Aroma With a View, page 12
I parked in front of the building. Reese waved as I got out of the car. “Damn, it’s bitter cold out this morning. I was just starting to get used to the warmer weather.” Her gaze ran appraisingly over my attire. “I want that coat,” she said. “And those boots.” She threw up her hands. “Screw it. I want the mittens and the hat, too.”
I’m not going to say I preened and pranced my way over to them like a show pony, but I might have shown off a little. “I’m fancy,” I told her.
“Hah!” she laughed. “You sure are.”
“Morning, Ezra.” I turned and flipped my peplum.
He took my hand and twirled me around and dipped me back for a smooch that was more a greeting than an invitation. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Winter looks good on you.”
Reese cleared her throat. “Official police business going on here.” She jangled a set of keys.
Ezra set me upright. He straightened his coat. “Let’s get to officialing.”
Reese unlocked the door. “How do you want to do this, Nora? Should we wait outside?”
“That might be better, in case any of the scents in there trigger a walk down memory lane for one of you. I mean, do you really want me to see any doll-related trauma you might have experienced in the past?”
Reese wrinkled her nose. “Good call.”
Ezra held the door open for me. “Holler if you see something.”
I smiled. “If I scent something, I’ll say something.”
“Hardy-har, Nancy Shrew,” Reese replied.
I chuckled. “Did you just come up with that, or have you been holding on to it for just such an occasion?”
“I’ve been holding on to it for a while now,” she admitted. “It’s not quite on the nose, though.” She smirked.
“Keep trying. You’ll get there.” I took off my mittens and tucked them away in my coat pockets, then opened my purse and took out a pair of latex gloves.
Ezra’s eyes widened. “You’ve come prepared.”
“We can play doctor later.” I snapped a fingertip on my right hand. “Anyhow, there might be evidence or rat droppings in there.” I took one cleansing, calming breath and walked into the doll museum.
Porcelain and ceramic dolls lined shelves. Some of the more fragile and expensive were displayed behind glass, along with several styles of dollhouses, doll clothing displays, costume jewelry, and accessories. Since moving back to Garden Cove, I’d been inside once when all the business owners took the resort tour for fun. Dolly’s was the first stop. When Dolly had shown us around, her enthusiasm for dolls and doll making had given the place a feeling of warmth, vibrancy, and history. Now, the interior felt cold and gray, and not just because of the weather. It was as if the place had lost its soul.
The maze of aisles in the museum was designed to take customers on a walk-through history. The displays started with modern-day dolls made with laser precision and went all the way back to figures of the mid-1800s. While Dolly had kept the place spotless, there was still a scent of mustiness similar to that of a damp book.
Unfortunately, I was getting a lot of random remembrances of small children playing tea parties and other such games that come with having dolls, but nothing that specifically pointed to Dolly or a motive for her death. I rounded a corner near her desk and a display of books on the history of dolls. The sharp tang of lemon and pine made me sneeze.
“What do you want?” a woman asks. I recognize her voice and her pearl-button cardigan. It’s Dolly, and she’s straightening the books on the rack. She’s wearing an apron around her waist, its pockets bulging with what I assume is cleaning supplies.
“I know what you’re hiding, Dolly. You can pay me, or I can go to the cops with your little secret,” a man says. His voice is low and hushed as he stands in the shadows. Most of the lights are out except for blinking, colorful fairy lights that highlight the display along with frosted garland.
“If you tell the police, I might go to jail, but so will you. Blackmail is illegal, too.”
“I’m just a good citizen doing my duty,” he says blandly. “That’s all they’ll hear when I make my report.”
“Get out,” Dolly seethes. “I know your type. You won’t do crap that doesn’t somehow benefit you.”
“Okay, then. I’ll just tell your sweetheart of a daughter about your misspent youth. I’m sure she would love to know what trash her mother used to be.”
“Leave Carrie out of this.”
He moves from the shadows, his voice quiet and menacing. “I will, if you give me what I want.”
“I don’t have them here,” she says.
“You have until the end of the week.” He leaves.
Even though I can’t see her face, I know she’s crying from the way her chest heaves. She reaches around the backside of the book rack and retrieves a bottle clearly marked gin. She unscrews the top, the liquid sloshes out of the opening as she lifts it up to drink. After, she pulls a cleaning rag from her pockets and wipes the spill away.
When the scent-memory ended, I looked at the display. There were no lights or garland around the rack now, so I had to presume the vision took place near Christmastime. Cripes, had someone been blackmailing Dolly for the past two months? The fear in her voice after he’d threatened to tell Carrie had been thick and palpable. Why had she been so confident he wouldn’t go to the police, and yet, just as sure he’d tell her daughter whatever awful thing she’d wanted to hide?
On a whim, I reached behind the display, unsurprised when I found a bottle. I gripped the neck and took it from its hiding place. Only, this wasn’t the small pint of gin Dolly had been drinking in the memory. This was a fifth of premium vodka, and the bottle was almost empty. I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff.
“We did it, baby!” the young blonde woman jumps up onto a tall man, wrapping her legs around his waist. “I can’t believe we did it!”
He has a bottle in his hand and takes a drink. Eagerly, she grabs it from him and takes her own long, slow pull.
“I’m going to marry you,” he says. “When this is all over, and we’re set for life. I’m going to give you the life you dream of. A house. White picket fences. Babies. The works.”
“I’ve been waiting for you my whole life, Dodger,” she says.
“I’ve been right here, Dolls,” he tells her. “Right here waiting for you.”
The woman takes her top off as the man carries her down the hall.
I blinked the vision away. Right here waiting for you. The gold band in her small treasure chest, the one where she had kept the lock of hair with the key and the AA medallions, it had been inscribed with the words Right Here Waiting.
I felt unsteady and out of sorts after the last aroma-mojo hit. By the time I got to the front door, I was stumbling. My knees buckled as I stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“Nora!” Ezra said. He put his arm around me. “You look pale.”
“And sweaty,” Reese said. “You look like you just ran a marathon.”
I handed Ezra the vodka bottle then unzipped my coat to let the cold wash over my overheated body. “I found this behind a book rack.”
“You need to sit down.” He looked anxious, and I wondered just how bad I looked.
“I’m okay,” I assured him. The wintery wind had done the job of clearing my mind and restoring my strength. The last vision, the one of Dolly and her lover, had been potent. The stronger the emotions were behind the memories I saw, the harder they were to recover from.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“Dolly was being blackmailed.”
“For what?” Reese asked.
“I’m not sure, but it was something she didn’t want Carrie to find out about. It was the only thing the blackmailer said to her that made her afraid.” I thought back to their conversation. “She wasn’t afraid of him,” I said. “I mean, not physically. That’s strange.”
“Unless he was someone she knew well,” Reese said.
“She definitely knew the guy.” I nodded.
“Do you think it was someone she was seeing?” Ezra asked.
I took the latex gloves off. Ezra handed me my purse, and I dropped them inside. “Seeing as in dating?”
“Or just sleeping with,” Reese mused.
I zipped my coat back up. “It didn’t feel as if they were intimate, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t or that they hadn’t been in the past. Oh, and she had Christmas decorations up.”
“So, this could have happened as far back as November.”
Reese shook her head. “Dolly was the kind of woman who would have waited until after Thanksgiving to put up Christmas. We can ask Carrie if she knows when her mom would have decorated for the holiday.”
“And when she usually took them down. It could give us sort of a timeline since there are no decorations in there now,” I added. “Of course, there is nothing to say that the blackmail started recently. What I saw could have taken place years ago.” The twenty-something-degree weather was seeping into my bones now. I rubbed my fingers together to warm them.
Ezra plucked my mittens from my pockets and put them on me. The frown on his face told me he was still worried. I smiled at him. “I’m fine, I promise.”
“Did you see anything else?” he asked.
“Yes, when I smelled the vodka, I got another memory of the young blonde woman that I’d seen when I found Dolly. Only this time, she wasn’t fighting with the man. They were celebrating.”
“What?”
“Some victory.” I shrugged. “She called the man Dodger, and…” I remembered the way she’d laughed when he’d carried her down the hall. I’ve been here, Dolls. Right here waiting for you. “And I think he loved her very much.”
Chapter
Eighteen
I left my car in town and rode with Ezra out to Dolly’s lake house. He twisted his hands on the steering wheel, his jaw clenched tight as he watched the road ahead.
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the icy passenger window. I opened them when I felt his hand on my thigh. I slipped my fingers through his, and he pulled my hand up and kissed my knuckle.
“We don’t have to do this now,” he said. “Or at all.”
“I know, but I want to, Ezra. I would tell you if I didn’t.” I sat up straight and looked at him. “What’s going on with you? You’re not usually this…overprotective.”
He was silent for a long moment before he said, “You didn’t see the way you looked when you came out of there. You looked…you looked like someone who was dying.”
I unbuckled my seat belt and skootched across the seat until I could put my head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I scared you. I promise you, I’m not dying. At least not any faster than anyone else.”
He gave me a quick kiss on the forehead while keeping his gaze on the road. “I love you, Nora. All of you. Your stubbornness, your independence, your humor, your intelligence, and your beauty…”
“Stop,” I said. Then jokingly added, “But do go on.”
He chuckled. “I’m just saying, you are everything I want in a woman.”
“But—”
“No buts. The thing is, I know if I hold you too tightly that I’ll suffocate all the things about you that I love. I don’t want to do that, but sometimes it’s hard to reconcile that with the part of my brain that wants to keep you safe.”
“It’s killing you that I don’t have my seat belt on, isn’t it?”
His smile turned into a bemused grin. “It really is.”
I slid back over to my side of the cab and belted myself in. “See,” I told him. “I’m not unreasonable.”
“Not at all,” he agreed. He tapped the blinker lever as he slowed the truck. “We’re here.”
Reese had beat us to Dolly’s. She was on the porch, bouncing around to stay warm. “Took you guys long enough. I feel like I’ve been here for ages.”
She only left a few minutes before us, so we hadn’t been that far behind. “I know an exaggeration when I hear it,” I told her. “Besides, you could’ve waited in the car.”
The wind blew Reese’s strawberry-blonde hair into her face. She brushed it back. “I could have, but then I wouldn’t have had any reason to complain.” She gestured at the door. “It’s unlocked. Do you want us to go in with you this time or no?”
It made me feel good that she offered me the choice instead of trying to make the decision for me. “You guys can come in.”
I swear I saw the worry lines in Ezra’s forehead vanish like magic. “If that’s what you want,” he said nonchalantly.
I arched a brow as I walked past him and went inside the A-frame home.
“Okay,” Reese said. “Dolly’s house has a simple layout. Obviously, living room up front. Just up ahead, the area is split in two, with a kitchen on the right and the bathroom on the left. You guys found Dolly in the space between. There is a narrow path between the two rooms that opens to a hall with a utility room on the left and a home office on the right. On the left in front of the utility room is a staircase that leads to a large master bed and bath that takes up the entire loft.”
“This is a beautiful place,” I said.
“The loft bedroom has a balcony that overlooks the lake. Prime realty.” Reese gave a low whistle. “If Carrie decides to sell this place, I think she can get a small fortune for it.”
“That’s a motive,” I said.
“I didn’t mean—” She squinted at me. “Damn. That is a motive.”
“I don’t think Carrie had anything to do with her mom’s death, though.”
“We can’t rule anything out at this point,” Ezra said. “I hope Carrie didn’t have anything to do with her mother’s death, but you never know.”
“She has an excellent alibi.”
“Sometimes criminals hire other criminals to do the dirty work,” he said.
I sighed. “True enough.” But in my gut, I knew Carrie’s grief for her mother had been real. She was a daughter torn up by the loss. “I still don’t think she’s guilty.”
“She’s not a serious suspect,” Ezra admitted. “But that’s where we’re at. We have a bunch of nothing to go on, which is why it wasn’t too hard to convince Chief Rafferty to let you have a stab at it. The mayor is on his butt for results.” He gave me an open palm shrug. “Desperate times and all.”
I guess I was desperate measures. I took a couple of deep breaths to calm my brain, then nodded. “I’m ready to take my stab.”
It struck me how nothing much had changed since Monday morning when Gilly and I had found Dolly on the floor near her kitchen, except for the no dead body part, of course. But otherwise, the police had been respectful when they’d searched the place. I walked through, reliving my own memories of that day. The living room was a good twenty-four feet wide, but the depth was only about twelve feet, so I could see the dark area on the hardwood floor where she had bled out.
“Can Carrie call in a cleaner yet?” Some cleaners specialized in sanitizing biohazardous areas—anything from sewage-soaked carpets to overflowing toilets to bloody crime scenes. Unlike in the movies, these cleaners didn’t show up on their own. It was the responsibility of family and friends to hire someone to do it. Since Carrie was in the hospital, she probably hadn’t even thought about it.
“We finished up here yesterday,” Reese acknowledged. “She can have someone come in now.”
“I’ll let her know.” When she got out of the hospital, it would be hard enough dealing with her mother’s funeral arrangements. The last thing she needed was to come here to find Dolly an outfit for the funeral home and walk into this horror. “If she can’t make the call herself, I’ll do it for her.”
“They moved Carrie out of intensive care this morning.” Reese cringed as she added, “I got a look at her arm when they changed the bandages out last night. I don’t know how they managed to save her hand.”
Reese was in her late twenties. They didn’t interact much at the baby shower, and I’d never heard Reese mention her, so it hadn’t dawned on me that she and Carrie might be friends. “How long have you known Carrie?”
“As long as anyone knows anyone in a small town. She was two grades ahead of me, so we didn’t hang out, but I was aware of her.”
The way she’d described her relationship with Carrie made me feel like Reese was holding something back.
Ezra must have picked up on it as well because he asked her, “Is there something more?”
“Not really.” Reese wiggled her mouth as her brow lowered. “There were rumors about Carrie and one of the high school teachers her senior year.” Her expression was one of consternation. “The thing is, I never believed it. It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on now, anyway. So that’s why I didn’t say anything.”
Her response seemed to mollify Ezra. “Okay. We’re here,” he said. “Nora, do your thing.”
I raised my brows. “My thing, huh?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I certainly do.” Ezra and Reese followed me back into the living room. I went over to the box on the shelf. “Did you guys go through this?”
Reese nodded. “I checked it out when you first told me about it.”
I opened the small chest and took out the ring. “I think the man in my vision, Dodger, gave this ring to Dolly.” I showed Ezra the inscription. “He said this to her. That he’d been right here waiting for her?”
“Like the old Richard Marx song,” Ezra said.
“Who?” Reese asked.
I rolled my eyes so hard. “Only a multiplatinum artist of awesome ballads like 'Should’ve Known Better', 'Hold On To The Nights', and of course, 'Right Here Waiting'.”
She snickered. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Reese McKay didn’t know it yet, but the next time we had a girls’ night out, she was going to get a music education. I scoped out the living room and wasn’t picking up any strong odors. “I can’t believe she doesn’t even have any scented candles in this place.”
“Some people don’t like them,” Reese said defensively.
