Janet Evanovich - Wicked Appetite

I fished in my pocket, found the charm, and handed it over. “No one said anything about Uncle Phil having any of these obsessions. Is it possible it’s all mental with Lenny, Shirley, Mark, and me? The SALIGIA Stone story is pretty far out there.”

“Personally, I’m a lazy kind of guy, and leaving the door open on the mystical saves me work. I don’t have to stress my brain trying to explain the unexplainable. It’s magic. End of discussion.”

“So you’re buying into the SALIGIA Stone fairy tale?”

“Yeah. I’m believing the whole enchilada.”

The light blinked off in Mark More’s office, and Mark exited via the front door and walked to his car. The engine caught, and he drove out of the lot and down the street.

“Showtime,” Diesel said.

“What if he set an alarm?”

“Not a concern. I didn’t see a security system keypad anywhere in the building.”

We covered the short distance to the warehouse, Diesel opened the door, and we walked in. No alarm sounded. No little red diode flashed from anywhere in the room.

I heard Diesel move toward the hall in the pitch-black building and I followed him, immediately smashing into the desk.

“I suppose you can see in the dark,” I said on a sigh.

“Yeah, and obviously you can’t, so stick close to me.”

I put my hand to his back.

“Closer would be better,” he said.

“How close did you have in mind?”

“Really, really close.”

I kicked him in the back of the leg, and he grunted.

Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t mind getting close, but holy cow, not when I’m doing B &E on a chocolate mint warehouse.

“I hear you,” Diesel said, “but I’m only human… sort of.”

“What about the limit on how far we can go?”

“I’ll let you know when we reach it.”

He led me to the warehouse, and once we were inside and the door was closed behind us, he switched the lights on.

“Do you want first crack at the backhoe?” he asked.

“Yes!”

I climbed on board and studied the controls. I turned the key, stepped on the gas, and rolled to the pile of locks. I lowered the shovel and dug in. I backed up and carried the locks to the other side of the room and dumped them next to the cartons of mints. I did this ten times, motored over to Diesel, and parked it.

“It’s all yours,” I said, jumping off. “I don’t want to be a backhoe hog.”

“It’s boring, right?”

“Yes.”

Diesel hauled himself up behind the wheel and went to work shoveling locks. I watched him for a while, wondering who on earth he was. When I found myself fantasizing him naked, I gave myself a mental slap and looked for something else to do. If I’d had my computer, I’d have googled SALIGIA Stones. In the absence of the computer, I called my mom.

“So, how’s it going?” I asked her.

“It’s going just fine. How’s it going with you? Do you like your new job?”

“Yes. My job is terrific.”

I grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, just outside the Beltway. My parents still live there, in the same redbrick ranch with a dogwood tree in the front yard and picnic table and swing set in the back. My dad’s old Bonneville and my mom’s new Camry are tucked away in a two-car attached garage, and at this time of the year, the azaleas are beginning to bloom.

My mom teaches fifth grade, and my dad drives a public transport bus, like Ralph Cramden on The Honeymooners. My sister, Sara, is a year older than me and already has two kids. My brother, Tommy, is a year younger, is still single, and works in an auto body shop, customizing motorcycles. We’re the typical all-American family… except at least one of us might be an Unmentionable.

“Is there anything weird about our family?” I asked my mother.

“Weird?”

“Maybe special is a better word. Like, do we have any special abilities?”

“Your Uncle Fred can touch his tongue to his nose.”

“How about turning cats into fry pans?”

“Fred can’t do that. And besides, it would be mean.”

“I’ve always been able to make cupcakes better than anyone else.”

“That’s true,” my mother said. “You make wonderful cupcakes. You got that from your Great Grandmother Fanny.”

“I never knew her. Was she an Unmentionable?”

“Unmentionable? Heavens, no. We talked about her all the time. She was a hoot.”

“What about Ophelia? I only remember her from photographs.”

“Ophelia was Fanny’s little sister. She married a man named Wilbur Snell. He owned a shoe factory in Salem, and two weeks after the wedding, he disappeared and never was seen again. Ophelia stayed in Snell’s house in Marblehead until the day she died. The shoe factory closed long ago, but I guess it left Ophelia with enough to keep going. The family drifted apart, and the last time we saw Ophelia, you were five years old. She thought you were very special. She said you had a complicated destiny. I’ve remembered her words all these years. Ophelia was a little New Age in her old age.”

“Do you know why she left me her house?”

“She stated in the will that you were a kindred spirit. And of course, she didn’t have any children of her own. Only a one-eyed cat. And she could hardly leave her house to him.”

My heart skipped a couple beats. “What happened to the one-eyed cat?”

“I don’t know. I imagine he went to the animal shelter.”

“Do you know any more about him?”

“No. Your grandmother spoke to Ophelia from time to time, and she would mention the cat.”

I made a little more small talk, then disconnected and watched Diesel some more. I offered to take another shift, but he declined.

“More to the left,” I yelled out to him after a couple hours. “The pile is uneven.”

He looked back to me. “You want to take over, Miss Picky?”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

“You can be helpful by looking through all the locks that are left.”

My eyebrows went up an inch into my forehead. “Are you serious? There are still hundreds of locks. Maybe thousands.”

Diesel cut the engine and swung down off the backhoe. “I’ve reduced the pile by ninety percent. I can’t cut it down any more than that. These locks have been pushed around for years. The lock charm isn’t going to be exactly where it was originally placed.”

He was right. Problem was, I’d been going since four this morning, and I was running on empty. I walked to the edge of the remaining lock pile and began working my way through it, picking locks up, tossing them to Diesel, who pitched them across the room to the new heap of locks. After an hour, there were no more locks, I hadn’t come across a charm, and nothing had glowed or buzzed in my hand.

“Now what?” I asked Diesel.

“Now we go home. And tomorrow we have another conversation with Mark More.”

It was a little past midnight when we parked in front of my house. The Spook Patrol was absent, and the street was dark and blissfully quiet. Diesel let us in and flipped the lights on. Cat 7143 was sprawled in the middle of the floor, feet in the air.

“Omigosh,” I said. “He’s dead!”

Cat’s good eye opened, his tail twitched, and the eye closed.

“Sleeping,” Diesel said.

I looked more closely at Cat. He had muffin crumbs stuck to his face fur. “Looks like he helped himself to dinner.”

Diesel sauntered into the kitchen and stood hands on hips, surveying the carnage. “If Uncle Phil were here, he’d turn Cat into a waffle iron.”

Every muffin had been sampled. Some more than others. And some were completely destroyed.

“He prefers the muffins in the pink wrappers,” Diesel said.