Cloaked in Malice (21 page)

Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.

—ERIC BENTLEY

“Paisley, Madeira,” Nick called, coming up to us. “Where are you two headed?”

“Well,” Paisley said, “Mam and Pap are down in the clearing. I was going to show Mad where I buried them. Why?”

“Because one of the agents needs to ask you some questions. You’ll be talking to Assistant Director in Charge, Ray Scanlon, DC office, so pay him due respect.”

“Why don’t I just spit in his face, like you expect me to?”

Nick ran a hand through his hair. “I apologize. You were
brought up here, where nobody had a title, and from what I’ve heard, nobody respected anybody either.”

Paisley expelled her breath with a frustrated lip ruffle. “You’re off the hook. But I understand the word ‘respect,’ and I would never offer him anything less,” she said, no longer quite as miffed that he’d doubt her.

“Coming, Mad?” she asked.

“No, Paisley, you go on up to see Scanlon. I’m supposed to be grilling Mad, which I’ll do to the best of my ability, though we’ve never played FBI agent–suspect before, and I’m not sure she’ll behave.”

I considered his comment. “You gonna treat me like a suspect, Jackalope?”

“Yes, I am, Ladybug. New nickname, by the way?”

“New life partner, by the way?”

“Call it even?”

“Yes, sir, Jackalope, sir.”

“What’s a Jackalope?”

“Mythical creature, sir. Part jackrabbit, part antelope…and part a hole, is my guess. Some have more of the first two characteristics, and the third indicator makes only rare appearances.”

“You will, of course, tell me whenever that hap-pens.”

“I consider it my duty, sir,” I said as I got swept into his arms with a laugh and set back on my feet.

Paisley chuckled, too, as she left, but halfway to Scanlon,
her entire demeanor changed, her back going ramrod straight, respectful persona in place.

Nick took my arm and led me in the direction Paisley and I
had
been going.

“Are you
supposed
to be fraternizing?” I asked.

“I’m grilling you myself, Ladybug, so I can have some alone time with you.”

“It was the solo shower I made you take yesterday, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“No. This really is business.”

“Monkey business?”

“FBI business. Jackalope, hey? You’re sure?”

“What? You don’t like it as much as Ladybug? I mean, I thought of calling you Firefly as a pet name, but that would be too obvious. And there’s Horned Toad or Cockatoo.”

“Mad, put the torture on hold. I need you to let me in on the clues you picked up when you got your vintage clothing visions. How many have you had and what did you learn from them?”

“Okay, truce. Let me see. I told you about Paisley as a little girl in the white cloak, right?”

“Some. As I remember, it was pillow talk, and we got distracted. Have you remembered anything new?”

“Yes, I remembered the sound of a baby crying in the background on that city street. I mean, who takes a baby to a wedding?”

“You’re sure it was a wedding?”

“No.” I bent to pick a yellow iris, just one, to admire. “Paisley was dressed in the cloak, a little white ruffled gown, diamond-studded Mary Janes, but I’ve been thinking it could have been after a Christmas service.”

“Did it seem like a funeral?”

“If it was a funeral, someone might have been helping her mother into the limo—no, she was definitely shoved. Not a funeral. But I suppose it could have been anything. Thirtyish years ago, the Catholic Church had a lot of dressy special events. I’ll bet there were even more in Paris.”

“About that.” Nick took the iris and slipped it into my hair at my ear. “Gorgeous. Now Dolly Sweet’s in Paris. And on my computer at home is a search for that eighties kidnapping-killing in Paris, as you requested, but you wanna run the reason by me again?”

“I began to suspect Paris after I read the Cassini dress.”

“Define Cassini?”

“Oleg Cassini, Jackie Kennedy’s designer. He designed the dress we found here, in the previously locked closet, remember?
You
read the tag.”

“Oh, right. Sorry, but for me, designers don’t stick.”

“I forgive you. Paisley’s grandfather was married to a double agent who wore that priceless vintage dress on the Eiffel Tower, where she passed information, or I did, to a bearded courier in a white suit.”

“You mean the dress we found here in the closet where
the wall flipped,” Nick asked, “has also been worn to the top of the Eiffel Tower?”

“Yes, do you think we should have looked closer at what was behind the wall?”

“Let’s do that now.”

“Wait, Nick. Tell me how spies and the mob might end up working together, in the event they do.”

“It would be a simple transaction to begin with. A simple exchange of information, a name or location. The first would have been so easy, it might happen again, another exchange, and again, until all those bits led to the worst: Somebody knew too much. After that, ‘pop,’ knowledge erased.”

“So it can happen?”

“Can and does.”

“And the pop was a gun going off?” I winced, waiting for his answer.

He didn’t bother with an answer. He turned me in the opposite direction—straight line for the house, as far away from Paisley as we could get, but we got sidetracked anyway.

Werner argued with a Fed while Johnny Shields and Ted Macri, paramedics, watched. We tried to ignore them but Werner’s voice carried. “That ambulance belongs to Mystick Falls. What happens if someone in my town has an emergency while it’s here?”

“Detective,” the agent said. “Mystic proper, Stonington, and Groton, are taking your Mystick Falls calls.”

“This is New York,” Werner said. “You should have commandeered New York ambulances.”

“Time was an issue. You know darned well that New London was our best and most efficient entry point to this chain of islands.”

Werner raised his chin. “I’m holding you responsible if anybody in my district suffers because of this.”

“Yes, Detective.”

Johnny Shields stood straighter. “Look, over there. That’s Paisley from Mad’s shop.”

“She has six Feds talking to her,” Ted said. “We’re loser fifth wheels.”

“More like seventh wheels, but let’s go anyway,” Shields suggested, Macri right behind him.

“Somebody might make a match here today, but whether any thugs are caught is another matter.”

“Tell me about it.” Nick clipped his badge to his belt, and we made our way upstairs to the hall closet, mostly undisturbed, except for the forensics Feds making small talk as we passed.

Nick closed us inside the closet, and pushed the movable wall just a bit.

I peeked. “Nothing there, thank the stars.” I turned to go.

Nick worked the flashlight on his handy-dandy stylus.

“Oh, scrap,” I said, “there are stairs in there, and cobwebs.” I pulled the string hanging from the ceiling. “Great,
a two-watt lightbulb in a cracked enamel socket. It’ll probably go out when we’re halfway down.”

When I heard the rodent-type squeal, I about jumped into Nick’s arms.

“Ah, mice,” he said, “which makes this fun because I have you in my arms. Hey, maybe I
am
a jackalope.”

“Only the good parts.” Okay, so I enjoyed his roguish attentions, despite the long-tailed squeakers.

“You go first,” I said, pulling from his arms, and making my way to the step behind him. “Scatter them before me.”

He took my hand to lead me down. “The stairs are clear. Let’s move fast.”

In no time, we stood at the bottom, and he flipped a switch which lit four
five
-watt bulbs. “It’s like daylight.”

“Cut the snark.”

“It’s a freakin’ nursery,” I said. “The painted crib, dressing table, twin bed, and bureau say forties, the bedding is all feed bag prints. On the shelf, those dolls are the Dionne quints—a memento of the thirties. Those other dolls in graduated sizes are pretty, but different.”

“Nesting dolls,” Nick said. “From Russia.”

“For people who never went anywhere, they got around. Dolls from Canada and Russia, gorgeous ones compared to what they let Paisley grow up playing with. You know, Mam or Pap could have been born here, for all we know.”

Nick led me to the door opposite the stairs, which opened easily and allowed a slew of bats to rush in.

“This way,” he said, ducking below them, and when I got into the tunnel with him, he shut the door on the bats. They’ll be stuck in the nursery, because we shut the door at the top of the stairs. On our way back, we’ll see if we can let them out before we go any farther than here, okay?”

“Please,” I said. “Nick it stinks in here.” I gagged.

“Hold that gag reflex, Cutler. We have to follow this lead,” he said, wielding his penlight. “Keep moving, scare anything in our way. And don’t look down.”

“Faster,” I said. “Run.”

Nick ran, and after the longest tunnel sprint of my life, we stood at the top of another set of stairs, also going down.

I sighed. “What did Ethel say about Dolly being as old as the earth’s core? We may find out.”

Nick ran down the stairs fast and shoved at the wooden end but the wall wouldn’t give. Then suddenly it creaked and caved instead, and we found ourselves standing in Bepah’s shack, not far from the fireplace, amid rotted splintered wood.

Nick looked out a window. “No wonder Paisley couldn’t see the shack from the farm. We’re much closer to sea level here. I can barely see the center chimney topping the farmhouse.”

“Hypothesis,” I said. “Suppose Paisley’s Mam con-trolled
then killed the old man, and the tunnel and stairs are how she came and went?”

“Maybe the nursery was Paisley’s when she was small?”

“She was about three when her grandfather saved her. That’s the size of the cloak anyway, and she wore it in my vision in front of that church. She was too big for the nursery, unless they expected her to come to them sooner. Possibly another baby lived there, or one was expected to, and maybe never did, but why underground?”

“Good hideout.” Nick whistled. “Mad, on that snowy street where Paisley’s father was killed, didn’t you say that you heard a baby crying?”

I found that I had to swallow a sob.

Maybe there were more lives lost that night than I thought. “Yes, Nick, I did.”

Twenty-eight

I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist.

—VERA WANG

After a fruitless try to get the bats to move beyond the tunnel, through the shack, and toward the outside, we gave up and left them in the tunnel. At least we’d gotten them out of the nursery. Stepping back into the hidden stairwell from the shack, Nick set the wooden door, disguised as a wall, back into place, so the pieces sort of snapped together. “I’ll just bend these two nails,” he said, going he-man on me as he bent them with his hands. “The opening isn’t strong, but unless someone leans on it, it shouldn’t look like there’s a door beside the fireplace, though why I care, I don’t know.”