The Chick and the Dead (29 page)

"But you loved me!"

Didi's anguished cry echoed through my head.

"But you loved her!" I said.

Howell's smile was as penetrating as a sword. "You think so? Then you should know this: I've never regretted my decision not to meet Didi. Not for one moment. I wasn't responsible for her death, but I never regretted that, either. It certainly made my life easier. Now if you'll excuse me…" He turned away. And I saw not only my investigation into Didi's murder, but my chance of proving she was the author of
So Far the Dawn
, going with him.

"Wait!" When I clamped a hand on his arm, Howell whirled around. "The manuscript," I said, before he could make good on the threat he'd made that day at his office and call security on me. "It's the page Didi gave you, isn't it? It's the one she wrote her dedication on. I've got the five thousand dollars now. I'll deliver it to your office tomorrow. I'll—"

He shrugged out from under my hand. "The manuscript page," he said, "is no longer for sale. Not to you. Not to anyone else."

"But—"

"As a matter of fact…" Howell's gaze was as cold as a snake's. "When I get home, I'm going to burn it. I hope you're a smart enough young lady to know what that means. Don't ever let me see your face again. There's nothing you can prove. Not about Didi's death and certainly not about any wild claims to her writing that ridiculous book. Good evening."

And before I could even think of something to say to make him change his mind, Howell was gone. When I turned around, I realized Didi was, too.

So much for my plans to break the case wide open.

I wasn't sure what I was going to accomplish with my hopes dashed and my mood as black as the night outside, but I headed back into the party, anyway. Maybe Quinn would take pity on me, and we could dance. Or at least talk, if he was through being pigheaded and insisting I let him in on what I was doing and why. Or maybe I would just take a page from Susan Gwitkowski's book. Maybe a couple of glasses of champagne would dull the pain and help me forget that on the private investigator scale of one to ten, I was somewhere in the negative numbers.

I hoped for the Quinn scenario, but I'd settle for the champagne if I had to. All the buzz without the grief. Or at least without the same kind of grief. With that in mind, I headed off after a passing waiter. I was just about to snatch a crystal flute from his tray when an arm went around my waist and a voice whispered close to my ear.

"You're not drinking and driving, are you?"

Maybe I already was.

Drinking, that is.

At least that would explain why I recognized the voice.

I spun away from the arm and the man it belonged to and turned. Even a bushy mustache wasn't enough to disguise the face looking back at me.

"Dan Callahan, what the hell—"

"Nice to see you, too." Dan sounded pleasant enough, but his expression didn't match his voice. He darted a look around, and even though no one was close enough to overhear us, he bent his head closer to mine. "You want to tell me what you're up to?"

"I'm the one who should be asking that question."

"You mean—"

"I mean, you took my picture at the cemetery. And you followed me toOhioCity . You don't work at the hospital, either, do you? You never did."

For all his cuteness (and believe me, he was plenty cute), Dan could avoid a subject as well as anyone I'd ever known. He could change one pretty well, too. I found that out when he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a photograph.

"We need to talk," he said, and he handed me the picture.

It was a photo of me, taken the night I started unpacking Merilee's traveling library. I was standing in her study and—

"You were spying! Through the window!" I clutched the photo and dared Dan to dispute this. He didn't even try. "Take a close look," he said.

"I don't need to take a close look. I know exactly what I was doing. What I want to know is what you were doing. What you are doing. Why are you—"

As I talked, I'd clutched the picture to my chest. Dan laid his hand over mine and moved the photo far enough away from my body so I could see it. "I said, take a close look." Have I mentioned that Dan once saved my life? I'd like to think that I looked at the picture in question to return the favor, but I have to admit, that's not completely true. Though he kept it low, Dan's voice rang with authority. His grip on my hand was like iron. I couldn't have refused if I tried. I gulped down any feeble protest I might have made and took another gander at the picture. In it, I was standing near the desk. Like I was in the middle of saying something, my mouth was open, but of course, I was the only one in the room.

Or was I?

I squinted and took a closer look.

Barely visible, there were two wisps of white on the other side of the desk. One of them was shaped like a bell. Or a woman wearing a gown with a hoop skirt. The other was tall and imposing, a little more solid-looking. Like a man in a uniform might be.

Kurt and Elizabeth.

My breath caught and my mouth dropped open.

"How—"

Dan didn't give me a chance to finish the question. "Do you have any idea what you're messing with?"

"I'm not messing. With anything. I—"

"Do you know how dangerous this can be?"

"I don't, I—"

He plucked the photo out of my hands, glancing over his shoulder before he looked back at me. "I shouldn't be telling you this. I wouldn't be except that I'm worried. Pepper, you have no idea what you're getting into."

"And you don't know what you're talking about."

Was that my voice? The one that managed to sound pissed and regal and very Opal-like? In an effort to look as sure of myself as I sounded, I lifted my chin.

If I expected Dan to back down, I was disappointed.

He tucked the photo back where it came from and backed away. "It's a friendly warning," he said. "And the only one you'll get."

"A friendly warning?" By this time, my heart was slamming against my ribs. My corset felt as if it was going to pop. I sucked in a breath. "As opposed to… ?"

Dan bowed from the waist, the way a proper Civil War gentleman would. "As much as I'd like to, I can't afford to give anyone a second chance. Not even you. Don't forget what I said, Pepper. And don't mess with powers you can't possibly understand."

He backed away another step, and the next second, he was swallowed by the crowd, and I was left to try and figure out what the hell had just happened.

I didn't have much of a chance. The next thing I knew, a voice called to me from the doorway.

"Miss Martin!" It was Rick Jensen, the photographer, and one look at the flush of excitement on his face told me something was up.

"Miss Martin, look!" He hurried toward me, a fat manila file folder in his hand. "My press credentials got me past the front door," he explained, and he pushed the file into my hands. "I'm glad I didn't have to wait until you showed up at the cemetery again. I couldn't wait to show you these." I flipped open the file, and again I found myself looking at photos. I thumbed through them. I have to say, I couldn't see what Rick was so excited about. At least the picture Dan presented me showed the misty forms of Kurt and Elizabeth. These pictures didn't show much of anything but gray blobs. I guess my expression said it all because Rick plucked the pictures out my hands and turned them right-side up. "They're hard to see, I know," he said. "Just as you thought, the film was exposed. It took some fancy footwork to get anything out of it. But here. Take a look." He found one picture in particular and moved it to the top of the pile. "Recognize anything?"

I squinted. I tilted my head. I squinted some more.

And slowly, the picture came into focus.

"Holy shit," I mumbled.

Because for the second time in as many minutes, I realized I was looking at a ghost. The photo showed the Bowman mausoleum. Sure it was blurry. Okay, so it was fuzzy. And yes, the picture (at least from what I could see of it) was taken from pretty far away. But none of that mattered.

What did matter was what was barely visible in the background: a mousy woman in a nondescript suit and way sensible shoes.

No question who she was.

And no question what she was up to, either.

While Rick had been busy waiting for the perfect photo of perfect Merilee visiting her dear, dear, dearly departed parents, he'd accidentally caught a shot of Trish Kingston.

She was messing with the urn of flowers in front of the mausoleum, and though I couldn't tell what she was doing, I knew one thing. Whatever it was, it had cost Rick his camera and earned him a lump on the back of his head from the marble tip of an angel wing.

If I discounted the fact that I arrived with Merilee
, who sipped icy pink champagne from the backseat bar all the way fromOhioCity and never once offered me a glass, showing up at the gala in a limo was not half bad. I could easily get used to having a uniformed driver open the door of the car for me and offer me a hand to help me out. I got a buzz when I stepped onto the sidewalk outside the hotel and a roar went up from the huge crowd of SFTD fans who were waiting. Even if they weren't waiting for me.

The flip side, of course, was—photos of Trish Kingston in hand and a burning need to get over to Garden View and try to figure out why she poking around in that urn—I was stuck. Fortunately, Rick was a good sport.

And he had a car parked right outside.

I offered him an exclusive on whatever it was we were going to find, and because I couldn't fit into the front, I squeezed and squashed me and my hoop skirt into the backseat of his PT Cruiser. We were off. We used the employee entrance into the cemetery, and while the reenactors, the fans, and the cream of Cleveland society were still back at the hotel quadrilling their little feet off, Rick and I stood in front of the Bowman mausoleum.

"You're going to get your pretty gown all dirty," he warned when I made a move for the urn, but I was past caring. I ripped off my elbow-length gloves and went for the flowers. Of course, they'd been replaced a time or two since that first day when Merilee arrived to visit her dear, dear parents. The current arrangement was composed of white mums and yellow roses. It was long past dark, and the mums glowed like ghostly orbs. The roses made me sneeze.

It didn't take me long to feel along the edges of the arrangement and find the block of wet, foamy stuff the flowers were stuck in. I lifted the entire thing out, handed the whole shebang to Rick, and stuck my hand into the now-empty urn.

Which, as it turned out, wasn't empty after all.

"What is it?" Rick asked when I lifted out a fat, heavy package. It was wrapped with paper, then rewrapped with waterproof plastic and sealed with duct tape.

Like the kind I'd found in Trish's room the day I moved into the Bowman house.

"I think it's papers," I told Rick, because though I'd promised him an exclusive, I wasn't exactly ready to give away the farm. Not until I knew for sure if what I was holding was what I thought I was holding.

"What kind of papers? And what are you going to do with them?" A good question, and while I considered it, Rick's curiosity kicked in. He was no dummy. "Does this have something to do with thatKingston woman being murdered?" he asked. Oh, yeah.

I knew it as sure as I knew that the trek from the car and through the damp grass over to the mausoleum had resulted in a sloppy mess at the hem of my dress and that I'd probably have to pay a fortune for dry cleaning.

Just like I knew there was only one person I could trust with what I'd found. Like I mentioned before, Rick was a good sport. It didn't take any time at all to convince him to make a quick stop at the Bowman house before we headed to theJusticeCenter .

"Are you sure we're allowed to be here?"

Rick was standing behind me. He peered over my shoulder into the darkened main room of the
So Far
the Dawn
museum. "The museum is closed."

"I work here, remember," I told him, and I guess his nervousness was contagious. When he whispered, I whispered back. "I live here, too. Which means technically I can come in any time I want."

"Yeah, but nobody's around and—"

"That," I told him, "is the whole idea." Before I could forget it, I zipped into the museum, flicked on the lights, and headed for the glass case where Merilee's "original" manuscript was displayed. Someday, the museum board had promised, security alarms were going to be added for each of what they liked to think of as their "priceless" exhibits. Lucky for me,
someday
had yet to come. I lifted the latch on the side of the display case and swung open the glass door.

"What in the world are you doing?" When he raced across the room toward me, Rick's face was pale. Like a walleye hooked and pulled from the water, his mouth opened and closed. "You're not going to—"

"Steal the manuscript? Don't be ridiculous! Of course I'm not going to steal the manuscript. If I did, Merilee would notice." I pish-tushed the very suggestion while I reached into the case and slipped a few pages from the middle of the stack. I closed the display case door. "Nobody's ever going to miss a couple of pages."

"But…" Rick had that deer-in-the-headlights look. He stood between me and the door, and bless him, he thought he was trying to save me from my baser instincts. "You can't steal them, Pepper. It's wrong. You'll get in big trouble."

The pages clutched in one hand, I tilted my head and propped my fists on my hips. "I thought you were a reporter," I said. "Aren't you supposed to be bold and daring and willing to do anything for the sake of a story?"

"I'm a photographer," he corrected me. "I might be willing to do anything for the sake of a picture." I shrugged. "So take my picture."

"Stealing the manuscript?" Rick's voice was shrill. "Then the cops would know I was here. I'd be an accomplice or a codefendant or—"

"Don't worry about it," I said and made a motion to shoo him aside. Since he was standing between the display case where Kurt's original uniform was exhibited and a large-as-life (and very creepy because of it) mannequin wearing Opal's garden party gown, there was no other way to get around him. "Trust me, Rick. We're not doing anything wrong. And there is that exclusive to think about." He might not fit in the bold and daring category, but when it came down to it, Rick was all for the exclusive. He nodded, silently confirming his accomplice status, and turned to leave the room. In the great scheme of things, it was just as well that he was leading the way. He was the one who ran into Weird Bob at the door.