You Only Live Nine Times, page 8
"Humans and their ridiculous secrets," Scarlett scoffed, but her eyes glinted with interest. "Whatever it is, it must be important if they're both so worked up about it."
"I hope Tommy will be all right." The concern in Vashti’s voice was genuine.
"Maybe we should keep an ear out for—" Homer began, but stopped abruptly at the sound of Rachel's footsteps on the wrought-iron staircase.
"Act natural!" Scarlett hissed.
By the time Rachel opened the door, Scarlett had arranged herself into a convincing portrait of feline slumber, Homer had (to Scarlett’s annoyance) curled up not far from her on the couch, and Vashti was perched elegantly on the windowsill as if she'd been watching the night sky for hours.
Rachel entered with a weary but satisfied sigh. She kicked off her kitten heels and sank onto the couch beside Scarlett, who gave an Oscar-worthy performance of having been deeply asleep until that very moment.
"What a night," Rachel murmured, scratching Scarlett behind the ears. "I wish you guys could have seen it."
Scarlett purred innocently and butted her head against Rachel’s hand. Homer padded over and jumped into her lap, his nose twitching at the symphony of scents that clung to Rachel—dozens of perfumes and colognes, the paper and ink of newly signed books, lingering notes of wine and Danny's culinary creations. He pressed his head against her chest, feeling the steady rhythm of her heartbeat. Vashti stretched languorously on the windowsill before leaping down to join them, settling against Rachel's side with elegant grace.
"Dorothea was thrilled," Rachel told them. "Said it was the most successful event Title Wave has ever hosted." She yawned and rubbed Homer affectionately behind the ears. "Tommy and I were supposed to go out and celebrate, but honestly, I'm kind of glad to be home with you three."
Homer purred in response, kneading Rachel's thigh gently with his paws. Her triumph was their triumph, after all.
Hours later, long after Rachel had gone to bed, Homer found himself suddenly awake. His ears swiveled toward the bedroom window, detecting something on the quiet pre-dawn street below. A shuffling sound, then silence. Then more shuffling.
Carefully extracting himself from Rachel's side, Homer made his way to the window where Vashti had been sleeping earlier. He pressed his face against the glass, his whiskers detecting the slightest vibrations from outside.
Someone was down there, moving slowly, erratically. A familiar scent drifted up through the partially opened window—Daisy’s perfume, mingled with that strange, elusive smell he'd noticed earlier. Homer heard a soft thump, then nothing more.
He stayed at the window for a long time, waiting for more sounds, more movement. But there was nothing, even as the first hints of morning light began to filter through the darkness.
Whatever—or whoever—was down there had gone completely still.
Nick Torres stared out the window of his office, where morning light glinted off the tawny façade of the Spanish-style apartment building that faced him across Allamanda Avenue. At forty-five, the salt-and-pepper at his temples had started creeping further into his dark hair, and the laugh lines around his eyes had deepened—evidence of twenty years with the Coacoochee Police Department and five as Chief.
Spread in front of him was Isabella Stuart’s latest column in the weekend edition of the Miami Daily News, which contained a detailed write-up of the previous night’s book-signing for Danny Elliott over at Title Wave. An untidy pile on Nick’s desk also contained Palm and a sampling of the other local papers and ‘zines that covered Coacoochee’s social scene. His wife, Elena, teased him about reading “the society pages,” but in a town as small as Coacoochee it never hurt to know who the players were and what they looked like.
Nick sipped his coffee, grimacing at how quickly it had cooled despite the mug's alleged insulating properties. On his desk, framed photos caught the sunlight: eight-year-old Hanna with her science fair trophy, six-year-old Lucas in his Little League uniform, both kids flanking him and Elena at last year's Halloween parade. Thinking about his family always made Nick smile, but the coffee was truly irredeemable. With a sigh, he set down the mug and decided to treat himself to a fresh cup and maybe even a bear claw (what Elena didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her) over at Beachy Beans, only a block down Allamanda Avenue from police headquarters.
It never failed to astonish him how quiet Allamanda was on a Saturday morning. All Nick could hear now were soft ocean breezes sweeping through the royal palms and riotous yellow allamandas that grew in the medians of the four-lane road. By sundown, Allamanda Avenue would be a carnival of club kids in outrageous getups, high schoolers with shoddy fake IDs trying to sneak into nightclubs owned by Prince or patronized by Madonna, the stop-and-go gridlock of rented convertibles blaring dance music from their radios next to cabs containing locals who knew better than to try to find parking on Allamanda after dark.
The Coacoochee Police Department headquarters, located at the intersection of Allamanda and Eleventh Street, was an enormous, gleaming-white, Art Deco relic. The portion of the exterior façade that faced the street was a profusion of curved walls and round porthole windows. Back in the wild and woolly Eighties—when cocaine and cash had flowed so freely, corruption on the force had been more common than colds—there was a joke that the Coacoochee Police Department was so crooked, even the building that housed it couldn’t manage a straight line.
But Chief Nick Torres had always played by the rules. The corrupt cops he’d come up with had, for the most part, been rounded up in sting operations by the time the early Nineties rolled around. Nick had been among the scrupulous core that remained, and it had formed the nucleus of the spotless police department he oversaw today.
Nick had just made it to the front of the line at Beachy Beans when a call came in over his handheld transceiver. "Chief, it's Martinez." Officer Jessica Martinez's normally calm voice held a note of tension. "We've got a body on Hibiscus Road. Found just outside the entrance to Title Wave Books."
Nick reluctantly turned away from the counter and stepped outside. As he did so he held the door open for Mrs. Hernandez, one of Allamanda Avenue’s last remaining elderly residents, who came in every morning for coffee and pastelitos. "Accident? Homicide?"
"Can't tell yet, sir. No obvious signs of violence, but..." Jessica paused. "It's Daisy Locarro. The jogger who found her knew her socially."
Fifteen minutes later, Nick ducked under the yellow tape cordoning off the area in front of Title Wave Books. Morning tourists clustered at the perimeter, their faces wearing that particular mix of morbid fascination and discomfort that the proximity of death always seemed to inspire.
Martinez met him halfway to the body. "ME's on her way," she said. "Scene's undisturbed."
Nick’s eyes scanned the crowd. "Who found her?"
"Early morning jogger. Tends bar at the Tenth Street Diner at night. He's over there, pretty shaken up." Martinez gestured toward a man wrapped in a shock blanket, sitting on a bench.
“Any signs of a struggle?"
"None. No visible injuries. Nothing that looks like foul play."
Nick nodded, his instincts already prickling. Something felt wrong. Daisy was young—mid-twenties at most. People that age didn't typically drop dead on sidewalks for no reason.
He noticed movement at Title Wave's entrance. Rachel Baum, the new manager Dorothea Wilson had brought in a few months ago, stood in the doorway. Her olive-complected face was drained of color, looking even paler next to the tousled brown-black curls that framed it. Beside her stood Tommy Duvall, who wrote for Palm magazine, with an arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. His usually animated face was unnaturally still.
"Has anyone notified next of kin?" Nick asked.
Martinez shook her head. "We’re working on it. She has a mother in Palm Beach, but they weren't close according to the neighbors we've spoken with."
"Keep me posted," Nick said, his eyes still on Rachel and Tommy. "I'll talk to them after the ME's done here."
By late afternoon, Nick sat at his desk reviewing the Medical Examiner's preliminary report. Dr. Edwidge Michel sat across from him, her white lab coat immaculate despite the morning's work.
"Cardiac arrest," she said, tapping a manila folder containing her notes. "Unusual in someone her age, but not unheard of. No external trauma, no defensive wounds, no signs of sexual assault."
"Toxicology?" Nick asked.
"Preliminary results show no common recreational drugs, nothing unusual." She adjusted her glasses. "If I had to guess, I'd say undiagnosed congenital heart defect. It happens."
"Anything else?"
"Nothing that would point to homicide." Dr. Michel closed her folder. "I know it feels wrong, Nick. A young, healthy-looking woman found dead. But sometimes nature just has bad timing."
Nick nodded, though he wasn't entirely convinced. He was about to ask another question when Commissioner Carpenter appeared in the doorway—a bearish man in his sixties with bushy white eyebrows that seemed perpetually furrowed.
"Dr. Michel," he acknowledged with a nod, before turning his attention to Nick. "Torres, a word?"
Dr. Michel gathered her materials and made a graceful exit. The Commissioner didn't bother sitting down.
"Please tell me this isn't going to be a problem," he said. "We're six weeks from Season. The last thing Coacoochee needs is tourists thinking there's a killer on the loose."
"The ME's preliminary finding is natural causes," Nick replied carefully. "Cardiac arrest. Possibly an undiagnosed heart condition."
Relief flashed across Commissioner Carpenter’s face. "That's good. Sign off on it and let's move on. We've got the Halloween parade coming up in a few weeks. City Hall's breathing down my neck about keeping Coacoochee's image squeaky clean."
After the Commissioner left, Nick stared at the preliminary death certificate on his desk. The official cause of death read "Cardiac Arrest—Natural Causes." All he had to do was sign it, and the case would be officially closed.
He thought about Daisy, of her age and apparent health. He thought about how lively and vivacious she’d always seemed every time their paths had crossed.
With a sigh, he signed the certificate. Officially, Daisy Locarro had died of natural causes.
Mentally, though, Nick filed it under "not quite closed"—a special category he'd maintained for years, reserved for cases that technically met all the requirements for closure but still left that persistent, nagging itch of doubt in the back of his mind.
As he packed up to head home, Nick glanced at his desk calendar. It would be a couple more weeks before the third Sunday of the month rolled around—Title Wave’s Story Time, which he never missed with Hanna and Lucas. Maybe Nick would find a reason to pop in before then. It might give him a chance to observe Rachel Baum and the other bookstore regulars more closely. Not as Chief of Police investigating a case, which he absolutely wasn't doing. He was simply a customer with a healthy curiosity about the place where a young woman had spent her final evening before dying unexpectedly on the sidewalk outside.
He closed his office door, locking it behind him. Maybe Daisy Locarro really had died of natural causes. But in Nick's twenty years of police work, he'd learned that coincidences often weren't coincidences at all—and timing was rarely just bad luck.
The paperback thriller the customer handed Rachel had a lurid cover featuring a red-headed woman with shockingly white skin. The woman was spilling out of a low-cut dress and appeared to be dead, although maybe she was just unconscious.
Looking at the cover now, Rachel felt sick. She couldn’t help wondering what she’d been thinking when she’d decided to stock it.
It was Tuesday, and Rachel’s hands still trembled whenever something reminded her of Daisy’s pale, lifeless face as she’d last seen it on Saturday morning. She silently willed them to steady themselves as she fished change out of the register (she could only hope it was the correct amount) and handed it over to the customer.
"Terrible thing that happened," the woman said in a hushed tone. "And right outside your front door, too."
Rachel nodded, not trusting herself to speak. It had been like this for nearly four days now—well-meaning strangers offering condolences as if she'd lost a close relative, curious locals fishing for details she didn't want to share, and tourists who'd heard rumors of "a body on Hibiscus Road" peering through the windows with morbid fascination.
Scarlett observed it all from her sunny perch in the front display window, her yellow-green eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Her gray-and-white tail twitched against a display copy of The Secret History as she watched Rachel's shoulders tense with each new interaction. Even Homer, who couldn't see the dark circles under Rachel's eyes, heard the weariness in her voice and the heaviness in her usually brisk footsteps.
Her downcast mood was at odds with the gorgeous October day. The sky was the pure, crystalline blue they tried hard to showcase in Coacoochee travel brochures, and the late-afternoon sun beamed down with the exaggerated golden sweetness that was only seen in the fall. All up and down Hibiscus Road, people basked in the beautiful weather, eating at outdoor tables or sitting on benches in small groups while they carried on lively conversations. It struck Rachel as slightly obscene, somehow—as if the weather itself, in refusing to cloud over or offer up a teary drizzle of rain, were mocking Daisy’s loss rather than mourning it.
The jingle of the bell above the door cut into Rachel’s thoughts, announcing Griselda's arrival. The hostess from Sabrosa entered with her usual poise, although she was noticeably subdued. She was dressed in a simple black sheath dress that accentuated her slender figure, her glossy black hair pulled back in an unfussy ponytail. Even the click of her heels against the terrazzo floor seemed muted, as if she were trying not to disturb the heavy quiet that had settled over the bookstore.
"I thought you might need company." Griselda slid onto a café stool. Her dark eyes, usually sparkling with warmth, were soft with sympathy. "It's been a hell of a few days."
Rachel nodded, grateful for the presence of another human who wasn't asking for details about "the body." She poured Griselda a cup of coffee from the freshly brewed pot, the rich dark liquid streaming into one of Title Wave's signature aqua-blue cups. She added a splash of cream without being asked, the warm, milky aroma curling upward with the steam.
"I still can't believe it.” Rachel’s voice caught as she remembered Daisy's pale complexion on Friday night, the way she'd seemed unsteady in her gold stilettos. The image of a laughing Daisy in her shimmering dress was impossible to reconcile with the knowledge that she'd died on the sidewalk just outside.
"I know." Griselda wrapped her elegant fingers around the coffee cup. A delicate silver bracelet slid down her wrist, catching the light. "Danny's completely shaken up."
"Was Daisy close with Danny?" Rachel realized how little she knew about Daisy's connections beyond Tommy. For all her lively presence and seemingly endless stories about Coacoochee's elite, Daisy had revealed surprisingly little about her own life.
Griselda hesitated, her dark eyes flicking around the empty store as if to confirm they were alone. The afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows cast dappled patterns across her face as she leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Not particularly, but..." She traced the rim of her coffee cup with one perfectly manicured finger. "She came by Sabrosa a few nights before she died. She was upset—really upset. Danny was talking to her at the bar after closing."
"About what?" Rachel was intrigued despite herself.
"I couldn't hear everything, but it sounded like something involving Tommy," Griselda said. "I figured they’d had a little spat or something—you know the two of them have been friends for years. Danny had the bartender comp her a couple of drinks until she calmed down,” Griselda concluded. “When she came back a few days later for the Palm party, it was like nothing had happened. "
Vashti, who was fastidiously washing her face with her front paws over in Florida History, felt her ears perk up. She remembered that Palm party—Tommy had taken Rachel, and he’d kept her out so late that the cats had to meow and meow directly into her ear the next morning to wake her. She’d ended up feeding them ten whole minutes past their usual time, which had put Scarlett into a snit for the rest of the morning.
The bell above the door jingled again, and Rachel looked up to see Natalie entering with Hot Mike at her side. "G'day, all.” Natalie unclipped Hot Mike's leash as she approached the café counter. "I just got back from Buenos Aires and heard about Daisy." She settled onto a stool next to Griselda. "Heart attack, they're saying?"
"That's what the police told me," Rachel confirmed. She reached for another cup to prepare Natalie's usual café con leche. The metal steaming wand hissed as she submerged it in milk. "Though it seems strange in someone so young."
Homer had positioned himself near Rachel's feet. He recalled the mysterious smell that had clung to Daisy that night—subtle, but distinctive, unlike anything he'd encountered before.
"She seemed ill at the book signing." Rachel poured the steamed milk over the espresso and handed it to Natalie, who accepted it with a grateful nod. "I thought it was just too much partying, but now I wonder if she was already experiencing symptoms."
"Nausea can be a precursor to heart attacks," Natalie noted. She took a sip of her coffee, leaving a faint trace of lipstick on the rim. "Still, it's odd in someone her age without any health issues—at least, none we know about."
Vashti abandoned her grooming and made her way to the café counter. She leapt onto it in a single fluid motion, positioning herself delicately between Griselda and Natalie despite Rachel's half-hearted attempt to shoo her away. Her emerald eyes fixed on the women with unmistakable interest.
Hot Mike, after greeting the cats, had settled himself beneath the café counter with his broad head resting on his paws. His ears remained at attention, shifting subtly as he followed what the humans were saying.
