The Curse of the Holy Pail #2 (12 page)

Kyle smiled at her. "You may not have to move, Stella. This is my house now."

"What?" she asked, pulling away to look at him better.

"This is my house," he repeated proudly. "Dad put me on as joint tenant. Now that he's dead, it's mine and I'm moving in. He also just bought the Center, which also becomes mine now, free and clear. He signed those papers the day he died."

Immediately, my mind went back to the papers I notarized for Price. I could not remember exactly what they were, but they did have Kyle's name on them. I wrote a mental note to myself to check my notary journal for the types of documents Price had signed.

"But why, Kyle?" Stella asked. "Why would he do that?"

"Because he wanted us to be happy, Stella. You and me." He kissed her lightly again while she mulled his words over. "I told him about us," he told her between kisses.

"You what?" She sounded shocked.

"I told him about us. That the baby was mine."

"No, Kyle, you shouldn't have." Stella said, growing agitated.

Baby? I clutched a hand over my mouth to keep from gasping from the news. Stella Hughes was pregnant? Menopause, maybe. But pregnant? Suddenly I was glad I had stuffed myself into the closet. Geez, the Price family was better than the stuff that won Emmys for daytime drama.

"Don't worry, Stella. He was only mad at first." Kyle was dotting her face with little kisses as he spoke. "Besides, I had some good leverage. It was in his best interest to do it."

Stella seemed speechless. She pulled her face away from Kyle's lips and looked directly at him a long time. "What do you mean?" she asked warily. "What leverage?"

"Information, Stella. Information the old man needed." Kyle lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. "Information he was happy to pay for." He let go of Stella's hands and started unbuttoning the front of her dress as he talked, his voice becoming more nasally as he spoke. "Let's just say I finally managed to kick my sister off her golden pedestal."

Well, this was an interesting development. Kyle seemed pretty meek to me when I met him downstairs. What information could he have sold to his father in exchange for a house and the Center, whatever that was?

Stella remained silent as Kyle continued working her buttons. I wanted desperately to see the look on her face, but all I saw was the side of her head tilted up to him. The little bit of her face I could see reflected no emotion. She and Jackson seemed to both have a talent for blank faces when the need arose. Kyle looked back at her with slavish adoration.

Silently, and still looking at Kyle, Stella finished undoing the front of her dress and lowered it. Then she unhooked her bra and released her full breasts. Kyle wasted no time moving his mouth to one naked nipple, then to the other. Stella's hands moved to grasp his butt, as she had done to the unwilling Jackson. She said something to him I didn't catch, but it caused Kyle to lift his face from her boobs and glance at the doors. Straightening up, he walked out of my view. I heard the study doors open and shut and thought he had left-hoped he had left. Then I heard a faint click that sounded like a lock. Kyle returned to Stella, who had now shimmied out of her dress and was working on removing her hose.

"Everyone's downstairs," she told him in her husky voice. "No one will come up here today."

Oh, yeah? Personally, I felt the study was seeing far too much traffic.

TEN

"ARE YOU OUT OF your mind?" Zee nearly shouted at me from across our table at Mi Casa. A few people from neighboring booths glanced over at us briefly, then went back to stuffing their faces with enchiladas and burritos.

Following Stella and Kyle's copulation in the study, during which I did a fairly good imitation of the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil apes, I made sure the coast was clear and skedaddled out of there. Downstairs, I said my goodbyes to the Wallaces and headed for the front door, my car, and fresh air. I needed to slough off the sleazy feeling that covered me like morning film on teeth.

"Odelia," I heard someone call just as I reached the foyer.

It was Stella Hughes, moving toward me from the living room. Once she was in front of me, I found it difficult to look her in the eye. I mean, what do you say to a woman you just witnessed being bent over a desk with her knickers around her ankles?

"Odelia, I did so enjoy meeting you. Perhaps we can have lunch sometime?" she asked, again wearing the plastic smile.

Apparently, Stella was wasting no time getting to the bottom of my intelligence level. Glancing quickly at her face, but still avoiding her eyes, I mumbled something like, "Yeah, sure. Call me at the office." Then I fled.

Zee's home was closer to the Price house than my place, but I decided to go straight home. From there I called Zee. Seth was at a meeting and not expected for dinner, she told me, so we agreed to meet at Mi Casa in an hour. So much for my fantasy of chicken and dumplings or anything else homemade. But I do love Mexican food, and Mi Casa has great stuff. Before going to the restaurant, I changed into loose shorts and a cotton shirt and gave Wainwright a quick walk, apologizing the whole way for Greg's continued absence.

Instead of responding to Zee's outburst, I ignored her and continued munching on tortilla chips and salsa like a power saw at a lumberjack competition. There's something very satisfying about food that goes crunch. It's almost therapeutic the way it appeals to both the sense of sound and of touch, with taste thrown in as a bonus.

I buzzed through one chip, then another, until Zee grabbed the bowl and moved it out of my reach.

"What?" I said to her irritably.

"What? Did you just ask me what?" she asked, trying to keep her voice down. "You just announced that you spent the good part of an hour in a closet spying on a couple having sex, and you ask me what?"

I shrugged, attempting to be nonchalant about the spying accusation. "But I think I got some info about Sterling Price's murder, at least some possible motives. And I'm dying to know what dirt Kyle has on his sister."

"Dear Lord," Zee said, addressing a pinata shaped like a burro hanging over our table, "she is out of her mind." She looked back at me. "Didn't we go through this when you decided to stick your nose into Sophie's murder?"

I said nothing, but waved to a busboy to bring more chips.

"Wasn't getting shot in the behind-almost killed, mind you-" she continued, "enough warning to stay out of this sort of thing?"

I looked at my friend and started to say something, but our food arrived. I clammed up until our waitress, dressed in a white off-the-shoulder embroidered peasant blouse and full red skirt, left our table. Next, the busboy showed up with a new bowl of chips and fresh salsa.

"But don't you think it's odd that the Holy Pail disappeared the same day Sterling Price died?" I asked Zee. "The very same day I first saw it?"

Zee said nothing. She was in the middle of her usual food ritual of making sure everything was just so. We had both ordered enchiladas rancheros, but hers were both chicken while one of mine was shredded beef and the other pork. First, she scraped the sour cream off her food and plopped it on my plate, then followed suit with the guacamole, both of which I was happy to receive. Next, she scattered the chopped tomatoes, cilantro, and onions that were on one side of the plate evenly over the enchiladas. Finally, she daintily scooped up salsa from the bowl in the middle of the table with a spoon and sprinkled it over everything, including her rice and beans.

I simply smeared the extra guacamole and sour cream over my enchiladas like Spackle, dug in, and waited for her response.

"I do think it's odd," she said before taking her first bite, "that the lunchbox is missing. But that doesn't mean you should be sticking your big nose into it."

I chewed the food in my mouth before answering. "But don't you see? They, whoever they are, think I have the stupid box."

"But you don't, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"So what's the problem?" Zee took another bite, chewed and swallowed before going on. "Just let the police do their job. They really don't need you, Odelia. Especially that nice Detective Frye. Doesn't he have enough on his mind without worrying about you again?"

Earlier, I had told Zee about Dev Frye being on the case and about his wife's recent passing.

We ate in silence for a while before I started up again. When I latch onto an idea, I'm like a starving dog with a soup bone.

"But don't you think it's odd that all those previous owners of the Holy Pail died?"

"Odelia, there are such things as coincidences. I bet if you look into those deaths you'll find a reasonable explanation for each of them. After all," she said, getting agitated, "it's just a silly lunchbox!"

My thoughts exactly.

Joe had not been able to provide me with further information on the three dead men mentioned in the American Executive article about the Holy Pail and Sterling Price, so all I had was the magazine's brief account of each. According to the article, Jasper Kellogg, a resident of a small town in upstate New York, had died from a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight; Ivan Fisher was fiftysix when he was killed in a car accident on an icy road outside of Chicago; and William Proctor, the owner prior to Price, had been lost at sea during a storm, along with his wife. He had been fortytwo and his sailboat was discovered battered and abandoned off the western coast of Mexico. Zee may be right.

"A more important discussion," Zee continued, "is what you're going to tell Greg when he gets home. Seems to me you're more concerned about this silly lunchbox and those crazy people than you are about your own problems."

I took another bite and washed it down with iced tea before answering. Okay, I'll admit it: I was using the whole Price thing and Uncle Stu's tragic death to buy me more time to obsess about Greg's proposal. And I seriously doubted if this extra time was a good thing.

"I think Greg and I need to have another heart-to-heart talk before I give him my answer," I told my best friend. Zee nodded, her big, soulful eyes beacons of understanding in her dark brown face. "I won't be able to say yes until I know for sure he's okay about not having kids. I mean, truly okay with it."

I started playing with my remaining rice with the tines of my fork, looking at them and concentrating on the individual grains. "When I heard his voice today on the phone, I knew I couldn't bear to lose him." I put my fork down and looked up at Zee. "But I'm not sure I'm ready for marriage. Maybe we should just live together, try it out."

Zee sighed. "Well, you know my thoughts about couples living together before marriage. But that aside, do you really think that will give you the information you need to make a decision? Don't you know Greg well enough by now?"

"Yes, Zee," I said, feeling tears start to well up in my eyes. "I do know him well enough. And that's the problem. I know that I want him in my life. But I also know that having a family is a big dream of his. But it's not my dream. I'm forty-seven years old. I don't want children at this point in my life." Suddenly, Stella Hughes crossed my mind, and I wondered if she wanted the baby she was carrying. Odds were, she didn't.

I wiped at an escaping tear with one hand. "It's just the onions," I told Zee quickly when I noticed her own eyes begin to pool.

"Don't you see;" I said, continuing, my voice strained, "for Greg and me to get married, one of us is going to have to sacrifice what we want or don't want on this issue. One of us will always feel like they settled or gave in. Is that how a marriage should start out?" I paused and waited for Zee to answer, but she just looked at me in helpless frustration. "This isn't a difference over whether the bathroom towels should be green or beige," I continued, "this is about children, other human beings."

"So what are you going to do?" Zee asked in a small voice.

"Right now," I said, motioning to our waitress, "I'm going to order flan."

I INSPECTED MY NAILS as the phone on the other end of my call rang-one, two, three times. A manicure was clearly in my future. On the fourth ring I would be automatically kicked into Mike Steele's voice mail. It was eight o'clock in the evening. I was full of enchiladas, flan, and questions, and I needed to digest them all.

Steele often worked late. I was calling him in the hope that he could give me some answers tonight, before I had to resort to Pepto-Bismol. The fourth ring began. I was about to hang up, thinking I would ask Steele my questions in the morning, when someone answered just before it rolled over into voice mail. It was Steele, and he sounded a tad winded. Probably ran in from another office or the library, I thought.

"It's me-Odelia," I announced to him.

"Jesus, Grey," he said impatiently, "what do you want at this hour? Another half-day off?"

I kicked myself for even thinking of calling, but now that I had him on the phone, I might as well go ahead. "I have a few questions about Sterling Homes and didn't want to wait until morning," I began. "But if you're busy, it can wait."

"Of course I'm busy," he responded with irritation. He paused. I almost said goodbye and hung up. Then he added, "Talk to me, Grey. What's on your mind?"