It Must Be Magic (9 page)

Men. They were so darn cute. Her mom had given her
the
talk, and her father had absolutely, unequivocally refused to ever purchase feminine products for any reason for any woman. Ever. “I can help Erika with that when the time comes.”

“Thank you.”

She gathered her Baggie and the empty soda can, then rolled to her hands and knees facing him. And stopped. The enormity of what he’d given her overwhelmed her. “Thank you. You can’t imagine how honored I am to be given this important duty.”

“I think you’re making fun of me.” Then his eyes dropped, and she realized that in this position her tank top wasn’t flush with her body. And she was giving him an eyeful.

She stood, grabbed the pack, shoved her litter inside then handed it to Tanner. A flush shot up from her breasts to her throat to her face.

Turning, she surveyed the tree line with her back to him. Amid the rustle of plastic and the clink of the cans, she put her hands on her hips and tipped her head. Fluffy had been in an oak, the body beneath, the meadow to the left, though the tree had seemed to be right on the edge of it. They’d trudged around the rim, right next to the trees, but maybe they needed to go deeper in the forest, change the angle. Cats
did
see differently than humans, and she might have misjudged.

The rustling stopped. She glanced over her shoulder to find Tanner standing a few steps away, the pack dangling from his fingers. He wasn’t surveying the land. He was staring at her.

Then he dropped the pack, closed the distance between them, grabbed her arm and hauled her up against him.

“I shouldn’t do this. But it’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last hour. So I have to.”

He didn’t just kiss her, he devoured her. Holding her still with one hand cupping her head, his other arm wrapped across her back, he plundered her mouth like a Viking warrior. She slid her fingers into the hair at his nape. His chest was hard, his hair soft and his tongue hot and sizzling in her mouth. He smelled like sun-dried laundry, the subtle zest of cologne and heady male hormones. Dipping his knees, he plunged deeper, backed off to nip her lip, then angled in the opposite direction to take her all over again.

He made a sound, a low, intimate growl deep in his throat, then his hand slipped down to the curve of her butt and pressed her against him. Oh, Lord, he was hard. She wanted —

“I won’t have any salacious activities going on in my backyard, you heathens.”

Lili jumped and stumbled two steps before Tanner caught her. Then she saw the shotgun pointed straight at them.

H
IS COCK WAS HARDER THAN
a diamond-tipped drill bit. All he could think about was her. Holy hell, he was in trouble.

Tanner shoved Lili behind him. “Buddy, put that gun down. You know you aren’t going to shoot us.”

Buddy Welch had them in his sights, and his finger trembled on the trigger of his twelve-gauge. “You’re trespassing.”

“You know this is public land.”

“I don’t recognize a government that takes my land away.”

Buddy Welch was the picture of a mountain man if there ever was one. His pink scalp peeked through sparse white hair that hadn’t seen a comb since the Vietnam War. Streaks of dirt filled the craggy lines along his nose, and a grizzled gray beard reached his chest. Faded camouflage pants and an old flak jacket completed the look. The old man was a relic from the war,
one
of the wars, though Tanner wasn’t sure which, only that Buddy Welch had been living in a shack in the middle of his three acres long before Tanner had moved in. He was a fixture, though the government hadn’t taken the land from him, as Buddy claimed. The meadow and forest had always been public land.

Nor had Buddy shot anyone, not even a real trespasser. The old man liked to threaten. It usually worked, too.

Lili gripped Tanner’s shoulders and tried to peer around him. “Stay back there,” Tanner whispered, his gaze never leaving Buddy. Then he raised his voice once more. “You know you don’t want the county sheriff out here. Gresswell might seize your illegal firepower again.”

“I don’t have anything illegal. They’re registered with the laaaw.” He gave the word extra emphasis, then spat in the grass.

“All right. Then I’ll appeal to your sense of chivalry. You’re frightening my friend.”

“She didn’t
look
scared when I first saw her.”

Lili clung to his back, but whether it was from fright or embarrassment at what they’d been caught doing, he wasn’t sure. If Buddy had shown up five minutes later, they’d have been horizontal on the ground with only the soft grass as a cushion.

Tanner hadn’t been thinking too clearly from the moment she’d rolled to her hands and knees in front of him.

“Well, she’s scared now. So put the damn gun down.”

Then Buddy suddenly raised the rifle in the air and pulled the trigger. Instead of a blast, there was a click. The gun hadn’t been loaded.

“Goddamn buzzards.” Buddy spat in the grass again.

Behind him, Lili made a little horrified
eww
noise. “He’s not chewing tobacco, is he?” she whispered.

“That —”
he pointed at Buddy “— wasn’t nice.”

Buddy took it to mean firing the shotgun to scare the crap out of them. “Next time it’ll be loaded, and I’ll be firing at buzzards of the human variety.” Then he slapped the gun on his shoulder, turned and marched across the meadow.

Keeping her hands on him, Lili shuffled to Tanner’s side. “I thought he was just an urban legend around here.”

Tanner pulled Lili under his arm. “Are you okay?”

She smiled lopsidedly up at him. “I’m fine.” She covered her mouth. “Oops. I mean I’m totally peachy.”

Tanner turned. Her fingers slid across his back, then fell away. He wanted her to keep touching him. “I got out of hand —”

She put a finger to his lips. He had the overpowering urge to suck it into his mouth.

“I liked your kiss. A lot. So don’t apologize, okay?”

Her lips were plump and well kissed. He was pretty sure her dilated pupils hadn’t been caused by fright, and he was damn sure her tight, beaded nipples had nothing to do with fear. His fingers had mussed her hair, tangling the fine strands. Needing his hands on her, he smoothed them back to order.

“You,” he said, then let out a heavy sigh, because somehow she made him breathless all over again, “have a way of making me forget where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Turning her face, she nuzzled into his hand. “Ditto.” Then she pulled away. “Tanner, did he say
buzzards?
” Then she tipped her face to the sky. “Oh, my God, there
are
buzzards.”

He turned, first his head on his shoulders, so slowly he could hear the creak of his neck, then his whole body. And watched a flock of buzzards circling over the trees. He felt a little queasy. “It could be an animal.”

She didn’t even bother to answer that. “How long have they been there?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.” Buzzards were the first thing he should have looked for. If he’d truly believed.

There were only three, but they were buzzards. Not crows or blue jays or sparrows. Then one dive-bombed, straight down.

Tanner’s stomach dive-bombed right along with it.

“You go look,” she said, giving him a slight push.

It never occurred to him to take her along. “Will you be all right out here alone?”

She nodded. “Better than I will be if I go in there.”

He glanced back over his shoulder as Buddy Welch disappeared into the thicket on the other side of the field. “I won’t be long. But you yell like hell if he comes back.”

“Okay.”

He studied the vultures once more. From the ground, it was difficult to gauge how far in their quarry lay. Then he entered the forest. Dark and cool beneath the trees, the ground was moist. He couldn’t find a path in the underbrush, so he made his own, glancing up when the sky peeked through the canopy to make sure he was on a beeline for the buzzards.

Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!
He had to smile, thinking of Dorothy in the forest with the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. The movie had been Erika’s favorite until she watched
Napoleon Dynamite.
Quite frankly, he didn’t get the switch in allegiance. In fact, he hadn’t even understood the movie. But Erika knew every line and said it before each character did.

And thinking about Erika was better than thinking about…The deeper he went, the more elemental the scents became. Decaying leaves, wet soil, animal droppings. And something else.

He shoved aside a branch only to have the one in front of it whack him in the face.

That smell. What the hell was it? He could actually taste it. Like shrimp that had gone bad. Or…

He was afraid to take a deep breath. He was actually afraid to push through the bushes. But he did.

Aw, shit.

There were more than three buzzards.

And animals didn’t wear bright blue windbreakers.

H
E WAS A MAN. HE WASN’T
going to be sick. But he’d never before seen anything this bad. Animals had dragged…it. He didn’t want to think of it as a once living, breathing person. Now it was…parts. It wasn’t even completely intact.

Tanner picked up a rock, threw it, and the vultures dispersed into the sky. Bile rose in his throat, and if he didn’t get the hell out now, he was going to be sick.

Lili stood in the meadow right where he’d left her. A statue. Only her hair blowing gently in the afternoon breeze. Tanner stayed in the shadow of a tree where she couldn’t easily see him and used his cell phone. She didn’t move the entire time it took to make the call and pinpoint their location as best he could. Just her hair, wafting back and forth across her shoulders, into her face, and away again.

Then he stepped into the bright sunlight. Lili simply collapsed onto her haunches.

He hunkered down beside her. Thin blue lines showed beneath the pale skin of her cheeks. A pulse ticked at her throat.

She rocked slowly. “It was really there, wasn’t it?”

Even she called what he’d found an
it.
“Don’t think about it. I want you to go home.” No, wait, he didn’t want her walking by herself. He’d lose a lifetime thinking about her alone in the woods. Anything could happen. “Stay with me. The police will be here soon,
then
I’ll take you home.”

“Tanner?”

That was all she said. Looking at him as if he had answers for…something, the horror of murder so close to home.

What the hell had he done? He hadn’t given a single thought to what this outcome would do to Lili. He’d treated the whole episode as some itch to get out of her system. Placate her, show her she’s wrong, move on. He’d damn near made love to her with that thing mere yards away in the woods.

Good Lord. Erika. How the hell was he supposed to tell his daughter? If Lili was traumatized, Erika would be comatose.

He was the screw-up of the century.

Yet Lili was looking at him as if he had the answers.

“I don’t feel so well,” she murmured.

He cupped her cheek, her skin clammy and cold. “Come here.” He folded her into his arms.

“I didn’t think it was real. I mean, I know what Fluffy saw, but I sort of stopped thinking about it being a real person.” She didn’t cry, but she hiccuped. “It was just a body that had to be found,” she whispered. Then she raised her head from his shoulder to meet his eyes. “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah.” TV desensitized a person to violence. It was a concept rather than a reality. Until it got slammed into your face. Tanner couldn’t get that smell out of his nostrils or the phantom taste out of his mouth.

He’d only felt this kind of helplessness once, the day Karen had died, the moment when he’d gone from an angry “What the hell has she done?” to a panicked “Dear God, this can’t be happening.”

Yet, with the sun on his head, the cheerful chirp of a nearby bird, Lili’s face once again pressed to his shoulder and her flowery scent driving that freaking smell away, he’d never felt closer to a human soul.

It was as terrifying as the first time he’d held Erika in his arms.

L
ILI FOLLOWED IN
T
ANNER’S
wake across the meadow. Since they’d started out earlier in the day, the sun had tracked across the sky, and everything,
everything
was different. She wasn’t the same person she’d been two hours, a can of soda and a tuna-fish sandwich ago.

Lili couldn’t believe it. There really was a body. It wasn’t an
it.
That was a man lying out there.

She closed her eyes and shuddered.

The police had been out there looking for clues for fifteen minutes, or half an hour…or more. She’d lost track of time while more cops had arrived, then Sheriff Gresswell. They hadn’t called it murder, but Lili knew that it was. It was now more than something Fluffy had seen. She’d answered what felt like a zillion questions, but when she’d opened her mouth to tell them about Fluffy, Tanner had given her a look.
Don’t.
That was his unspoken message, and she got it loud and clear. Why she’d obeyed, she couldn’t say. That was why she felt guilty now. Not mentioning Fluffy felt like a lie of omission.

Tanner had finally gotten them dispensation to go home.

They moved from meadow and sunshine onto the woods path that would lead them to her backyard. She shuddered again in the sudden coolness of the shade.

She didn’t realize she’d made an accompanying sound until Tanner turned, took hold of her shoulders and leaned down to read her face. “Are you all right?”

She remembered the way he’d held her in the meadow before the police had arrived, as if they were the only two people in the world and they needed each other. This was an altogether different Tanner. Despite the seeming concern in his question, his fingers bit a little too deeply.

She opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong, what had changed, why he was looking at her as if she’d
done
something, but another thought flew into her head. “Where’s Einstein?” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, God, I forgot all about her.”

“The cat’s fine. It’s at —”

The fact that he’d cut himself off made her stomach tumble. “Where is she?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Translation: she was making a nuisance of herself at the…crime scene.

“Einstein will be back.” Tanner smoothed his hands along her arms, but he stared over her shoulder as if his mind was…back there.

“Why didn’t we tell them about Fluffy?” she whispered.

His gaze shot to her face. “It’ll confuse the issue.”

“But they don’t even know it’s a murder yet. I have to tell them or they won’t figure it out until they do the autopsy.”

He dipped his head, and the soothing caress of his hands ceased. “There are —” He squeezed her arms. “They can tell a lot of things before the autopsy merely by looking. And since I don’t think they’re stupid, I do think they’ll
look.
”

“Oh.” She sucked in a breath between her clenched teeth. Tanner had left her in the meadow for a time while he’d shown the two sheriff’s deputies the exact location. “Oh,” she said again, and that was the most she could manage.

“We want to keep a low profile, Lili.” He spoke as if to a child.

She felt like a child, totally inept, clueless and bewildered. “They won’t know exactly where it happened.” Fluffy had been in a tree much closer to the meadow than where Tanner had found…the remains.

“They’ll figure it out.”

“But how?”

“Don’t ask me how, okay?” His voice was sharper, his grip harder. He was trying to shield her from the details, but there was only one answer. Drag marks. She didn’t want to throw up; she just wanted to go to sleep.

But she couldn’t run away from it. “Fluffy’s a witness.”

“Fluffy’s a cat, not a witness.” Tanner shook her. “Do you honestly think they’re going to believe you?”

Tanner hadn’t believed her, so why would the police? That was why she hadn’t gone to them in the first place. Yet hearing Tanner say it was like poking a finger in an open wound.

He
kept
poking. “They’re not going to give a damn what you
say
Fluffy saw. So we’re going to leave it alone.” Then he must have realized how hard, how angry he sounded, because he once again smoothed up and down her arms. “This is the best way. The police are good at what they do.”

“I don’t feel right about this, Tanner.”

He straightened and stepped away from her altogether, turning for a moment so she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t fathom what he was thinking. Then he delivered the death blow over his shoulder. “Do you want to get Erika involved in all this?”

Of course. That had been his concern from the get-go, and she’d ignored it. Good Lord, it was a mess. She hadn’t thought about the ramifications. She’d actually been happy that he’d told Roscoe and Erika what Fluffy had shown her.
Happy.
She was an idiot human, just as Einstein liked to point out.

How would Erika ever recover from this horrible thing? Lili couldn’t do anything about the body; that was out there, and so was a murderer. But by insisting Tanner
had
to help her, she’d brought the horror of it right into the Rutland house.

“We took a hike, we saw Buddy, then the buzzards, then I went into the woods to look,” Tanner repeated the story they’d given the police as if she required a reminder. “That’s the important information. The rest is just…”

Just what, Tanner?
She didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know what he thought of her. “What about Buddy? Maybe we shouldn’t have told them about him, either. What if they accuse him of killing that man just because he happened to be there?”

“Give them some credit. They’d need more evidence than that. And maybe Buddy saw something. Either today or earlier if he was out there.”

Lili suddenly remembered Lady Dreadlock lying in the long grass. Would the police jump to conclusions about her? Definitely. The woman talked to animals, but Einstein didn’t get a freaky impression from her, which the cat certainly would have received if Lady D. had killed someone. There was something else going on with the woman that had nothing to do with murder, Lili was sure of it. She couldn’t throw her to the dogs before she’d had time to think through all the implications. That was the problem with everything she’d done so far; she hadn’t considered every outcome
before
she took action.

She almost laughed aloud, maybe a little hysterically. She’d castigated Tanner for not telling the police about Fluffy, and here she was taking it upon herself to shield Lady Dreadlock simply because the woman could talk to animals.

“Lili?” Tanner tipped her chin. “Where’d you go?”

“I was thinking.”

“About what?” A furrow marred his brow, and his usually open blue gaze was hooded and unreadable.

“I was thinking that I need to be strong for Erika.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but not the whole truth, either. Still, she had to stare at his shoulder as she uttered it. “Right now, I can’t think much further ahead than that.”

The shadows clouding his eyes deepened. “Believe it or not, I can’t, either.”

H
E COULD HEAR
L
ILI’S SOFT
footfalls behind him and actually felt it inside every time she sighed. Ahead he could see her back fence at the end of the path. They were almost home. He had to decide how to handle Erika. Tanner regretted telling her what Lili claimed Fluffy saw. That decision had been made under the erroneous assumption that there was no body.

The body changed everything.

While he wanted his daughter to exercise her brain and think for herself, there was no way in hell he’d let her anywhere near a murder investigation. Not even peripherally.

Lili simply didn’t get it. The police were not going to ask her to help them solve the crime by
talking
to Fluffy and getting more information. They’d start investigating
her.
Then they’d get around to questioning Erika about everything that had happened from the moment she’d taken Fluffy next door.

He would not have his daughter questioned.

In the back of his mind, he could hear the way his thoughts had altered. He was back to referring to what Lili
claimed
Fluffy knew; what Lili
said
happened. That brief moment of oneness he’d felt had been snuffed out by the stench in the air as he’d led the deputies into the woods. It was in his hair, on his clothes, up his nostrils. The rancid aroma of death.

And he’d had the unconscionable thought that maybe Lili had known the body was there
before
she’d talked to Fluffy.

He’d started watching her, observing the long minutes of brooding silence. Yes, finding the body bothered her, but as the afternoon wore on, her silences wore on him until everything she said and did became suspicious. He’d become certain she was hiding something that moment on the path when she couldn’t meet his eyes. She hadn’t been thinking about Erika, he was sure of that, so what the hell
was
she thinking about?

T
HE
R
UTLAND KITCHEN WAS LIGHT
blue with lace curtains at the window over the sink. It was neat and fairly up to date with an automatic ice maker and water dispenser in the refrigerator door. The blue-and-white checkerboard tablecloth matched the wall paint, and a small jelly jar of yellow daises sat in the middle of the table. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a male-dominated household, but then Roscoe wasn’t your typical grandfather, and Lili was sure he was the family decorator.

It gave Lili the heebie-jeebies to be resting her elbows on the checkerboard cloth while the four of them talked about dead bodies, as if the discussion would forever taint the friendly kitchen. Yet it was the way Tanner kept looking at her that made her stomach roil and rumble. He had penetrating ice-blue eyes, the eyes of a predator waiting for its prey’s weakest moment.

Erika didn’t seem to notice the tension at all. “So Lili really can talk to animals?” It was just like a child to skip over the horrific bits and glom on to the unimportant and innocuous parts. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

Tanner’s eyebrows dipped together, and he drummed his fingers on the table. Erika’s gaze ping-ponged from her father to Lili. If Lili didn’t miss her guess, there was steam starting to come out of Tanner’s ears, and his voice held the strain of keeping a tight rein on himself. “There’s nothing cool about it, Erika.” He glanced at Lili. “
Murder
isn’t cool.”

That glance set a little warning bell going inside her. The fact that Tanner had to qualify the statement meant he
had
been thinking animal speak wasn’t cool. Yet right now, the thing of utmost importance was to lend her support. For Erika’s sake. “Something terrible has happened to a human being. It’s not a TV show you’re watching. This is real now.”

“I know,” Erika said, her eyes as bright blue as the tablecloth. “There’s a bad person out there. I mean, there’s lots of bad people, but this one came really close to our house. And he could still be out there.”