Cloaked in Malice (7 page)

I wondered if her words were the result of memory rather than fear? Not that she’d know it. Maybe just being away from her time, or possible incarceration, on that island would jar her into remembering.

“I guess it’s like the devil you don’t know, isn’t it?” I said. “Because the description of the place where you were brought up scares
me
.” My attempt to turn her fear to amusement darn near succeeded.

“So here’s the skinny,” I said, searching for my keys. “This amazing house here, where I was raised with my brother and sisters, is a renovated old coach stop and tavern, still standing at the quarter-century mark—depending on which section of the house you’re in. It’s a gracious grand dame of a Connecticut Yankee that spent the better part of her life on the old Boston Post Road as a coaching inn and tavern.

“It has the distinction of having hosted George Washington,
the father of our country, and Thomas Jefferson, as well, at different times in its history, but both early in their respective careers as land surveyors. I used to think that Benjamin Franklin slept here, too, but my father says I was wrong about that.”

“It seems I’ve read that a lot of old houses make that claim,” Paisley said. “About George Washington sleeping there, I mean.”

“I’ll show you the proof when we get inside.”

“Wow, you know the history of your house, and I don’t know the history of myself.”

I squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll fix that. I just don’t want you to be afraid of the house.”

“Thanks, it helped. Tell me more.”

“There isn’t much. When the old place was moved, early in the last century, from the well-traveled Boston coaching road, it was deposited and rebuilt here, across the river from Mystic Seaport. See how it towers over the neighborhood? I like to think of it as a sentinel standing watch and protecting us all.”

Paisley tilted her head. “That is a comforting thought.”

Sure,
I’d
seen the old tavern ghosts from the cradle, but most people never did, so I left out that little detail. “It’s really old and drafty,” I added for good measure, “so if a door squeals open and no one’s on the other side, don’t freak.”

The front door opened as if to prove me right and we both yelped.

Paisley elbowed me, and I rolled my eyes. “I know, neither of us listened to me.”

Nick stood on the inside and opened the door the rest of the way, indicating that we should enter.

I gave him a peck on the cheek. “I didn’t see you leave us standing there.”

“You were too busy recalling the house’s history, so I ran around back and took our favorite route.”

Paisley cleared her throat. “Your favorite what?”

“The getaway tree,” I said. “That’s what I call it.”

Nick grinned. “I like to think of it as the sneak tree myself. I’ve been using it as my own special entry since the two of us were in high school.”

I turned on the light in the front hall, then in the keeping room, in time to see Paisley’s eyes go wide. “You two have been a couple that long?”

“On and off,” we said together.

She eyed us. “So Detective Werner, he was just a—”

“Blip,” I said.

“Wake-up call,” Nick countered.

Kewl. He’d gotten it.

Paisley’s eyes twinkled at the difference in our statements, and then she lowered her shoulders, and sighed heavily. “I’m a virgin.”

“TMI!” Nick said, escaping to light the rest of the house, thereby giving me a minute alone with our guest.

I hooked my arm through Paisley’s to lead her on a first-timer’s tour. “I’ll throw a party to introduce you to the
neighborhood, though it’ll have to be after Dolly’s hundred-and-fourth birthday party, where you’ll meet some of the neighbors anyway.”

“Won’t people wonder what I’m doing here?”

“I’m sure Tunney’s alerted gossip central by now of your mysterious presence. Between Dolly’s party and your own, let’s call yours a bachelor party, we’ll see if we can’t get you a couple of dates. Gotta start somewhere, but, er, in case your mam didn’t cover this in her homeschooling, it’s probably not smart to
sleep
with the first person you date, and especially not with all the guys you date.”

Paisley laughed, a truly lighthearted sound. “If Mam covered anything, she covered the facts of life, the ‘never sleep with a man till you marry him’ version.”

I wiped my brow. “Glad we don’t need to have
that
talk.”

“I’m a little too old to be just stepping foot into the cold waters of the dating scene at this point, aren’t I?”

“Nah, this way, we’ll only invite the guys who’ve been weeded out. You won’t have any clunkers to choose from.”

“Clunkers?”

“You know, married guys, two-timers, chauvinists, narcissists, that kind of thing,” I said. “You missed the worst part by starting late:
Dating duds for fits and frustration
.”

We reached the oldest part of the house, the tavern. I slid
open the window beneath the portico. “How’s this for a Mickey-D-type drive-through, colonial style? Oh, and these are known as Indian shutters, for back when the natives didn’t like us stealing their land, so they shot their arrows to get us the Hermès out of here. And I don’t blame them. Wait, is that my father’s voice? Dad, Aunt Fee,” I called. “Is that you?”

I dragged Paisley back to the keeping room, where I got bear hugged by my father and maternally squished by Aunt Fiona, his Old Spice mingling with her peachy Trésor, which made me feel like I’d just come home.

“Dad, we have a guest. Paisley Skye, these are my parents. Oh, sorry, I forgot that referring to them as my parents raises my dad’s blood pressure. See the color of his face? Sort of a muted magenta, wouldn’t you say?”

Aunt Fiona laughed and extended her hand to Paisley. “I’m Fiona. Mad’s late mother was my best friend. The world has made peace with the fact that I’m dating Kathleen’s widower, but her widower hasn’t.”

“Will you stop?” my father snapped. “I think Calvin Coolidge said it best,” Dad said, looking from me to the woman he refused to admit he adored.

She rolled her eyes, and Nick and I smiled, while my dad cleared his throat. “Coolidge said: ‘Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.’” My father raised a brow. “You could take a lesson, Madeira.”

I wiped Aunt Fiona’s lipstick smudge off his cheek. “So,
Dad, what you’re really saying is, ‘Shut up, al-ready’?”

My father hugged me again. “Brat. Now who is this lovely young lady?”

Our houseguest was not shy. She stepped forward, and pumped my father’s hand. “Hello, Mr. Cutler, I’m Paisley Skye—the name’s fake, by the way—and I’m an asylum escapee. I’ll be staying with you for a while, until Mad figures out who I
really
am.”

Eight

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

—GEORG C. LICHTENBERG

As quickly as we had said hello to my parents, we said good-bye to them. Dad decided, since I had a houseguest, he’d spend the night in Aunt Fiona’s guest room.

Yeah, right.

True, I grew up calling Fiona my aunt—my mom died when I was ten, after all, but as dad had taken to pointing out lately, Fiona wasn’t related to us at all.

I walked them to the car. “Don’t worry, she’s not nuts.” I focused on Fiona. “She has some vintage children’s clothes she wants me to take a look at.”

“Have you seen any of them?” Aunt Fee asked.

“Well,” I said, using the pause for emphasis. “I held a small
cloak earlier this afternoon and decided right then that she needed my help.”

“Gotcha,” Fee said. “Is Nick staying, too?”

“Yes, he is.”

Fee patted my father’s knee. “Mad’ll be fine. We can go.”

My father leaned across Fiona to grab my hand and squeeze. “If you’re playing sleuth again, be careful, baby. I love you.”

My heart melted. Just when I forgot to give Professor Harry Cutler, best dad in the world, credit, he came through, and turned right back into the big old huggy bear I remembered from my childhood.

I watched them leave then pull into Fiona’s driveway, four houses up. I waved again, and went inside.

I found Nick whipping up a light salad with some savory biscuits and Paisley in the gentlemen’s parlor looking at the diplomas on the wall. Lots of diplomas. My parents’, mine and my siblings’, overachievers all, from kindergarten diplomas to PhDs, and everything in between. One master’s degree was never enough in the Cutler family.

Paisley folded her arms as she turned to me and she stamped her foot. “You lucky brat. School, school, school, and I never went to one. No papers to show for my knowledge.”

Well…but it wasn’t a “there there” I found, it was an idea. “Would you like to take some college courses?”

“Would I? But I don’t have the credentials to get into any school. And I’d look pretty foolish in first grade.”

I picked up my iPhone and hit speed dial for Eve. “Nick’s cooking. Wanna come over for a snack? I have an educational challenge for you. Sure, pj’s are always cool.”

Ten minutes and the steampunk goth arrived with the pizza she’d ordered.

“Eve,” Nick said, “your hair is so red, I think I need sunglasses. Looking at you is hurting my eyes.”

“So don’t look, Fedface.”

I shrugged at Paisley. “They hate each other.”

She dipped a mozzarella stick into marinara sauce. “I can tell. Why?”

“They both love me and they’ve been fighting over me since junior high.”

“Oh, so, Eve, you date women? I hear that’s big now.”

Nick laughed so hard, he rocked back on his chair, and Eve pushed it the rest of the way back with her foot. He didn’t even stop laughing while he got up off the floor and stood his chair upright.

“Nick and I fight over Madeira’s devoted friendship,” Eve said, “The Fed’s not good enough for her and he knows it.”

“That’s true,” Nick said. “I do know it.”

Paisley licked her lips and looked from one of them to the other. “Uh-huh. Well, um, what about me going to school?”

Among us, we gave Eve an abbreviated version of Paisley’s noneducational background. “Eve,” I said, “I figured you could arrange for her to audit your class and maybe a couple that your friends teach.”

“Sounds good,” Eve said. “Paisley, let’s talk about what you’d like to learn.”

“Come on, Nick,” I said. “I’ll help you clean the kitchen. We’ll shut the door so you two can talk education.”

The kitchen had a back entrance, of course, and I shoved Nick through it, into the small back parlor-den.

“Oh,” he said, “you want to play.” He obliged, took me in his oh-so-capable arms, and kissed me.

“Well, yeah, I do,” I said, slipping his shirt buttons in and out of their buttonholes, “but I can’t right now. Gotta read those clothes while Paisley’s occupied.”

“Rats, foiled again.”

“What, you won’t be able to find your way to my room later?”

That seemed to cheer him as we made our way to Paisley’s treasures via the back stairs. See, in my house, you can fool about anybody, because we have four sets of stairs. The front stairs, the back stairs, the keeping room stairs, and the stairs that lead to only one back bedroom. Yes, the house had been added to, and renovated, over the centuries regularly, and decades apart, by different families. It was like our very own small, sane,
tame version of the Winchester house in California without windows in floors and stairs to ceilings.

Could a family with four kids have fun here? Oh, yeah.

Paisley had left her treasure trove of children’s clothes in my room during our presupper, second-floor tour, so I didn’t feel entirely like I was prying, especially since she wanted my opinion. And there appeared to be a murder-kidnapping to be solved.

Not to mention Paisley’s lifetime incarceration, another crime to iron out.

“Nick, can you sit on the sofa with me and hand me the ruffled gown, then can you hold me while I read it? If I can read it?”

“With one exception, there’s nothing I’d rather do, no place I’d rather be, than on a sofa with you in my arms, but psychometric readings always wring you out, and I hate the thought of your physical and mental exhaustion afterward, for
your
sake.”