Cloaked in Malice (4 page)

“I couldn’t find it on a map, but it’s small—nothing there
but our farm. The nearest charted island is Fishers Island, so neither is far from here.”

“How did you get off your island?”

“I walked the beach every day until I found a fisherman offshore who heard my shout. I grabbed the bags I’d packed, and here I am.” Paisley released the double clasps on the carpetbag and opened it wide, different types of fabric spilling out, all white. Satin, fur, silk ruffles. Seeing them made me as nervous as a cat, excited, too, with new vintage treasures to feast my eyes upon, and lose my soul inside.

Chakra returned to me, jumped to my lap, rubbed her head against my solar plexus, and played with my fingers. Then she settled into my arms like a babe for a snooze, both paws on her little pink kitty nose.

Chakra’s comfort became a good excuse not to touch any of Paisley’s clothes and take a chance on getting a psychometric reading that could embarrass us both. That often happened when I touched something vintage, I zoned straight to a fixed point in the item’s past, checking out of my own mind like a tuckin’ zombie.

In the process, I’ve been known to do anything from speaking in someone else’s voice to slinking to the floor, with no recall of those acts, and only the shock of scary
once-upon-a-time
’s to show for my freaky mind-trips.

According to Fiona—my mother’s fellow witch, who’d hugged me regularly, after Mom’s passing,
unlike
poor unhugged
Paisley—I have a psychic gift, bestowed by a universe that decides which significant events I get to see. Now what I do with the visuals is up to me, but it’s usually connected to some obscure, often
illegal
episode, of some import to people like Paisley Skye herself. So I’d best get to it, in case she was in trouble and didn’t know it any more than she knew her real name or parentage. “Were there albums with baby pictures of you in your farmhouse?” I asked.

“Not a one. Not even a camera.”

Chakra sleep-scratched her left back paw with her right while I thought about Paisley’s answer. “That’s almost like…if a tree falls in the woods and you don’t hear it, do you
have
a past?”

“Exactly. I’m as mixed a metaphor as you say. So here.” Paisley shoved a froth of rich white satin into my arms, smothering Chakra into a literal flipping departure, her striped tail leading her pink nose.

“What about that?” Paisley asked of the tiny white cloak. “It says ‘Paris’ on the label in gold.”

“Couture,” I said, hiding my trembling hands. “Mink trim on crepe-backed silk satin. Likely for a two- or three-year-old,” I said, losing the
me
I tried to be.

Overcome with a grief I couldn’t contain, I began to weep, while Paisley, asking if I was okay, queried from a growing distance through a narrowing tunnel.

I became a child wearing the cloak over a long-skirted lavender gown at a quiet dinner party where the women
around me wore narrow dresses with raised waists, in the Empire style. Turn-of-the-century chic, those clothes. Paul Poirot came to mind as their designer. The nineteen hundreds, I’d bet.

But I didn’t belong there.

I made a quick shift to the roaring twenties, in my stomach and my head, a dreaded ride through the ether. Now I stood, a different child in the same cloak, my gown a bright red, as celebratory as the flappers around me, in a lush, eccentric art nouveau living room, the gilding alone worth a fortune.

Just as fast and way less comfortably, I became a sapling in a forest of giants, a child surrounded by frightened and frightening adults. I came into my own in that incarnation. I had found the place marked for me by the universe during this trip. This cloak had served generations.

How did I know for sure that I’d landed? The souls of my feet touched ground this time.

The stone steps I climbed—surrounded by towering adults, all silent and scared if I didn’t miss my guess—were dark enough to scare the bejeebers out of me, and once outside, the gothic building behind us cast elongated shadows across a snow-slick road, blacking the dim-lit scene to sharp deadly points.

“Deadly” being the operative word; I glommed on to fear and couldn’t get away from its dismal clutches.

Still I was a child, and in the back of my mind I worried
that my velvet Mary Janes were getting wet—I looked down, surprised at how small they were. Looking up made it impossible to ignore the line of cars before me, like sentinels of death, across a wide sidewalk.

The vehicles reminded me of an eighties thriller—limos, Jags, Bentleys, BMWs, all black, except for the DeLorean, all with dour chauffeurs in drab uniforms standing guard. What would they do if I made a wrong move?

The fast-departing crowd flaunted designer gowns and gaudy diamonds, and somewhere in the distance a baby cried.

I was supposed to be happy today. Mama said so, but the man shoving her into a limo made her scream a name. Why didn’t anyone help her? Why did they just get in their cars and rush away, tires screeching, like they’d never been here?

I knew the name my mother called was mine, but it didn’t sound right to my ears. I wish she’d call me again, so I could remember…my name and her voice.

I started crying, too, and I screamed, “Mama!” Little good it did me, until a man lifted me in his arms and gently covered my mouth. “Shh, baby girl, shh, so they don’t notice you.” This was a man whose arms I could trust. I recognized his voice and his special hand.

Love—I remembered in that moment what it felt like.

While I wanted to get closer to my mother, the man carried
me farther away from her instead, but this man, this guardian angel with a missing finger, he loved me, so I trusted him, even as the car carrying my mother pulled away from the curb.

Where and why were they taking her?

Couldn’t they see that she didn’t want to go?

And why was my daddy lying in the gutter while something ate up the snow and grew a big red puddle beside him?

Four

Once upon a perfect night, unclouded and still, there came the face of a pale and beautiful lady. The tresses of her hair reached out to make the constellations, and the dewy vapors of her gown fell soft upon the land.

—KIT WILLIAMS

If I close my eyes, I can still see my mother’s face, thought the child whose skin I was being torn from. And this was surely the first time the universe pulled Madeira Cutler from a vision before she was ready to go.

It was enough to make the little girl in me weep.

I snapped out of the push-pull of my exit with my ears ringing, as if I’d roller-skated into a brick wall. Unfortunately, I
knew
what that felt like.

Still overwhelmed by grief, I shook my head from the proverbial headfirst body slam, and focused on my guest standing across from me, her eyes wide, the mink-trimmed child’s cloak I’d been holding now clutched to
her
breast.

“When the meat cutter said you read vintage clothes,” Paisley whispered, “he wasn’t kidding, was he?”

“No,” I snapped, my denial too strong. “No. He meant it the way you took it, believe me.”

Paisley Skye may have been no older than twenty-five or so, but her eyes held the wisdom of the ages. “Because your meat cutter godfather doesn’t know, does he, that you read clothes the way a palm reader reads palms?”

Vintage clothes, I thought. I only read
vintage
clothes.

I stood, found I was dizzy, and sat again. “No, Paisley, you’re wrong.”

The blue-striped, watered-silk walls of my shop looked beautiful to me, bright, welcoming, not dark like the place I’d been sent, but I couldn’t let my relief show.

“Don’t worry,” my mystifying guest said. “Somewhere in my DNA, I think I have an embedded chip that forces me not to tell—anything.”

“Or remember anything?” I asked.

Paisley winced, paled, and her chin came up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right,” I said softly, “you’re not blocking.”
And I’m nothing more than a vintage dress shop owner.

Paisley bit her lip. “You mean blocking like what? Memories? I’ll have to look up that concept on the Internet tonight and get back to you, because, you see, I have only the memories I don’t want, and can’t find the ones I crave. I will say that I read a lot about psychics on that old farm.”

“It surprises me that your Mam and Pap let you.”

“They had no idea what knowledge those books held. Though the newest copyright I found was from the six-ties.”

“Like your dress patterns?” I asked. “Great sewing job, by the way.”

She curtseyed and gave me a two-dimpled smile. “From you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was one of my mother’s favorite patterns,” I admitted. “I’ve made it dozens of ways.”

“I’d love to see some of your versions.”

“Maybe we can arrange that.” Since I now had a murder, or at least a shooting, and possibly a kidnapping, to solve, I knew we’d be staying in touch, whether I wanted to or not. “Paris,” I said, “early nineteen hundreds. That’s when that cloak was hand-stitched. You weren’t the first to wear it. But I’m betting you were the last.”

“What makes you think
I
wore it?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“I don’t
know
, I just assumed, since
you
brought it to me.” I frowned, picking up on the noise. “Wooly knobby knits, those sirens sound close.”

“Oh.” Paisley covered her mouth for a second. “I forgot. I called for help.”

Johnny Shields and Ted Macri ran in, and stopped dead, paramedics who happened to be friends I went to school with, K through twelve.

“False alarm, boys,” I said, but they weren’t looking at
me, they were tripping over each other to get to Paisley.

“Hi, I’m Ted Macri. Athletic director slash hockey coach at Mystick Falls High, and part-time paramedic.”

“And you haven’t changed a bit, Cassanova,” I quipped.

“Oh, hi, Mad, sorry.” Ted took out his False Alarm paperwork and called it in on his two-way.

Johnny Shields elbowed Macri out of the way. “Full-time paramedic and volunteer fireman. The name’s Johnny, Johnny Shields. Maybe we could have supper sometime?”

“Nice to meet you all,” Paisley said.

The guys, damned near to displaying their colorful plumage, barely cared.

“Paisley, I went to school with the peacocks here, but I seem to be invisible today.”

“Ah, no, Mad,” Ted said, keeping an eye on Paisley.

“You sure have a lot of false alarms, Mad,” Johnny said, wiping the metaphorical drool off his chin.

“My fault,” Paisley said. “The false alarm, I mean. I buried my parents recently. They would never let me call for help. Now, I get trigger happy when someone hyperventilates.”

“Is that what happened?” Detective Lytton Werner asked as he came through the front door of the shop. “You hyperventilated, Madeira? You didn’t OD on brownies and make yourself sick?”

The detective had given up using my nickname when I broke up with him to go back to Nick Jaconetti, my on-again, off-again since forever. Werner tried to keep our current relationship impersonal, but so much debris had gone over the bridge between us as to be laughable. “You know, Detective, you’re still cute when you worry about me.”

“Watch that cute stuff,” Nick said, arriving practically on the detective’s heels.

“And who called you?” I asked, standing to greet my guy with a quick kiss.

Nick held the kiss longer than I’d intended, then he claimed me by sliding an arm around my waist. Nevertheless, he and Werner managed to give Paisley a quick once-over.

I should have been insulted, but I was comfortable in my skin.

“I called Nick,” Werner said with a “don’t sass me” raise of his chin. “Calling for reinforcements is knee-jerk when I don’t know whether to worry about you or wring your neck. Matter of getting you some protection. From me.”

Whoa, loaded statement, considering our past. I shook a finger Werner’s way and forced him to turn to Paisley, or had he done that on his own? “Detective Lytton Werner here, at your service,” he told her, and I half expected him to click his heels and kiss her hand.