Night of the Living Deb (13 page)

He’d said lots of things that never made sense, mostly work-related terms like “ipso facto,” the “veracity prong,”

and the “Peyton exception,” which is usually when my mind started to wander and I’d pretend to listen, nodding a lot for good measure.

“Think about it, Kendricks,” she prompted, sounding edgy. “Nothing he said seemed the least bit off to you?

More so than usual, I mean.”

Wait a minute.

It was then that I recalled my dream, about the House of Mirrors and seeing Brian and a caped witch offering cabbage soup.

“My mother’s homemade cabbage soup,” I said, louder than necessary, which earned me an odd glance from Cissy, who started to open her mouth, then promptly shut it again. Probably afraid I’d duct-tape her lips if she interrupted one more time.

“Your mom’s soup?” Allie repeated, shifting from edgy to irritated. “Look, Kendricks, I don’t have time to chat about recipes. So give me a call if you come up with something better than that. Otherwise, I’ve gotta go. Old Abe is on a rampage, and I’ve got to see what I can do to buy time for Malone before the board kicks his tail out of the firm if he doesn’t turn up to defend himself and return those docs to the file.”

“Allie, wait,” I said, but she was already gone.

Still, she’d got me to thinking, and I didn’t much like any of the theories I was coming up with.

I set the receiver gently back in its cradle and turned around to face my mother, who sat patiently with hands folded in her lap, waiting for me to give the okay for her to resume vocalization.

“Something’s freaky,” I said, making the abrupt and nonsensical decision to tell-all, because I needed a sounding board, an impartial ear to assure me I was indeed sane and on the right track.

“Freaky can be relative,” my mother stated, nodding.

“Do go on.” She tilted her head, as she’d done while studying my painting. I’m sure she’d found its abstract streaks far more understandable than me, her own flesh and blood.

“No one’s seen Brian since Saturday night when he purportedly left The Men’s Club in the company of an, um, exotic dancer.” I managed to say it all in one breath, without blushing or collapsing into an embarrassed heap.

“I see.” She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

I swallowed a little extra air as backup and pushed onward.

“His car turned up early this morning in a no parking zone at the airport with a dead woman in the trunk.” I wet my lips. “The exotic dancer in question, or so it appears.”

“You’re imagining something has happened to him, aren’t you?” she asked, her eyes pinning down mine with stealth-bomb accuracy.

I felt that horrible surge that comes before I start to cry, but I didn’t aim to break down in front of my mother.

Crying could wait. Finding Brian couldn’t. And, perhaps, there was some way she could help me out. Being the Queen Mum of Dallas Society had its privileges, and she was a champion string-puller.

I gulped down any pride I had left, deciding to come clean with her, no matter what it cost, mostly in terms of my judgment (or lack of it) and Malone’s reputation.

“I’m frantic,” I admitted in a whisper. “And I don’t know what to do.”

“So it seems Mr. Malone has got himself into quite the conundrum.” Though her eyes narrowed the tiniest bit, my mother’s expression changed not a fig.

“A huge honking conundrum,” I said, unable to disagree.

“How did this come about?” she inquired. “Did he lose his mind? Was he possessed? Did he suffer amnesia?”

“I have no idea,” I said, thinking,
Take your pick.

“What does Ms. Price know about all this?”

“The same as I do. That the police want to find Brian and question him about the dead girl in his trunk, but no one seems to know where he is, and I’m more confused than ever since he called me last night and told me he wanted space and to apologize to you for missing the party because he loves your cabbage soup.” I dropped my head in my hands and moaned loudly, which felt pretty damned good and necessary. “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s insane . . . it’s beyond reason . . . it’s . . .”

“Utterly preposterous,” Cissy finished for me, and I raised my suddenly tear-filled eyes to meet hers. It was I who blinked first.

“What did you say?”

“I said”—she spoke slowly, which made for easy lipreading—“

it’s not possible that Mr. Malone would tell you such nonsense.”

Was she high on Joy perfume?

I didn’t get it.

My mother had been on Brian’s case for months about not putting a ring on my finger even though he stayed over at my condo—which she learned about from Penny George, my neighborhood snitch—and suddenly she was at his defense?

I swallowed, processing this bizarre turn of events, afraid to say too much or I’d spoil the moment. Still, I couldn’t help myself.

“Okay, what’s going on? You’ve hardly been Malone’s biggest cheerleader, yet you believe that he couldn’t have done those things? You agree with me that something’s wrong, and he’s found himself in some kind of sticky situation he can’t extricate himself from?”

She sighed. “Whatever I think of Mr. Malone’s etiquette in wooing you, I don’t for a minute believe he’s a bad man. In fact, just the opposite, or I wouldn’t allow your relationship to continue.”

Wouldn’t
allow
? Who was she kidding? Like she had control of my life any more these days than she had when I’d refused to debut.

“Besides, it’s highly unlikely that Mr. Malone would tell you he loves my cabbage soup. If he did, he was pulling your leg.”

“Pulling my leg?” As in joking? Brian sounded anything but comical when he’d called the night before. He’d sounded dead earnest.

“Yes, teasing you, Andrea. Messing with your head.

Playing mind games.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the sofa, wearing a smug expression that said,
Oh, boy, do I know something you don’t know.

My last nerve twanged like the guitar strings in a country western song. “Whatever you have to say, cough it up.” Or I’d be tempted to take hold of her pearls and twist until I forced it out of her. I was sadly lacking in patience at the moment. “Before Christmas, if you wouldn’t mind,” I prodded her.

Mother performed her usual delay tactics, plucking nonexistent lint off her tweed jacket, giving a little flip to her bobbed blond hair, finally coming out with, “My darling child, your Mr. Malone and I have had occasion to chat about many things outside your earshot, some of which concern you and others that have nothing whatsoever to do with you.” As I opened my mouth to ask what, she raised her hand to hush me up, just as I’d done with her. “On one such occasion, we discussed allergies. He’s

allergic to bees, did you realize? Said he swells up like a basketball, apparently. If he doesn’t get to an E.R. so they can treat him with those anaphylactic pens, he’s a goner.”

Bees?

My response was to stare at her, agog, because I hadn’t known, though I wouldn’t have admitted that to her if my life depended on it.

“What brought this up?” I managed to croak, once I’d gotten over my initial shock at the idea of Malone sharing secrets with Cissy.

She smoothed a hand over her skirt. “I shared with Mr. Malone that I once had a Polish nanny who used to make cabbage soup, which she forced upon me as a child.” Her heart-shaped face puckered. “That horrid stuff nearly killed me. I had the most severe case of hives. I missed Kitty Barstow’s fourth birthday party, and I was devastated.”

Good Lord, were those tears in her eyes?

“So I would never even joke about making cabbage soup.” She shuddered. “Even the thought of it makes me queasy.”

“You’re allergic to cabbage?” I’d never heard of such a thing.
Was
there such a thing?

She nodded. “And Mr. Malone knew it, so if he told you he looked forward to eating my cabbage soup, he must’ve been delirious, or it may have been intentional.”

Like he was trying to tell me something?

Just as Allie had suggested.

The wheels in my head started spinning so fast I could hear the grinding, and it wasn’t an unpleasant sound, not when I realized what this meant.

Malone needed me.

He’d hoped I’d be smart enough to figure things out, and I had. Well, a little anyway; enough to be sure he was in a very bad spot.

And help him, I would.

“Let’s go, Mother,” I said, and got up from the sofa to hunt down my purse.

“But I only just arrived, and we haven’t even talked about the menu for the dinner, and it’s on Wednesday—”

“That’s too bad,” I cut her off, having located bag and keys. I even fetched her cloak off the back of the couch and handed it to her. “Because I’ve got somewhere to go, and I want you to come with me.”

“Why?”

“I need a wing man.”

“A wing man?” I could see the alarm in her face, surely flashing back to the last time this situation had arisen; only it had been Mother asking the very same question of me. “What on earth for?”

“Breaking and entering,” I told her honestly as I hustled her toward the door, giving her pause to grab her umbrella before we headed out into the storm, both on the literal and figurative front.

Our destination: Brian Malone’s. My mission: to pry where no girlfriend had pried before.

I wanted answers, and I aimed to find them, whatever it took.

Chapter 12

I hadn’t been over to Malone’s apartment much, maybe twice in the four months we’d

been going out.

Mostly, he came over to my place, probably because I was usually there. When you worked from home, it meant you were often, well,
home
.

It wasn’t that he lived far away, as it was a pretty straight shot over to his building. He lived in Addison, a next door neighbor to my North Dallas suburb, so we were kissing cousins, location-wise.

The main reason why we didn’t spend time at Malone’s had to do with something more, er, olfactory.

I had a pretty good recollection of precisely what it was after I’d located the key in the hiding spot Allie had spilled the beans about (yep, there it was, wedged in a missing chunk of wood in the frame overhead), unlocked the door, stepped over the rolled-up newspaper on the doormat, and entered.

My nose wrinkled as it hit me.

Eau de Sock.

That was it.

The stench.

No matter how clean the place was—and it was meticulous—the air held an odor of sweaty athletic sock.

Don’t ask why. Malone didn’t smell like that, and I know he did his laundry regularly. Brian had suggested the last tenant wore the same pair of socks every day without washing them, until the stink had killed him. My guess was some kind of mold, growing somewhere behind the walls or in the vents, unseen and deadly.

Yeah, I watched the ten o’clock news and saw the stories about mold driving people out of their million dollar mansions, giving kids asthma, knocking the elderly unconscious, even making Fido’s fur fall out.

The government was so worried about terrorists and nuclear weapons they didn’t realize we could all be picked off slowly but surely by the fungus among us (try saying that three times fast without tongue-tripping).

“So this is where he lives when he’s not at your house?”

Mother tiptoed in behind me as I shut the door and hit the light switch.

We’d both trailed in a good bit of the outdoors, despite wiping our shoes on the welcome mat. The rain dripped off my slicker and Mother’s cape like the proverbial water off a duck’s back. If any of the gang from
CSI
dropped by to collect trace evidence, the muddy imprints of my sneakers and Cissy’s chi-chi boots would blatantly link us to the scene of the slime.

“Honestly, darling, I had hoped for so much more. Mr. Malone could use a good interior designer.” She sighed and gestured around us. “What do you call this style?”

“ ‘Penitentiary Spare,’ ” I managed to joke, even though my humor seemed to fall flat of late, as there was little to joke about.

“And what on earth is that odor?” she said, loudly sniffing, the first thing I’d thought when I’d ventured into Malone’s apartment initially, though I’d been well-bred enough to keep it to myself.

Cissy had no such compunction, since Malone wasn’t even around, and I was her daughter, which meant rules about manners didn’t always apply.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Brian thinks someone died here without ever washing his socks. I figure toxic mold lives in the walls.”

“Good Lord, I understand now why he spends so much time at your place. Not that I approve of cohabitation, even for health purposes,” she explained, if that constituted an explanation. “Besides”—she glanced around her, looking down her nose at the sparsely furnished bachelor pad, mostly done in early IKEA—“your decor is so much cozier.”

Cozier.

As in, less than a thousand square feet, jam-packed with the things I loved, collected through the years, some inherited (like the hope chest that served as my coffee table and the Eastlake bed I slept in); others I’d picked up at rummage or estate sales, consignment stores, or antique malls, whenever something struck my fancy. I was good at refinishing, too, when I felt like inhaling fumes from paint

stripper.

Argh.

There was that word again.

Stripper.

Though it was worse, wasn’t it, when preceded by “dead” as opposed to “paint”?

Which reminded me why I was there.

I had to find something that shed light on where Brian was and what trouble he’d gotten himself into. He was so organized, so on top of things; it was hard to believe he’d vanished without leaving a clue of some sort. If only I could get my hands on his day planner, I’d have it figured out in a jiff. But if it were in his briefcase, which he normally locked in his trunk, I was screwed.

So I started with the obvious.

He kept a calendar on his refrigerator, and I headed there first, sure that if he’d intended to skip town with Trayla Trash he would’ve jotted down a note in the appropriate square. Brian planned for everything. That boy left little to chance.