Page 47

CHAPTER 47

I got my tea—not Lemon Zinger, Vanilla Bean Macaron this time—and some cake—not butterkuchen but gingerbread—from Anita and sat down at the table off to the side and thought about how Lian would never be coming in to join me again. Good for her, bad for me. I was sipping my tea and wishing that Coral would come out of the kitchen and talk to me and trying to figure out how to get Dottie to come over from the Dark Side, when the door opened and Hermione Witch came in, beaming.

She saw me and waved and came over, and I braced myself for whatever she wanted now.

Turned out she wanted to gloat.

“I’m living with Oxley now,” she said as she plopped herself down across from me. “He loves me!”

“That’s nice,” I said, thinking about the haunted look I’d seen in Oxley Crothers’ eyes.

“And Oxley’s stereo system has speakers all over town, can you believe it? Some kind of warning system that nobody uses anymore. So I’m gonna play Christmas music all month! What’s your favorite?”

“‘Fairytales of New York.’”

“Never heard of it,” she said, blinking.

“It’s a classic,” I said. “Hermione, blasting Christmas music is a bad idea. We like it quiet here.”

“But it’s Christmas ,” she wailed, and then the door opened again and Louise came in.

She looked over at the two of us and smirked and looked around again, probably searching for Max or any available Y chromosome, and then she went to the counter, where Coral had just come out to give Anita a break, and asked for a refill on her thermos.

“I’ll ask Louise,” Hermione said. “I bet she loves Christmas music.”

“Yeah,” I said. “‘Santa Baby.’”

“Such a cute song,” Hermione said, and when Louise came over to say something cutting, Hermione asked for her favorite Christmas song. Louise said, “‘The Five Days of Christmas.’”

Hermione said, “I thought there were twelve.”

Louise shrugged. “I like birds,” she said, which was news to me; I didn’t think she liked anything but money, black coffee, and men. Then she added, “And maybe the lords a-leaping; how much money do lords have?” which was when the door opened again and Dottie came in, headed straight for us.

I got up to take her knife away if she drew one, but she ignored Louise and said to me, “A van left early two nights ago, up the road to the highway, and then headed north. Do you know anything about that?”

“Nope,” I said. Until Lian was safe in New York, I wasn’t telling anybody anything. And even then, nobody needed to know, especially since I had no doubt that Dottie was asking for Herc. I really needed to do something about Dottie.

“So you were hunched over your little screens, spying on people again, like a little bird,” Louise said, looking down on her. “That’s so cute.”

Dottie turned eyes like razors on her, and Louise laughed and unscrewed the top on her thermos, evidently settling in for a nice tormenting chat to make Dottie scream. Louise, our own personal Mean Girl. With firepower.

“Knock it off, Louise,” I said, and she laughed at Dottie again.

“You think you and Lionel are back together? That’s pathetic. All I have to do is give him the eye, and he’ll be crawling back. Hell, all anybody has to do, really. He’s a hound, Dottie. One you can’t feed at home.”

“You shut up about my Lion,” Dottie snapped.

“Lion!” Louise laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s barely a cat. Declawed.” She toasted Dottie with her Stanley thermos and then drank deep.

I watched to make sure Dottie didn’t pull out a knife.

“So,” Hermione said to Dottie, oblivious to the tension, “what’s your favorite Christmas song?”

“‘Let It Snow,’” Dottie said, watching Louise now with her little eyes narrowed. “So I don’t have to deliver the mail. What the hell?”

I looked up as Louise dropped her thermos and clawed at her throat, gasping, leaning on the table, turning blue, desperate to breathe. I said, “Sit down!” and shoved a chair toward her, but then her body spasmed and she went down to the floor.

I could hear Hermione screaming as I tried frantically to think of what to do as I went down on my knees beside her, how to help, and then she twitched a couple of times on Coral’s nice clean black-and-white-checked floor and went still, her eyes staring up at nothing.

It was the stillest I’d ever seen her.

The thing was, whatever else Louise had been, she’d been alive , every inch of her.

And now she wasn’t.

“ Louise! ” I said out loud, trying to think, Louise was dead , and I didn’t want that, and I had to fix this, and I didn’t know how, I hadn’t stopped the monster who was targeting my town, I hadn’t?—

“Huh,” Dottie said, looking surprised but not upset, and that broke me out of being stunned.

“CPR,” I said, knowing it was probably useless, but I had to try , and then Coral said, “ Don’t touch her. ”

I looked back to where Coral had come out from behind the counter and was heading our way.

“She is dead.” Coral said. “And nothing you can do can bring her back. That was poison, most likely in her mug, and if you try mouth-to-mouth, you will be tasting the poison, too.”

Hermione had stopped screaming and was bending over the body now. I very much doubted she had any interest in trying to resuscitate Louise, so I said, “Hermione, no, Louise would not want you to have whatever she has on her.”

Hermione looked up, abused. “But we were such good friends .”

“Touch her and I will break your arm,” I told her and meant it. Then I took my phone out of my apron and called Luke.

He sounded surly when I got him, snarling, “Yeah?” into the phone, and I said, “A body in Ecstasy, Louise this time. Coral thinks it was poison.”

I heard a woman’s voice in the background.

“Are you sure she’s dead?” Luke asked, sounding resigned.

“Positive,” I said and he hung up. I looked at Coral. “Luke’s on his way,” I told her, pretty sure he was, and she pulled a tablecloth off one of the empty tables and covered Louise. When she was done, I said, “Coral, she thought she was safe because she knew something.”

“That something is probably why she was killed.” Coral frowned at the body.

I tried to remember. “She was fine until she drank from her thermos, a big gulp. And then she convulsed. There wasn’t anybody else around her?—”

“When I took the thermos to fill it,” Coral said, “it was light, no liquid in it. And the coffee is fine, I poured myself a cup after I filled her bottle. It wasn’t the coffee.”

“Then it’s a Christmas miracle,” Dottie said, staring down at the cloth-covered body as if she couldn’t quite believe it.

“Knock it off, Dottie,” I looked at Coral. “So somebody put it in the thermos and waited for her to fill it?”

Coral shrugged and then Luke came in, carrying a body bag and looking like thunder, and I realized I’d interrupted something. He had his t-shirt on backwards, for one thing. And when he said, “I’m going to start calling you and Max in the middle of the night,” I realized I’d gotten him out of bed. With somebody. Although in my defense, it was late morning.

Which was probably a good time to sleep with somebody who had a teenager who was working at Coral’s during the day.

“I am really sorry,” I said.

“Let’s get it done,” he snapped.

Then Jackie came in, also looking disheveled, so we might be one step closer to getting a doctor. Not the way I wanted to find that out, but I was willing to take any win at the moment.

Jackie got down on her knees and pulled back the tablecloth and looked at Louise. She shook her head. “This place is basically an ER in a bad part of town on a Saturday night. With scenery.”

“This will stop once we find out who’s doing this,” I said, desperate to reassure her. “We’ll stop whoever it is and the town will be back to normal, I swear.”

“I get the feeling this is normal for this town,” Jackie said. “And you want me to raise a daughter here?”

“Your daughter wants to be raised here,” Quill said from behind Coral. “Also, I’m already raised. And I’m staying.” The girl looked at Louise on the floor and Jackie hastily covered her again. “She was mean,” Quill said of Louise and went back into the kitchen, and Coral sighed and followed her.

Jackie stood and put on rubber gloves from her bag before she picked up the thermos.

“Coral just filled that a minute ago,” I said. “It was from a pot that others have had cups from. It wasn’t in the coffee.”

“So it was already in the thermos,” Jackie said. “Put the poison in there, which would have no weight, and then Louise drinks after it mixes with the coffee. When was the last time she drank from this?”

“Yesterday morning, as far as I know. Every morning. I think she used it as an excuse to come here, to see what was going on.”

“So anytime in the last twenty-four hours,” Jackie said. “That made it easy.”

The few customers at the other tables were Rocky Start regulars who looked mildly interested and not terribly upset and were now going back to their coffee and pastry. I began to wonder if my estimate of only 10 percent of the population being pros had been too low. Or maybe lately, if you came to Coral’s, you had to expect there might be death. Or maybe they just didn’t care. Louise had not had a lot of admirers. And that made me think of Ozzie’s funeral, the flaming boat pushed out into the lake while dozens and dozens of people watched and wept. The real tragedy of Louise’s death, I thought, was that nobody cared.

“I’m assuming the police are not on their way,” Jackie said.

I shook my head. “Pike is upstairs, but Luke is here now. We’re covered.”

Jackie came to stand next to me as Luke unrolled the body bag beside Louise. I had a random thought that Louise’s body bag should have had rhinestones, something glittery and flashy, and then I realized she’d have gone for basic black—she’d had the kind of beauty that didn’t need jewelry, she’d sparkled on her own. And all of that beauty was now wrapped in black heavy-duty plastic, like takeout.

“Tell me something positive,” Jackie said. “Tell me something that will make me want to stay here. Quill really wants to, but this place scares me.”

I gave up. “Hermione is going to pipe Christmas music into town and is asking everyone for their favorite song. Avoid her.”

“That’s your selling point?”

“The thing is,” I said, watching Luke head for the door, “we do take care of each other. Whoever this is, he or she is not part of Rocky Start. Dottie might have gutted Louise on an impulse, but she wouldn’t have poisoned her coffee and then sat back and waited. Betty could have shot her, but she didn’t give a damn about Louise. Bea . . .” I shook my head. “Bea’s too destroyed over Harvey’s death to do anything like this. We’re all like that. We’ve been putting up with Louise for years, why kill her now? This was cold and calculated and not us. This is not how we kill people.”

“And how do you kill people?” Jackie said coldly.

“Defending ourselves against Outsiders.” I looked at her. “If you don’t want to stay, if you don’t want to be part of us, get out now. We need you, and your daughter wants to stay, but this is a community you have to want to be part of to understand, not stand off to one side making smart remarks.”

Her eyebrows went up, and she said again, “That’s how you’re selling me on this place?”

“I’m not selling anything,” I said, fed up with trying to convince her to stay. “If you don’t want to be part of us, leave. But if you’re going to stay, help. We could really use your help.”

Jackie snorted. “That’s pretty cold, Malone. Louise didn’t mean much to you, I gather.”

I looked in her eyes. “I’m going to start screaming any minute now. Louise just died in front of me and I didn’t like her, but I would have invited her to Christmas dinner anyway; she was part of us. I didn’t want her dead, and watching her die was horrible. I want this to stop. I need to fix this .” I took a deep breath. “So I’m going to go talk to Bea to see what she knows, and to Dottie to find out what she’s sitting on. I swear to God, if I have to beat the information out of them, I will. This has to stop .”

Jackie nodded. “Okay.” She thought for a moment and then took a deep breath. “Want me to go with you?”

That was a surprise. “Wow. Thank you, no. Bea will think it’s an intervention if I bring a doctor. I’ll take Poppy. Maybe reminding Bea that Poppy almost died twice will be motive for her to talk.” I smiled at her, or tried to. “I appreciate the offer. You help Luke.”

Jackie looked unsure. “He doesn’t need my help to put another body in the basement.”

“He’s upset with me for calling at a bad moment,” I said, trying to be tactful. “If you could smooth that over, that would be good. We need him.”

Jackie nodded. “Yeah, I can do that.” She looked over at the door, at Luke standing there like a monolith, Louise’s body bag over his shoulder. “I can do that.”

She went to join him, brushing past Hermione who actually asked them what their favorite Christmas songs were.

“Knock it off, Hermione,” I called to her and she frowned at me.

“We just need some Christmas spirit!” she said, but she looked cross, probably because she hadn’t been able to pillage the body. “I just want everybody to feel Christmassy!”

“Hermione, sometimes it’s not about what you want,” I said and went back to Oddities to get Poppy.

I was also going to get what I wanted: an end to this madness.