Chapter Twenty-one
My first thought was that I was surrounded by the smell of the ocean. I didn’t know why that struck me as funny, but I snorted at my own laughter before clamping my hand over my mouth.
What the hell had just happened, and where in the world was I? This was not good.
I jerked around to find any piece of furniture or sight that looked familiar. Obviously, I was not in my house. I wasn’t in a hospital bed, like where Bethany had woken up. I wasn’t in any place I knew, except that my gaze landed on a picture frame that I knew I had seen before. I was in the house Mrs. Petrovski had sent us to clean after the mansion was closed down for the investigation, the one that was way too clean to need to be cleaned.
I thought about calling out, but then I realized that one of my feet was tied to the chair I was sitting on and that I was not going anywhere, unless I planned on hopping out of here with my hands tied in front of me and with a chair attached to my leg. Holy crap. So not good.
“Well, at least I got the dose right this time, unlike with that stupid employee of yours. I ended up having to hit her more than once to get her to drift off, and then I had to give her something a little special to make it all end.”
That voice. I knew it, and I did not like it one bit. It had told me I was worthless, and it wouldn’t let me speak when I had something to say. It had talked down to me, as if I was less, and ultimately, it had told tales that obviously were not true, which was a given if I was tied to a chair in her house and was just waking up from something like chloroform.
Mrs. Petrovski. How had she drugged me, then dragged me in here?
I closed my eyes, then opened them again, hoping that I would find myself in a different place, thinking that I had been having a nightmare of epic proportions.
But no, it was definitely real. The knot at my ankle was digging into my flesh, the one around my wrists was pulling at the fine hairs on my arms, and I was staring into the eyes of a madwoman. So not awesome.
“No words, Tallie Graver? Usually, you’re full of words and questions and too much information, but not enough smarts. So here we are. You had one job and one job only. To leave it to Burton to arrest my nephew and get him out of my life, and you couldn’t even do that right.”
“I—”
“No, don’t start talking now. Let me tell you a story, and then I’m going to have Jackson take you out and get rid of you.”
Jackson? I looked frantically around the room but saw no one else.
“He’ll be in after I’m done. I’m thinking about an even more special cocktail for you, one that will make you tell me all the things I want to know and then cause you to forget it all before Jackson’s turn.” She paced in front of me, with her heels and her pearls and her perfectly made-up face. She clicked across the room with the exactitude of a metronome, staring at me and then staring at her nails and then staring at me again. I was too scared to be bored this time. Whereas I had not feared Preston and his can of soda or his threats, this woman was altogether different and not the militant but manageable old lady I’d thought she was.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I said no questions, but I’ll answer that one, because it goes nicely with the little story I have to tell.” She paused and fingered the pearls at her neck. “Do you know what it takes to run an empire, Tallie?”
Was I supposed to answer that? I didn’t know what it took to run an empire. I couldn’t even think up a good name for my cleaning crew. But since she had said no talking, I just shook my head and waited for her to continue. I was going to have to start thinking of a way to get out of this predicament, long before Jackson came to do his duty.
“It takes a smart woman and an army of dumb guys. That’s what it takes.”
“Okay.”
“But then somehow I got an idiot of a nephew and no one to help me move to the next level and a cop who didn’t know when to look the other way.”
“Who should have looked the other way?”
She towered over me in a flash. “Burton. He was supposed to look the other way, over at my nephew. And he would have done it if you hadn’t taken Preston to jail and then tried to dupe me out of my perfect setup. You know, he might not have killed her, but I know for a fact he was the one who wrapped her up in that carpet and took her out to the Dumpster. Him and that woman he hired to work for Audra during the competition. I watched them do it from behind the half wall Bethany took a picture of, before I could close it, the dimwit.”
“What?”
“You see, there is a secret wall, but I couldn’t tell you that, or it would give away too many of my secrets, so I scoffed and I pooh-poohed and you believed me, you silly twit. The half wall isn’t where you thought it was, but it does exist. It’s there for me to use at my discretion.”
A light blinked on in my mind. “It’s that soft spot on the wall in the room upstairs, isn’t it?”
She smiled but didn’t answer my question. Instead, she continued her story. “Preston moved the body because he was afraid that if someone found her in the house, it wouldn’t sell, and if it didn’t sell, then he wouldn’t be able to buy into a little proposition that I’d asked one of my men to approach him with. It was brilliant, actually. I’d have him pay me through one of my goons, and he’d never know that the money he made was coming right back to me. Stupid man.”
“And what was the proposition?” I hadn’t come up with a way to get out of this, but I was fascinated by what she was saying.
“Drugs, my dear. A lot of lovely drugs. Burton shut me down without knowing who I was. I was selling all these properties to start up somewhere new, now that he was onto my staff of dealers. I killed that girl so he would look the other way while I made my escape, but you had to get involved and do your little nosy thing and then start interfering, and he didn’t take it as seriously as he needed to. I tried to encourage him to do his job, but why should he when he has an unpaid, stupid woman to go floundering around, trying to find clues for him like a little dog?”
Now, that was going too far. I was not little, and I wasn’t a dog. I puffed up my shoulders, because I really wanted to take a swing at her, even with my hands tied, and the chair moved a little. An idea started to form in my head, but I’d need to work out the logistics before I attempted it. Since she was still delivering her monologue, I felt I had a little time to get all the info I possibly could to nail her for all her crimes when I got out of this.
When, not if. When.
“And then my idiot of a nephew touched the corpse before I had a chance to dispose of it. And because he was so afraid of getting in trouble, as he’d left his fingerprints on her, and was also afraid that the house wouldn’t sell, he decided to throw her away and call a truck in to take her to the dump, so people would just figure she went missing. I almost killed him, too, that day, but when you found her, I decided he would be the perfect scapegoat.”
I scooted a little on the chair again and found that it was heavy but not too heavy. She walked away, and I scooted a little more. This was doable. All I needed to do was wait for her to get close to me again.
Frustratingly, she stayed out of reach while she delivered her next monologue. “My family has been running drugs for years. I took the small-time business and made it into something magnificent in the past few years, putting my education at Harvard behind it to make it bloom like no one had even conceived. But it all went downhill when Burton caught a whiff of what was happening in his little burg. I tried to get someone to pay him off to keep quiet, but he was having none of it, that ridiculous do-gooder. And then Preston started playing with that floozy and thought he’d marry her. We were not going to marry beneath us. We just don’t do that in this family. That’s why I never married. There was no one who was worthy of me.”
Good Lord. Not only a monologue but a self-aggrandizing one. Awesome.
“And so she, too, was the perfect scapegoat.”
I took a breath right before I challenged her. It might be my last one ever. “Perfect, except for the idiot nephew and the idiot cop and the idiot you, who thought you could get away with it.”
She came for me, just as I had hoped she would. In a flash of movement, I stood, kicked out my leg with the chair attached to it, and nailed her right in the chest with the wooden seat. I was against violence on a daily basis, and I sometimes had a hard time watching action movies, because they made me wince, but when she went down, I did a little cheer inside, right before I hopped and hobbled out of the house and started yelling like the place was on fire.
To echo Bethany’s sentiments, maybe yelling was not my best idea, but I was not going to get far with this chair attached to my leg. I reached down to untie it now that I was semi-free, or at least free from that house and that woman, but a hulking figure came toward me from my right. Could this be Jackson? I was gearing myself up to take another swing with the chair when I recognized my cousin, Matt.
“Why in the world are you screaming, and what is that attached to your leg?” he asked, running toward me.
“No time for questions. Go arrest the old biddy on the floor in the house behind me and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
He did as I asked, but by then a crowd had developed. Max was there and my father, and even Burton stood near me. He took the utility knife off his belt again and sawed through the rope binding me to the chair.
“Not so efficient,” he said.
“And definitely not useful,” I answered as I fell into Max’s arms.
* * *
I woke up on a couch in the funeral parlor, the blue room, to be precise. My mom fluttered around my head as if she were a butterfly and I was a flower, but her face said she was likening me to a Venus flytrap.
“Don’t you ever do that again! Never! My heart can’t take this!”
“Stop yelling, Mother.” That was my dad, and I didn’t like him calling her that any more than I liked her calling him Daddy. But my head ached, so I let it pass.
“I’m going to need all of you to step out of this space,” Burton said, finally coming into view, as I tried to sit up. “Just stay where you are, young lady. I have questions, and you’d better have answers.”
Flopping back on the couch made my head pound more, but then Max was there with a warm washcloth and a kiss on my knuckles. “It’s going to be okay. I was so scared, but it’s going to be okay.”
I wanted to reassure him. I really did, yet the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, and I must have passed out again.
This time when I came to, I was still on the couch, but in Max’s arms. I snuggled in, not sure why we were on the first floor of the funeral parlor but willing to take his embrace anywhere I could get it.
Until Burton cleared his throat and everything came rushing back to me.
“Oh my God! Did you get her? Please tell me she didn’t get away from you. I think I hit her hard enough to make sure she didn’t move until someone got there. Oh, but Jackson could have carried her off. I didn’t think of that! Crap!”
“Slow down there, Tallie,” Burton told me. “Everyone has been caught, and even a few bonus guys, just for good measure. Once Marg started talking, she did everything she could to get out of the charges, but they’re going to stick like superglue. And we picked up the girl who helped Preston throw away the body, so no worries there, either.”
I sighed in relief, not wanting to have any loose ends that might come after me again.
“You can rest easy,” he added.
“And maybe you can now, too,” I answered.
“What?”
“You were working too hard. You were a mess and your shirt was rumpled and you were so stressed. When I was making my way to the station, I so wanted to be able to give you the name of the killer, but I was afraid I’d hit a dead end. Then Marg kidnapped me, and if nothing else, I was happy to be able to help.”
Burton shook his head and stared up at the ceiling. “You’re killing me.”
“No, I saved you. Now, what do you need from me? She did her unloading of all the information, so if there’s anything she isn’t telling you, I bet I can fill in the gaps.” I sat up with Max’s help. “Is she singing like a canary?”
Burton burst out laughing. “My God, you can be annoying, but you also are incredibly thorough. I have everything I need, but if I come across anything I’m unsure about, you’ll be the first person I ask. For now, rest. We can talk tomorrow. It’ll be soon enough.”
He left the room, and it was just Max and me.
“Sorry about all this,” I said. “I didn’t mean to get drugged and tied to a chair.”
His laughter wasn’t a burst, more a puff of disbelief. “I’m just so happy to have you back and unharmed. You are unharmed, right?”
I rotated my shoulders and shook out each leg, then rolled my neck. “Other than a headache, I’m good as gold.”
“You certainly are, and no matter what Burton says, he was extremely worried about you and incredibly grateful for all the info he now has.”
“He’d better be,” I said, but I didn’t actually mean it. He was a good cop and did a good job. Sometimes I just got there faster.
“Now, since you’re a little incapacitated and shouldn’t move for at least the next ten minutes, and the bad people have been caught and Burton has things under control, I thought I’d take a minute to talk to you about my plan for moving up here.”
“I’m all ears.” I had already heard everything Marg Petrovski had to say, and I knew most of the Preston story. I could get the rest of it tomorrow if I wanted it. But right now I wanted to think about happy things, and Max made me the happiest I’d ever been.
“I talked to your dad.”
I groaned. No good conversation started with that sentence.
“Are you hurting? We can do this later. No need to rush if you want to lie back down.”
I reached over to kiss his cheek. What a sweetie. “That groan was more for the ‘talking to my dad’ thing, not pain. I’m actually feeling pretty okay right now. So tell me what you and my dad talked about. I’m braced.”
“Well, the building next door went up for sale privately this morning. They asked your dad if he wanted it before putting it on the market. The lower floor is all set up to be an event spot, and he was thinking that perhaps you’d be willing to run that instead of working the actual funerals. Like a tea shop, but for grieving people. He even said that you could hold other events there if you wanted. Maybe Gina could help with catering.”
My eyes were about to pop out of my head, and my tongue was thick in my mouth. “Are you serious?”
“Is that a good ‘Are you serious?’ or a furious one?”
I grabbed his ears and kissed him full on the mouth. “That is totally a good question. I could be over there and still help here at the funeral home, but not be tied to the part I don’t care for here. I’d be independent. Heck, I’d even pay rent for the place if he wanted me to. And I have my fabulous crew of squeegee queens to watch over, too.”
“There’s a catch.”
I sank back against the cushions. Of course there was. “Lay it on me.”
“I would need to use a corner of the space to do taxes until something else opens up in the area.”
I slapped his arm. “That’s not a catch. That’s a bonus.”
“Okay. Then hopefully, you’ll like this part, too.”
He paused, and I held my breath. Was he going to ask me to marry him? What would I say?
“Your dad offered to let us open up the whole third floor of this building to make it into a legitimate living area, instead of a studio apartment. I asked when I was considering what the perfect space for us to live in would be, and he was very happy to offer. Dylan could help with the renovation work.”
“So we’d still live above the dead?”
“Quiet neighbors.”
“Quiet neighbors,” I agreed, and we laughed. After a pause, I looked him in those pretty eyes and said, “Yes, yes to all of it. And I just came up with the most awesome name for my cleaning crew. We will henceforth be called the Queens of Squeegeedom.”
I should have thought of that sooner, but now it was absolutely perfect, along with every other thing going on my life.