An Ex to Grind in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 5) Paperback – September 4, 2014 (30 page)

I guffawed. “He’s about as comforting as hugging a ball of rusty barbed-wire.”

Harvey set the lasagna on the table in front of us. “I’d bet my left nut that Coop’s already been there to do his comforting.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Why do you always bet your left nut and not your right?”

“It’s smaller, hairier, and looks like a peach pit, not near as purty as my right one. I never bet my prize-winnin’ ball.”

I groaned.

“You had to ask,” Doc said, chuckling.

“I should know better by now.”

Harvey hollered out the back door for the kids to come in and wash their hands. Then he joined us at the table. “That article reminded me of something I want Coop to look into.”

“What’s that?” I asked, wondering how much sway Harvey had with his nephew these days now that he was associated with me.

“If the Deadwood police ever figured out what weapon was used to cut off those three heads way back when.” Harvey spooned a scoop of lasagna onto one of the empty plates. “Remember,” he said to me, “Mudder Brothers has quite a collection of sharp tools down in their basement.”

I nodded, thinking of a certain pair of long, deadly scissors I’d used once myself that were now locked up in the Evidence room along with Prudence’s teeth. “I thought Eddie Mudder made it through the suspect hoops, though.”

“For his brother’s death, sure. But this ain’t his brother.”

“Was Eddie even born when those heads were found?” Doc asked.

“No, but his wild-eyed daddy was. They carted him off in a padded wagon when I was still learning to shave and greasing my hair back.”

“Let me get this straight.” I wanted to make sure all three of us were on the same page, because Harvey sometimes skipped forward several chapters without telling me. “You think Eddie’s dad killed the other three and now Eddie is following in his dad’s footsteps?”

He shrugged and dished up another plate. “It’s an idea I had when I saw some old obituaries in the newspapers while searchin’ for this article. Eddie’s dad used to be the embalmer at the funeral home back before it belonged to George and Eddie.” He handed me a plate of lasagna.

I hadn’t realized the Mudder boys were playing their part in a family tradition.

Harvey raised his bushy eyebrows. “Who’d know better how to deform a skull than someone who dabbles with corpses for a livin’?”

I picked at my lasagna, my appetite waning as I pictured Eddie in his rubber apron elbow deep in his work. Tomato sauce and blood were a bit too similar at the moment.

Handing a full plate to Doc, Harvey added, “After the Mudder Brothers fun you two had that night, I told Coop to ask Eddie about the creepy tools we saw in their basement.”

“Wasn’t there a scythe in there, too?” Doc asked me.

I nodded, staring at Harvey with my fork hesitating above the steaming cheese. “Did Coop ask him?”

Harvey grunted in acknowledgment.

Addy, Kelly, and then Layne came stumbling inside the back door, laughing and bumping into each other. Addy’s chicken followed them inside using the cat door Aunt Zoe had installed last week for the damned bird.

“Addy, put that chicken in the basement.” I thumbed toward the dining room. “Then go wash your hands—all of you.”

After the three had tromped off, Harvey leaned forward. “Turns out George and Eddie weren’t the collectors. Those tools have been in the family for a
looooong
time.”

Chapter Fifteen

Saturday, October 6th

I dreamed that all of my teeth were being yanked out one-by-one.

Gasping awake, my nightmare continued when I realized there were fingers in my mouth gripping my bottom incisors. Then I realized they were my fingers and spit them out, wiping my hands off on my camisole, which was damp with sweat.

“Damn you, Prudence, and your obsession with teeth,” I grumbled and rolled out of bed.

I checked the time via my cell phone. It was super early, as in dark o’clock still. Outside my window, the street was shadow-filled and empty. I opened my window, breathing in the fresh, cool air. The birds hadn’t even started their pre-dawn chatter yet. I shivered as a breeze blew over my sweaty camisole and I shut the window.

Crud. I could really use someone to talk to right now, somebody who could help me forget about my problems long enough to catch a little more shuteye. I hesitated in front of my bedroom door, thinking of Aunt Zoe sleeping two doors down. I hated to wake her up, though. She’d looked so tired when she’d come in late after the first night of Oktoberfest. I wondered how much of it was due to a lack of sleep since that fight with Reid. Lately, she and I’d been wearing matching red-rimmed eyes in the mornings. She didn’t talk about why, and I hadn’t asked … yet.

I slumped onto the bed, wondering if Natalie were awake yet down in Arizona. Probably not since she was with her cousins who liked to hang out at the bar into the wee hours.

I pulled up Doc’s number, hesitated, and then hit the Call button.

It rang five times. “Violet?” his voice sounded rough.

“Were you sleeping?” What a dumb question. I’d already heard the answer in his voice.

“Are you okay?” he asked back.

“Yes.” I touched my teeth. One seemed to wiggle a smidgeon. “I think.”

“What time is it?”

“Early.”

“Are your kids okay?”

“Yeah.” I scrubbed some sleep from my eye. “I just …”
needed to hear your voice
, “I had a nightmare.”

There was a pause from his end. “Kyrkozz, Wolfgang, or Caly?”

“It was Prudence this time.” I actually couldn’t remember the details, only her face leaning over mine and the feeling of my teeth being tugged on. “She’d come to collect my canines.”

“You want me to come over?”

“No, you might wake up Aunt Zoe and the kids.”

“You could come over here.”

“Harvey’s on your couch again.” Last night, the old goat had informed me that was where he’d be in case I needed my bodyguard. “He sleeps like a new mother.”

I knew from experience that Harvey woke at the mere swish of a sock brushing over the carpet. There was no sneaking past him in the middle of the night for a leftover steak, a few spoonfuls of ice cream, or the bottle of tequila I kept above the fridge.

“I noticed that about him. What can I do to help?”

“Talk to me.”

“Okay.” I heard his bed creak and imagined snuggling up to him on his soft sheets. “Do you want to talk about Prudence and her weird messages?”

“Not really.”

“Then tell me something about you,” he said.

Besides the fact that I’d fallen head over heels for him and lately had begun to daydream about a gold ring, a layered cake, and a long white dress?

“Something from your past that I don’t know,” he added.

“You go first.” That gave me time to come up with something other than my usual boring tales of family drama, unwed pregnancy, and shitty jobs. What I didn’t know about him could keep us chatting for weeks.

He cleared his throat. “Let’s see … I worked in a garage during college.”

“You mean as a mechanic?”

“Yes. My grandfather taught me all about engines while I was growing up. He considered the hours we spent in his shop as part of my vocational education while he was homeschooling me. He’s the one who got me hooked on Detroit muscle and steel.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Very much. Tinkering with engines is relaxing, and the times spent with my grandfather are some of my favorite memories.”

My throat constricted a little for him, knowing what I did about his childhood.

“By the time I finished college,” he continued, “the owner of the garage had become a good friend. Actually, he was more like an uncle to me. He helped me fix up my car.”

“You mean your Camaro SS?”

“Yep.”

He’d had that car since college and it still looked that good? Maybe he shouldn’t let my kids ride in it anymore. Their ability to cause mass destruction with only their fingers was legendary.

“Have you stayed in contact with the garage owner?”

“He’s dead.”

I plucked at a loose string edging my pillowcase. “I’m sorry.”

“I haven’t tried to look him up since I heard the news.”

Did Doc mean the guy’s ghost? “Can you do that?”

His chuckle sounded husky with sleep yet. “I was kidding, Violet. Your turn now.”

I leaned back against my headboard, weeding through my past. There were a lot of thistles and dandelions growing there, quite a few brambles, too, but none had the emotional level of what Doc had shared. I didn’t want him to feel shortchanged because I wanted him to keep telling me more, to open the Book of Doc even wider.

Then I remembered something that might appeal to him. “I have an irrational fear of rune casting.”

“Did you say rune casting?”

“Yes, as in the casting of runes to figure out the path one is taking and the likely outcome. My grandma-great is to blame. Casting her runes was part of her daily routine.”

“Was she into tarot card reading, too?”

“Nope, just runes. She carried them in a little pouch made of some kind of soft leather—I think it was deer skin, maybe rabbit. They were made of bone, worn smooth on the edges with small cracks throughout.” I could still envision them as clearly as when I was a child watching her yellowed fingernails as they clacked against them. “She said they’d ‘sing’ to her.”

I remembered her telling me that one day when I found her kneeling on her attic floor next to the runes. The memory of her tired, lined face in the morning sunlight appeared in my mind, fresh as when it had happened. Her watery eyes had locked on me, widening, then returned to the stones that were spread on a black piece of cloth she also carried folded in her pouch. She picked the stones up as I stood there and put them back in her pouch, muttered something under her breath, and cast them again. Her frown dragged her wrinkles downward when her focus landed on me again.

“Why do you fear them?” Doc pulled me back to present day. “I didn’t think runes were used for fortune telling. That they were more of a prediction, and you could change the outcome if you veered your current path.”

“How do you know about runes?”

“I read a lot.”

“I noticed.” Just like Layne. If my son could ever get past his worry about another man stealing his place in my heart, I had a feeling he and Doc would be as thick as thieves.

“Especially about topics having to do with the supernatural, mysterious, paranormal, or magical,” Doc said.

Of course he did, with his history. I should have figured he’d know as much about runes as I did. Probably more.

“So what happened that caused you to fear them?” he prodded. “Was it something to do with your path back then?”

“No, my path was always boring according to her reading of the runes—I’d continue to go to school, learn as much as I could, and be a good girl.” That was what she told me, anyway, when I was younger and would ask her to cast the runes for me.

I closed my eyes, thinking back again to that morning in her attic. I could still smell the old varnish and stale air. Dust particles had danced in the sun, orbiting the crown of her head, reminding me of Saturn’s rings, which we’d recently learned about in school. “She scared me off runes when it came to her path,” I told Doc.

“What do you mean?”

“She told me one day when I’d walked in on her reading the runes that every time I was in the room with her while she cast them, the same rune would appear in a negative position.”

“
Merkstave
.”

“Yeah, I think some people call it that.” It had been a while since I thought about my father’s and Aunt Zoe’s grandmother. She’d always seemed so very, very old with her craggy face and dull silver hair.

“Did she say which rune or what its position meant?” Doc pressed.

“She showed me once. The rune reminded me of an old telephone pole, or a capital Y with a third line going up through the center. Sort of like a fork. I can’t remember the name of it.”

“And what was her take on the meaning of it showing up in Merkstave?”

“She said it showed hidden danger surrounding me. Once she even mentioned that she’d catch a whiff of death in the air for a second or two right when the rune stone was cast. She took both signs as warnings.”

“Warnings about what?”

“Me. I was a threat to her.”

“You were a kid.”

“I know, but she always watched me closely with a guarded look in her eyes. After a while, I started to feel uneasy around her and began making excuses not to visit her or my grandmother when I knew Grandma-great would be there.”

One time, my mother begged me to go, resorting to bribery, telling me that my dad’s family was accusing her of keeping me from them. I knew she would never understand my reasoning, so I didn’t try to explain my steadfastness. To this day, she still groused about my stubbornness and how I took after my father and his family.

“I never told my dad or Aunt Zoe this, but I was relieved when she died. She had grown so creepy as her arthritis crippled her. I can still see her hands, gnarled and claw-like as she cast the runes.” I shuddered at the memory and burrowed under the blanket.

“Whatever happened to her pouch of rune stones?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since. I figured Grandma buried them with her mother.” I tried to remember if Aunt Zoe had ever mentioned the rune stones but nothing popped into my memory. However, something recent resurfaced. “I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find out Grandma-great taught Aunt Zoe how to read and write Latin.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Maybe she was some kind of sorceress.”

“So you’ve never had anyone else cast rune stones in your company?”

“Nope. In college, some of the girls would play with tarot cards, palm reading, or rune stones. I’d always leave. I’d had enough of that hocus pocus stuff as a kid.”

“Is that why you hooked up with Rex back then?” he asked. “Because he was a scientist—all black and white logic and the practical application of theories?”

“Maybe. I remember thinking how steady and down-to-earth he was.” I laughed with a good dose of sarcasm at reality. “But then my crazy world caught up with us and I rubbed off on him.” I pursed my lips, contemplating Rex’s actions back then from a different perspective. “You know, now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have been surprised he ran away from me and my babies. He was used to a much more staid, non-dramatic life. Then I blew in like a prairie dust-devil and probably scared the hell out of him.”