It Must Be Magic (15 page)

“You don’t believe me,” she said with a faintly militant tone and slightly narrowed eyes.

“I believe you.” It was himself he couldn’t believe. Sex was sex. Since when had it become an addiction? Since Lili.

Actually, Tanner did believe her. He couldn’t explain it, but there was a sense of wrongness in the air. He almost laughed. She was getting to him. He was even starting to think like her.

“Tanner, get your butt down here and check this out.” Roscoe’s voice boomed from the bottom of the stairs.

He started down the hall, then turned. Lili hadn’t moved.

“I feel it, too,” he told her.

Her eyes went a deep purple. “You do?”

“I do, Lili.” And he was going to make damn sure nothing happened to her. “So let’s go see what Roscoe has to show us.”

He held out his hand, and she took it like a skittish kitten. They found Roscoe and Erika in the small laundry room off the kitchen.

Roscoe pointed to the door. “Someone jimmied it.”

Sure enough, there were scuff marks all over it and the telltale skid of lead or some other metal.

Tanner tipped his head at the damage. “Was it like that this morning?”

Lili shook her head. “I lock the cat door up at night so the raccoons can’t come in and open it first thing in the morning. The door wasn’t like that when I left.”

So it had happened while she’d been out. In broad daylight. His insides quaked. “Didn’t you see anything, Roscoe?”

“I was cleaning out the pantry.”

The laundry room was on the far end of the house, its door out of sight of Tanner’s kitchen window. And Roscoe had been inside the pantry.

“Erika was doing her homework,” Roscoe added without any prompting. “We didn’t go outside.”

Don’t confuse efforts with results.
He’d turned his daughter into an automaton. She should have been outside on a sunny day, not inside doing her homework, especially since she was on spring break for the next week. What child did homework a week in advance? His child. The child he’d driven her to be. Yet Erika’s homework habits, or rather his change in thinking on the matter, were an entirely different issue to be dealt with at another time.

He whipped his cell phone out and called Sheriff Gresswell.

Then he turned to Lili. “Let’s do what the sheriff suggested and have another talk with Fluffy.”

I
T WAS NICE THAT TANNER MADE
the suggestion, but all Lili could think about was how Lady Dreadlock had looked talking to Einstein. All woo-woo and weird. Of course, Lady D.— Lili couldn’t get used to calling her Patricia, not even Patsy — had been naked at the time.

Lili also remembered how Roscoe had reacted after she’d first talked with Fluffy. Even he’d been concerned, though Lili had to admit she’d been in a state of shock Thursday afternoon.

Worse, she didn’t think Fluffy was going to suddenly reveal gobs of information. After that first day, she’d struck out with him every time she’d tried. She was doomed to failure, and Tanner was going to see that, too.

Admittedly, she was focusing on the upcoming session rather than what had happened to her house. And to the cats. They were discombobulated all over again. How could someone scare them like that? She almost shuddered, but managed to keep it to herself. She didn’t want Tanner knowing the eviscerated lock had scared her silly. She didn’t want to think about it at all.

“Don’t we want to let Einstein help?” Erika asked when Tanner was about to shut his kitchen door in Einstein’s face.

If a cat could look like a child on the verge of a tantrum, then Einstein had it down pat. Her eyes were completely green with a stripe of black pupil; her tail thumped on the back porch like a jackhammer and a low rumble that was definitely not a purr vibrated in her throat.

She hadn’t liked being left at the shop while they’d gone to the sheriff’s and having the door shut in her face was the absolute end of her patience. She was obviously too angry to even send Lili a sarcastic image.

“Um, yeah, I think we should bring her in.” Lili didn’t want to deal with her later if they didn’t.

Tanner met Einstein’s glare with an answering…well, it could only be called a snarl, his lip slightly curled and his eyes narrowed. Then he held the door open, executed a courtly bow and a hand sweep.

Einstein trotted inside, swiping an open-clawed paw across his pant leg as she passed.

“Your cat doesn’t like me.”

“Fluffy takes a swat at Tanner every once in a while, too,” Roscoe said. “Keeps him in line.” Then he turned to Erika. “Is Fluffy in your room?”

The girl’s eyes ping-ponged between the three adults. “I don’t think you guys are taking this seriously enough. Lili’s house was broken into, Fluffy’s aura is a mess and we need to help the sheriff in every way we can.”

Tanner rubbed her blond hair. “We know it’s serious, sweetheart, but sometimes you have to add a little levity, too.”

“Oh. You mean like nervous laughter.”

“No. Laughter to ease the tension.”

Lili didn’t think they’d been joking. She felt funny, but not in a good way. “Let’s go up and find Fluffy.” A very good idea. Then Tanner wouldn’t see her “talking” with Fluffy.

He’d probably think she was woo-woo. Well, he already did, but at least he didn’t have a visual to go with it.

Erika took her hand to tow her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Warmth spread clear around her heart. Erika was so…trusting. It was all Lili could do not to look down at the bottom of the banister and the expression on Tanner’s face.

Einstein raced past them into the bedroom, took a flying leap, landed in the center of the bed, then curled up between the two pillows.

The room lacked the myriad stuffed animals Lili’d had in her room as a child, but the girliness of it still struck her.

A dark purple bed skirt enhanced the comforter’s shade, which matched the ruffled curtains. A border of white shag trimmed the purple carpet. Gold edged the white furniture, bureau, chest of drawers and desk. Not a single piece of clothing lay on the floor or covered the chair in the corner.

“It’s a very nice room.”

“Purple’s my favorite color. But don’t look at the desk. It’s messy.”

Covered with open schoolbooks, a notebook and Erika’s backpack resting against the side, the desk wasn’t what Lili would have characterized as messy, just busy.

“I promise I won’t look. So where’s Fluffy?”

Lying down flat on the carpet, Erika lifted the bed skirt to peer under. “He’s here. He went under there after being outside to do his business this morning. He hates outside.”

“I can imagine.” Lili lay down next to Erika, and together they peered under the bed.

Not a dust bunny in sight, but Fluffy was a dark hump outlined by the light through the bed skirt on the other side. His yellow eyes glowed like candle flames, and his muddy-blue aura pulsed.

“Come here, Fluffy,” Erika crooned, adding kissie noises.

Fluffy’s yellow eyes disappeared a moment as he blinked.

Lili added her own plea. “Come on, we’re not going to hurt you. We only want to help. Give it a chance.”

Fluffy wasn’t budging from the hinterlands beneath the queen-size bed.

“Erika, you stay here, and I’ll go to the other side of the bed and flush him out.” Lili crawled on her hands and knees because it was faster than standing only to lie down again on the carpet.

On the way, she glared at Einstein. “You
could
help.”

He’s having a male snit. I’m not getting involved.

“Have some sympathy.”

Einstein merely sniffed and closed her eyes. Lili got the feeling that Einstein had been having a female snit for a week because the male continued to ignore her. She was used to being treated with the adoration a queen deserved.

Lili put her shoulders and head beneath the bed skirt.

“I’m sorry if I came on too strong the first time, Fluffy. I promise to be more gentle this time.” She tried sending soothing images of the back of a couch with the sun streaming across it, an overstuffed chair with a few claw marks in its upholstery, a big bowl of yummy cat crispies.

“Maybe you should crawl all the way in there with him.”

She jerked and hit her head on the underside of the wooden mattress support. Oh man, how long had
he
been watching?

“Dad, you made Lili hit her head.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Then he was lying beside her, full length, his body heat sizzling along her side. In the relative darkness under the bed, his teeth gleamed like the Cheshire Cat as he smiled.

Then he took the situation in hand. “Fluffy, I’m done with your nonsense. Get your butt over here.”

“Dad, you’re making it worse.”

Lili bopped his arm with her elbow. “Have some sympathy.”

“He doesn’t need sympathy. He needs tough love.” He flashed Lili another Cheshire grin. “Watch this,” he whispered. He pointed his finger at Fluffy. “Come here now.”

Lili snorted. “Oh yeah, like that’s going to work.”

Fluffy simply got up and walked right into Tanner’s outstretched hands. Closing his fingers in the ruff of Fluffy’s neck, he backed out, then scooped the cat up into his arms. Lili pulled out in time to see him plop Fluffy on the bed.

At which point, the cat promptly growled when he saw Einstein curled up in what was probably
his
favorite spot.

“Behave.” Tanner stared him down. And Fluffy shut up.

“That was amazing.” Lili felt all agog. Tanner hadn’t demonstrated the least ability with animals, not even Fluffy.

He met his daughter’s brilliant blue gaze over the expanse of bed. They both spoke at once. “Stockholm syndrome.”

Erika laughed. Tanner smiled. Lili’s heart flipped over in her chest when Tanner turned that dazzling smile on her.

Yesterday, she’d been an outsider. Today, Tanner’s smile was all-inclusive, and Lili’s heart grew in her chest.

T
ANNER WAS NOT HAVING SEXUAL
thoughts with his daughter in the room while Lili was stretched out across Erika’s bed, a strip of skin peeking out above the waistband of her pants.

No, he wasn’t having sexual thoughts.

Lili smoothed a finger over the top of Fluffy’s head and down between his eyes to his nose as she crooned reassuring words, the sound of her voice soft and, to Tanner’s ears, unbearably sexy.

Climbing on the bed, Erika flopped down on her stomach and propped her chin on her hands. Roscoe crossed his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. Only Tanner felt the charged atmosphere, and he figured that was mostly in his mind, the expectation of something bad to come. He pushed a pillow up against the headboard and settled back for a ringside view of the show on the now-crowded bed. A low rumble disturbed the air, so faint it was almost undetectable, and Einstein, sitting between the pillows, glared at him as if she’d like to take a bite out of his hand.

He realized he’d referred to it as a
she.
And
she
was sending him some sort of warning. If he didn’t know better, he’d say the cat was communicating, though he had no idea what Einstein was saying beyond,
I’m watching every move you make.

Lili glanced at him over Fluffy’s marmalade back, her gaze on his mouth, then met his eyes. He got the feeling she wasn’t thinking so much about his mouth as what he might say with it.

“Do what comes naturally, Lili.”

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, bringing an odd frown to her face. Then she nodded. Closing her eyes, she laid her head on her arm and stroked the underside of Fluffy’s paw. Fluffy didn’t like having his pads played with, but he sat still for her, even going so far as to wrap his tail around his body and settle in for the long haul.

Now even Fluffy was a he instead of an
it.

“Dad,” Erika stage-whispered.

Tanner put his finger to his lips and shook his head.

Lili was the picture of relaxed. She could have been sleeping but for the gentle stroke of her finger. Were they communicating? He’d expected some of the snarky exchanges she had with Einstein, though he’d only heard one side of it along with Lili’s interpretation.

Fluffy didn’t move, either. Nobody moved. It was strange. Through the window, the jays squawked and squirrels chattered. Roscoe’s shoe tapped lightly on the hallway hardwood.

Each individual breath was identifiable; Roscoe’s harsh through his nose, Erika’s a little louder, as if she were trying so hard to be quiet that she held it, then let it out with a loud whoosh. Einstein wheezed.

I do not wheeze.

He didn’t
hear
it. It wasn’t even a voice in his head. He just knew that was what the cat would say. He was starting to know her as well as he knew Lili. Well, not
that
way.

As he watched, Lili started to breathe faster, then her eyes raced beneath her lids and she twitched. Good Lord, she was asleep and dreaming. It felt oddly intimate watching her, as if he’d come upon her with her guard down and all her secrets were his for the taking. His pulse tattooed in his ears, his mouth was dry as he swallowed and the temperature in the room rose a couple of degrees.

Not that he was having sexual thoughts with Erika right there on the bed. It was a reaction to the sight of Lili stretched out on the bed with everyone watching like…psychic voyeurs. It raised the hairs along the arms and stole a person’s breath. Like feeling a cold rush of air in a closed room during a séance. He’d been to one séance in his life — Karen had begged — and he hadn’t felt any cold rushes or heard ghostly voices, but if he had, this was what it would have felt like.

Tanner rubbed the goose bumps down and settled into the sheer pleasure of studying Lili. He had the strangest need to crawl inside her — no, that was not a sexual thought — to see what she saw, to feel what she felt. To taste life as she tasted it.

He startled when Lili opened her eyes, went up on one elbow and put her nose in Fluffy’s face, in one continuous movement.

She cross-eyed the cat. Maybe there was a message in that.

“Okay, we’re done.”

Tanner glanced at his watch and couldn’t believe a full ten minutes had passed. Maybe he’d gone through a time warp. Or maybe it was that he could have gone on watching Lili forever.

Forever?
Get a grip on yourself.

Erika cupped her jaw, curled her fingers to her cheeks, and scissored her feet back and forth in the air. “What’d he say?”

Lili scooted over, rolled to her stomach and imitated Erika’s childlike position.

“It was sort of murky.”

“Murky how?”

“Everything is colored very dark. Not as though it’s night, but more like everything he sees now is dark. As if his outlook on life is deteriorating. You know, like someone who wakes up to find it raining outside and thinks, darn it, I have to get out my galoshes and my umbrella and someone in front of me will probably spin out because they’re driving too fast and they’ll smack into me —” she took a breath “— versus someone who says, cool, it’s raining and we needed the rain and that means all the flowers will be out next week and I can’t wait to get out of bed.”

Erika was silent for at least three seconds, which seemed longer than the ten minutes Lili had been communing with Fluffy. “What are galoshes?”

Lili took an equally long time answering. “I don’t know. I must have read about them somewhere.”

“They’re thin rubber boots you wear over your shoes when it’s raining or snowing.” Roscoe stuck out one shoe as if that helped explain it better.

Erika leaned her head for a sideways view of him. “But why would you wear them over your shoes like you’ve got on two pairs? Why not just wear boots?”

“Because a nice, pretty lady is going to work, and she can’t wear boots at her job because she’s CEO, but she still wants to wear pretty, high-heeled shoes.”

“I’m never wearing high-heeled shoes,” Erika grumbled. “They look like they hurt.”

“But what if it’s your first dance,” Lili jumped in, “or your wedding or —”

Tanner knocked on the headboard. “Hello. We have business here. No time for tangents about galoshes and shoes.” Besides, he wasn’t sure you could wear galoshes over high-heeled shoes, and somehow with Lili around, one got off on a lot of tangents.

He closed his eyes and shook his head.
I can’t believe I thought that.
This morning it hadn’t been a tangent getting him off in the flower shop. He was not having sexual thoughts in his daughter’s bedroom, not even sexual memories.

When he opened his lids, he found three sets of eyes staring at him. Four, counting Einstein. “You may go on, Lili.”

“Well, gee, thanks,” she said as if he’d sounded like a pompous ass. “As I was saying before we got on the galoshes tangent, Fluffy’s murky. He showed me basically the same thing as last time —” which meant the tree, the helmet, the stick and the man on the ground “— but I asked him about Lady Dreadlock.” She pointedly held Tanner’s gaze, probably because he was the only one who would have a clue who she was talking about.

“What did he say?” Tanner prompted when she took too long.

“He said they talked for a long time.”

Tanner circled his hand in the air. “And?”

“That’s all.”

“Nothing about what they talked about?”

“If he told me, I couldn’t figure it out.”

“But if you’re communicating telepathically, can’t you hear what they said?”

“They weren’t talking out loud. It was mind images.”

“What were the images?”

She squinted down at Fluffy. “They were…weird.”

She’d had a boatload to say about galoshes, but now she couldn’t spit it out. Until it all came out in a one-breath rush. “It was about devils and fire and stuff, because I think Lady D. is afraid she’s going to hell for talking to animals. But the strange thing is that Fluffy wasn’t scared. You’d expect him to be all jittery, but I didn’t get any sense that he was worried about
her.
”

“Who’s Lady D.?” Roscoe asked when Lili stopped for a breath.

“I’ll tell you later,” Tanner said then ignored him. “Did you learn anything we can tell the sheriff?”

“Well, I’d be willing to bet that Lady Dreadlock got a lot more out of Fluffy than I did.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she’d done before she’d started. “I think she’s better at animal communication than I am.”

She glanced at Einstein, and Tanner could swear they blinked together. She circled a finger in the comforter, catching a loose thread. The admission seemed to cost her, as if talking to animals was all that distinguished her from the crowd.

“Does it matter if she can do it better than you can? She’s crazy. She probably can’t even explain it to the sheriff.”

“Dad, you said I wasn’t supposed to call people
crazy.
You said they were mentally misdirected.”

“You’re right, sweetheart. She’s mentally misdirected, and therefore she won’t be adequately capable of relaying Fluffy’s visual images in the same expert manner that Lili can.”

“That’s better, Dad.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Lili mimicked. “We’re not crazy, we’re only mentally misdirected.” Then she shot him a beatific smile. It didn’t make it all the way to her eyes.

Roscoe cocked his head out the door, listened, then said, “The sheriff’s here,” just as Tanner heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive.

Erika bounced off the bed, landing feet-first, like an acrobat or a cat, then grabbed Fluffy around his stomach and dragged him into her arms. “I’ll let the sheriff in.”

“I’ll help her,” Roscoe added as she flew past him out the bedroom door.

Einstein rose from her pillows, stretched her long body, flexing first one front paw, then the other. Lili rubbed her nose between the cat’s eyes. “Sure, fine,” she said, “but do not irritate Fluffy.”

Einstein jumped down and padded out the door, her tail held high as Lili stood to straighten her sweater. She gave a sideways glance at the empty doorway, then looked up at Tanner.

“She says she won’t irritate Fluffy.”

“I gathered that.” People talked to their animals all the time. With Lili, they talked back. Despite what they’d been through together, Tanner couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

After a beat of silence, Lili said, “Um, Tanner, I have something to add that I didn’t want to say in front of Erika.”

At least she was being up-front with him. “What?”

“Fluffy saw Lady Dreadlock in the middle of the night.” She glanced down at the blue laces of her tennis shoes. “I’d be willing to bet she saw the murder.”

“Did Fluffy specifically say that?” It wasn’t lost on him that the question indicated some sort of acceptance on his part.

“Not exactly.” Her laces seemed particularly interesting. “While they were talking about all that stuff I couldn’t understand, Fluffy felt…” She paused, tipping her head to view him through a rim of eyelash. “He was cold. If it was the morning, the sun would have been out. The shadows were all weird as if it was night instead of day. Does that make sense?”

Not really. “How do you know which night it was?”

“He’d already seen the murder, and he hasn’t been out at night since, so it had to be
that
night.”

“Okay.” Why fight it? Oddly, he wanted to accept. He wanted to take what she said on faith.

“Should we tell the sheriff?” she asked.

With her head tilted to look up at him, she folded her arms across her chest. Classic defensive posture. She was waiting for him to slam her down. Hell, he’d slammed her down several times in the few short days they’d known each other. He’d asked her to help with Erika, then he’d gone silent on the whole issue. He backed her up with the sheriff, but when push came to shove, he couldn’t tell her he believed her.

What the hell else would she expect but another slam?

“Yeah,” he said, “we’ll tell him.”

It wasn’t a one-hundred percent endorsement, but it wasn’t a slam, either.

“Okay.” She didn’t smile, and she didn’t add another five sentences of clarification on that simple
okay.
He sensed her disappointment in her renewed contemplation of her shoelaces.

Her earlier tangent seemed to epitomize the issues between them. He was the type to pull on his galoshes when the rain came pouring down, and she was the type to look for spring flowers.

S
HERIFF GRESSWELL PROPPED
his reading glasses on his nose and examined the metal scrapings on Lili’s laundry room door. “Uh, yup, looks like someone broke in, all right.”

“Aren’t you going to bring out the techie guys to dust for prints?” Erika bounced heel to toe on her tennis shoes.

One hand planted on his knee and bent over to afford a good view of the butchered door latch, the sheriff lowered his glasses, stared at Erika over the rims and didn’t say a word.

“I’m comparing what I’ve seen on TV to what the police really do,” Erika whispered loudly in an aside to Lili. “Dad says you should never believe everything on TV. You have to check it out for yourself.”

“And Dad’s right.” Tanner watched the proceedings, his arms crossed over his chest and a totally unreadable expression on his face, especially with his eyes hidden behind the sunglasses he’d donned as they all, including Roscoe, waited outside while the sheriff investigated.

Lili felt like a bug again. Despite the sunglasses, she knew he was watching her, observing every word, cataloging what she said, memorizing each action as if he planned to trot it all out later to castigate her with.

Tanner was hot and cold. One minute he made her deliriously happy, appeared to have faith in her, yadda yadda. The next, the
very
next, he’d be like this, aloof, withdrawn, scrutinizing, judgmental. It was as if the intimacy in the flower shop had never happened. But then those kinds of activities didn’t hold the same meaning for men.

Lili did realize she should feel afraid, but she’d never been one for feeling what she
should
feel. She was more worried about the lasting effects the break-in might have on the cats. It was their territory that had been invaded. She’d just gotten them settled after she’d moved in, and now this.