Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] (36 page)

Chapter Sixteen
 

      
I muttered good-bye to Rotondo when he pulled the police car up to the curb in front of my house. I still felt silly for having cried on him, but he was being nice about it and pretending it had never happened, which was more consideration than I’d have expected from this source, especially since he totally disapproved of how I made my living.

      
Because I felt stupid, and because I thought it was important, I turned back and leaned in through the window. “I’m not kidding about the Coast Guard, Detective. I know you think the idea is a bad one, but it
has
to be easier to slip away over water than get through a guarded land border.

      
“The man was studying Spanish, for heaven’s sake! There are ports all down the coast of South America where he could catch a steamer to anywhere in Europe or Asia or—shoot, I don’t know. Maybe he wants to buy a Greek island and live on it or something. If you don’t get in touch with the Coast Guard, I’ll bet you’ll be sorry.”

      
He looked exasperated. “Right. I keep forgetting you have connections with the other realms.”

      
“Darn you! That’s not the reason, and you know it!” Totally irate, which doesn’t happen
too
often due to the amount of practice in holding my temper I get daily, I stamped down the walk to our cute little bungalow, stormed up the porch steps, and would have slammed the door behind me except that I didn’t want anyone inside, and especially not Billy, to know what had happened. With me, that is. The whole family wanted to hear all the dirt I could give them on the Kincaid affair.

      
It was way past dinnertime. I’d forgotten about food (and I suspect the petit fours had temporarily cured any hunger pangs I might have experienced without them) until I sniffed Aunt Vi’s pot roast as I walked through the kitchen to our room. Then my stomach growled as if it belonged to a bear that had been hibernating all winter.

      
Billy sat on the sun porch with Pa, Ma, and Aunt Vi. They were all talking softly and watching the lights on Mount Wilson blink. They’d installed—not Pa, Ma, Aunt Vi, and Billy, but some scientists—a huge telescope up there the year before, and we’d sit out there at night sometimes and wonder what discoveries were being made. The Mount Wilson Telescope was the largest in the world, and we all liked to imagine what it was seeing. Talk about a Great Beyond; now the sky is what
I’d
consider a Great Beyond.

      
“Hey, I’m home.”

      
I needn’t have announced myself, since they’d already turned to see who was there. I was grateful for the dark, because I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been crying.

      
“What the heck happened, Daisy?” Billy asked. He was mad as heck at me for being away so long, but he was trying to be nice about it because my relatives were with him. Do I know my Billy, or not?

      
“It was pretty awful. I’ll tell you everything in a minute. I
have
to eat something or I’ll keel over.”

      
As I might have expected, Aunt Vi jumped to her feet. “I’ll fix you a plate, child. You look all done in.”

      
I was all done in, but I didn’t want to put Vi out. After all, she’d worked all day, too. “No, no, please don’t bother. I’ll just get a sandwich.”

      
“You’d be better off taking Vi’s suggestion,” Billy said, a hint of a grin in his voice, for which I was infinitely thankful. “It was one of the best pot roasts I’ve ever tasted.”

      
Blushing, as was her wont, Aunt Vi said, “Go along with you, Billy Majesty. You say that every time I cook a meal.”

      
“It’s because it’s the truth,” my Billy said.

      
I guess I was really worn out, because that statement, uttered in his old-Billy voice, made me feel like blubbering some more. Shoot, I had to get over this. And quick. Billy would hate it if he knew I was pitying him. I know it sounds contradictory, because he really did need sympathy and attention, but there’s a fine line I tried never to cross between understanding and pity. It was my bad luck that the line seemed to move from day to day, and I was always stepping on the wrong side of it and aggravating my husband.

      
“Please don’t bother with feeding me, Vi,” said I nobly—at that point, I could have eaten the entire cow raw; to heck with the roasted parts. “I can fix myself a sandwich.” And it would be quicker than her fixing me a full dinner plate and warming it up.

      
“Fiddlesticks. You look like you’re going to drop in your tracks, Daisy Majesty. You just come right out here and plop yourself in this chair and wait five minutes. It won’t take me more than that to get a
real
meal ready for you to eat.” Aunt Vi didn’t believe in sandwiches unless you were going on a picnic somewhere far, far away from your own home.

      
Outnumbered and overruled, I tried to be polite as I conceded the point. “Thanks, Vi. Let me hang up my hat and get comfortable.”

      
Getting comfortable would probably have taken a week of sleep, a healthy husband, and a million dollars, but it felt good to take off my hat, slip out of my lovely foulard dress and hang it up, remove my shoes and stockings, throw on an old polka-dot wrapper, and shove my tired feet into a pair of floppy slippers that probably should have been discarded eons before, but which were so comfortable I couldn’t bear to part with them.

      
I limped out to the sun porch, kissed Billy, and collapsed into the chair beside him. “My land, but those people have problems,” I announced in a tired voice. “Quincy Applewood came back, though.”

      
“What about Kincaid?” Billy asked.

      
“No sign of the old buzzard yet,” said I.

      
“Daisy!” Ma had always tried to make me behave like a lady, but her efforts hadn’t panned out very well.

      
“But he is an old buzzard, Ma. He’s a thief and a lecher. He used to chase Edie Marsh around in his wheelchair.” My mother gasped. Pa chuckled. I’ll never understand men. “The police think Quincy murdered him and re-stole the stolen bearer bonds.”

      
“This is getting confusing.” Billy chuckled, and my heart went all warm and gooey.

      
“You’re telling me. What’s even worse is that the man who drove Mr. Kincaid away from the mansion last night bopped Quincy over the head with a tree trunk or something and
I
had to doctor the poor boy.” I shuddered, remembering.

      
“You?” Billy’s eyes opened so wide, I could see how gorgeous they were even in the dark.

      
“Good heavens.” Ma again, pressing a palm to her heart.

      
“That’s my girl,” said Pa, who was much more easygoing than Ma.

      
“Maybe. But I didn’t like doing it. It was horrid. He had a lump on his head the size of a boulder, and there were even bugs stuck in the dried blood there.”

      
“Good God.” Billy.

      
“How awful!” Ma.

      
“Be damned. Were they alive?” Pa. Of course.

      
God bless him. I laughed. “Naw. They were only dead ants, but the experience wasn’t one I care to repeat any time soon. I don’t think I’m cut out for nursing.”

      
Aunt Vi was as good as her word, and within five minutes I was trying to act like a lady for Ma’s sake, but I’m afraid I ate too quickly to maintain a true ladylike appearance. Since I’d been in the middle of describing the state of affairs at the Kincaid mansion when the food came, not even Ma chastised me for gobbling my food. She was as eager as everyone else there to hear the scoop.

      
As soon as I’d downed the very last bite of pot roast, carrots, pearl onions in Aunt Vi’s special and never-to-be-forgotten cream sauce, potatoes, and gravy, I sat back and sighed. “That was the best pot roast you’ve ever made, Vi.”

      
Aunt Vi shook her head. “You’re as bad as Billy, Daisy Majesty.”

      
“Sure, I am.” I reached for Billy’s hand and squeezed it. He returned the pressure. “We’re alike like that.”

      
“Hmph. Well, all I can say is that you’d better not tell any more of your story until I get back with your piece of coconut cake, young lady.”

      
“Coconut cake?” Awed, I stared up at my sainted aunt. If there’s one thing on earth I love almost more than Billy or Scotch shortbread, it’s coconut cake the way Aunt Vi makes it—white cake with fluffy white frosting sprinkled with flaked coconut. I could die happy if my last meal ended with Aunt Vi’s coconut cake.

      
But I respected her wishes. Gazing up at the sky, I muttered tritely, “The moon’s sure bright tonight. It looks kind of like a silver dollar, doesn’t it?” I sighed, overjoyed to be back in the bosom of my family. And being waited on, too. Life couldn’t get much better than that. Well, unless Billy were to get better, but there you go. There are always a few kinks getting in the way of perfection.

      
“Yeah, but you can’t see the stars so well when the moon’s this bright,” Billy said, not complaining, just stating a fact.

      
“True.”

      
“I wonder what that telescope’s finding up there,” mused Pa. He’d always been intrigued by gadgets, and I’m sure he’d love to visit the telescope.

      
“Maybe we can all take a trip up to Mount Wilson one of these days and see for ourselves,” I said.

      
There used to be a small-gauge railway that took rich people (and their servants, although I’d wager they stayed in less opulent cars than their employers) up to the lodge at Mount Wilson, but the lodge had burned down a few years before. I think the railroad was still running, though, and I knew that somebody, probably at the California Institute of Technology (I had a hard time remembering it wasn’t Throop College any longer) held guided tours through the planetarium at Mount Wilson.

      
“That would be swell,” said Billy. “I wonder if I could go, too.”

      
He sounded so pensive, I almost cried
again
. I was beginning to wonder if my monthly was coming early. I don’t generally get weepy at the drop of a hat.

      
“We’d see to it that you came with us, Billy. Don’t you ever worry about that.” Pa patted Billy on the shoulder.

      
As a rule, Billy didn’t like people patting him on the shoulder in exhibitions of compassion or sympathy, but he never minded when Pa did it. Pa was like that. Everyone loved him because he was, purely and simply, a good man. There was no getting around it. It was a fact of life.

      
And, when I wasn’t feeling unjustly burdened by life, I felt honestly blessed to have been born into such a wonderful family. Heck, look at the Kincaids. They had more money than God, and their family was a total disaster except for Harold, and he wasn’t exactly normal.

      
Aunt Vi brought me a big piece of coconut cake and a glass of milk, and the only sounds that could be heard for the next several seconds were those of my own slurping and gulping. Again, Ma didn’t complain about my manners. Not being scolded by my mother was the best of all ways to conclude a ghastly day, and I appreciated it.

      
When there wasn’t any food left for me to eat after I’d devoured the cake, I finished my tale of Quincy’s unfortunate beating, my unfortunate nursing, and Detective Rotondo’s unfortunate interrogation.

      
“The rotten policeman actually believes Quincy killed Mr. Kincaid and took the bearer bonds,” I announced, vexed. “He’s such an idiot.”

      
I felt Billy shrug beside me. “I don’t think Sam’s anything close to being an idiot. I think he’s smart as a whip and probably great at his job.”

      
Staring at my beloved, I recalled their gin rummy game and the fact that Rotondo had visited him this morning. “You were beating the pants off him in gin rummy,” I reminded him.

      
I heard the grin in Billy’s voice when he answered my irate declaration. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean beans when it comes to police work. He told me a lot of things about the police while we were playing, too. If I were still a whole, sound man, I might even try to get into the police force.”

      
“You? A policeman?” My mind boggled, although I think I disguised it. “I never knew you were interested in police work.”

      
“I never knew it either, until I talked to Sam.”

      
Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam. Foolishly, I resented the fact that the two men were into a first-name relationship. Also, I didn’t trust Rotondo—Sam, to Billy—not to have been using Billy to get information in a sneaky way. Not that Billy knew a thing about the Kincaids, but I still didn’t trust Rotondo. Sam, indeed!

      
“Brother, it sounds like that family’s in a whole lot of trouble,” said Billy, dropping the Sam subject, for which I could only be gratified. “What do you think happened to old man Kincaid?”

      
“I think he took a bolt for the ocean and aims to get a boat and hie himself off to some other country with his stolen loot. The police think Quincy stole the money from him, killed him, and hid the money and, presumably, the body somewhere.” I sniffed significantly.

      
“Why’d he aim for the ocean when the land border to Mexico is so close?” Billy wanted to know.

      
It irked me that men stuck together even when they were apart. My own dear Billy was beginning to sound like Detective Rotondo, and I didn’t like it.