Cloaked in Malice (3 page)

Two

We are creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident.

—WILLIAM HAZLITT

“No one ever said you looked like any of your relatives?” I asked. “You must be from a very small family.”

Paisley sighed. “I’m the last of my family. If there’s a current generation, I wouldn’t know it.”

She momentarily looked lost. “I’m an only child of an only child of an only child, and so on. They made that clear. Nobody but nobody is related to me, according to them.”

I wondered who “they” and “them” were, Paisley acted so curiously vague and disconnected. She raised what I now saw closely enough to identify as a vintage carpetbag to her chest and hugged it as if for support, holding
it
in addition
to her funky, and not in a good way, boxy pearlized shoulder bag.

Paisley’s expression became wistful. “I once asked point blank where I came from, because I never did connect with my parents. I thought they might be aliens, or I might be. Sometimes I could barely understand them. Anyway, when I asked, my father, and I use the word ‘father’ loosely, he said they bought me from the gypsies.” Paisley shrugged. “That’s as close as the dour man ever came to making a joke. At least it made
his
belly shake. My mother, also a loose term, not so much. Then they gave me the ‘no relative’ shtick.”

“Goodness,” I said, surprised at the outpouring of personal angst from a stranger.

Paisley touched Dolly’s arm. “That’s why I was so happy you said I look like you.”

Dolly chafed beneath the adoration in Paisley’s smile. “I have to go now,” my old friend said. “Take good care of her, Mad, and I mean that.” Dolly’s look said so much more than her words. “Come along, Ethel,” she told her daughter-in-law, an order
not
to be disobeyed, since she’d opened the door to go.

“But, Mama, we just got here.”

Dolly left, her hand raised in an afterthought of a good-bye. Weird for the social butterfly of Mystick Falls, who normally liked to linger, if not escape entirely to Paris when it sizzles, where Dante never failed to escape as well.

Now his frown turned to a blank look, a brow raised in speculation.

“I hope to see you again soon,” Paisley called after them.

Ethel turned to shrug her arthritic shoulders. “Mama’s getting these fits and starts lately.” Dolly’s daughter-in-law/companion shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but I think she might be getting old.”

I chuckled. “I doubt that.”

“Madeira,” Ethel added, “come for a lemon square after work today. Bring Nick if you want. He’s not on assignment, is he?”

“No, he’s in town. As a matter of fact, we have plans later. Can I take a rain check and have that lemon square for breakfast tomorrow? With a nice cup of clover honey tea?”

Ethel got as close to smiling as she could. “Our world-traveling FBI agent is sticking close to home these days,” she observed with a wink. “Guess he’s spooked by the competition. Speaking of which, I saw Detective Werner earlier. He asked if you and Nick were engaged yet.”

“I may choose to be an autumn bride,” I said, making Ethel stumble.

Paisley caught her arm and steadied her.

“Guess I’m not as sprightly as I was at eighty. Thank you, dear.”

“My pleasure,” Paisley said, biting her lip on a smile.

“This autumn, Madeira?” Ethel asked, pushing like the rest of Mystick Falls. “Say yes.”

“Sorry. No.” I cleared my throat, regretting the tease. “I mean that I’ll probably marry in the autumn of my life.”

A car horn blared…and blared, and blared.

“Drat the bossy thing. She can’t wait for anyone.” Ethel went out the door yelling, “Cool it, old woman!”

“She used to wait willingly, and at length, for me,” Dante murmured, a faraway look in his expression.

My gaze met Paisley Skye’s while we tried not to laugh at Ethel’s outburst, but I lost the fight when Paisley did, and frankly, she looked as if her infectious laughter surprised her as much as it did me.

“Now, Miss Skye, since you’ve met two of our more colorful natives, how can I dress you?”

“Oh, I’ll definitely be back to shop, but today I came for a different reason. I have several vintage items I’d like your opinion on.”

“You mean that you’d like to know their dollar value?”

“No, I need to know where they came from. Tunney Lague said that you can tell me the year the style was worn, maybe what type of family would own such clothes. He sings your praises, that man.”

“He’s like my unofficial godfather. Watches out for me. Keeps me in the loop. That’s the kind of man he is, a softhearted gossip. But listen, what made you go to the butcher shop about clothes?”

“No, I was looking for the Mystic Photography Studio. The address is on the back of a picture I found tucked in with the clothes, but the butcher shop’s there now.”

Dante rose from the fainting couch. “I used to know the man who owned the Mystic Photography Studio, until he changed personality and disappeared, that is.”

Okay, quiet information
not
to exclaim over but to digest and examine
later
. “Paisley, please have a seat in my little parlor. Can I get you a cup of tea while the place is still quiet?”

“No, thank you, on the tea. I couldn’t swallow a thing. I’m too nervous.” She sat at the edge of my overstuffed tapestry chair, her legs crossed at the ankles, near the chair’s leg, her back straight, while she fidgeted with the Bakelite butterfly clasp on her carpetbag.

She intrigued me so much, I forgot about tea for myself. “Nervous, why?” I sat facing her at the foot of my tufted blue fainting couch, most recently the place where Detective Werner and I had necked during my experimental period, before Nick and I were on again, and I said good-bye to the detective…more or less.

“I…don’t know who I am,” Paisley said. “I don’t believe what I’ve been told about my background,” she admitted, voice soft. “I’m hoping you can help me find out.”

She really didn’t believe that Paisley Skye was her real
name. She hadn’t been kidding about it sounding fake, which it did.

“Can you start at the beginning?” I asked, leaning gently forward, treating her like some kind of skittish colt.

“I wish I knew the beginning,” Paisley said, her face going pink, “but here goes. As far back as I can remember, I called the people who fed and clothed me Mam and Pap. Hick-retro, right? We lived on a farm, acres of land, no neighbors in sight, distantly surrounded by an ocean I never saw, until after my mother, my remaining parent, that is, died a few months ago.”

“My condolences. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Don’t be. Love wasn’t something I knew. Neither was the touch of another human being. No hugs in our house, though Pap patted me on the head now and again, just like he patted the sheep. Frankly he saved his embraces for Spotsylvania, our Dalmatian. I think even Mam was a little jealous of that dog.”

I faked a smile.

“Anyway, I had warm clothes by day and heavy quilts at night in winter, hearty food, and farmwork, lots of it. Oh, and endless schoolwork. I’ve learned that’s called homeschooled. I gave my embraces to the rabbits and sheep, the live ones, and to the stuffed animals and dolls I made myself as I got older. Sewing became one of the lessons I embraced as much as reading.” Paisley raised her
right thumbnail to her lips, then slid it to a tooth, and watched for my reaction, a range of fear and hope fighting for prominence in her insecure expression.

“Turns out, we lived on an island,” she said. “I inherited it. A fact I discovered when I found Mam and Pap’s will.” Her head came up. “But I never did find my own birth certificate, and nowhere in the will did they refer to me as their daughter. Never in my life has
anyone
done that.”

“In your memory,” I said, giving her hope. “Maybe when you were a baby?”

“It’s true!” Her dimple came out. “I suppose I had to slide down somebody’s birth canal.”

Three

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.

—QUENTIN CRISP

How Paisley Skye managed to make being born sound like good news, I couldn’t say, but I felt better about it myself. “I get that you didn’t know your parents as a babe. But you didn’t know you lived on an island growing up?”

“The water surrounding us wasn’t visible from the farm. And I couldn’t go beyond the fences, that was the rule. I never left the property. Though I heard the gulls, it wasn’t until I read about them that I knew where they came from, so I suspected the sea couldn’t be
too
far away, but I had no concept of the distance.”

“What about television? The telephone?”

“We lived in the last century. No TV, no telephone, no
computers, no means of communicating with the outside world.”

“Did you never get sick?” I asked. “Need a doctor?”

“Mam practiced medicine her own way. I don’t think they needed to die so young, but they seemed to accept that as their fate. They would never talk to me about doctors or hospitals. It was like they were afraid of the outside world. I don’t get it. I never did, and I broke out as quickly as I could, once they were gone.”

“Where have you been staying?”

“At a bed-and-breakfast, the Carriage House, on Pearl Street, here in Mystic. I’ve been watching television and catching up with the world.”

“Television is a far cry from the real world,” I cautioned her, trying not to let my shock over her life show, but she read my horror anyway while I caught the scent of chocolate—my mom telling me to tread lightly. Or that’s how I took the sign of my dead mother’s unexpected presence. She had only ever showed herself, like Dante often does, at the one momentous family occasion, my sister Sherry’s wedding. Mostly, the scent of her favorite indulgence in life told me of her presence in death.

She’d passed when I was ten. But I still missed her.

And poor Paisley, she had no one to miss. “What’s the name of your island?” I asked.