Cloaked in Malice (18 page)

I threw a huge wad of butcher paper at Nick.

He rolled over to face the back of the sofa.

Not even a package of quilt batting woke him.

Fat lot of help he was gonna be.

“Where’s his gun?” Paisley wrote.

I pointed to it on the sofa’s end table.

She got down on all fours, crawled beneath the windows on a rug with maple leaves in burgundies, rusts, and golds, and slipped the gun off the table. Then “click, click, click,” she stood on her knees and aimed at my legs.
Then
I remembered that I shouldn’t trust her.

“Get under the table.” Her no-nonsense tone—no fearful shrinking violet here—sent a shiver up my spine.

My shock notwithstanding, my mind looking for a way out, I did as I was told, thinking how much I’d hate to die on such an ugly rug.

Twenty-three

Jeans were the insignia of resistance for only a short time. Then they became the universal, unisex apparel worn by most of the world’s population.

—ULF POSCHARDT

In the second before Paisley fired the gun, I realized I was doomed to spending eternity wearing unremarkable jeans, not some Parisian designer’s best vintage work, not even my own, and I was pissed.

The gunshot stole my hearing first, while I gathered clichés and thought: My body must be shutting down.

It really doesn’t hurt to die, I discovered, if you die quickly.

Fear’s a wonder; it can make idiots of all of us. I wasn’t dead.

Werner used a string of colorful, if not off-color, words, the kind I’d only heard from him as class bully. No,
he and I didn’t become frenemies—his word—until I bought my shop last year.

“Madeira!” he snapped. “You put a hole in my favorite hat!”

Good, I thought. I hated that hat.

“I did it!” Paisley snapped. “You shouldn’t have leaned your hat in the open doorway at a time like that. You
scared
us!” Her legs seemed to give out and she had no recourse but to land on the sofa Nick had vacated in a gun-blazing blink.

Paisley didn’t care that he was now prying the gun from her frozen fingers.

Most murderers were not petrified by the fact that they’d shot a gun, so I happily knocked Paisley off my list of possible Tuna killers.

Nick seemed as confused as I’d been about Paisley’s intentions.

Me? Who cared? I wasn’t dead. Only my nondesigner pride had been wounded. But then I looked at the bright side: I still had a shot at spending eternity in a Versace.

Relief washed through me. And then my teeth began to chatter.

Aunt Fiona and Eve, of all people, whisked me from beneath the table, lifting me on jelly legs, and holding me up while they kissed and hugged me, and looked for obvious gunshot wounds, and I was too grateful to be alive to ask what the Pucci they were doing there.

“I thought she shot you, Mad,” Aunt Fiona said. “I really did.”

That struck Werner unexpectedly hard; he looked like I felt when Paisley pointed the gun my way—pale, and a bit like he might pass out, so I opened my arms, and he stepped into them.

My poor detective trembled from the inside out.

“Somebody care to tell
me
what happened here?” Nick shouted, his voice cracking, his face chalk white and dripping sweat.

I’m sure it was difficult for him to be so cocky and affronted, not to mention jealous, when Aunt Fiona pushed him down on the sofa with one finger to his shoulder and made put his head between his legs. Every time Nick tried to lift it, Fee shoved his poor head down there again.

I stifled a giggle while I got my sea legs and circulation back.

I didn’t know the green monster could bite Nick quite that hard, but jean-a-ma-jig, maybe he’d just feared for
everybody’s
life. The jealousy, that was good for him now and again—for him and our relationship.

But cardiac arrest? Not so much.

“You okay, Nick?” I asked.

“Well, I like that,” Eve said. “Fiona and I were worried sick and you don’t ask if we’re okay.”

Werner hadn’t yet let me go; as a matter of fact, he pulled me tighter against him.

I looked back at Nick, and tilted my head at Werner, silently asking for my freedom.

“Just because we broke up doesn’t mean—never mind.” He let me go, and I went straight to Nick.

I sat on the sofa beside my guy and let Nick reel me in, rogue style.

“You scared the life out of me,” he whispered against my hair, and I sighed, quite happy I didn’t die.

“Does anybody care that I’m okay?” Paisley asked.

I pulled away from Nick, because this was no time to neck, and I gave Paisley a thumbs-up. “My hero, of course you’re okay.
You
were holding the gun.” Sure, I thought it was aimed at me, but she didn’t need to sense my original terror. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”

“My grandfather, I think. And if memory serves, the gun I learned on stood taller than me.”

My alarm came back to haunt me. “You did scare me.”

“Never mind that,” she said, taking in our motley rescue team. “How did you three know we were in trouble and stuck here? Are there more of you?”

They all started talking at once, Eve, Fiona, and Werner.

Nick raised a hand, which did no good, so he pointed his gun toward the ceiling and cocked the trigger.

Instant silence.

“One at a time,” he said, “in order of events, please, so there’ll be no backtracking.”

“I’ll start,” Aunt Fiona said. “Mad, I got worried when you didn’t come home, so I called you, without luck, then Nick’s house phone
and
cell, and got no answer at either.”

“Where was Dad?” I asked. “Is he here?”

“It’s just us three. Your dad’s asleep, snoring like a steam engine climbing Mount—” She pointed a finger my way, then she turned and wagged that same warning finger at everyone. “You didn’t hear that description from me, or he and I will be divorced before he figures out that he wants to marry me.”

I firmed my lips at the TMI meeting all my hopes and dreams.

Fiona smoothed the sweater set she wore with tan slacks. “I dressed and went to your shop, in case you were hurt, Mad, and my sleuthing
there
,” she stressed, “gave me an idea what happened.”

Her sleuthing at the shop, as in: Her talk with Dante revealed our planned “boat to island jaunt” conversation.

When Aunt Fee opened her mouth to continue, Werner indicated with a raised finger that it was his turn to talk. “That’s when Fiona came to me,” Werner said, “and I got a warrant to search Nick’s house.”

Nick rose from the sofa. “You searched my house?”

“Not really,” Werner said. “We searched your computer.”

“Which,” Eve said, “they called me to do, because I’m
a computer genius. And wow, you’ve got some neato-slick computer programs. Can I have copies?”

“Sure, we’ll both love the cuisine in prison after we get taken down for copyright infringement. The law’s really taking a bite out of that.”

“That was a knee-jerk reaction from the early, uninformed, days. Sorry,” Eve said. “Whoever wrote the programs deserves to get paid for them. I’ll just make a list so I can go and buy them.”

“I’ll not only give you a list, I’ll tell you which ones are best and why.”

“And should I trust your recommendations, Fedhead?”

“When it comes to computer programs, yes.”

“Thanks. Anyway, back to how we got here,” Eve said, “not that our clothes don’t tell a story.”

“I was gonna say: You…jumped out of a plane and did a tuck and roll through a briar patch?”

“Shush. I tracked your search history and found that you’d looked up the
Concertina
, then rented a boat for yesterday morning. After we went and talked to McCreadie, the
Concertina
’s skipper, he mentioned taking the girl you had with you off this island a few months ago and giving you directions here yesterday.”

So the captain had seen us. Scrap, he’d even identified Paisley. I shivered.

“Then the three of us discussed it,” Werner said, “and it seemed likely that you got stranded here, so we followed
your lead to the boat rental company, and here we are.”

“I wish you hadn’t talked to McCreadie or used the same rental company,” Nick said.

“Why?” Werner asked.

“Gut hunch. I don’t like that guy.”

Double scrap, I thought, their boat could have been cut loose, too.

Twenty-four

I thank you for your kind invitation to introduce me to the president of the Republic. Since I have not been out of my atelier for two months, I have no appropriate costume for this circumstance.

—CAMILLE CLAUDEL

“What’s Dad going to think when he wakes up and you’re gone, Fee?”

“And you and Paisley and Nick are gone, too?” Aunt Fiona said. “He won’t be happy until he knows we’re okay, but for goodness’ sakes, shut up about the whole ‘gunfire on arrival’ fiasco, or we’ll be force-fed literary quotes to the end of our days.”

“Blockin’ it,” I said. “Oh, baby, blockin’ it big time.”

“This is a strange place,” Eve said, wrinkling her nose.

Oops.

“I grew up here, thank you very much.” Paisley’s tone said “miffed” like when I put down her toys.

Werner got out his notepad. “You grew up in a house surrounded by an electric fence?”

I looked back at him. “How did you know the fence was electric?”

Eve giggled. “We were climbing this tree, and a branch fell. Zap!”

Fiona cleared her throat. “Gave me a bit of angina, I don’t mind saying, like hanging over the electric chair.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Werner said.

Eve rolled her eyes. “There were some lovely bells on the tree.”

Werner paled. “Which I thought would beget a spotlight and a firing squad.”

“We weren’t running from the Nazis,” Eve said.

“Obviously, because they would not have appreciated your rendition of ‘Jingle Bells.’”

Nick’s grin about split his face. “Why didn’t
we
hear the bells?” he asked.

Paisley and I shared a fit of the giggles.

“Because you snore too loud and sleep too deeply,” Paisley said. “You probably drowned out the sound.”