Wicked Appetite (5 page)

“Get out!” Glo’s voice shot into Minnie Mouse range. “You were in Cupcake Shirley’s apartment? What were you looking for? Is she a thief? A spy? An Internet porn star?”

“She’s a Glutton,” I said.

“Yeah, but you can’t hold that against her,” Glo said. “Did you get what you were looking for?”

“No.”

“You should go back and confront her and demand that she hand it over. And if she won’t hand it over, I could put a spell on her. There’s a whole chapter in my book on making people spill the beans.”

I looked over at Diesel. “What do you think?”

“The spell might be fun.”

“I wasn’t talking about the spell. I was talking about confronting her.”

Diesel pulled the key out of the ignition. “We could try that, too.”

Three minutes later, we were all at Shirley’s door.

“What’s the plan?” Glo asked.

“This is going to be the Lizzy Show,” Diesel said, back on his heels. “Lizzy is going to explain to Shirley how she shorted her a cupcake.”

“Works for me,” Glo said. “And what are we trying to get?”

“The Gluttonoid,” Diesel said.

I did a giant eye roll. “Good grief.”

Diesel grinned at me. “You don’t like Gluttonoid?”

“You just made that up.”

“Yeah,” Diesel said. “You got something better?”

I turned to Glo. “You know how when you go out to buy new shoes and you don’t exactly know what you want until you see it? The thing we’re looking for is sort of like that.”

Diesel rang the bell, and Shirley opened the door and peeked out at us.

“Hi,” I said. “We’re from Dazzle’s. I’m the cupcake baker, and you probably know Glo.”

Shirley smiled wide. “Sure. I know both of you. I love Dazzle’s. I’m thinking about increasing my cupcake order.”

She looked beyond me to Diesel, and her eyes glazed over a little, like she’d just seen the mother of all cupcakes.

“This is Diesel,” I told her.

“ ’Lo,” Shirley said.

I pushed past Shirley and eased myself in. “I wanted to talk to you about the cupcakes.”

That got Shirley’s attention off Diesel. “What about them? You’re not going to stop making them, are you? I couldn’t get through the day without them. I save them for bedtime.”

“I just wanted to tell you there’s a cupcake missing. I dropped a cupcake on the floor while I was filling the boxes, and I didn’t have any extras. I meant to put a note in with your order but forgot. So we stopped by to tell you.”

“Was it chocolate or carrot cake?”

“Chocolate.”

“I love the chocolate ones,” she said.

Glo followed me in, and in my peripheral vision I could see her head swiveling around, scoping out Shirley’s apartment.

“Yowza,” Glo whispered.

“It looked like you had a scuffle with a man just as we were driving up,” I said to Shirley. “Are you okay?”

“That was my idiot stepbrother, Mark. I haven’t seen him in seven years, not since my Uncle Phil died, and now all of a sudden he’s following me around, asking for stuff.”

Holy cow. She coldcocked her stepbrother. I had the guy pegged for a mugger or random pervert. “What kind of stuff does he want? Is he, you know, dangerous?”

“I don’t know. My parents divorced when I was four, and
my mom and I moved to Seattle. I never saw my stepbrothers or my cousins until Uncle Phil died. I came back for the funeral and never left. How strange is that, right?”

“So you lived here in Salem for seven years, but you never saw your stepbrother after the funeral?”

“I guess everyone was mad because I was in the will. No one was real friendly to me.”

“What did Uncle Phil leave you?” I asked her.

“It’s a secret. All the inheritances were secret, and we were told we’d have eternal bad luck if we revealed what we got.”

“Wow,” Glo said. “Eternal bad luck would be for a long time.”

“Yeah. And now idiot Mark wants my inheritance. He says he’s a collector. Fat chance he has of ever getting it. He couldn’t pay me enough. Him and his brother, Lenny. Too bad I didn’t get a chance to kick Lenny in the you-know-whats. Except Lenny would probably like it. From what I can see, Lenny is a real glutton for punishment.”

“That’s an odd choice of words,” Diesel said.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Shirley said.

I was watching Glo from the corner of my eye. She was feverishly thumbing through her book, her teeth sunk into her lower lip in concentration.

“Eureka,” Glo said. “Here it is. Ibis by honor. Tongue tie not. Freely speaketh. Truth told, I command magpie Shirley More.” Glo snapped her fingers twice and clapped her hands once. She pointed at Shirley, closed her eyes, and chanted, “Shirley. Shirley. Shirley.”

Diesel had eyebrows slightly raised. “Have you ever cast this spell?”

“No,” Glo said. “But I’m pretty sure I did it right.”

“Glamma bamma,” Shirley said.

We all turned to her.

“I wiggum big dick do flammy stick,” she said. “Eep! Lick stick rubba dubba.” Her eyes got wide, and she clapped her hands over her mouth. She shook her head. That wasn’t what she meant to say. “Gooky ball. Big gooky ball!”

Shirley was talking gibberish. My first thought was stroke. My second thought was psycho mushrooms. My third thought was so outlandish I didn’t even want to articulate it. My third thought was that Glo had done it.

“Holy cow,” Glo said. “What happened? She wasn’t supposed to talk gibberish. It was supposed to be a truth spell.”

“Are you
sure
you read the spell right?” Diesel asked Glo.

“I read it straight from the book. I was supposed to have powdered yak brain, but I couldn’t see where that would make a difference. I mean, we were in a crunch situation here, and I didn’t have any yak brain.”

Shirley glared at Glo. “You fart foreskin!”

“Criminy,” Glo said. “That’s harsh.”

“Okay,” I said to Glo, “assuming Shirley isn’t yanking our chain, and you actually cast some sort of spell . . . how about removing it.”

Glo had her nose buried in her book. “There doesn’t seem to be an anti-spell here.”

I looked over at Diesel.

“I’ve got nothing,” Diesel said. “I don’t do spells.”

Shirley looked panicky. “Scooby booby,” she said.

“Maybe it’ll wear off,” Glo said. “Some of these spells are temporary. The book isn’t always specific about length of time.”

“Hear that?” I said to Shirley. “Good news. The spell might wear off.”

Shirley flipped me the finger.

“More good news,” Diesel said. “She knows sign language.”

Shirley pulled her middle finger back and extended her index finger.

“One minute?” Glo guessed.

Shirley nodded. She whirled around and went into the bedroom.

“Maybe she’s going to come out with the secret inheritance,” Glo said.

I cut my eyes to Diesel. “This isn’t going well, is it?”

Diesel blew out a sigh.

A moment later, Shirley marched out of her bedroom with the tent dress billowing around her. She raised her arm and pointed a gun at us.

“Eat poop and clock,” Shirley said.

I spun around and ran for the door, shoving Glo in front of me.
Bang, bang, bang
. A bullet embedded itself in the wall and a chunk of plaster fell to the floor. We flew flat out, down the stairs, through the small lobby, and across the street with
Diesel behind us. We jumped into the SUV, and Diesel wheeled away.

It had all happened so fast. My heart was pounding, and I was scramble-brained. This was the first time I’d ever had a gun aimed at me. And as if it wasn’t awful enough, I’d been shot at by one of my cupcake customers.

Diesel didn’t seem to be overly bothered. He’d been the prime target, bringing up the rear, but he was looking calm behind the wheel.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Yeah. She’s not much of a marksman. And even if she’d tagged me, I’m not easy to kill.”

Okay, I guess that explained his composure. He wasn’t easy to kill. Unlike me. I was a wimpy human held together by skin and dumb luck.

We got halfway down the block, and Glo leaned forward. “Now what?” Glo wanted to know. “Is it still happy hour?”

I stared at Glo. “Happy hour? Are you serious? How could you think about happy hour? We were just shot at. We could have been killed. And we left a woman talking nonsense. And happy hour ended hours ago.”

“I guess that was my bad,” Glo said, “but honestly, I didn’t think yak brain would make a difference.”

It was way long past happy hour when we left the Golden Dungeon Pub. As a town, Salem is a mixed bag. There are new hotels and office buildings side-by-side with two-hundred-year-old houses, museums reflecting the town’s nautical and heretic history, and shops catering to the weird and the curious.

The Golden Dungeon Pub was four steps down from the sidewalk in a converted basement that had nothing golden but was reminiscent of a dungeon, in a cozy sort of way. Dark wood booths, dark wood floors, dim light, a ghoulish waiter, sixteen taps, and theme-based food.

I’d had a couple Davey Jones crab cake sliders, a lot of bar nuts, and two sips of beer. I’d limited myself to two sips, because it seemed like it wasn’t a good idea to have more than two mouthfuls of alcohol sloshing around in my brain when I
was sitting next to a man who smelled like fresh-baked Christmas cookies, looked good enough to eat and bad enough to ruin my life. And it was very possible he wasn’t entirely normal.

Glo hadn’t felt the need for caution, so we dropped her off at her house, and Diesel motored out of Salem and into Marblehead. He parked in front of my house and walked me to my front door.

“Knowing what’s going on in your head isn’t doing much for my ego,” Diesel said. “Most women want me to come in and get friendly. You’re panicked you won’t be able to keep me out.”

“I have to go to work early tomorrow.”

“That’s it?”

“And, you’re scary.”

Diesel pushed my door open and nudged me in. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it!”

Diesel went still for a moment. “Wulf’s been here,” he said.

“Here? You mean in my house? How do you know?”

“I just know.”

I looked around. “Is he still here?”

Diesel slouched into the couch and reached for the television remote. “No. Just you, me, and Cat.”

Cat 7143 was at the edge of the room, watching us. He was back on his haunches with his half-tail curled around himself, seeming not overly upset that Wulf had come and gone.

“I kind of like having a cat,” I said, more to myself than to Diesel.

“He suits the house,” Diesel said. “Is this your furniture or was it part of your inheritance?”

“The furniture’s mostly mine. I had a few pieces in New York, and I picked some things up at garage sales when I first got here. The big rag rug in the dining room was Clara’s. She didn’t want it anymore. The curtains were left with the house.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Diesel said. “If you get me another piece of lasagna, I’ll let you choose which side of the bed you want.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have a television in your bedroom, right?”

“Wrong. Not that it matters to you. You won’t be spending time there.”

“We’ll see.”

I tried not to roll my eyes but wasn’t successful.

“You’ve got to stop with the eye-rolling,” he said. “You’re going to strain something.”

“It’s you! You’re . . .”

“Charming?”

Yes. And terrifying.

“I know you think you have to protect me,” I said to Diesel, “but you can’t stay here.”

“Sure I can,” Diesel said.

“What about a motel? Your car? A park bench?”

“Don’t think so.”

My eyes inadvertently took in the couch.

“Honey, do I look like I’d fit on this couch?” Diesel asked.

“Do I look like I care?”

“Maybe a little. Mostly, you look like you’d kick me out and not look back.”

A light flashed into my living room window, and there was the sound of people talking on the sidewalk in front of my house. The light swept up to my second floor, held for a moment, and blinked off. More talking.

I went to the door and looked out. It was a ghost tour. Most of the ghost tours were conducted in Salem, but twice a week, a guide walked around Marblehead with tourists in tow, pointing out houses that were supposedly haunted.

The guide was in his late fifties, dressed in period clothes, carrying a lantern and a flashlight. Six women and two men were clustered around him.

“Are you the owner of this house?” the guide asked me.

“Yes.”