Dying to Read (23 page)

Willow smiled again. “I was just dishing it up. I’ll get another plate.”

“Willow, don’t do this,” Cate begged. “Pick up and leave. Now! Go down to live with your grandmother in—” She broke off before she let “Florida” slip out.

Willow’s eyes flicked back to Cate. “Well, going down to Grandma’s was just an . . . option.”

“I wouldn’t object to going down South somewhere,” Coop said. “Magnolias, mint juleps, Southern sunshine . . . sounds great! But I have another idea that might interest you.”

“Remember what this guy did to you!” Cate said. “He hit you. He threatened you.”

Coop shook his head. “Willow, babe, you told her all that? How melodramatic can you get?”

“You did punch me once,” Willow said to Coop.

“It was self-defense. You were pounding on me at the time.”

“A gentleman wouldn’t hit back!”

Coop grinned at her, and, after a moment, Cate was dismayed to see Willow grin too. Coop gave Cate a smug smile. “She exaggerated.”

“But most of it was true,” Willow insisted. “You did want to know where I was every minute. And that sob story you told Cate about my taking your dad’s belt buckle. You hocked it yourself when we were up in Seattle.”

Coop shrugged. “I guess I forgot about that. But I think I used the money to buy you some earrings. I always suspected good ol’ Dad stole it instead of winning it anyway,” Coop added, as if that justified forgetting whatever he’d done with the buckle. Or maybe it was just another lie.

“And then you told Cate I ran up thousands of dollars on your credit card,” Willow accused. “You didn’t even have a credit card, remember? Both of them were canceled.”

Cate blinked. She felt caught in a whirlpool of lies and counter-lies. But Coop and Willow were looking at each other, and again they started to smile at the same time. Then they were laughing.

Cate had kept wanting to believe in her look-alike. Because they looked enough alike to be twins? A bad reason, a truly lousy reason.

And yet she didn’t want to see Willow make another big mistake in her life.

“Willow, don’t let him talk you into going back to him!”

“Ah, c’mon, Cate,” Coop said. “Are you trying to stand in the way of true love?” He looked at Willow. “We ought to do it up right and get married this time.”

Cate groaned. Playing the high card. Marriage. “Willow, this is a worse idea than . . . than sitting in a two-hundred-foot tree while they cut it down.”

“You should probably leave now,” Coop said to Cate. He draped a proprietary arm across Willow’s shoulders. “Willow and I have things to talk about.”

“There’s lemonade in the fridge to go with the spaghetti,” Willow said.

“This is a bad idea, Willow.” Cate wanted to throw a pitcher of lemonade or a plate of spaghetti . . . something! . . . over Willow’s head. Anything to wake her up or shield her from Coop’s manipulation. But she knew it would take more than a cold splash of ice cubes to shield Willow from herself. “A really bad idea,” she repeated even as she knew how useless the warning was.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” Coop said to Cate. It sounded more like a get-out threat than a polite offer.

“Don’t bother.”

Outside the door, Cate heard the lock click behind her. Willow was going to go back to Coop. She knew it as surely as if Willow was holding up a diagram with her initials carved with Coop’s inside a heart. And there wasn’t a thing Cate could do about it.

Except pray. Which she did fiercely on her way out to the car.
Hammer some sense into her head, Lord. Please!

Cate was in her car and at the end of the block before a thought occurred to her. Not a persuasive thought to make Willow change her mind. Something considerably more petty. Willow had given her that sack of cat food, and she’d stomped out without taking it.

Suddenly that seemed the last straw piled on top a whole lot of other straws of disillusionment today. That cat food belonged to Octavia, and she was going to claim it.

She U-turned at the end of the street and zoomed up the sloped driveway, right up beside Coop’s big bike. His flashy, flame-painted helmet still hung on a handlebar. On the porch she decided to ignore the doorbell. Willow and Coop were probably already in the backyard sharing lemonade and spaghetti and cozy plans to reunite. She’d just run in and grab the cat food.

That wasn’t going to happen, she realized a moment later. She’d forgotten Coop had locked the door behind her. Coming back for the cat food was a dumb idea anyway. Cate turned away from the door. Then she remembered something.

She ran back to the car and rummaged through her purse. Yes, there it was.

She stuck the key in the lock, opened the door, and tiptoed across the living room. Yes, the sack of cat food was still leaning in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. She hefted it into her arms and braced it on her hip. A murmur of voices came from the backyard through the open windows. A sudden burst of Coop’s husky laughter fueled Cate’s already simmering anger.

“I can’t believe it. You really told her that mom-and-pop-raised-me-in-a-carnival story?” Coop asked. “And she bought it?”

“I was going to tell her the truth one of these days. She’s sweet, Coop, she really is. But sometimes, I don’t know, I just can’t help making up things.”

“Yeah, I know. You told me that whopper the first time we met. Along with some others.” He sounded affectionate, not critical, and Cate had no trouble picturing a hug around her shoulders.

Cate clutched the sack. Gullible, that’s what she’d been, she groaned at herself. She shifted the weight of the sack in her arms and turned to head back to the door. They wanted to tell lies, let them tell lies to each other. But Coop’s next words stopped her.

“I have an interesting project in the works. Something you’ll like, I think.”

“You’d cheat your own brother,” Willow scoffed. “In fact, I think you did cheat your own brother. So why should I be interested in any ‘project’ with you?”

“You know I’d never do anything to cheat
you
,” Coop said. “And this deal is worth big bucks.”

Cate tried to get her feet moving. She was not interested in Coop’s deal. But curiosity trapped her. A punch of that familiar protective feeling for her look-alike also kicked in. Would it do any good to storm out there and again try to persuade Willow to tell him to get lost?

“Except that your ‘big bucks’ never seem to materialize,” Willow said.

“We’ve had some bad luck, but we’re good together, babe. Remember how we lived in that high-class Houston apartment and worked the rare coin thing? That was fun, wasn’t it?”

Rare coin thing? Somehow that did not sound like an endeavor endorsed by the Better Business Bureau.

A suspicion affirmed when Willow said, “What I remember is that we left town with the cops practically snapping at our heels. So what kind of deal is it this time?”

Cate rested the heavy sack of cat food on the edge of the oblong dining table as she listened.

“I’ve been looking at apartments because Jeff says he wants to live in the cabin himself, and I met this old guy with a sixty-unit apartment complex over in Springfield. He and his dead wife have had it for years, so he owns it outright, no mortgage. He’d like to sell it, because he’s got arthritis, lumbago, whatever. He can’t keep up on repairs or manage the renters. He says they’re driving him crazy.”

“He’ll need a super salesman and lots of luck, the way real estate is selling now.”

“Right. So he’s kind of stuck. He was thinking about hiring a management company to handle the rentals, but he’s suspicious of companies like that, and I think we could talk him into something else.”

“You want to buy an apartment building?” Willow sounded astonished.

Cate was surprised too. Buying an apartment building was an admirable enough project. Was she mistaken about Coop? Then Willow raised an obvious objection.

“We couldn’t come up with the money to buy an apartment building. With our credit rating, we couldn’t finance a doghouse.”

“Not exactly buy it. Though we’d need some money to get the deal started. Show the old guy our good intentions and all.”

Again Cate was surprised as Coop outlined what he had in mind. She didn’t know much about business deals, and this sounded as if it might be classified as “creative financing.” But not necessarily dishonest.

They would approach the old guy with a combination sales and partnership deal. They’d put up some money as down payment and also evidence of their credibility and good will, then live in and manage the apartments, with a percentage of the rents going toward their buying the place.

“So, basically we’d be apartment managers,” Willow said when he was done. “I’d go for that.”

“The problem is, we’d need some money to get the deal started.”

A long moment of silence until Willow said slowly, “I might be able to come up with some money.”

Although Cate had been intrigued by what sounded like a viable possibility, now she silently wailed,
No, no, no! Whatever money you have coming, don’t let Coop get his sticky fingers into it until you’re positive this isn’t something shady!

“Whatever you’re making on a job like this isn’t going to do it, babe,” Coop said, not unkindly.

“Bigger money than that.”

“You pushed the old lady down the stairs, didn’t you?” Coop laughed. “I wondered if you’d done it. You got cash she had stashed?”

“No! I did not push her! How’d you know anything about Amelia’s fall?”

“Various addresses showed up when I was tracking Cate. I researched them on the internet and asked some questions here and there until I figured out this was the right place. It’s no big deal to me if you did push her, you know.”

“But I didn’t,” Willow said, and her insistence reassured Cate. Given Coop’s charitable attitude toward murder, she’d have no reason to lie now. “I’d been away from the house, and I came back and found her lying right over there at the bottom of the stairs, dead. I got scared, you know? Another elderly woman I worked for fell off a balcony—”

“Like that old dairy farmer who fell off the roof?”

No comment from Willow on whatever that was about. “So I decided I’d better get out, before they accused me of having something to do with her falling. But before I left I thought about all the jewelry Amelia had. I figured a few pieces wouldn’t be missed, so I ran upstairs to grab some. But the valuable stuff was all gone.”

“You mean somebody else killed her and stole the stuff?”

“Somebody killed her, all right. Her fall was no accident.”

“Like who?”

Cate leaned toward the window, balancing the sack of cat food on the table with an outstretched hand. Yes, who? Willow hesitated, and Cate wondered as if she was considering possibilities or perhaps not yet certain enough of Coop to share something this important with him. Then Willow said something, but her voice had lowered. Cate moved closer trying to hear, but all she caught was Coop’s surprised word.

“Black—”

Willow apparently cut him off before he could finish the word. Cate puzzled over it. Black? Black what? Blackberry? Black widow? Black sheep?

Blackmail! Willow’s “big money” was coming from
blackmail
?

More unintelligible murmurs from Willow. But Cate knew what Willow must be telling him. She either had always known, or knew now, that Cheryl had pushed her aunt down the stairs. And Cheryl either knew or suspected that Willow knew. Was the job offer so they could keep an eye on Willow? Or had Cheryl hoped the job offer would buy Willow’s silence? But it obviously hadn’t been enough. Willow wanted more.

No gold stars for Willow. Not a murderer, but definitely a blackmailer.

But what about Amelia’s jewelry? The hide-and-seek jewelry that sometimes seemed to be missing, sometimes wasn’t. What kind of game was Cheryl playing there?

“Good work,” Coop said with satisfaction at whatever figure Willow had told him. “That ought to be enough to do it.”

“
If
I decide I want in on your deal,” Willow said. “We used to talk about going down to Mexico to live. Cabo, maybe.”

“We can still go to Mexico, and after the apartment house deal, we’ll have enough money to live there as long as we want. In style. The old guy is in no position to check out repairs we charge for. Or how many units we tell him are empty and not bringing in rent. There’d be all kinds of opportunities to skim off a larger share for us.”

A scam. This was more like the Coop Cate knew and suspected.

“Doesn’t the old guy have kids or family or a lawyer who’d jump in and nail us?” Willow asked.

“Wife’s dead, no kids. He thinks his nephews and nieces are lazy bums and he won’t even talk to them, and he calls lawyers ‘vultures in expensive suits.’ It’s an awesome setup. Chance of a lifetime.”

“What makes you think he’d go for a deal with us when he doesn’t trust anyone else?”

“Because I’ve been buttering him up. Helping out with the rental repairs. He’s thinking of me as the son he never had.” Coop sounded smug.

“So what do you need me for?”

“I love you, babe. Don’t you know that yet? I could find a partner for a deal, but I need
you.
”

Love and marriage. Coop was pulling out all the big guns.

“And think about the payoff in the end,” Coop went on. “As part of the partnership, we set up one of those big insurance policies that pays off the other partners if one partner dies. Plus, if we handle it right, something that gives us ownership of the apartments if anything happens to him. And I’d bet anything he has a bundle of cash stashed under his bed or in his cookie jar. He’s a stasher kind of guy.”

Cate saw what was coming. It sent a shiver to her toes.

But Willow seemed oblivious. “Even if his health is bad, it might be years before anything happened to him.”

“Years? Oh no, babe. Just long enough to keep it from looking suspicious.”

“Keep what from looking suspicious?”

“Poor old Mr. Linkbetter’s untimely death. Or timely, depending on your point of view.”

“You’re talking about—” Willow almost hissed a gasp. “About
making
him die?”