Keepsake (25 page)

Reassured, Quinn turned and headed back for his truck. And then, because he was brought up to be thorough and because he wanted to clear his head and because he could not shake his hunch of a premonition, he detoured and walked around to the alley that ran behind the shops.

The alley was narrow, deserted, and dark, with bleary lights standing guard over dark brown Dumpsters and cardboard boxes flattened for recycling. Patches of
buried
cobblestones peeking through asphalt echoed under his footsteps as he tried to figure out which back exit belonged to Miracourt. A stack of wooden crates, obviously from citrus fruits, told him that he'd reached the juicerie next to Olivia's shop.

He wasn't surprised to see that Miracourt's backside looked as trim and neat as its front. The metal door, painted a deep shade of green, was decorated with a handpainted wreath of twigs and flowers; the light that shone down on it looked like an old ship's lantern, another anticommercial touch. Quinn smiled. Leave it to Olivia to bring charm and whimsy to the most workaday site.

The door was closed, but Quinn tried the doorknob anyway. He winced as he did it, fearing that he would set something off, and was surprised when the knob turned easily
.

He stepped cautiously inside a stockroom filled with boxes and bolts of fabric. The room itself was unlit, but a rectangle of amber told him that the shop lay directly ahead. He was in the cutout of light with no place to hide, so he stood and just listened. It was eerily quiet. Whoever had been in the shop had come and gone, of that he felt sure.

He walked into the warm glow of the shop itself and went immediately up the stairs to the second-floor loft. That's where Olivia's desk was, and her personal effects. Quinn decided that if anyone had gone amuck, he would do it upstairs, out of the view of window-shoppers.

He
was right. At the top of the stairs he saw her desk, a big wooden antique in
fine
shape and set squarely in the middle of the loft. He could see that papers were strewn across the desk and all over the planked floor around it. As he got closer, he discovered something else: a humongous rat, bloody and eviscerated, lying sprawled across a stack of invoices and packing receipts on the desk.

Quinn stared with disgust at the mauled rodent. It was
déjà vu
all over again, except that this latest punch to the gut—maybe combined with all that beef jerky—was a little more strident, a little more vicious. The thought that Olivia was intended to stumble sleepy-eyed onto this scene the next morning was chilling.

As for the rat, Quinn actually found himself feeling sorry for it. There it had been, sniffing around for crumbs and minding its own business, when
...
whack.
How exactly had the critter been dispatched? Surely not with a knife. Quinn turned the three-way lamp up to its brightest light and, flopping the carcass over with a pencil and a ruler, gave it a closer look.

As he suspected: a bullet hole, right through the middle. So the rat was a country rat and the prankster, an expert marksman. Surprise, surprise. Hunters were common in Keepsake: Some hunted for food, most for sport. It didn't much matter to Quinn why the guy had acquired the skill. The important thing was that he possessed it.

Automatically he reached for the phone to call Chief Vickers, then thought better of it. Olivia would want to be in on the loop. She might be home. Clutching a nearby sample of fabric, he used it to pick up the phone, then punched in Olivia's number with a pencil point.

She answered on the first ring. She sounded relaxed and happy. It made him sick to have to be the one to tell her what had happened, but there were no better options. The first words out of his mouth were, "Does Miracourt have an alarm?"

"Of course. My insurance requires it. Why?"

Shit—an expert marksman who was bright enough to cut the right wire. "The alarm's been disabled," he said. In a few terse sentences he explained where he was and what he'd found.

"I'll be right over," she said in a wobbly voice, and she slammed down the phone before he could ask about Vickers.

While Quinn waited, he looked around more carefully. Nothing seemed to have been stolen. There was only the rat and the papers strewn like flower petals in a path to the carnage. At the last minute Quinn thought, to hell with Vickers and proper procedure, and he rolled the rat up in a Miracourt bag like a gourmet cheese head, then tied it around for good measure with twine. He didn't want fearless Olivia taking a peek; he really didn't.

****

Olivia had no intention of looking in the bag.

"Take it out to the Dumpster—please!" she said, trying not to picture its contents. "If Chief Vickers needs the rat for an autopsy, he's welcome to retrieve it."

She forced herself to become all business. Snapping open a shopping bag, she said to Quinn, "Would you hand me the pinking shears?"

"The—?"

"Those scissors with the zigzag blades," she explained. Quinn gave them to her on his way out to the Dumpster, and she began to pick through the wreckage of her paperwork, using the scissors like tongs to retrieve the invoices and dispose of the packing slips.

Her hands were shaking as she did it. She told herself that it was with indignation, but t
hat didn't account for her sky-
high jump when Quinn came back into the loft and started to say something behind her. "I'm sorry," she
muttered
. "I'm just—"

She threw down the shears and said, "Scared. Quinn, I'm a little scared now. This is two in a row. Why is he suddenly targeting
me
?"

Quinn took her into his arms and immediately she felt safe. If she could only stay that way, she'd be ready to take on the world. Once upon a time, she thought she
could
take on the world. Not anymore. This was not a world she either knew or understood.

Quinn held her close, caressing the back of her hair. "He's figured out how much I care for you," he said softly, "
so
he's sending me messages—
"

"Is
he a he?" she asked, hoping somehow he was not.

"I'm pretty sure of it," Quinn said. "Although, none of these stunts took exceptional strength—just a strong stomach."

"Which I don't happen to have," she said, shuddering.

Quinn sighed and said, "Anyway, the text of the messages seems to be, 'Go away and I'll leave her alone.' "

"I know," she admitted in a faltering voice. "I'
ve read them that way, too. But you're not going away;
I don't want you to go away
.  S
o what will we do?"

He said nothing. For much too long, he said nothing. Olivia felt her heart plunge like a cannonball into her admittedly weak stomach. "Quinn?" she said, looking up at him. "Say something?"

She knew him well enough to know when he was picking and choosing his words with care. This was one of those times. She laid her head back on his shoulder and waited.

"Olivia," he said softly, "we have to wonder whether whoever is doing these things got your cousin pregnant, or murdered her, or both."

He was telling her that he thought the prankster was the killer. But that couldn't be. Not after all these years. It would mean that the killer had lived among them all these years.

"No. I don't see it," she said, shaking her head. "Killing a woman is different from killing a rat.
This,'"
she said, waving her hand at the bloody mess, "was disgusting and mean, but that's all. People kill rats all the time. They hire hit men; we call them exterminators. Or they use them for target practice—you remember how kids in school did that with their BB guns."

"I understand that, but—"

"No," she said, cutting him off. "I really do not see it. You're overreacting." She preferred her version of events to his, so much.

"I wish I could agree with you, Liv."

Olivia glanced at the papers that remained to be cleaned up. She wanted to wave a wand over them and make them go away. But no one else knew which things to keep and what to toss, not even Quinn. It was up to her.

She picked up the pinking shears and went back to work. "After this, I want cocoa. A Hershey bar
will not
do. We
have to find cocoa. And marshmallows, too. We'll make a nice fire in my fireplace, and I'll make the cocoa extra rich and sweet—"

"Olivia, do you have a gun?" he asked, interrupting her ramble.

She stopped and stared, more distressed now than before and more determined not to let him know it. In a weird way, it was flattering. He thought she could handle a gun.

"No. I don't."

"Does anyone in your family? Does
Rand
?"

"Well, yes, I'm sure he does. For skeet shooting. You remember that he was always pretty good, don't you?"

Quinn shrugged. "I suppose. Sometimes you move on. But you're saying he's
... kept up with it?"

"There's a range not far from here. It's what some men do in the country. Why are you asking? Do you think I'd actually tell
Rand
that I need his guns to protect myself? My God, he'd have my mother in hysterics."

"Yeah, you're right," Quinn said abruptly. "Forget I mentioned it."

"Now that I think about it," Olivia added, "I'd rather not have Chief Vickers know about this disgusting episode."

She raised her hand over Quinn's objections and said, "Wait, wait, hear me out. Vickers hasn't been able to do a thing so far about these pranks. And you know what? I don't think he wants to. We both know he'd rather you just went away. So what will we accomplish by telling him? He'll go straight to my father, upsetting him needlessly and making things even harder between you and me."

"That's not a good idea, Liv."

"Well
,
that's how I feel. It's bad enough that my father knows about the cape."

"Are you sure that he does?"

"Yes. He told
Rand
about it—in strictest confidence. Naturally
Rand
immediately told Eileen, also in confidence; she called me as soon as she heard. My mother, as usual, hasn't been told anything. Eventually she'll find out and then she'll be angry at all of us. But that's the way my family operates. I can't even keep track of all our confidences anymore; after a while, they begin to blur." She plucked the last bloody paper with the pinking shears and dumped it in the wastebasket.

Quinn pulled out the plastic liner. "I always thought honesty was the best policy,"
he said, glancing up at her as he knotted the bag
.

"Nobody lies," she said with a shrug. "Just
... nobody tells."

Quinn smiled wryly at the distinction, then said, "Are you missing anything from your desk—a knife, a letter opener, a pair of scissors?"

Olivia glanced at a small ceramic vase that she kept filled with pens and pencils, rulers and openers. "Yes. I keep an X-Acto Knife right there. Why? Is it the murder weapon?''

"Not exactly. The rat was shot. The knife was used to draw and quarter it."

Olivia took a deep, slow breath, then let it out just as deliberately. With a lift of her eyebrows, she said, "Well! I hope he has the courtesy to replace the blade before he brings it back."

She was dismayed to see that Quinn neither laughed nor smiled.

A little later on, they found the bloodied knife after all, lying on a bolt of winter-white silk.

The only night that Mike Redding was home and available for buttonholing by Quinn happened to be Mitzi's Bunco night.

Mike had to baby-sit, so Quinn found himself in Mike's basement workshop, trying to carry on a conversation with his old friend
as he alternated between sawing
wood for a new set of kitchen cabinets and yelling up the stairs at his three kids, who sounded bound and determined to tear the house down as fast as Mike could build it up again.

"God, I hate January," Mike growled. "At least in the summer they're outside."

He marked off a dimension with a carpenter's pencil on a sheet of lumbercore and carried it over to the table saw. "Hold that end up while I rip this, would you? Thanks."

The sound of bodies rolling and thumping on the floor above them made Quinn glance involuntarily at the ceiling to see if it was coming down.

Mike sighed. "I hate January," he repeated. "I hate Bunco. But most of all I hate being responsible for breakage when Mitzi's out for the night. You're a lucky sonofabitch you never married, Quinn."

"Yeah, well, the right one just never—"

The rest of Quinn's sentence got drowned out by the whine of the saw as Mike split the sheet into halves, then quarters. It was fairly obvious that Mike didn't care nearly as much about Quinn's love life as he did about woodworking. Mike was a hard-driving, extremely successful businessman, the owner of his own import-export firm, but his real passion in life was wood. Right now he looked overjoyed to be traipsing around in piles of sawdust, despite all the macho griping about being forced to baby-sit.