Tea-Totally Dead (2 page)

“I can’t expect you to like Mom, not after what she did to you,” Wayne commented quietly. “After she tried so hard to split us up.” He turned to me, and I glimpsed a plea in what I could see of his eyes. “But just for a few days, Kate, could you… well, pretend?”

I gulped down my own sigh. I was a big girl, more than forty years old now. I ought to be able to handle the assignment.

“I’ll do my best,” I said brightly.

Five long, silent minutes later, Wayne pulled his Jaguar up to the curb in front of La Risa Green, the condominium complex where Vesta lived.
And,
I suddenly remembered, where Vesta’s new friend and whipping girl, Harmony Fitch, lived. Harmony was a leftover from the sixties who was currently “crashing” in Vesta’s spare room. She and Vesta had a lot in common, including large, unhealthy doses of paranoia and a fondness for smoking dope and plotting revenge.

As we walked up the well-groomed path to Vesta’s ground-floor unit, I asked Wayne if Harmony was going to be there.

“Yeah, she is,” he replied grimly. The muscles in his jaw tightened visibly. I could just imagine how the Skeritts were getting along with Harmony. I wondered if she had told them about the UFO’s yet.

Wayne gave me one last chance at Vesta’s front door.

“Don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” he offered brusquely.

“I wouldn’t miss it for all the Perrier in Marin County,” I replied, and pasted on what I hoped looked like a cheery smile.

“Thank you,” he whispered. He bent down and kissed my smiling lips gently. I pulled him closer and the kiss heated up, melting all the resentment in my body to a small pool of lust. “I love you, Kate,” he growled.

“I know,” I told him huskily. “I just remembered.”

Then I turned and rang the doorbell before I could change my mind and run home.

Somehow, I hadn’t expected a pair of white-faced clowns to open the door. Especially clowns with weapons. The first clown had huge, sad eyes and carried an upraised, wooden baseball bat. The second one had a large red happy smile and held what looked like a space gun, or maybe a space Uzi. The gun’s arm-length barrel was opaque white plastic, its trigger and butt a transparent fluorescent yellow, and on top of the whole thing was a foot and a half long, lime-green object shaped like a plump hot dog.

“Stick ‘em up,” the happy clown said and raised the space gun to aim the white plastic barrel at the center of my forehead.

- Two -

I stiffened, then relaxed. The white clown faces were only painted masks. And I knew who the two clowns were that wore them. I recognized the happy one by the cackles coming from behind her mask and the black, Addams family-style dress that clothed her skinny body. That had to be Vesta. The sad clown to her right was wearing a leather jacket with handfuls of tiny crystals and crosses woven into the fringe. I would have known this was Harmony even if I hadn’t spotted the jacket she always had on. Her scent, made up of leather, perspiration, patchouli oil and dope, was unmistakable.

“All right, you guys—” I began.

The happy clown pulled the trigger on the space gun.

A shock of cold water hit my face. I raised my hand to block the spray just as it dribbled to an end.

“Mom, stop that!” Wayne ordered as I sputtered. He snatched the space gun from Vesta’s hand before I had a chance to. Unfortunately, he didn’t squirt her back. I took a deep breath, trying to slow my racing pulse.

The sad clown put down her baseball bat and handed me a towel that had been tucked into the pocket of her leather jacket. I wiped my face, glad I hadn’t had time to put on makeup this evening, glad that my short dark curls were waterproof by nature. But my ears were still ringing with the adrenaline the spray of cold water had called up.

“Trick or treat!” Vesta and Harmony called in unison as they pulled off their masks. They should have left them on, I thought peevishly.

Vesta was a tall, bone-thin woman with long, dyed black hair and a pair of navy blue eyes set under low, heavy brows not unlike Wayne’s. Only the brows looked better on him. Of course, I might have been the tiniest bit prejudiced. I glared at Vesta without speaking.

She drew her thin lips back from her teeth in a malevolent smile. Somehow I didn’t think I was going to learn to appreciate Wayne’s mother. Not in this lifetime anyway. Pretend, I reminded myself. Pretend this was just a friendly little prank.

I took one last swipe at my face and handed the damp towel back to Harmony. I still couldn’t trust myself to speak.

“That was really cool!” Harmony shrilled. Then she laughed.

A shiver tugged at my shoulders. Harmony’s laugh was always a little out of sync. It sounded stretched and distorted in spots, like a tape that had been left out in the sun.

Harmony looked like she had been left in the sun too. Maybe for her entire forty or fifty years. Her skin was a leathery tan, her hair a blond bush of frizz and her eyes a pale, bleached blue. She fingered the crosses and crystals hanging around her neck, her expression going blank when no one shared her laughter.

“Mom,” began Wayne, setting the space gun carefully on the floor. “Why do you do these—”

“Oh, Waynie, my heart condition,” Vesta cut in, the smile leaving her face. She clutched a hand to her chest and stared wide-eyed at Wayne.

Did she really think Wayne was going to fall for that old trick again? After all the times he had hauled her down to the doctor just to be told that her only heart condition was good to excellent? I smiled smugly. Then I noticed Wayne wasn’t talking. I glanced up at his face. It was stricken. He had fallen for it. I felt the heat of anger flush my cheeks.

I grabbed Wayne’s shoulder and shook it hard. After a couple of seconds he came out of it.

“Mom, I’m serious—” he began again.

“Hooboy, Wayne,” interrupted a deep voice from behind Vesta. “Some trick or treat, huh? More like a
trigger
treat, if you ask me.”

Vesta giggled at the pun and stepped away from the doorway, revealing a heavily muscled, balding man who was at least as tall as Wayne, maybe even taller. And Wayne was well over six feet. The man’s face looked like Wayne’s too, with its large nose and heavy low brows. His eyes were navy blue, though, like Vesta’s.

“Uncle Ace?” I guessed.

The man grinned, his homely face suddenly rendered comical. He stuck his hands into the air.

“I surrender,” he growled. “You got me dead to rights, ma’am.”

Then he stepped forward, bowed and grabbed my hand, pulling it up to meet his lips before I could resist. “Surrendering to you could only be a pleasure,” he added and kissed my hand a second time.

I found it a strangely erotic gesture, especially coming from a man who looked like Wayne, only fifteen years or so older. I snatched my hand back, uncomfortable with the thoughts Ace’s kiss had aroused.

“Uncle Ace, this is Kate Jasper,” Wayne introduced belatedly.

“Yow!
The
Kate Jasper?” Ace said, stepping back in mock astonishment.

This time I smiled, thinking he’d probably keep on clowning until I did. “That’s me,” I replied.

“Well, come on in,” he invited. He turned to the side and bowed again, sweeping his arm in a grand gesture toward Vesta’s living room.

I took a quick glance up at Wayne’s face. He was watching Ace with a shy, tentative smile that caught at my heart with its vulnerability. I grabbed his hand and pulled him past Harmony, who still stood in the doorway. I barely had time to glance at the roomful of tall strangers who filled Vesta’s living room when Vesta herself reappeared. At least her space gun and mask were gone.

“So, now you’ve met Wayne’s live-in girlfriend,” she said to Ace, with a sneering emphasis on “live-in.” “What do you think?”

I reminded myself to stay cool. Pretend to like Vesta, I thought. At least she hadn’t called me “the adulteress,” her usual term of affection for me. Or maybe it was disaffection.

Ace put his arm around Vesta’s bony shoulders.

“She’s a beauty,” he said with a nod in my direction. Vesta’s brows dropped into a frown. “But there’s no one as beautiful as my Vessie,” he added quickly. So, I thought, Ace was smart as well as funny.

Vesta laughed. “Ace, you’d say good morning to the devil if—”

“Aunt Vesta, you know what?” interrupted a tall, chubby young man walking toward us. His voice was high and insistent. “You don’t say ‘trick or treat’ if you’re the one opening the door.”

I took a closer look and saw that he was more of a boy than a young man. It was his height that had fooled me. But the face on top of that tall body was soft and round with youth. The boy’s blue eyes blinked anxiously through his thick wire-rimmed glasses.

“That’s totally bogus,” he went on. “You only say ‘trick or treat’ if you’re the visitor—”

“This is my grandson, Eric Skeritt,” Ace said, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. The hand didn’t seem to restrain the boy any.

“And anyhow, it isn’t Halloween yet, you know,” he went on. “And you know what else…”

“Eric is thirteen,” Ace whispered over his grandson’s lecture on Halloween. Then he rolled his eyes. A quick snort of laughter escaped me before I could cover my mouth.

I averted my eyes, glancing around the living room as Vesta snapped back at Eric. Her condo was efficiently arranged, with a large living room and kitchen downstairs and the bedroom area upstairs. The beige-and-white living room was filled with black leather chairs and sofas and glass-topped black-lacquered tables. But I was more interested in the members of the Skeritt clan, who stood around talking in small groups. I felt like I’d wandered into the land of the giants. Everyone in the room looked taller than me, including the other child present. But then, I am shorter than most, not to mention dark and A-line in figure. I turned back to Eric.

“So it’s really totally bogus, you know—” he was saying.

“I heard a joke on the radio the other day,” Vesta cut in. “Hire a high-school kid quick… before they forget they know everything.” She let out a loud hoot of laughter.

Ace laughed with her. It was really pretty funny. Too bad the joke was at Eric’s expense.

Eric drew himself up to stand on his tiptoes. “I am not in high school,” he corrected her. “I’m in middle school.”

It was nice to see Vesta with a friend in her own mental age group. Thirteen-year-old Eric was a good sparring partner for her.

“It’s just like Christmas trees, you know,” he plowed on. “They’re totally bogus. They don’t have anything to do with Christianity….”

“Wanna meet some of the other inmates?” Ace whispered in my ear.

I nodded gratefully.

Ace put a meaty hand on my shoulder and guided me away from Vesta and Eric. I snuck a backward glance at Wayne, left behind with them, and saw with relief that his stricken expression had completely disappeared. He actually looked amused now as he listened to Eric lecture.

“My big brother, Trent Skeritt,” Ace announced.

I swiveled my head back around in time to smile at the man Ace was introducing. Trent Skeritt returned my smile. At least I thought his was a smile. His teeth were showing. But somehow he didn’t radiate the warmth that usually goes with the expression. Suddenly, my own smile felt stiff on my face.

“So glad to meet you, Mrs. Jasper,” he said in a deep, sonorous voice. He stuck out his hand to shake mine.

His hand was cool, his grip firm but not too tight. I would have bet that Trent Skeritt did a lot of professional handshaking. He was a distinguished-looking man, as tall as the rest of the Skeritts but slimmer than Ace and Wayne, and less muscular. He had the heavy Skeritt brow too, over cool brown eyes, but the brow looked noble on him, aristocratic. Maybe it was his styled, silver hair. Or possibly the way he held his trim body erect.

“Please, call me Kate,” I said, a beat too late to sound natural.

He nodded. “And please, call me Trent,” he replied smoothly. He turned to the large white-haired woman, who stood behind him. “This is my wife, Ingrid,” he said.

“So happy to meet Wayne’s fiancée.” Ingrid’s greeting came out in a surprisingly resonant whisper.

She took my left hand in both of her moist ones and squeezed.

“Great to meet you too,” I claimed inadequately, squeezing back as well as I could with one hand.

I smiled inanely and wondered who had told Ingrid that I was Wayne’s “fiancée.” Would Wayne have used the word? He of all people knew we had no wedding plans.

I squinted at Ingrid’s face, noticing something familiar about her. She had a handsome face, blessed by good bones and friendly blue eyes. Barbara Bush, I realized—that was it. Ingrid looked like the former First Lady. And the superficial resemblance was strengthened by the similarity in the styling of Ingrid’s white hair. And by the three strings of pearls she wore around her neck. Was she imitating the former President’s wife on purpose?

“Lori,” Trent called out. His voice wasn’t loud, but there was a command implicit in its tone.

Ingrid dropped my hand gently and turned.

I followed her glance and saw a woman who might have been my age and a girl who looked about twelve or so sitting on a black leather couch across the room. The woman stood and waved. She was tall, probably close to six feet, with brown eyes and a long blond braid down her back. The girl stood too. Her movements resembled the woman’s, but she had dark skin and features that proudly declared her African ancestry. The tall woman grinned at us and strode our way, her bracelets jangling as she approached. I could smell her perfume when she got within a yard of us. It was sweet and spicy. And strong. The girl followed along behind her.