Janet Evanovich - Wicked Appetite

Diesel looked at Lenny. “Tell me about the booby trap. Are we talking major explosion?”

“Not atomic,” Lenny said.

“Would it kill Superman?”

“You’d need kryptonite to do that.”

“Okay, how about Batman?”

“I don’t know. Batman is tricky.”

“So the let-Wulf-get-the-charm plan won’t work,” Diesel said to me. “Doesn’t sound like we can count on it to kill him.”

The house was around two thousand square feet. Living room, dining room, kitchen, powder room, mudroom leading to the back door. The bedrooms were obviously upstairs. Impossible to know if Lenny had gone to the dark side because of the charm, but going on the assumption that this was the case, I thought the charm most likely was in the house. Hard to believe any of this was real but even more difficult to believe the charm could leak onto someone without consistent exposure. And if I booby-trapped something in my house, it wouldn’t be in a high-traffic area. I’d want it out of the way, hidden from sight.

“Do you have a cellar?” I asked Lenny.

“Yep.”

“Did you hide your inheritance in your cellar?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“I’d had a lot to drink. A real lot. And I tried a bunch of different places before I settled. And it was a long time ago.”

“Your wife’s only been gone for three months,” Diesel said.

“She was a party pooper,” Lenny said. “Did I already tell you that? Anyway, you can look around the cellar if you want, but I’m not going. It’s scary down there. And I might have booby-trapped it.”

Diesel opened the cellar door and went down the steep, narrow stairwell. He got to the bottom and looked back at me.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Are you coming down?”

“No.”

He was wearing jeans and a cream-colored cotton crew-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. His teeth were white against his beach bum tan. And he was looking very big in the small cellar.

“There are some things I’d like you to hold,” he said.

“I bet.”

“I meant potential charm things.”

“I knew that. Are you sure it’s safe down there?”

He did arms outstretched. “No bad guys or obvious booby traps.”

“What about spiders?”

“Haven’t seen any.”

I cautiously crept down the stairs, stood next to Diesel, and looked around. The cellar floor was crudely poured cement. The walls were mortar and stone. A bare 60-watt bulb lit the space. The air was cool and damp and smelled musty, like rotting wood and mildew. The ceiling was riddled with pipes, and wires running along support beams. The water heater and furnace were to one side. The rest of the cellar was cluttered with plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

“You don’t expect me to go through all these bins and boxes, do you?” I asked Diesel.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll take hours. And what about the hiding and the booby-trapping? This stuff’s just sitting here.”

“No stone unturned,” Diesel said. “No pun intended.”

Okay, let’s get this out in the open. First, I’m a big coward. I don’t like the idea of getting blown up, and I don’t like spiders. I know at first glance we don’t see any spiders, but they’re sneaky. They hide in places and then jump out at you. And second, what about my muffins and my cookbook? I don’t have time to save the world. I need cookbook money to fix my foundation, or my house is going to fall over. And third, this whole thing is weirding me out. It would make a good television show, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen in real life.

“If we go back to my house, you can eat more muffins,” I said to Diesel.

“If we stay here and go through these bins, I’ll get out of your bed.”

“Really?”

“Scout’s honor,” Diesel said, wrangling the lid off a plastic bin.

I looked inside the bin and found it was filled with sheet music for classical guitar. The second bin Diesel opened held CDs. Opera, guitar, symphonies. A lot of Haydn and Mozart and artists out of my scope of knowledge.

“Hey, Lenny!” I yelled up the stairs. “Do you play the guitar?”

“Used to,” he said. “Traded it for a fraternity paddle used in the movie Animal House. It’s a collector’s item.”

“That’s so sad,” I said to Diesel. “He had a whole other life before his inheritance.”

“Focus,” Diesel said. “At the risk of seeming insensitive, I don’t care about his life then or now. I care about the charm. Anyway, he’s got the paddle used in Animal House. I’m jealous.”

Fortunately, the rest of the bins contained neatly folded men’s clothes, which was sad only in Lenny’s sometimes unfortunate choices in ties. I ripped through the bins in record time, and Diesel opened the first of the boxes.

“Are you okay up there?” he called to Leonard.

“I want a pizza.”

“We have three boxes to check out, and then it’s pizza time,” Diesel told him.

The boxes were filled with the sort of junk you acquire over a lifetime and can’t discard but no longer need. A baseball mitt, a broken stapler, a bunch of photos, Hardy Boys books, a commemorative chunk of the Berlin Wall, a cassette player, a bicycle chain, his high school yearbook, a kitty litter scooper.

I was making my way through the last box when there was a whoosh of air, the cellar door slammed shut, and the light went out, throwing us into utter blackness. Diesel moved flat against my back, his arm tight around my waist. There was thirty seconds of wind screaming on the other side of the door, and then all was quiet and the light blinked back on.

“What was th-th-that?” I asked, my heart knocking around in my chest.

Diesel took my hand and tugged me up the stairs. “That was Wulf.”

“Is he here?”

“Not anymore.” Diesel opened the cellar door and stepped into the kitchen. “And neither is Lenny.”

“Where’d they go? Are you sure Lenny isn’t here?” I looked around the kitchen. Nothing was out of place. No sign of struggle. No damage from the howling wind. “It sounded like a tornado blew through here. Why aren’t things tossed around?”

“I guess that wasn’t part of the show,” Diesel said.

“And you think it was Wulf?”

“I know it was Wulf. I can sense his presence.”

“How?”

“I know his scent. The air pressure changes. I get a cramp in my ass.”

I didn’t notice a change in the air pressure, and my nose was still stuffed with cellar smells. Fine by me. I didn’t want to add any more special skills to my Unmentionableness. I already had one too many. I could deal with baking Unmentionable cupcakes. I’d like to lose the empowered objects thing.

“Where did Wulf take Lenny?” I asked Diesel.

Diesel shrugged. “Someplace to talk.”

I had a really icky feeling in my stomach. Lenny was creepy, but he didn’t seem like a bad person, and I wasn’t happy about him being whisked away.

“Wulf won’t do the death claw on him, will he?”

“Not as long as he needs him,” Diesel said. “A dead man can’t tell you where the treasure is hidden. If we weren’t here, I’m sure Wulf would have stayed and had Steven Hatchet sweep the house.”

“So now what? Do we chase Wulf down and duke it out with him?”

“That would be the movie version. In the real-life version, we go through the rest of the house and look for the inheritance.”

I wasn’t crazy about either of the versions. I wanted to get back to my muffins.

“The muffins will wait,” Diesel said. “Let’s start upstairs.”

There were three bedrooms upstairs. I stepped into the master first, immediately turned to leave, and bumped into Diesel.