Chapter 6

The next morning Jimmy updated me on his background searches into the Gloriana Alden-Taylor case.

“Zip on Myra Gordon. Emil Ramos looks fairly clean, considering that he’s such a hot-tempered political gadfly. Nothing but a few parking tickets, all promptly paid. But David Zhang ran into some financial problems six years back, right before he started Desert Trails. He got real comfy again real fast, and I haven’t found out why yet. Randall Ott looks promising, too. He’s in hot water with the Anti-Defamation League, La Raza, the NAACP.”

“Over Losing America?”

Jimmy shook his head. “That’s the interesting thing. Sure, the Civil Rights crowd has been complaining loud and long to the media about Ott’s faulty research and voodoo science, but I’m not talking about the book. The trouble is old trouble. When he was twelve, he got caught painting a swastika on a Scottsdale temple. Mommy and Daddy had to pay a big fine. At the ripe old age of fourteen, he and a few fellow travelers turned loose a grease-covered pig in a United Farm Workers’ meeting—his parents paid for that, too. A year later, he was caught defacing a billboard advertising a Marvin Gaye concert. He actually did a stint in juvie for that.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Granted, that’s old history,” Jimmy continued, “when he was your basic addle-brained delinquent. Apparently he cleaned up his act when he began writing. In a manner of speaking.”

I tsk-tsked. “They’re going to catch you some day, hacking into those files.”

He responded with a sly grin. “I cover my tracks. But you haven’t heard the best part yet. Lynn Tinsley? The honorable congresswoman?” He sat back in his chair, an expectant look on his face.

I played along. “I await your news with bated breath, oh Great Master of Cyberspace.”

Gratified, he said, “Seven years ago, before she ran for the House, she was picked up for shoplifting a silk scarf from Neiman Marcus.”

I flashed on Tinsley, with her too-teased hair, her frou-frou dress, her incongruous spike heels sinking into the dirt at WestWorld. So miss Girly Girl was a regular Miss Misdemeanor. “How’d it play out?”

“Charges dropped. Everything hushed up. Not even a fine.”

“Hmm.” Could Gloriana have found out this dirt and threatened Tinsley? And if so, why? What would Gloriana have to gain? The obvious answer was help with legislation of some sort, possibly exempting bulk book sales from state sales tax.

“Jimmy, keep checking on Tinsley, and keep an eye out for whatever legislation she’s sponsored in the last couple of years.”

“Gloriana-type legislation?”

“Exactly. And while you’re at it, I want you to look at that librarian again. I’ve got a feeling about her.”

“Will do.”

As his fingers flew over the keyboard, I placed a call to Dr. Deborah Mendelson, the dermatologist who had tried to save Gloriana’s life. The woman who answered the phone told me the doctor was having a busy morning and would have to call me back.

I left my number, as well as a brief explanation, and proceeded to burrow into the stacks of paperwork generated by various cases both past and present. Whoever forecasted that computers would create a paperless office had been sorely mistaken. Paper usage was up, not down. While I was on the phone to Office Max begging for new filing cabinets to be delivered to Desert Investigations as soon as possible, my second phone line lit up. Caller ID notified me that Dr. Mendelson was returning my call, so I picked up, leaving the Office Max clerk in the lurch.

“Dr. Mendelson, I’m a detective working the Gloriana Alden-Taylor murder case, and I’d like to ask you some questions.”

A long silence, then, “Detective with whom, may I ask? Your prefix isn’t right for Scottsdale PD.”

No dummy, this doc. “I used to be with Scottsdale PD, but now I’m a private detective brought into the case by Owen Sisiwan’s family. As you probably have heard, he’s been charged with Gloriana’s murder.”

Another silence, shorter this time. “I remember Mr. Sisiwan. He seemed like a nice man. Ms. Alden-Taylor told him to sit in the hallway while she ate lunch, which I thought rather unkind. I asked her if I might take him something to eat, but she told me to mind my own business. Look, Ms. Jones, I only have a couple of minutes before my next patient comes in, so we’d better make this quick.”

I’m no dummy, either, and I had my questions ready. “What made you think Gloriana’s death wasn’t natural? The captain in charge of the case said you alerted the EMTs immediately.”

“Ms. Alden-Taylor’s symptoms were clearly not those of a heart attack or stroke. At first I thought she might be choking on something she ate, but when I rendered aid, I found her air passages were swollen almost completely shut. After she expired, I remembered that the garnish on her salad didn’t look quite the same as mine. That, coupled with her symptoms, ran up a red flag, so I shared my suspicions with the EMTs. They took it from there.”

From her end of the phone, I heard a quick buzz.

“My patient’s here, Ms. Jones. You’ll need to call me at another time if you want anything else.” With a soft click, Dr. Mendelson hung up.

I drummed my fingers on my desk until Jimmy turned away from his computer and asked, “Problems?”

“Just the usual nobody-knows-nothing. I’m really beginning to worry about Owen.”

He didn’t say anything for a second, then, “We’re all worried about him, especially his wife.” He told me about his visit with her the night before, of the dire straits Owen’s family would endure without his paycheck. “The money he was getting from the G.I. Bill stopped when Owen’s work schedule kept him from attending classes at Scottsdale Community College. Our family’s doing what they can, but that’s not much.”

During my bill-paying frenzy the night before, I had also written out a check to help Owen’s wife buy groceries, but that wouldn’t help her long-term problem. Like most of the Pima Indians out on the Salt River-Maricopa Reservation, the Sisiwans had little money. Life had begun to look up since the Pima casinos had opened on the eastern edge of Scottsdale, but it would take time for the tribe to complete its climb out of poverty. War hero or not, Owen was as broke as everybody else on the Rez.

Thinking about Owen’s real-life problems made my own nightmares fade. “You’re visiting him tonight, right?”

“Yeah. Esther and I’ll drive over to the jail after work.”

“Tell him not to worry, that I’ll have him out of there in no time.”

I hoped my voice sounded more optimistic than I felt.

***

When I parked the Jeep in front of Zachary Alden-Taylor VI’s house, I allowed myself a moment of surprise. I had imagined that Gloriana’s grandson would live in grander digs, but I’d been wrong. Granted, South Scottsdale had never been known for its high-toned mansions—we left that sort of thing up to our posher kin to the north—but Scottsdale was still Scottsdale, right?

The street, while not exactly slummy, was lined with the kind of small, inexpensive tract homes you would find in any working class Arizona neighborhood. Bargain-basement stucco painted in ice cream colors attempted to relieve the monotony, but Zachary’s house wouldn’t have looked out of place in Appalachia. Its roof sagged, a sheet of crumpled aluminum foil patched a broken front window, and the indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the a-kilter porch had been ripped in several places, exposing the crumbling concrete pad beneath. The tiny lawn surrounding this wreck had long ago given up its fight for life and had let the desert take over. Someone had money troubles.

I stepped carefully up the short walk, dodging a couple of skittering scorpions, yet feeling my spirits rise. I could almost hear Owen’s cell door open.

When I reached up to knock on the ripped screen door, though, a yellow flier fluttering from the knob temporarily drove Owen from my mind. Over the photograph of a blond-haired child, the headline on the flier read, MISSING: A FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN. At the bottom was an invitation to join the National Alliance.

They were recruiting in Scottsdale now? I looked back along the street and saw yellow fliers on each door.

As I stood on the porch, wondering if I’d break any laws if I ripped the flier away (and if I cared), the screen door opened. A tall, dark-haired beauty with vivid blue eyes smiled down at me. “I told Boz you were coming for him and he’s very excited.”

Boz? “I don’t think.…”

She opened the screen door further, and I saw a small black and brown dog grinning up at me from between Beauty’s ankles. Regardless of the fact that he was a mere Heinz 57 mutt, he had been groomed within an inch of his life and reeked of Giorgio.

“Cute dog,” I said. “But I.…”

“Get in here quick before somebody gets out.” She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a tiny living room, which, after the bright sunlight outside, seemed barroom dark. As the screen door snapped shut behind me, the scent of Eau de Kitty Litter replaced the Giorgio. Even in the gloom I could make out a startling assortment of animals perched upon every conceivable piece of furniture. More dogs, cats, even several rabbits swarmed across a tatty, tweed-patterned carpet. The few areas not covered with shed hair and/or animals were heaped with books.

Beauty, whom I now saw was very pregnant, chattered on about Boz and paperwork. Surreptitiously, I stuffed the National Alliance flier into my carry-all.

“You’ll need to fill out some papers swearing on the life of your first-born that you won’t keep him on a chain in the backyard and other evil stuff like that, then you can take him home.” She looked down at the grinning dog, who took that as a cue to chase his tail. “Would you like that, Boz? Would you like that?”

Boz paused in his tail-chasing to bark an affirmative.

Yes, a very cute dog, but not for me. This big dog hunted alone. “Look, ma’am, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” I said. “I’m not here about Boz.”

Beauty scrunched her face, which didn’t even begin to mar her astonishing looks. “Then you’re not Mrs. Howell?”

“No, but it looks like Mrs. Howell is getting a great little dog.”

Upon hearing the word dog, Boz made a beeline for my ankle, which he then proceeded to lick as if it had been slathered in liver. A ratty-looking white cat hissed at him from the corner.

“Bad dog, Boz. Bad cat, Andrew,” Beauty said, obviously not meaning it. Then she leaned over—with difficulty, due to her prominent belly—and tugged the dog away from me by his collar. “Don’t lick her, Boz.”

I dug into my carry-all and handed her a card. “Lena Jones, Desert Investigations.”

She released the dog’s collar and her friendly face closed down. “I told you. It’s being taken care of.”

Interesting. Beauty had confused me with someone else yet again, even after I’d identified myself as a private detective.

Boz, sensing that something had upset his mistress, began to growl. A few other dogs joined the hostile chorus, making the room sound like the tuba section of the Scottsdale Symphony.

“Bad dogs!” This time she meant it. Boz and friends shut up, but Beauty’s own voice turned to a growl when she said, “You’d better leave, Ms. Jones. And you can tell the people who hired you that this is getting ridiculous. Tell them to mind their own business and I’ll mind mine.”

People who hired me? “Look, Mrs. Alden-Taylor, if that’s who you are, I don’t know who you think I am, but I’ve been retained by Owen Sisiwan’s family to investigate Gloriana Alden-Taylor’s murder.”

The frown left her face. “Oh. I thought.…” She gave me a shame-faced smile. “The neighbors have been getting pretty irritated about my beasties, and.…Never mind. That problem’s about to disappear. As to Owen, the very idea that he would hurt a hair on Gloriana’s head is ludicrous. Zach and I have such faith in his innocence that we’re in the process of hiring an attorney for him right now. Here, take a seat. And yeah, I’m Mrs. Alden-Taylor, but call me Megan. Not even Gloriana used that pretentious double-barreled name.”

I looked around at the various mounds of fur dozing on the sofa and chairs. “Er.…”

“Just move somebody.”

My eyes now accustomed to the dim light, I picked my way through the swarming mass of dogs and cats to the dingy La-Z-Boy recliner near a sofa which the cats had obviously been using for a claw-sharpening post. I leaned over the chair and picked up the fat black Persian whose hair, I hoped, wouldn’t look too grungy against my black jeans and T-shirt. Then I sat down, lifting the “beastie” onto my lap. Through all this, the cat never moved, other than to increase the volume of his purrs.

Megan nestled herself on the ragged sofa between two stacks of books, whereupon two elderly cats, arthritic bones poking through beautifully groomed coats, immediately draped themselves over her thighs. She appeared not to notice the clumps of white and gray fur adhering to her denim maternity jeans. “All settled in now?” she asked them.

After they purred their assent, she addressed herself to my own lap-warmer. “Poor Black Bart, does Mama need to blow your nose?” Then, to me, “Pig-faced Persians frequently have breathing difficulties. Oh. My manners. Would you like some iced tea? I’ve got some made.” She started to get up, whereupon her two cats yowled in protest.

I waved away the offer of tea, taking care not to dislodge Black Bart, whose purrs now revealed themselves to be catarrhal snorts. “Actually, I’m here to see Mr. Alden-Ta…, uh, Zachary, if that would be possible.”

She shook her head, glossy brown hair rippling like a waterfall at midnight. With her deeply tanned face and vivid blue eyes, the effect was stunning, and I wondered if she had once been a model. If so, judging from the shambles around her, she’d certainly married down.

“Zach’s at the office. He’s the managing editor of Patriot’s Blood Press, you know, and with Gloriana dead, there is a mountain of details for him to tackle. Canceling most of the summer catalog, for one. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but you wouldn’t believe some of the garbage his grandmother was about to publish.”

Neither Megan nor Zach sounded like National Alliance recruitment material, so I fished the flier out of my carry-all and thrust it at her. “This was stuck on your front door.”

She looked at it and scowled. “Fucking Nazis.” Then she wadded the flier up into a ball and rolled it across the floor, where several cats began to fight over shredding rights. “Jesus, to think that after all we’ve been through, Americans can still hate each other.”

“Why do you think the National Alliance picked this neighborhood to recruit from?” Unlike North Scottsdale’s mostly White enclaves, South Scottsdale was racially mixed, with a large Hispanic and Asian contingent.

“Probably because of the economy,” Megan answered. “There’ve been a lot of layoffs around here, and these Aryan knuckleheads believe it’s because minorities have taken all the jobs. The fact that corporate corruption might have something to do with it never enters their pointy heads. That’s what Zach says, anyway, and I totally agree with him.”

Given such a liberal mind-set, I wondered how her husband could bear to work for Patriot’s Blood in the first place. This wasn’t the time to ask.

Instead, I said, “It’s nice to hear that your husband is making some changes at Patriot’s Blood. So he inherits?”

“Of course. He’s executive editor and publisher now, which is only right. Other than Sandra, Vicky, and the aunts, he’s Gloriana’s only surviving relative.”

“Vicky?”

Megan brushed a cat hair off her cheek. “Victoria. Gloriana’s daughter. But given her refusal to run Patriot’s Blood, the chances of her inheriting anything sizeable have always been minimal. Same for Gloriana’s older sisters, Leila and Lavelle. Identical twins. I heard through the family grapevine that Gloriana was thinking about taking over their affairs, but I don’t know exactly why. They’re not senile. Anyway, as I was saying, most of the estate comes to Zach.”

She looked around at her wreck of a house. “Gloriana’s death is sad, of course, and don’t think I don’t care, because I do. But with the baby coming and everything else going on around here, we really need a bigger place. Zach’s moving us into the Hacienda, up by the Paradise Valley Country Club. I’ll admit that I’m a little worried about how those folks will react to my menagerie, but maybe we can work it out. The Hacienda is isolated and the lot’s certainly big enough. Twenty rooms on three acres.”

Megan and her husband would need every inch of it, too. I had already counted seventeen cats and six dogs. I couldn’t get a fix on the rabbits, because they stayed on the move. Or hop.

Animals weren’t the only problem in the house, though. Several overflowing, mismatched bookcases lined the battered walls, with even more books stacked in tall columns on the fur-covered carpet. A glance at the pile nearest me revealed Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Dean Koontz’s The Watchers, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and more than a dozen mysteries. Talk about eclectic taste.

“My animals need all the room they can get, so in one way, the Hacienda is the answer to a prayer,” Megan continued. “On the downside, the place is pretty old and the upkeep is astronomical. If we sold it, along with the acreage up north, we’d have more options. Maybe we could even buy a little ranch out in the desert where there are no neighbors or zoning to worry about, and build a no-kill animal shelter. I am so sick of complaining neighbors.”

I remembered Megan’s reaction when she found out I wasn’t here to adopt Boz. “How much do they complain?”

She frowned. “Last week they drew up a petition saying that if I don’t get rid of my strays they’d take legal action. They don’t care anything about the suffering that goes on out there, the dogs being dropped off in the desert, the cats being tortured, the poor ‘Easter Bunnies’ abandoned in the park to die a week after Easter.…”

Having a soft spot for animals myself, I sympathized. “Did they give you a deadline?”

“Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” Her voice was as gloomy as the room.

I wished her well, but her pet problem wasn’t mine. I was about to ask her about funeral arrangements when I heard squeals coming from the direction of the backyard.

“Megan, did I hear a pig?”

She nodded. “That’s Emma. One of those shady pet shops sold her as a miniature Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, but of course she wasn’t. When she grew too large, her owners dumped her at the pound. That’s where our rescuers found her.”

“Rescuers?” I wondered idly how the country club set would react to sharing their neighborhood with a pig.

“Oh. I thought you knew. I’m founder and president of Save Our Friends. Besides myself, about fifty volunteers take in strays and castoffs. We spay and neuter them, give them their shots, then foster them out to various homes until we find permanent adoptive parents. That’s who I thought you were, Boz’s new mom. She’s due any minute now. Are you sure you don’t want a dog? Or a cat? We have plenty up for adoption, and I can tell that you’re good with animals. Black Bart certainly likes you.”

Black Bart sneezed, depositing something nasty-looking on my jeans. “I’m allergic to cats. Dogs, too,” I lied. “You mentioned something about Gloriana’s daughter, that she refused to have anything to do with Patriot’s Blood. Why?”

“Vicky has her own business to worry about. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She works under the name of Sappho.”

The name rang a bell, a bell that wasn’t tied to the classical Greek poet. “The film-maker?”

“That’s her. She’s won a couple of Sundance awards, and I think there’s a pretty good chance she’ll actually snag an Oscar nomination with her new film, a documentary about gay archetypes in the Old West. She hasn’t released it yet, but Zach and I have seen the rough cut and it’s brilliant.”

During the past decade, Scottsdale had become a haven for creative types fleeing Hollywood’s increasingly congested film colony, and I had met more than my share of actors, producers, and directors. Despite the public’s perception, not all were wealthy. A big inheritance would buy a lot of expensive movie equipment.

“Did Vicky know her mother was leaving almost everything to Zach?” If not, she wouldn’t have been the first person to murder someone while operating under the false belief of future riches.

“Of course she knew. Gloriana was up front about it, just like Gloriana was up front about me and my…ah, that she didn’t like me.”

I found this admission surprising. Although Megan’s home was obviously a wreck and her bond with her strays a bit much, she seemed likeable enough to me. “What did she have against you?” I asked.

Megan scowled. “What didn’t she have against me! For starters, she didn’t like the fact that Zach married one of his students. That’s where we met, in his creative writing class at ASU. For seconds, she didn’t like animals, and I was already involved in Save Our Friends. But the real deal-breaker was that I didn’t have the right bloodlines. I’m Italian, but it wasn’t the Italian thing she minded so much. After all, Christopher Columbus was Italian. What she hated was that my family came over on the wrong boat.” She laughed and tossed that glorious chestnut mane again. “As far as Gloriana was concerned, any boat but the Mayflower was the wrong boat. My grandparents arrived in steerage, on some leaky liner in the early 1900s, so you can see how many points that made with her.”

I frowned. “She cared that much about heredity?”

The laughter died. “Sounds like you didn’t know her.”

I pretended ignorance. No point in telling her about my encounter with Gloriana at the Chamber of Commerce mixer. “Megan, at this point, I only know that Gloriana was wealthy, owned a publishing house, and got herself murdered.” I’ll probably go to Hell for all the lies I tell.

Megan didn’t answer right away, simply stroked her lap cats, making them purr even louder. Then, as if coming to a difficult decision, she leaned forward as far as her belly would allow, and looked me straight in the eye. “I’m sorry, but I really disliked the woman. So that means you’ll have to take everything I say about her with a grain of salt.”

“Point taken.” I tried not to let my amusement show. She was the first person I had ever met who apologized for disliking an in-law.

“Gloriana was aggressive about her snobbery. You could have won the Nobel Peace Prize or cured cancer, but as far as she was concerned, it didn’t make any difference if you had the wrong ancestry. The only thing she cared about, and I’m not exaggerating here, was a person’s last name. Especially her own. The damned Aldens. And the double-damned, slave-owning Taylors.”

Considering Gloriana’s remarks about my own DNA, I found Megan’s statement odd. Or maybe there’d been a Jones on the Mayflower; I’d have to check. But Megan’s comment did offer the chance to clear up a question that had intrigued me since I’d first heard of Gloriana. “Those double-barreled names are pretty rare outside England, aren’t they?”

Megan smiled. “Feminists love them, too, don’t forget. But I’ll have to give the devil her due on that subject, at least. Gloriana didn’t start that hyphen stuff. It happened back in the eighteen hundreds, when one of the lesser Alden women married a lesser grandson of Zachary Taylor. Two losers basking in the reflected glory of their ancestors. Today the damned name’s nothing but trouble. With the hyphen, nobody knows how to file your name. Alden or Taylor? Taylor or Alden? Your insurance and mortgage records get screwed up.…”

Suddenly her face changed, and she shoved the cats aside to pat her stomach. “He’s dancing again,” she said. “Want to feel?”

No, I didn’t. Instead, I sat quietly for a moment, watching the wonder on her face. Had my mother ever looked like that when I was growing inside her?

Probably not. If she had, she wouldn’t have shot me.

After a while, Megan settled back and let the cats climb back onto her lap. “I sound self-centered, don’t I? Going on and on, as if I didn’t care about the poor woman getting murdered.”

Not really. Megan was merely a pregnant woman with more immediate worries than the death of an in-law who had disliked her. At least she was honest. I took the opportunity to steer her back to her original subject. “You were talking about Gloriana’s ancestry. Actually, it surprises me that a woman with her background would run something like Patriot’s Blood. Why didn’t she use her money for more, um, tasteful projects. Charity work, for instance?”

“That’s how little you know,” Megan said.

Regardless of Gloriana’s Plymouth Brethren connections, Megan explained, the Aldens never did as well in trade as the other Mayflower families. Then, as the Pilgrim blood thinned through the centuries, Gloriana’s branch had degenerated into near penury. But Gloriana, who had apparently been quite the looker in her youth, married a fairly well-heeled stockbroker. When he keeled over from a coronary at the Phoenix Open Golf Tournament, she inherited his seven-figure estate, and the Alden-Taylors were relatively flush again.

“Zach tells me that she blew a lot of it fixing up the Hacienda,” Megan said. “By then, she’d started Patriot’s Blood magazine, and the profits helped stem the flow. Then something happened that changed everything.”

She told me that in the Eighties and Nineties, the large New York publishing houses had merged into conglomerates. “The country wound up with, what, six major houses? And some of those houses had offshore owners, typically the Europeans. They brought in MBAs who fired editors wholesale, released writers from their contracts.…It was a literary bloodbath.”

I looked at the books piled beside her, around the room. “Looks to me like there are still plenty of books to go around.”

“Take a look at the spines,” she said. “Most of these come from publishing houses you’ve never heard of. Niche houses.”

Before I could ask what that meant, she explained.

“Niche houses are small, specialist presses like Patriot’s Blood, companies who had the foresight to sign the writers the big houses released, even some new writers. Companies who were willing to take a chance on people not named Stephen King or John Grisham.”

Her eyes took on a dreamy look. “You know, for a while I wanted to be a writer myself. That’s why I was in Zach’s creative writing class.”

The revelation didn’t surprise me. I could easily see Megan writing sensitive stories from an animal’s point of view, possibly creating something like a modern version of Black Beauty. Or maybe even one of those cat detective books.

She patted her stomach. “As it turned out, I didn’t want it enough. There were other things I wanted more. Like Zach. And all the little live things.” She leaned over and nuzzled the cats. “That’s a Wallace Stegner title, All the Little Live Things. I’d planned to be like Stegner, to write the story of the Southwest. Instead, I got Zach and all my own little live things. And now my baby. I guess love isn’t a bad trade-off for a writing career, is it?”

Given my own background, I had no idea. But I did know that if Megan loved her baby only half as much as she obviously did her strays, the baby would have a wonderful life. A wave of jealousy swept over me for a moment, and only with difficulty did I manage to quash it. What had Jim Morrison sung in that Doors song? “Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.”

I remembered my mother firing her gun in my face. My own endless night.

“Lena? Are you all right?”

I forced a smile. Never let them see you bleed. “Probably a touch of indigestion. You were talking about Patriot’s Blood. Was it successful right away?”

“To a certain extent,” Megan continued, stroking a tiny white kitten which had climbed up her leg to join the elderly nappers. “But it became more so when she began publishing books. Everyone knew Gloriana’s background, so even in the beginning she had an in with researchers who were working on books about the Founding Fathers. She signed them, and the reviews were good, but the income wasn’t great. And Gloriana liked money, so she decided to, as she put it, ‘broaden the company’s publishing guidelines.’ Zach had no idea how far she’d go. God, you should see the stuff in her latest catalog.”

“I’ve seen a brochure.” The titles alone should be good for a few more nightmares.

Megan gave a little shudder, making one of the old cats grumble in complaint. “The full catalog’s even worse. Gloriana didn’t originally plan to publish that type of material, but.…” Her shudder turned to a shrug. “Well, once she got started with books like Randall Ott’s, most of her original authors deserted her. She didn’t care. Why should she, when she was making money like she’d never dreamed of? That’s what Gloriana was all about, money. At the expense of everything decent.”

“Was she aware of how you and Zach felt about the new editorial direction?”

The anger in her face hardly marred her beauty. “Of course she was. Zach fought her tooth and nail, but Gloriana didn’t care.” Her former glow returned. “Everything will change now, though. Zach will return Patriot’s Blood to its original mission, maybe even start publishing some literary fiction. I’d like to see him do a nice mystery line, to tell you the truth. These days, it seems like mystery novels are the only places where good triumphs over evil. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? People like Gloriana.…Well, she suckered Zach into coming to work for her by telling him he could head up a new fiction imprint. Then as soon as he resigned from ASU and came on board as her managing editor, she changed her mind. Or maybe she’d simply been leading him on in the first place. Whatever the truth, by then I was pregnant.”

I asked the expected question. “When are you due?”

“In forty-five days. It’s a boy. We promised Gloriana we’d name him Zachary Alden-Taylor VII, but now maybe we can just call him Joe. Or name him after my father. Marcello. Now there’s a beautiful name.”

I was getting ready to ask her another question when the doorbell rang. Dogs, cats, and rabbits scattered in all directions.

Megan lumbered to her feet, but not before gently placing her lap cats on the floor. “That must be Mrs. Howell to collect Boz.” Did I detect a note of relief in her voice?

Boz, hearing his name, chased his tail again, and woofed.

I knew a good exit line when I heard one, so as Megan opened the door to a short, middle-aged woman bearing a leash and a big smile, I waved goodby. I stepped outside just in time to see the door open at the house across the street. A rumpled-looking man in stained overalls lifted the National Alliance flier from his doorknob. He stood there reading it for a moment, but instead of crumpling it into a ball, he nodded.

Then he went back inside, taking the flier with him.