A Wild Fright in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 7) (6 page)

Did he mean I was Scooby-Doo or Shaggy? Never mind.

“We didn’t do anything wrong, Cooper.” We hadn’t been anywhere close to the body this time. “Or is it illegal now to make phone calls to the cops about someone who might be in danger? Silly me, I thought that was one of the purposes of 911.”

“Not illegal, but it’s suspicious as hell when we receive a warning call about someone who’d been found murdered not eight hours prior.”

“Murdered?” I repeated, getting stuck on the word. It was as I’d feared. Wanda wasn’t just dead, she’d been murdered.

“Yes, murdered.” He watched me closely, searching for who knew what.

I frowned over at Doc. The storm clouds were back on his face. I had a feeling I had a tornado brewing on mine.

Memories of Wanda flickered behind my eyes like I was watching from the backside of a movie screen. Guilt sat heavily on my chest. Regret and frustration followed, joining the sit-in. I lowered my head, blinking through an onslaught of tears.

Wanda had saved my life several times, but when the day came to return the favor, I hadn’t been there for her, damn it. Someone was going to have to let Prudence know that I’d failed to do my job. That my bungling attempts to figure out my new lot in life had most likely caused the premature death of an innocent woman whom I was supposed to protect.

“How was Wanda killed?” Doc asked.

Cooper hesitated. A muscle in his jaw ticked.

My guilt grew heavier. What did the killer do to her?

“That’s police business,” Cooper finally answered.

“Coop,” Harvey scolded. “Our friend is dead.”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

Anger stoked the furnace in my belly. “Yet you’re at liberty to stomp over here and rake me over the coals for making a single phone call to try to help Wanda?”

“The coroner hasn’t delivered his report. Until then, procedure doesn’t allow speculation with the public. I already said too much by telling you three she was murdered.”

Knees a little wobbly all of a sudden, I fell into Doc’s chair. “So, what now?”

“We start rounding up suspects and interrogating them.”

Starting with me. I snarled at him. “You shouldn’t have had me on speaker phone, damn it.”

He bristled. “That wasn’t my doing. I was in a meeting with Hawke. He saw your number pop up on my desk phone and hit the speaker button.”

Detective Hawke knew my number by sight alone? That couldn’t be good. “Still, you could’ve warned me.”

“How was I to know you were going to open your big mouth and incriminate yourself?”

“Why else would I call you? To talk about guns and motorcycles?” Or any of Cooper’s other favorite topics outside of murder?

“How about to tell me you’d found a buyer for my house?”

Oh, yeah, my regular job. I bit my lip and turned away.

“How much trouble is Violet in this time?” Doc’s hair was even more finger plowed now.

“Hawke wanted me to locate her and bring her to the station immediately. I convinced him that he was moving too fast and needed to collect more facts first.”

In other words, Cooper had temporarily saved my ass. “Thank you for buying me time.” It hurt my tongue to say that.

“Don’t thank me yet, Parker. This is only temporary. Hawke really wants to string you up.”

“The feeling is mutual.” My love for that toe-stomping, overbearing gumshoe could fit through the eye of a needle—and a very tiny needle at that. Like the needle a flea would use to stitch its flea circus tent.

“I hope you have an alibi for the last forty-eight hours.”

I did. A nasty cough left behind from the flu had been keeping me company in bed, but I doubted that would hold water with Detective Hawke. I should have sneezed all over him when I had the chance.

“Are there any other suspects?” Doc asked.

“Nobody as interesting as your girlfriend. Wanda has a few family members who benefit from her death, but that’s it for the list so far.”

I sighed, resting my head in my hands. “All I did was make a stupid phone call.”

“What prompted that call?” Cooper asked.

Before I could answer, Doc cut in. “Is this on the record or off?”

“Off.”

I looked at Harvey. “You’re going to have to back me up on this, you know.”

“You want me to share yer noose?”

“If it comes down to it, maybe Mr. Bodyguard.”

With a nod, he turned to his nephew. “Prudence did some chin waggin’ with Violet and me this morning over at the Carhart place.”

Cooper’s steely gaze leveled on me. “You mean your ghost pal?”

“She’s not my pal.” More of a disgruntled ex-coworker.

“We ain’t foolin’ around, boy. I was there with Violet.”

I could see Cooper’s jaw work, like he was chewing on Harvey’s words some more, trying to swallow them without choking. “What did Prudence the ghost have to say today?”

I ciphered through the cryptic stuff Prudence had told me. “That Wanda was in danger,” I told him. “Someone recently broke into the Carhart house looking for something Wanda supposedly had, but they came up empty. Prudence was worried the culprit was going to hunt down Wanda next.”

Not surprisingly, my answer added a new topcoat of granite to Cooper’s expression. “Let me get this straight. You called me this morning to talk about Wanda because a ghost told you that she might be in danger?”

I knew it sounded hokey, but, “Prudence was quite insistent about it.”

“But your ghost pal didn’t know Wanda was already dead?”

I shook my head.

He smirked.

“What? She’s a ghost, not a soothsayer.”

Cooper frowned at Doc. “This doesn’t help your girlfriend’s case.”

Doc shrugged. “Maybe not with Detective Hawke, but it explains why she called you.”

“And you believe her?”

“Of course,” Doc said without hesitation.

“Hello,” I waved at the detective. “I’m sitting right here you know.”

Cooper sighed, scrubbing his hand down his face. “You all must realize that I can’t use a warning from a ghost as part of any defensive strategy down at the station. Nobody will believe you or me, and I’ll probably be suspended on indefinite psych leave.”

I sighed. “Of course you can’t.” Was this what the musicians on the Titanic felt like when icy water had lapped at their feet? “Now what?”

“Stick around town and try not to do anything else wrong.” Cooper glared at me. “And answer your damned phone when I call.”

I flipped off the big jerk.

He wrinkled his lip in reply before opening the door. He shot Doc a glance on the way out. “I’ll be home late tonight, Nyce, thanks to your girlfriend’s screw up.”

I scowled at the detective’s backside, wishing I were close enough to plant my size 8 boot in it. “I didn’t kill Wanda Carhart!”

Cooper paused on the other side of the threshold, squinting back in at me. “Oddly enough, Parker, I believe you’re innocent. But I’m not the one you need to convince this time.”

Chapter Three

I’d learned at a young age that when shit hit the fan, there was no better place to lie low than my Aunt Zoe’s kitchen. The fresh lemonade in her refrigerator and sweet goodies in her Betty Boop cookie jar always helped me to choke down a long day chock-full with bitter pills.

And boy oh boy had today been one of those days. I had acid indigestion coming out my ears.

“Violet,” Aunt Zoe’s voice interrupted my pity party. “Wanda’s death is not your fault.”

I blinked out of my daze and looked across the kitchen table into her all-seeing dark blue gaze. Aunt Zoe always had been able to read me like an eye doctor chart. Since childhood, I’d distracted most who looked my way with my big, bold E’s and F’s on the surface. Only she had known to squint and peer lower, zeroing in on my tiny, troubled O’s and C’s.

My focus dropped to the last couple of toast bites smothered with chipped beef in white sauce that were now cold. I shoved them around the plate with my fork.

“Prudence would disagree with you,” I told her.

Aunt Zoe leaned forward, her long silver-lined hair pulled back in a loose ponytail tonight. Her red glass earrings, a product of her own crafting, looked pretty fancy compared to her faded plaid work shirt and jeans.

“Violet, you may share a vocation with Prudence, but your stripes are different. Remember that the next time you compare yourself to her.”

“What do you mean?” Doc asked from where he stood by the sink, drying the big saucepan Aunt Zoe had used to make Layne’s favorite dish.

The kid had plowed through three helpings of what my dad always called
shit-on-a-shingle
, snarfing down bite after bite before asking to be excused to go watch El Dorado in the living room. One would think the nearly ten-year-old was fresh in from driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail or something, sheesh.

“Just as your talents and abilities as a medium vary from another’s,” she told Doc, “Violet’s skills might include elements that Prudence’s didn’t or vice-versa.”

He put the pan on the counter and pulled the ladle from the drain rack. He still wore the same jeans and black shirt from earlier and sported the same finger plowed hair, too. However, in the soft yellow surroundings of my aunt’s kitchen with snowflakes falling outside the window, he sort of hypnotized me with his pulse-palpitating good looks.

It took several slow blinks and a head-clearing shake to realize that maybe it was just the sight of a man doing housework that had my motor revving. If Doc grabbed the broom and started sweeping, I might have to ask Aunt Zoe to leave so I could have my wicked way with him on her clean wooden floor.

“Zoe, have any other executioners in your family’s lineage had the ability to see ghosts?” Doc asked, unaware that I had moved on to a fantasy involving him folding socks and towels.

Aunt Zoe turned to me, staring pointedly.

I left Fantasyland Doc in the midst of ironing my shirts and frowned back at present-moment Aunt Zoe. Why was I getting
that
look from her? After my kids had been excused from the table, I’d filled her in about my episode this morning with Prudence. Had I forgotten something important?

“What?” I asked, sticking a bite of cold toast in my mouth.

“Have you finished the book?”

As much as I’d have liked to pretend I didn’t know what book she was talking about, I knew she’d yank on my ear if I played dumb.

“Almost.”

“Violet, that’s your key to unlocking the possibilities of what you can and can’t do.”

“I know, but reading long, handwritten tomes isn’t exactly my strong suit.” Unlike my son, who carted around college-sized history books on the ancient Maya in case he had a spare moment to fit some reading into his day. At her narrowed gaze, I held up my hands. “Besides, it’s not my fault. I can’t find the book.”

“What do you mean you can’t find it? I thought I told you to keep it safe up in your room.”

“You did, and it’s somewhere around here. I’m sure of that because I didn’t take it anywhere else.”

“How could you lose
that
book?”

“I was reading it when I was in bed sick and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was gone.” At her growl of unhappiness, I stuck another bite in my mouth, mumbling, “I’ll find it, I swear.”

“Did you look under your bed?”

“Of course I did, and in my closet where I’d been keeping it tucked away. I’ve checked everywhere. I must have sleepwalked and left it somewhere else around here.” My subconscious probably had made me hide it, trying to protect my kids from learning the truth about who we were.

“What’s in this book?” Doc was drying a plate now.

I kept telling Aunt Zoe we needed to invest in a dishwasher, but she preferred to hand wash dishes. “Doc, why don’t you let me finish those later.” I felt guilty about him coming over to clean up after us.

He waved the dish towel at me. “Answer my question.”

“The book has information on my family history.”

“Not only your family history,” Aunt Zoe chastised, fiddling with her coffee cup. “It’s a volume full of writings from various
magistrae
throughout our history about the executioners under their charge. Some accounts include lists of kills, others define abilities and disclose experiences along the way, and some give details on what method was used when executing different enemies.”

Doc’s brow rose. “But didn’t you say that what has worked in the past might not work for Violet? That she has to figure out how to kill each different species of these
others
on her own?”

“I did.” Aunt Zoe shot me a stern look. “But in addition to possible skill crossovers, which has happened in the past, she needs to read it to understand what else could potentially be out there waiting for her.”

Doc hung the towel over the cupboard door below the sink. “Zoe, how do you feel about me reading this book?”

He walked over and picked up my plate, holding it out for me to take the last bite. I stabbed it with my fork and popped it in my mouth. I handed him the fork, too, thanking him after I’d swallowed.

Doc was a definite keeper, if only I could find some sort of invisible shackling device that didn’t involve a wedding band. Marriage was a topic I’d avoided around him ever since finding out he might be allergic to having a wife. And if that were the case, his gaining my two children in the matrimony deal would probably send him into anaphylactic shock.

“Or would me reading this family memoir be against the rules?”

Aunt Zoe shook her head. “There are no rules, just warnings and plenty of dangers.” She sat back, crossing her arms over her chest. Her lips were pinched as she focused on me. “Unfortunately, until we find the book, nobody can read it.”

“There’s no second copy of it anywhere?” I asked, knowing the answer to that from her scoff alone.

“I can’t believe you misplaced the book.”

“It’s not my fault. I’m telling you, it was there when I fell asleep.”

“Why didn’t you mention it was missing before now?”

“I didn’t want you to look at me the way you are right now.”

Doc chuckled. “Now you sound like Addy did earlier.”

It was unfortunate that he’d had to witness my harping at my daughter at the dinner table about something else that had gone missing as of late—my water pick. When Layne had taken a moment to breathe in between his first and second helpings, he’d tattled on his sister. According to him, he’d witnessed Addy using my water pick to rinse off Elvis the chicken during the bird’s weekly bath. While I didn’t condone snitching, Addy knew better than to use my personal hygiene appliances on that damned chicken. We’d been there and done that before, with “grounding” consequences. So her claim not to realize I’d be upset about her using my water pick to blast the poop off Elvis’s tail feathers didn’t fly with me.