Page 14

CHAPTER 14

I was trying to figure out a way to say no to the “Fix this” command—which was hard because I wasn’t used to saying no to Betty—when somebody behind me said, “Excuse me,” and I turned to tell that person that the lasagna was gone, and it was Jackie Quill.

“My daughter has disappeared,” she said, looking at me, and for the first time since we’d met, she looked emotional.

“Oh, damn, I’m sorry. She didn’t leave you a note? She went with my daughter, Poppy, to check out the high school she’d be going to if you stayed.”

Jackie glared at me. “We are not staying. When will she be back?”

“Depends on how fast they get bored at school,” I said. “Definitely soon because Poppy said they’d be back around lunchtime to help Anita. Really, Poppy is a safe person to be with.” Everybody at the table except Hermione nodded. “I’m sorry all the lasagna is gone. But we were about to have tea and pastries,” I told her. “Please join us.”

I saw her start to say no, but I think the memory of the butterkuchen that morning did her in. She frowned and then she nodded, and I pulled a chair up for her from another table.

It was getting crowded, but that’s community for you.

I turned back to the rest of the table. “This is Dr. Jacqueline Quill, a distant relation of Sid’s who has inherited his pharmacy, which she cannot run because she’s a doctor, which does not mean she can’t stay and start a practice here once she gets rid of the pharmacy.”

“She could give it to me,” Hermione said as she scraped the last of her pasta off her plate. “Sidsie would have wanted me to have it.” I was waiting for her to lick the plate, but instead she said, “It just isn’t fair.”

“I’m not staying,” Jackie said, ignoring Hermione.

I signaled Anita for tea and cake. Lots of cake. “Sit down and have some butterkuchen ,” I said, and Jackie nodded.

“It really has to be you on this, Rose,” Betty said as Jackie pulled up a chair and sat down. “You’re the only person here that everybody trusts.”

Bea snorted, but she didn’t say no.

Betty ignored her. “We need you. What’s the plan?”

I looked around the table. Except for Jackie and Hermione and me, the women here were all retired pros, adept in their fields, nobody’s fools. Bea had a drinking problem, but she still functioned. The rest were strong, intelligent women with a lot of life experience who didn’t trust each other. But they trusted me.

So this was how nineteen years of being Cheerful and fixing things paid off: me organizing a bunch of lethal honey pots. Head Honey Pot. Max would laugh his ass off when he heard about this.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. The last time we didn’t get on top of things because we didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. We’re not going to do that again. So let’s start at the beginning. Who wants us dead?”

“Everyone, I would imagine,” somebody said and I glanced up to see Louise, our local femme fatale, looking at us all in blonde contempt over her thermos bottle. “What have we got here, a honey pot plot?”

Louise is incredibly beautiful and incredibly sexy, but that’s where all her energy goes, so she’s a big zero on tact and empathy.

I felt Dottie Ferrell get to her feet and pulled her back into her seat and took the knife in her hand away. “Have a seat, you’ll fit right in,” I said to Louise. (Louise had slept with Dottie’s husband, Lionel, which should have been enough of a punishment, but Dottie still wanted to open one of her veins.)

Louise laughed. “Women are not my thing.” She looked around the table. “Especially women with a lot of miles on them.”

“Shame,” Betty said. “You’re missing out.”

Hermione looked shocked, but the rest of the table knew Betty was bi and didn’t care. Really, if you were going to be shocked by something in Rocky Start, sexuality was pretty low on the list.

Louise rolled her eyes and waltzed over to smile coldly at Anita while she got her thermos filled with coffee. Black, of course. Nothing sweet about Louise.

“Ignore her,” Betty said to me, and the rest of the table looked at me again.

Great.

“Okay, we need to think about motive, so every one of you make a list of people who might rationally be doing this. It has to be somebody from the past because I don’t see anybody who’s here now doing this.”

“In general, I do not write things like that down,” Coral said.

“None of us do,” Betty said, frowning at me.

“In general, people do not show up at the crack of dawn to stab Coral or put a snake in my oven,” I said. “These are not general times. God knows which of us will be targeted next. Write your suspicions down, don’t sign it, slip it under the door of Oddities, nobody will ever know it’s you. I don’t know enough about your backgrounds to have any idea of who might be coming for any of us. If you want me to work on this, you have to help.”

They didn’t look happy, but nobody objected. Dottie volunteered to keep watch on the street using her cameras, and I told Betty she’d have to move into town from her cottage in the woods across the river. She refused. “I have Fernanda,” she said, and I had vivid memories of what her llama had done to the men who’d attacked me in the past, so I told her I’d be out to check on her and let that go for now. We agreed to put everyone on a group text so we could immediately contact the others if something happened. Everyone but Bea, who said she wasn’t lame enough to join a honey pot plot and walked out, looking like a sad, beaten-down copy of Louise.

She didn’t even thank me for the lasagna.

The rest looked variously concerned, confused, and overconfident, but at least we were on this, we weren’t taking anything for granted this time. This time, we were on top of things. Sort of.

Of course, I had to make my own list and the only name I could think of who might want to do me harm was Junior, Serena’s son. And he was an idiot.

Which, now that I could think about it without screaming, would explain the snake.

I really wished Max would hurry up and get home.

* * *

I bought some chocolate buns— Schokobrotchen —from Anita and went home and took out the second pan of lasagna and put the third in. When Poppy and Quill came in from school, Poppy said, “There’s a dead snake in the alley,” and I said, “Yep,” and handed her the lasagna to take over to Coral. Then while Poppy and Quill helped Anita at Ecstasy, I baked the third pan for dinner, inviting Jackie and Quill over. Poppy and Quill had evidently established, if not a friendship, a working relationship from their trip to school and from working together that afternoon after lunch in Coral’s, and Quill was enthusiastic about the bakery and Coral. Well, who wouldn’t be? Jackie was tired and wary but hungry, and good hot food and Quill’s shift from despair to excitement about the bakery made her a lot friendlier during dinner.

Then the Quills went back to their pharmacy, taking their Schokobrotchen with them, and Poppy and I did the dishes. I put the lasagna leftovers in the fridge, and Poppy went upstairs with her chocolate bun. She told me Marley had been sleeping in his truck out behind the building, and I started to say I’d talk to him, but she said, “I’ll handle it, no worries,” so I let it go. I had enough to handle already, she could have Marley.

I’d saved one of the Schokobrotchen for my dessert, so I went back out to the shop chomping down on tender pastry and marvelous chocolate and pulled out the box of masks that Ozzie had given me. I’d really enjoyed making the Coral mask, and I could think while I worked.

I sorted through the masks, finding some with post-its. There was a sharp-faced cardinal mask that had a post-it with “Dottie” on it, and I laughed because I’d always thought of her as bird-like. A steely white owl mask with “Betty” on it and I could see why Ozzie had gone there: She was a fluffy, white haired, bright-eyed observer of everything that went on, but she was also a raptor. There was a sexy red faux-leather fox mask marked “Lian,” and I laughed at that, too. And there was one beautiful gold cat mask that he’d labeled “Poppy.” Some of the others weren’t so funny, or at least were puzzling. Bea’s mask was a leopard, and I hadn’t thought of her as predatory. Louise’s was a dark stag, which was very male for a femme fatale. And some of them didn’t have any tags on them at all, including one vicious-looking vampirish mask that I thought looked like Serena Stafford. Except she was dead, not coming back. There was nothing labeled for Hermione—she’d shown up after Ozzie died—but there was a little, feverish-looking, orange and white sparkly rabbit mask that looked like her. Well, her persona anyway.

Finally, at the bottom of the box, I found an unmarked silver and black wolf mask and thought, Max.

I thought about what would make it Max. He always had a black watch cap on whenever he went out, so I sat in the dim light of Oddities with some leftover black yarn and crocheted a band and a half circle and glued it to the mask. I lost a good hour searching through the box of weird jewelry Ozzie had collected—if I hadn’t known Ozzie, I’d have sworn he’d knocked over a goth dollar store—and found a black wolf pin that looked like Maggs, and wolf earrings that I wrenched apart and glued under the mask’s eyes, and little silver gun charms that I glued over his eyes as eyebrows, pointing down so he was scowling. Then I pinned the wolf pin to the side of the cap and an old marshal’s badge from the toy box on the other side, and stepped back.

The mask looked appropriately terrifying, like Max had looked the first day I met him, like he’d looked every time he’d gone after somebody who was hurting people.

But that wasn’t all of Max. Because he could be wonderfully gentle with Poppy, and he had a great friendship with Luke, and I loved talking with him and teasing him and touching him.

I kept looking through the junk box and found some spiky silver and red hearts and hung them in the empty eye sockets of the mask. Because that’s what I saw when I looked in his eyes. No matter how short the time we’d had together, no matter how much he might have changed once he got away from Rocky Start and had the time to think again, I really did believe he cared about people. And I was pretty sure he loved me. It wasn’t a cuddly kind of love, more the kind that flattened you with its power, but it was real. Forever.

Yeah, I know, it was too soon to think that, but I thought it anyway.

It was almost midnight when I finished the mask, or at least got it to a place where it looked finished. It looked dark and dangerous, and even the hearts in the eyes were kind of dark. That seemed right. Loving a guy like Max was always going to be dangerous. When Jackie had asked me who Max was, I couldn’t think of the way to explain him easily without making him sound like a bad guy, actually not sure I could explain him at all. The mask was as close as I could come.

Which made me think. Maybe I didn’t know him. Maybe the Max I was remembering wasn’t right, maybe I’d made him better, fantasized him into something I wanted, hadn’t really seen love in his eyes even though he’d said he loved me. What if he wasn’t the same when he came back? We’d known each other for such a short time, and then he’d been gone for what seemed like forever, and I’d been pretending things were fine for so long, maybe I was pretending, maybe I was thinking of him as I wanted him to be, not as he was?—

Somebody banged on the door of the shop. I jerked up from the mask and my memories to see a dark shape through the window, and I froze.

“Rose, it’s me,” Max yelled though the glass.

I ran to let him in.