The Chick and the Dead (17 page)

"So…" His expression blank again, he took another sip of coffee. "You haven't told me what you know about Merilee."

"You haven't told me what you're doing here."

"And what about that Bob guy? Not exactly the kind of person I ever pictured you working with side-by-side."

"My sides and Bob's sides have never been side-by-side," I told him. "And never will be." I shivered.

"He gives me the willies."

"That's the first thing we've agreed on since—"

Since the night we almost ended up in bed together.

I knew that's what Quinn was thinking.

Quinn knew that I knew that's what he was thinking.

Which is why I decided it was time to change the subject.

"Merilee is a royal pain in the ass," I said. "Why do you care?" He shrugged. "Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just thinking that it may not be just dumb luck that you're here."

"Nobody said it was dumb."

"I didn't mean you."

It was as close to an apology as I'd ever get from him, and I knew it. I finished my cup of coffee. If Quinn had made the coffee—and I hadn't seen anybody else around, so I had to assume he had—it was another thing to add to the list of things he did (or probably did) better than any other man alive.

"Call me crazy…" No one ever would. Quinn was a lot of things, but crazy wasn't one of them. "But I'm thinking you're not just here because Merilee needs a secretary. I know you too well for that, Pepper. You have a way of sticking your nose where it doesn't belong."

"You don't know me well at all," I reminded him. "And why do you care if I'm here, anyway?" He looked me up and down. "Maybe because you obviously ran into some problems. And from the looks of things, I'd say it was just recently."

"It's nothing." I waved away his concern, mostly because I knew it was professional and not personal. "I was up in the attic and I got attacked by a Wookiee."

He raised his dark brows.

I sighed and confessed. What choice did I have when he was giving me that penetrating tell-me-everything-you-know look? "I was up in the attic and a storage cabinet fell over on me. There was a fur coat on top of it."

"The Wookiee."

I nodded, confirming his theory.

"Storage cabinets don't fall over by themselves."

"I didn't get hurt." Just to prove it, I dance-stepped across the kitchen. "Everything's in good working order."

He gave me another quick once-over. "I have no doubt of that. What were you doing in the attic?"

"Looking around."

"Minding your own business?"

"Don't I always?"

"Not if hanging around with the local mob means anything."

"It doesn't." That much was true. My investigation of Gus's murder was done with. My hanging-around-with-the-mob days were over. "I'm here as a favor to Ella, my boss, who just happens to be the ringleader of the crazy SFTD fans," I told Quinn. "That's it. Honest."

"Is there a reason I don't believe you?"

"I don't know what you believe and what you don't believe. And honestly, I don't really care." I poured another cup of coffee. "If you want to stay here and drink coffee all day, be my guest. Right now, the most important things to me are a shower and a change of clothes." I headed for the door.

"You haven't put it together yet, have you?"

I didn't know what he was talking about, and honestly, I doubted that it had anything to do with Didi and the missing manuscript that may not have been missing because maybe it never existed in the first place. But I couldn't take the chance.

I stopped and turned to him. "What?"

"You don't think I stopped by just to see you, do you?"

"Is it that impossible?"

"It is, because I didn't know you were here."

"Which means—"

The
chunk
I heard inside my head was the pieces falling into place. Slowly, I admit. Then again, I had a good excuse for the fact that my brain was moving at a snail's pace. I had recently been knocked out. I had spent the night on a hard wooden floor. I'd been ambushed by a man I wasn't expecting to see and a whole lot of wants/needs/ desires that I had hoped to never have to grapple with again. At least not with this man.

"Trish died," I said. "Here. Just a couple of days ago. And you're with—"

"Bingo!" Quinn grinned. It was not a happy expression.

"That means—"

"You got it." When Quinn's cell phone rang, he set down his coffee cup and reached for it. "You're working here as Merilee's secretary. And apparently, no one told the new secretary what really happened to the old secretary. She didn't just die, Pepper. She was murdered."

A sour taste filled my mouth. It had nothing to do
with Quinn's coffee. When he walked out of the kitchen to take his phone call, I was left there trying to absorb everything I'd just heard.

The news of Trish's murder put a whole new spin on what happened in the attic the night before. Not to mention the little detail of me staying in Trish's room.

The room where she died.

"Chocolate chip? Or peanut butter?"

My grim thoughts were interrupted by Didi's pleasant chirp.

I turned to find her standing at the stove in a pencil-slim dress, heels, pearls, and an apron. She had a quilted oven mitt on each hand, and she held out a cookie sheet toward me. "Chocolate chip?" She glanced toward the left half of the tray and two rows of steaming hot cookies dotted with gooey chocolate morsels. She looked at the right half. "Or peanut butter?"

"How about the truth for a change."

The tone of my voice told her I wasn't kidding around. She set the cookie sheet down on the stove and just as had happened whenElizabeth discarded her cigarette holder, the cookie sheet instantly disappeared. So did the oven mitts when she yanked them off. "What are you talking about?" she asked. I barely contained my sigh of frustration, but there was nothing I could do to control the wave of exasperation that churned through my stomach along with a healthy dose of anger. "Well, we could start with your movie career. Or should I say your lack of a movie career?" Can ghosts blush? I guess so, because a pink flush raced across Didi's cheeks. She wrinkled her nose.

"There was no harm in telling you I'd been in the movies," she said. "I was just… I dunno… Just fooling around. It's fun to pretend, don't you think?"

"Not when you pretend you were murdered."

"Oh, no!" She went on the defensive, stepping back and shaking her head. "I never told you I was murdered."

"You never told me you weren't."

"You never asked how I died."

"I never thought—" My words came out too loud. I looked toward the hallway, and when I still heard Quinn's baritone hum on the phone, I lowered my voice. Decibels notwithstanding, I was plenty pissed.

"Don't pull that on me. I shouldn't be expected to know how this stupid Gift thing works. Gus was murdered, and I was able to see him. When I saw you, I figured you must have been murdered, too. I thought you showed up so that I could investigate. I even told you I'd look into your murder. More than once. You never said I was wrong."

"No, but I did tell you I didn't want you to do anything but find out the truth about my book."

"And you never mentioned that you killed yourself."

"What difference does it make?" Didi's shoulders slumped. Her voice wavered. She untied her apron and slipped it over her head. It, too, vanished the moment she set it down. "Dead is dead." I couldn't argue with that.

I couldn't afford to get sucked in by the pathetic trembling in her voice, either. Rather than think about what awful thing could have brought her life to the brink of despair, I stuck to the matter at hand.

"And then there's that original handwritten manuscript," I said. Didi's face brightened. "You found it?"

I didn't need to answer. My expression said it all.

"You didn't find it." Her smile disappeared like magic. Just like the cookie sheet and the oven mitts had.

"You don't believe it was ever there."

Too irritated to keep still, I threw my hands in the air and did a turn around the room. "What am I supposed to believe? You've been telling me stories, Didi. And sucker that I am, I've been more than willing to believe them. Then the truth comes out and smacks me in the face. Your movie career, the way you died, the manuscript. Sorry if I'm jumping the gun here, but I'm thinking that pretty soon, I'm going to need hip boots to wade through your lies. Maybe if I could find something in
So Far the Dawn
that sounded like you—"

"You're reading it?" Didi's smile was radiant. "Do you like it? I mean, really, tell me. Is it the best book ever? Have you gotten to the part where—"

"I've gotten to the part where Opal is leaving forBaltimore ," I confessed. "And what difference does it make what I think of the book? I'm not reading it to be entertained." Not exactly a lie since I never dreamed I'd actually like the book. "I'm reading it in the hopes of finding the truth. I don't see you in those pages anywhere."

"You don't see Merilee, either."

I couldn't deny it. "You're right. It's just that I thought maybe there would be some hint of your voice. I was thinking that maybe the way you describe things in the book would sound like the way you talk. That one of your characters would sound just like you."

"That's not what writing is all about." Didi waved away my theory. "It's not like writers take their own lives and just plunk them down on paper. It's fiction, silly. I made it all up."

"But if your voice was there—"

"What about what's not there?"

I wasn't sure what she was getting at, and it was Didi's turn to be frustrated. She gave me a penetrating look. "How far have you read?" she asked.

"I told you. Opal is leaving forBaltimore ."

"That would be…" Didi narrowed her eyes, thinking. "About page 147." As far as I remembered, she was just about right. I nodded.

"So tell me, in the 147 pages you've read, have you seen one mention of the unemployment rate inCleveland in 1857?"

"No, but—"

"Have you read anything about the petroleum industry here? Or the way steel is manufactured?

Or"—she shuddered—"economics?"

I knew where she was headed with this. "No," I said again. "And you're saying—"

"I'm saying that all you have to do is look at that so-called sequel Merilee is writing—"

"I already have." I dropped into the closest kitchen chair. "You're right. What I saw in her notebook is nothing like what I read last night. I just thought that some editor somewhere—"

"Please!" Like she smelled something bad, Didi sniffed. "No amount of editing could turn her sow's ear into my silk purse. I'm right, aren't I? Admit it Pepper, I'm right."

"You're right."

"About what?"

I'd spoken to Didi, but it was Quinn who answered. He walked back into the kitchen. "I mean, not that I'm arguing or anything," he said. "After all, I usually am right. I just wondered what you think I'm right about."

"Not much of anything as far as I can tell." It wasn't true, but it sounded hard-assed, and sounding hard-assed, well, it was better than throwing myself at his feet and begging him for a second chance at the date we'd once set up for a candlelight dinner at Pietro's. I'd stood him up—sort of—but only because Gus's son, Rudy the Cootie Scarpetti, had made me an offer I couldn't refuse for the same night.

"I was just thinking that you were right about Irish," I told him. It was better than trying to explain that he was standing at the door, I was sitting in a chair, and there was a woman between us who'd been dead since before either of us was born. "Nobody told me she was murdered." A new thought struck and I groaned. "Great, now I feel bad about thinking how stupid she was to get smothered by her own corset."

"The corset story isn't entirely wrong." Quinn took another few steps into the kitchen. "As a matter of fact, the coroner believed her death was an accident. Until he completed his autopsy. That's when he determined that the angle was all wrong. Those things…" Quinn wiggled his fingers along his back. "What do you call them?"

"The laces? On the corset? You mean the things that tie at the back?"

"Yeah, that's it. They left marks on Ms. Kingston's skin. And the coroner could see that the angle was all wrong. Ms. Kingston may have started out tying that corset, but someone else finished the job. That someone else kept pulling tighter and tighter. Until Trish Kingston couldn't breathe anymore." I didn't want to think about the way the murderer must have squeezed all hope out of Trish. Just like he squeezed out all her air. I pictured her up there in my bedroom, as limp as a rag doll, powerless to save herself. Helpless. Blue.

A shiver snaked up my spine, and I knew I'd better concentrate on the facts at hand.

"I guess all that makes sense. Look." I got up from the chair and put my hands behind my back, pretending to tie a pretend corset. "There's only so far I can reach around to my own back. And if I was tying a corset like this… " I went through the motions, approaching the matter scientifically. Apparently Quinn's mind was on something other than science. When I looked his way, his eyes glimmered. "Is there something I should know about you and corsets?" he asked. "Looks like you know your way around sexy lingerie pretty well."

"Maybe I do." There was no harm in dangling him along. "Maybe I'm wearing a corset right now." He stepped closer and looked at my cleavage. "Oh, I don't think so. Though I will admit they have a certain appeal, corsets are stiff and old-fashioned. Something tells me if you were wearing one, the view wouldn't be nearly as nice."

"You're slipping, detective. That almost sounded like a compliment." Quinn reached for my arm. "It was a compliment. As a matter of fact—" His cell rang.

Quinn gritted his teeth. "Duty calls," he said, and he left the kitchen again.

"He's a dreamboat!"

I didn't need Didi to remind me.

"Yeah. A dreamboat who keeps floating away."

She chuckled. "That's funny. But listen, kiddo, you can't expect him to stay around when you treat him the way you do."