It’s not like anyone could blame me for not moving fast enough. After all, I was speechless. And terrified. I was still rooted to the spot when Quinn tossed the banjo on the bed and stood.
‘You don’t …’ What I almost said was, ‘You don’t want to kill me,’ but the very idea didn’t jibe with my handsome lover standing there in nice tight jeans and the button-down shirt with colorful parrots all over it that I’d bought him after we spent a few hours daydreaming about where we’d like to go on our someday honeymoon and narrowed down the choices to Costa Rica or Hawaii. The words refused to form in my mouth and, instead, I managed to stammer out, ‘You don’t play the banjo!’
‘Of course I do, don’t you remember?’ The voice was Quinn’s. So was the smile. But the eyes … those green eyes reminded me of the color of the lichens that grew on gravestones in shady parts of the cemetery. Like death. ‘I’ve always played the banjo.’
‘Sure. Of course you have.’ I backstepped my way to the bedroom door and hightailed it into the great room. ‘I guess I’m just so hungry, I wasn’t thinking,’ I called out, then realized I didn’t have to; Quinn was right behind me. ‘So what are you making for dinner?’ I asked him.
He ducked around the breakfast bar with the amber-colored hand blown glass pendant lights hanging over it and peered into a pot simmering on the stove. ‘Pasta. I know …’ Like I was going to say something (and let’s face it, I wasn’t because I was still too horrified to put together anything that sounded even a little coherent), he held up one hand. ‘It might not be as good as your sauce, but I had to give it a try. It’s the least I can do for you, my sweet. We’ll sit down and eat in a couple minutes.’ Humming a couple bars of Ain’t Misbehavin’, he rummaged around in a cupboard, grabbed a box of pasta and set it on the countertop near the stove, then sauntered over and took my hand. ‘But first, we need to talk about that message you left on my phone this afternoon. You told me Cindy McClure didn’t kill her husband.’
It wasn’t a question and, damn, if it was, I wasn’t sure I could have answered it, anyway. The way my heart pounded and my blood pumped made thinking a little tough. How I managed a smile was anybody’s guess. ‘Did I say that? Really? What on earth was I talking about?’ I laughed and oh-so-casually untangled my hand from his. ‘I was so busy at work today, I didn’t have a minute to even think about the case. I must have been speculating, that’s all. Just taking a little break and speculating and—’
As quick as I took my hand back, Quinn grabbed it again and this time, he held on so tight I would have winced, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. ‘You told me you know where the ashes are.’
It wasn’t what he said that flash-froze my stomach.
It was the way he said it.
It was the look he gave me, the one that was completely devoid of emotion.
And humanity.
Funny, at that moment, looking into the eyes of death shook me back to life. Adrenaline shot through me along with a big dose of recklessness. Then again, something told me that the way things were going, I didn’t have a lot to lose.
I laughed. ‘Can you believe it?’ I asked, and when I tugged my hand from his and he refused to let go, I tugged harder. Finally free, I didn’t waste another second. I spun around and stutterstepped my way around the herd of wooden, stone, and glass elephants between me and the door. ‘I left my phone in the car. I’m going to run down and get it and I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
The real Quinn would have known something was haywire as soon as he heard that lame lamb’s tail line that I’d learned from Ness. This Quinn didn’t bat an eyelash. But then, Capone and Ness shared a common history as well as a common vocabulary.
He didn’t move an inch, and relieved, grateful, and praying that the elevator came and came fast, I dashed out into the hallway, slammed the door behind me and poked a finger against the call button.
‘Come on, come on!’ Yes, I know, pounding the button over and over wasn’t going to help. Like I cared at that point! One eye on the closed door to Quinn’s loft and my heart in my stomach, I pounded for all I was worth. ‘Come on, already!’
The elevator arrived, the doors swished open and I stepped inside the empty car and punched the button for the first floor. It was only a few seconds before the doors slid closed and when they did, I let go a shaky breath.
At least until Quinn stuck his arm between the doors and they popped back open again.
That would pretty much be when my heart stopped and my breathing did, too.
‘I hate the thought of you going down to the car by yourself.’ As smooth as silk, he joined me inside the elevator. I stepped back, but … well, elevator. There wasn’t much room for retreat. ‘It’s … what would you call it? It’s unchivalrous. And you know I’m anything but.’
The elevator doors closed and the car lurched.
I took another step away from the most important person in my life who was suddenly a stranger.
‘So …’ I was wedged into the corner of the elevator, and Quinn closed in. He braced a hand on the wall on either side of me. ‘You were saying, about those ashes.’
I’m not sure what I hoped to accomplish since my mouth was suddenly as dry as sand, but I ran my tongue over my lips. ‘What I was saying was that I wasn’t saying anything. I told you, I was just speculating. How could I possibly know where the ashes are?’
‘But you do.’
It was as simple as that, and he didn’t move a muscle or say another word, not even when the elevator bumped to a stop on the first floor and the doors swooshed open. Damn, there was no one waiting in the lobby.
I stepped forward.
Quinn didn’t move and I was forced to stay right where I was. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.
Somehow, I managed to meet his gaze. ‘I don’t know.’
The elevator doors shut.
Quinn moved a step closer and all the colors on all those parrots on his shirt blurred in front of my eyes. ‘I have all the time in the world,’ he said and there wasn’t one scrap of doubt in my head who that I was.
‘Being dead does have its advantages,’ I told Al Capone.
‘Who would have imagined it, huh?’ Like we weren’t discussing something so weird it would have made most peoples’ brains explode, he threw back his head and laughed in a very un-Quinn-like way. But then, the New York accent he’d suddenly acquired was very much not Quinn, either. ‘When you’re alive, you think dying is the end of the world! You know what I mean? And then you find out it’s not. That there’s more out there. More time. More things to do and places to go and people to—’
‘Possess?’
He cocked his head and studied me and the elevator car started moving again. ‘It could be worse,’ he said.
‘I doubt it.’
‘You would. From what I hear, that’s part of your problem. You doubt. And that makes you ask questions, and that means you stick your nose where it don’t belong. See, when you do stuff like that …’ He glided one finger down my neck and to the collar of shirt and inched it down to touch the bruises that still ringed my neck. ‘This is what happens when you ask too many questions. And see this?’ He fingered his left cheek. Quinn’s left cheek. And because I knew every plane and angle of it, because I’d traced it in the dark and covered it with kisses and because so many times I’d felt it against mine, I knew there wasn’t a scar on it. Yet his fingers traced the shape of a wound. ‘These here scars, this is what comes from sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.’
‘Then you should have learned a lesson.’
‘Oh, I have.’ His smile was sleek. ‘I’ve learned to survive. My way. No one else’s. I proved that, didn’t I? Eliot Ness …’ He gave the name a sour twist. ‘He thought he could keep me in my grave with that there stupid containment spell. You see how wrong he was? And once you tell me where his ashes are … well, that will take care of him once and for all. Finally, he’ll find out who’s really the boss.’
‘I told you I don’t know anything about the ashes.’
‘And I told you the world works the way I want it to. It always has and it always will. Don’t forget, my pretty lady, just because I have all the time in the world, doesn’t mean your friend here …’ He touched a finger to the front of the parrot shirt. ‘Your friend doesn’t.’
He reached back and hit the button on the door panel and the elevator bumped to a stop. The overhead light flickered.
‘You’re a pretty dame, but you’re not fooling anyone.’ He leaned nearer. ‘You’ve been through this. You know exactly what I’m talking about.’
There was no use denying it. Like it was no big deal, I tossed my head. ‘You’ll notice that Madeline Callahan, that ghost who tried to take my body, isn’t around anymore. I took care of her.’
‘And you think you can do the same with me?’ His chuckle was soft and guttural. ‘She was weak.’
‘And I’m a lot stronger than I look.’
‘And I don’t take no for an answer.’ He pushed himself against me, his mouth near my ear. ‘And I’ll promise you this …’
He didn’t touch the button, but the elevator started up again and my heart bounced into my throat. When the doors whooshed open, I recognized the hallway outside Quinn’s loft.
‘I’m staying,’ he said, his breath hot against my ear. ‘Until you bring me those ashes, I’m staying right here in this body, and the longer it takes, the less likely it is that there will be anything left of him to ever come back to you.’
He stepped off the elevator and into the hallway, but the doors didn’t close, not right away. That gave him a chance to tip an imaginary hat to me.
‘That is, unless you’d like me to jump out of this jamoke and into someone else.’
The doors slid shut, but not before he delivered his parting shot.
‘Like maybe your mother.’
I didn’t go home.
Quinn had a key to my apartment, and until I had a chance to get the locks changed, I wasn’t going to risk walking in and finding him there. And it’s not like I’d get a wink of sleep or a moment’s rest, anyway, not if I was listening for every creak of the floor and the telltale sounds of the door opening in the wee hours of the night.
With no place else to go (let’s face it, Mom and Dad’s wasn’t an option, not when the only talk I’d hear was wedding-this and wedding-that), I drove back to the cemetery and, since it closes at sunset, I entered through the back gate that the landscape and maintenance crews sometimes use when there’s a problem and they have to come or go after hours. I’m not brainless, I knew there was no way I was going to get any rest in my office. That wasn’t what I was looking for, and at that point, it didn’t much matter. I was so keyed up, so worried, and so scared out of my mind, I couldn’t sit still, anyway.
I paced.
And talked to myself.
I tried to sit still and ended up twirling in my desk chair until my brain spun and my vision blurred and my head ached, and when I couldn’t pace anymore and I couldn’t twirl for another second, and I had nothing left to say even to myself, I laid my head down on my desk and cried my eyes out.
Like tears usually do when the world is falling apart, it helped to let them flow, and when I finally stopped, and my eyes were red and swollen and my nose was sloppy, I made up my mind.
I had to find Eliot Ness’s ashes.
Fast.
I grabbed a legal pad and made a list, talking to myself while I scrawled line after nearly unintelligible line.
Wally looking for ashes.
So he knows they exist.
So he could have been the one who took them.
And killed Dean McClure.
‘It makes sense from an investigative standpoint.’
If I had even an ounce of energy left, I would have jumped at the sound of Eliot Ness’s voice. The way it was, I simply glanced over to my right and at the cloud suspended over my desk.
‘I need to find your ashes,’ I told him.
Was it possible for a man as professional as Ness to actually click his tongue? ‘I told you that right from the start.’
‘But now—’ I bit back the rest of the words that had almost slipped. How could I tell Ness that I wasn’t looking for the ashes so that he could rest in peace, but so that I could hand them over to Al Capone? I cleared the heaviness from my throat with a cough. ‘Where do we start?’
‘We start by being logical. By thinking clearly and dispassionately. Those tears of yours …’ He zipped in close, and I had a feeling he was looking me in the eye. ‘You’re upset.’
I wanted to tell him. Honest. But the words burned inside me like fire and it was too painful, I couldn’t force them out. ‘Quinn and I had a fight,’ I said.
‘Is he possessed like that friend of yours, that Beauchamp fellow, said he might be?’
‘He’s not my friend.’
If Ness noticed that I didn’t answer, he didn’t let on. ‘I was married three times, you know,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t much in the way of a faithful husband. I always had an eye for the ladies.’
‘That’s not Quinn’s problem,’ I told him in no uncertain terms.
‘I didn’t say it was. I just meant that I understand these little … let’s call them differences. We can’t let our emotions get in the way of our duties.’
‘Like finding your ashes.’
‘Exactly.’ He wafted toward the door. ‘Shall we get started?’
Of course we should. We had to. Only …
At the same time I stood, I raised my arms in the air and let them flop to my sides. ‘Where?’
‘Like your list says, with Wally, of course.’ Ness hovered near the door and I knew what he wanted. I opened it for him and allowed him to step … er … float into the hallway before me. ‘I think Capone must have possessed Wally, at least twice, possibly three times. It explains why he wasn’t acting like himself when he came in to clean up the broken bottle.’
‘Because Capone had slipped into him.’ I’d already thought of this, of course, but it didn’t hurt to say it out loud, just to keep the facts straight.
‘And I think Wally, with Capone’s spirit inside him, must have known about my ashes being in McClure’s home because now he knows they’re missing. Otherwise he wouldn’t be looking for them.’
‘Not only that, but I think he killed McClure,’ I told Ness because he hadn’t been around when I went to see Wally in the hospital that afternoon so he didn’t know this part of the story. ‘Wally doesn’t remember what happened for a chunk of the evening when McClure was killed, but he does remember that when he got home, there was blood on his clothes. If Capone possessed him, it isn’t Wally’s fault,’ I added with surprising oomph. Sure, Wally was Wally and a big ol’ pain in the neck, but I couldn’t stand the thought of an innocent man being accused of a murder. ‘Wally killed McClure, took the ashes, and then Capone must have de-possessed him. Or un-possessed him. Or whatever you want to call it.’
We’d been walking down the hallway as we talked, and we were in the reception area where Jennine usually greeted visitors. In the light of the security lamp outside above the door, I saw Ness sparkle above the maroon sweater she kept on the back of her chair. ‘You mean because—’
‘Because Wally stashed the ashes and Capone doesn’t know where they are.’ Before he could ask me how I knew this for sure, I provided him with the most logical answer. ‘When Capone possessed Wally again and went to get the ashes, Wally couldn’t find them. Capone has no idea where they are. It explains why Wally ripped his house apart.’
‘So when he wasn’t possessed—’
‘Wally put the ashes somewhere for safekeeping. But he doesn’t remember where because after a person’s been possessed, he’d kind of out of it for a while. I saw that with Ella and with my mom. So Wally forgot what he did with your ashes, and now it’s our job to figure out where he put them.’
And then do what with them?
The thought pounded through my head, but I couldn’t let it distract me. I couldn’t worry about Al Capone or about dashing Ness’s hopes for resting in peace. That was phase two of this operation. Phase one was all about finding the ashes.
There was a hallway directly opposite Jennine’s desk and I started down it and Ness followed along. ‘You have an idea?’ he asked.
I hated to admit I didn’t. Not a solid one, anyway.
‘Wally said he cleaned the employee locker room,’ I told Ness. ‘At least it’s somewhere we can start.’ I pushed open the doorway at the end of the hallway and headed down the stairs.
The Garden View employee locker room is one of those places I don’t visit very often. Since I’d had an office of my own ever since I worked at the cemetery, I’d never needed a place to stash my coat or my purse. Each employee and volunteer (there was an army of them, and they’re all history lovers or genealogist or cemetery geeks like Ella), has an assigned locker and the sign Ella had hanging just inside the door informed them that at the end of every shift, each locker had to be emptied and left open. (Yes, this does sound dictatorial, especially coming from warm and fuzzy Ella, but there’s the story of the volunteer who broke her leg on the way home from Garden View one day. And the operation that kept her from coming back for six weeks. And the tuna fish sandwich she’d stashed in her locker before she left on the day of the accident. Believe me, Ella was onto something with the open lockers!)
And as it turned out, I was, too, because the open lockers made it easy for me to see that Wally hadn’t tucked those ashes in any of the lockers.
‘Other possibilities?’ Ness asked when he saw my shoulders droop.
There were hundreds.
Together, Eliot Ness and I spent the next hours checking out every one of them. We searched every inch of the administration building. We rummaged through every desk. We checked out every office. Since he had the whole incorporeal thing going on (a definite advantage in this instance), I was the one who went through the trash – and since Wally had been in the hospital and it hadn’t been emptied and Max in accounting had a birthday that day and someone had brought in cupcakes with gooey chocolate icing …
In the conference room that also served as an employee break room, I grabbed a paper towel, scraped chocolate from my hands and kept the ‘Ew!’ to myself.
‘Nothing,’ I told Ness.
‘Not yet.’
I wondered if he was so annoyingly optimistic when he was alive or if it was a trait he’d acquired since. ‘I could go back to Wally’s,’ I suggested, not nearly as optimistic as he was, but far more desperate. ‘But I was there. I saw the way the house was torn apart. If the ashes were there, Wally would have found them. He obviously looked everywhere.’
Except …
‘What is it?’ Ness asked. ‘You look as if you’ve thought of something.’
‘The fire pit.’ I raced to my office for my keys and, even though I knew I’d be coming back since I had nowhere else to go, I locked up the administration building when I left. Ella was always the first one in the office every morning and I couldn’t take the chance that she’d find the building open when she arrived in just another hour or so.
Holding on to the fragile thread of hope, Ness and I arrived at Wally’s just as the sun came up over the horizon. If any of the neighbors was an early bird, I was ready with a story about how I was checking on the house for my dear coworker, but as it turned out, I didn’t need the lie. We walked out back and found the fire pit with four tree stumps set around it for chairs.
With one finger (and cringing the whole time) I poked through the ashes. They were heavy and wet.
‘Like they’ve been here all winter,’ I grumbled.
‘And no sign of the box my ashes were in,’ Ness added. ‘So I’m guessing my ashes aren’t mixed with those.’
It hit me like a brick there in Wally Birch’s backyard. How tired I was. How scared I was. How worried I was about Quinn’s safety and his health and his soul.
‘It’s an honor to work beside a person who takes the job so seriously,’ Ness said, and he wasn’t reading my mind; I think he could figure out how I felt from the way I dragged around to the front of the house and out to the car, my head hanging. ‘We’ve got to keep working at it, Pepper. You’ll see. What we’ve accomplished tonight is to eliminate a lot of possibilities. That means we’re getting closer and closer to finding the answer. And the ashes. And then …’ In the morning sunlight, what there was of Eliot Ness twinkled like stars and, yeah, I know the guy wasn’t living and he sure wasn’t breathing, but the sound he made reminded me of a person drawing in a lungful of fresh morning air and letting it out again with a whoosh to welcome the new day.
‘You’ll have my ashes,’ he assured me. ‘And then I’ll rest in peace.’
‘But—’ Honest to goodness, I wanted to explain that there were things going on that he didn’t know about, things that made me wonder what I would do once I got my hands on the ashes.
Would I take them right out to the newly filled lake behind the chapel so they could be sprinkled as they were supposed to have been sprinkled all those years ago?
Or would I turn them over to Al Capone to save Quinn’s life and give Capone the power to destroy Eliot Ness once and for all?
I was too tired to think through the problem and, besides, even when I tried, all it did was bring up more questions.
Like, who was I really working for?
Eliot Ness?
Or Al Capone?