often stood corset-deep in them. She simply liked the challenge of changing men as often as her hair color.

Me? I could hardly wait to move away, again, though I wouldn’t go as far as the New York fashion district this time. I’d live above my shop. Dad and Aunt Fiona needed alone time, when they could be certain I wouldn’t pop in any minute. Aunt Fee is not my biological aunt. She was my mother’s college BFF, her sister witch, and later, a “mom in a storm” for four motherless Cutler kids. Still is—twenty years after my mother’s passing.

Aunt Fee and my dad fought for eighteen of those years—it was the witch thing—but recently, his interest in her took a sudden and interesting turn. Fiona, well, she’s loved him since
before
he met my mother. ’Nuff said. Right now, Dad wallows in denial. He loves her; he just doesn’t know it yet. I figure he needs space for a get-a-clue light bulb big as Texas. And I intend to give it to him.

The gathered crowd gasped bringing me back to the present, while Eve snapped pictures. I could almost forget the odd duck amid the masses. Like an ad for suits at five
grand, he stood so intensely focused on my roof, I had to wonder what he thought he’d see.

Could he be one of Eve’s latest? He sure didn’t seem the type to dance at the end of one of her man-strings. Though she’d brought home worse, and scarier.

In a theatrical traffic-stopping stunt, my roof rose above my building, held aloft by long-armed orange whirligigs, while a prefab third floor outer wall got slipped beneath it to meet my attic floor.

“Almost there,” Eve whispered, as if she might jinx it by speaking too loud.

Dad and Aunt Fiona joined me, with my little Chakra in her cat carrier for safety’s sake. They rarely took two cars anymore. Dad now drove Aunt Fee’s formerly “impractical” sporty vintage model.

Fiona came up behind me and slipped a black velvet cape over my shoulders and my father hooked it beneath the scarf at my chin.

“I told you, Harry, that she’d need it.”

“It was your mother’s, Mad,” my father said, knuckling my cheek. “Fee’s been keeping it for you. I agree, it’s time for you to have it.”

Whoa.
I stroked the full length cape, one surely worn for Wiccan rituals, and I pulled it tight around me. “It’s like she’s hugging me, Daddy.”

He did the same, probably so I wouldn’t see his eyes mist over, too, and I wallowed in the comforting scent of cherry pipe tobacco.

“Stop!” Isaac, the construction boss, shouted, pulling us apart and catching our attention in a big way.

“Stop!” an assortment of foremen echoed, one after the other.

“Something’s in the way,” Isaac shouted.

And didn’t the odd duck across the street jump, like he’d taken a jolt of electricity, then he stopped, too, breathing and moving…like somebody stabbed him in the chest with an ice pick?

Unexpectedly, our gazes locked—mine and Odd Duck’s—and a stricken look crossed his features, then almost as fast, he disappeared into the crowd.

I had stopped breathing, myself, for two reasons. The man spooked me, royally, and my roof raising had come to a dead halt. “Inches away and they can’t make it work?” I said to no one in particular, stepping off the curb to cross the street.

My dad caught my arm. “Wait,” he said. “Fools rush in and all that. Hear what Issac has to say first. It’s dangerous over there.”

I nodded, lip-biting silent, and backed onto the curb, while a hard-hat cast of thousands jostled a fragile puzzle consisting of heavy equipment and assorted building parts.

One mistake and they could wipe out my savings account, like forever.

At the Main and Bank Street corner of my attic, Isaac knelt, looked my way, and raised a wait-a-minute finger.

While my heart beat at a frantic pace, I saluted.
Never let them see you sweat.

Eve kept snapping pics, the reliable cadence of clicks, or mom’s cape, or both having rather a calming effect on me.

Isaac tugged something from the corner rafters, his shout one of success, and with both hands, he held up a package. The crew cheered, as did the watching crowd. Even strangers took pictures, reminding me that I was, once again, changing the face of Main Street. I’d already turned the derelict eyesore into a vintage beauty that graced brochures. And now I was giving it stature.

From the rubberneckers, who should be driving, I saw arms pumping approval out car windows, their horns blaring. In the distance, boat whistles responded, adding to the overall whoosh of Amtrak’s Acela rushing, as if on cue, non-stop through Mystic.

Isaac spoke to his second-in-command and disappeared from the top of the mark.

When he stepped out my front door, he grinned, his sooty eyes boring into me like a fast flashy drill bit. He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Hey, Mad, bit of buried treasure for ya.” He could make himself heard, that man, and people listened. That’s why I hired him. That and the fact that he worked cheap in winter, because after he walled the third floor, he’d only work on the inside when he had no other work. For that, I got a great price
and
a great contractor.

I was so focused on the “treasure,” I didn’t realize I’d missed the rush of getting a third floor, until half the town of Mystic applauded. I looked at Eve in shock, but she raised her camera with pride, and I knew the moment wasn’t lost to me, after all.

I hitched up my gloves and closed my cape. Traffic had picked up speed, but the cars turning onto Bank stopped to let us cross to my parking lot.

I thanked Isaac as he shoved the treasure into my hands, while Chakra hissed and swiped her bare claws out the “window” of her carrier, as if to claim, or annihilate, the find.

Fiona pulled my butterscotch striped baby away, but I hadn’t named her Chakra for nothing. She knew when I was scared, or should be, I suppose. And now, because of her reaction, I had that solar plexus tremble that only she could soothe, and evidently instigate.

I held the box tight, rather than drop it, and risk breaking whatever might be inside. The last unexpected find in this building gave me nightmares, still, and I didn’t have hope for better with this. So I wouldn’t speculate on the contents nor reveal them in public.

Eve took pictures at varied angles of the box and its covering, too. She said she had enough memory to take thousands. I presume she meant the camera did, though I’d learned never to sell Eve short.

The treasure box looked like a drear brick of
moiré-a-pois silk appliquéd in a faded peach-rose single-Vee chevron motif, with tiny, perfect hand stitching, like Parisian
Haute Couture
. Odd to find a quality piece like that as wrapping paper when newspaper would have done as well.

I pulled back on the suspicious fabric to reveal a vintage brass box, high quality, topped by a raised and engraved plate, and when I did, the wind whipped the fabric up to swipe it across my face.

Eve snapped pictures of the box from several angles, then the fabric alone, then the bare box and the engraving. “Mystick by the Sea Country Club, Established 1929,” she read, and whistled.

A rush of ice ran up my neck and by the time my knees weakened, I feared that the fabric might be a piece of vintage clothing.

“Oh, oh,” Aunt Fiona said. “Harry, grab her.”

“Not again!” Eve fought me for the box, while I had no control over my hand, in something of a death grip, as if rigor had set in.

“I bet that’s part of a dress or something!” Eve snapped. “I
hate
when this happens!” Her panic tickled me as I slipped from the reality of this plane to another, though I always left my body behind.

“Mad?” she shouted. “Where did you go this time?”

“Eve,” my father groused. “She’s right here.”

Confession time: My father doesn’t know about my psychometric
gift or my mother’s.
Not his thing,
Mom used to say.

Right now, all that mattered was everyone swirling away from me. Or, rather, their voices doing so, as I, in my own psychic way, swirled away from them, and found myself…where?

A hovel, cold, dark and dank, barely warmed by the labored breaths of the specters gathered, their features shadowed like spirits in the belly of a whale. I saw only the whites of their eyes, my gag reflex triggered by the overpowering stench of fish, fear…and guilt.

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