It Must Be Magic (3 page)

Duh.
A dunce cap meant
duh.
Or
you idiot human.

“You’re not being very helpful.”

That’s because I’m near death’s door. Feed me.
Food bowls pranced across her mind’s eye.

At least feeding the cats was something constructive. In the kitchen, Lili lined up the bowls and began opening cans. She’d tried feeding them in a rotation format, but everyone wanted to be fed first and she’d given up. With the first pop of a top, eight furry bodies started milling around her legs. Einstein stretched up to the counter and watched.

And Lili talked. “We have to get more out of Fluffy. I shouldn’t have pulled out so fast.” She’d let the shock take over. “How do I do it without telling Erika?”

Roscoe.
Lili saw the possibilities in Einstein’s image.

She set the first three bowls on the kitchen floor and the mob stormed them. Lili projected an image of order to the room at large, which didn’t work at all. There was something about food and cats that defied order.

She smiled despite her inner turmoil. There was Einstein’s silvery-blue coat, then white with black nose and black spots on white, calico and tortoiseshell, tiger-striped and leopard-spotted and Siamese elegance. Wanetta had always been taking in strays. She’d fattened them up and calmed them down, had them fixed, then had gone about locating good families to take them.

The knock on her back screen door had her whirling. A man stood in the shadow of her back stoop. She’d forgotten to turn on the outside light. Tall. Solid. Light-colored hair. That was about all she could tell. But Lili
knew.
Mysterious Tanner.

He was the answer to her prayers. She could tell
him
about Fluffy’s vision. It was the correct thing to do, anyway. He was Erika’s father.

The only problem was, with the state of her kitchen, eight cats in all, he was going to think she was a crazy cat lady. And after that, who knew if he’d listen to her.

“Don’t rush right into telling him about Fluffy’s sighting,” she whispered to herself. “Just be yourself.”

But if the
cats
made him think she was a crazy cat lady, being herself would make him run for the hills.

R
OSCOE HAD UNDERSTATED
. Lili Goodweather wasn’t pretty; she was stunning, with dark hair flowing to her waist and a smile as brilliant as a summer day. Her silk tank top left her shapely shoulders bare, and her long gossamer skirt, which accentuated her willowy body, matched the color of her eyes, an odd, vivid shade the color of lilacs in full bloom. Wool socks brushed the hem of her skirt, and her footwear nullified the otherwise delicate nature of her clothing. The boots were some sort of weird fashion statement, but wasn’t that only for adolescent girls? Lili Goodweather was closer to thirty, more or less.

“You must be Mysterious Tanner.” She held the screen door open and smiled brightly.

“Mysterious Tanner?”

“I wondered if you really existed. Roscoe and Erika talk about you, but I’ve never seen you. I thought maybe they made you up.” She had the plumpest, sweetest-looking lips.

Dammit, he didn’t want to be looking at or thinking about her lips. “I’d like to talk a minute.”

She stepped back, handing the open door off to him so it didn’t smack him in the face. Then he saw them. Wanetta’s cats. She’d had only seven, yet it appeared a miniature herd of cattle grazed on the checkerboard floor. A writhing mass of bodies emitting a low hiss, like an ant army attacking picnic remains.

Then a sharper, louder hiss was followed by a growl.

“Serenity, behave yourself,” Lili admonished.

In that heap of squirming felinity, he couldn’t tell which one had hissed and which one had growled. Lili scooped up a dark, striped cat and a food bowl, then set them both down to the right of the main herd.

“Cats like irony,” Lili said. “Serenity isn’t serene at all. She doesn’t like to share, not that cats ever
like
to share, and she’s the first to pick a fight over nothing.” She threw her hands palm up in the air and smiled. “What can ya do?”

One regal, gray cat stretched, swiped a tongue over its sharp little teeth and looked at him, an oddly assessing look. Then it hopped from the middle of the melee, jumped onto the kitchen table and sat. And stared. Its green eyes fixed on him with…well, he couldn’t call it intelligence.

“Einstein, quit staring. It’s rude.”

The cat blinked and settled down onto its belly, tucking its forelegs one by one to its chest. And continued to stare.

“She thinks you’re fascinating,” Lili offered.

“She told you?”

“No. She’s keeping her thoughts to herself right now.”

There was his opening. “That’s what I’d like to talk about.”

“Einstein’s thoughts?”

“No.” Then he stopped and looked at the cat, its eyes trained on him like a laser beam. “Why do you call it Einstein?”

Lili glanced at the cat, then back at him. “She doesn’t like to be called an
it,
” she whispered, then raised her voice to a normal level. “She says she’s the reincarnation of Einstein.”

“Says?”

“Well, she didn’t exactly
say.
But when we were discussing what she wanted to be named, she flashed me this image of Einstein —” she tipped her head “— and I knew what she meant.”

“How did the cat know what the real Einstein looked like?”

Lili grinned. “That’s it exactly! She couldn’t have known. That was before she started watching TV. She says Einstein came back as a cat because cats are earth’s highest life form.”

Was she joshing him? Tanner couldn’t tell. “Are you sure?”

She leaned in, her scent wafting over him, and murmured, “People and animals should be allowed their fantasies, don’t you think? Between you and me, with her sophisticated, snarky attitude, I think she’s got a lot more Joan Crawford in her.”

This was exactly the sort of thing he didn’t need Erika exposed to. “So, about why I came over —”

She beat him to the punch. “I’m glad you did, because I wanted to talk…” She trailed off, looked at him, quirked her mouth and started over. “About Erika. And your dad.”

She tipped her head yet again, and her hair fell across her shoulder to caress her breast. Tanner lost his train of thought.

“Roscoe’s such a doll,” she went on. “You must be so happy that he’s with Erika. My parents moved to Florida. It was warmer, and my mom wanted to be somewhere warm. Only she didn’t like the dry heat in the desert.” She glanced up, as if realizing she’d prattled on way too much. “Anyway, I miss them. So it’s great that Erika has her grandpa with her.” She stopped and looked at him. “I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

He smiled but didn’t contradict her.

“I don’t usually babble —” Again she stopped. “I do babble, but I’m babbling more than normal. You make me nervous.”

He
made her
nervous? She
unbalanced
him.

He didn’t want to delve into the why of it. “Having Dad around has been great for Erika.” He needed the conversation back on track. “Speaking of Erika, she’s why I came over.”

“She is so smart. She knew all about auras and psychic scams. She’s very grown-up.”

His daughter was his weak spot. He could talk about her all day, he was so damn proud. “She’s got a good mind.”

Lili let out a gasp he felt as well as heard. “She’s the cutest little thing. So blond. And all those big blue eyes.”

“All? She has more than two?”

She laughed, a seductive sound even worse — or better — than the gasp. “You know what I mean. She’s like a little Heidi. And she loves Fluffy. I’ve never seen a girl more devoted to her cat.” She hugged herself and oohed.

The woman made him dizzy, the way her body moved, her exuberance about utterly everything. He didn’t think she was capable of giving a straight yes or no answer or completing a thought in only one sentence.

He looked at the cats milling about the kitchen floor or licking now-empty food bowls as if there might be one missed micron. They licked paws or jaws or chests with swipes of long tongues. And he couldn’t help thinking about…licking. And food. And Lili Goodweather. “Are you a vegetarian?”

She turned her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye as if she couldn’t figure out where that question came from. Neither could he. Food associations. He also had this odd desire to know more about her.

“You
talk
to animals,” he clarified. “You don’t eat them?”

“Oh no, I’m a total carnivore.” She wiggled her shoulders, touchable, bare shoulders. “I mean, I don’t eat a cow after I’ve talked to it, but I rarely talk to cows, anyway. I figure it’s nature. You know, the predator and the prey. If Bigfoot decided to have me —” she put a hand right between her breasts, in case he didn’t know who the
me
was she referred to “— for dinner, why, that’s in the natural order of things.”

Damn. He imagined having her for dinner. Or dessert. Or both. He’d been having blatantly erotic thoughts about her almost from the moment she’d let him in her door. Not that he didn’t have his share of sexual thoughts. He was red-blooded, after all, but there was a time and place for that. Neither of which was now with this woman.

“Look, I have to insist that you don’t carry on with the talking-to-animals thing around my daughter.”

She stopped, her mouth open as if more words were dying to pour forth. “You don’t want me to talk to Fluffy?”

“Fluffy is off-limits.”

“But he’s traumatized.”

Unfortunately, it couldn’t be helped. “No talking.”

“You don’t understand.” Her eyes widened. “His fear will fester in his internal organs. Thoughts can do horrible things.”

“Fluffy’s a cat.”

“Mr. Rutland. Cats are delicate creatures. We’re talking about Fluffy’s quality of life here. Don’t you care?”

She stared at him as if he’d grown horns out of his head and started breathing fire from his nose. Any minute now, she’d be demanding to see his pitchfork. It was a terrible thing to have Lili look at him that way. As if he’d run over a cat and left it thrashing on the road while he went his merry way.

She flapped her hand at him and huffed out a weary breath. “Okay, here’s the thing. I’ve been trying to figure out
how
to tell you, but I realize now that I’m never going to lead myself neatly into it. It has to be said.”

She pursed her lips, which he was sure was a very un-Lili-like expression, and a knot tangled in his stomach.
Had
she bilked Wanetta out of the house? No. Even without Roscoe’s explanation, Lili didn’t fit the type. “Am I going to have to call the police?”

He was trying to make light, but she heaved a great sigh, and all the giddiness seemed to slide right off her face. As if for the last fifteen minutes, she’d been giving him a grand performance. Or maybe
this
was the performance.

“Not yet,” she said without a hint of her previous vivacity. “You should sit down.” She pulled a chair out and sat herself.

Not yet.
That had an ominous sound. But really, how bad could it be? They were talking about a cat, for God’s sake. He didn’t think Lili was going to confess to murder.

Grand larceny? Maybe. But not murder.

“
I’m
the one who needs to sit down,” she told him. “And I feel very nervous with you towering over me. The Bigfoot comparison, you know. Please sit?” Then she beamed.

He wasn’t sure how a woman could flip from pursed lips to beaming so seamlessly, but he figured Lili Goodweather couldn’t be kept down for long. Or maybe she had multiple personalities.

Her smile knocked him sideways. Her fresh scent, like spring rain and new flowers, made him dizzy. Her voice and her nonstop dialogue had thrown him off balance from the moment he’d stepped into her house. Or rather, since he’d stepped into her world, because Lili seemed to live in a completely different dimension from him.

He wasn’t sure how he’d keep her smile from overriding his common sense no matter what she was about to confess.

“P
LEASE SIT.”
Lili gave Tanner her most winning smile, which was difficult to do under the circumstances.

Gosh, he was tall. She was on the tall side herself at five foot eight and not used to looking so far up at a man. Tanner had to be over six feet. He looked scrumptious in jeans and a dark blue, button-down shirt. In addition, like icing on a cake, he had broad shoulders, divine true-blue eyes and hanks of gorgeous, short blond hair. Erika’s was lighter, like golden threads, but her father’s was a deep tan color. And thick. Yummy enough to touch. Not to mention his low, sexy voice, which had an effect like caramel sauce drizzled all over your body. Then licked off. In a past life, he was probably a Viking warrior. Not a raider, but a protector. That was how he’d talked about Erika. He adored that girl. What a big sweetie he was.

Only she didn’t think he was going to be so sweet when she told him what Fluffy had witnessed.

Tanner sat. Einstein was still on the table. Glowering. Lili didn’t reproach the cat aloud. She’d already let her mouth run away with her and put Tanner on the defensive. At the very least, he thought she was an airhead even if she wasn’t blond.

“So, as I was saying, when I —” She cut herself off. She couldn’t say
talked
with Fluffy, because talking about
talking
with animals had already gotten them off to a bad start.

Bite the bullet, babe.
Her own face with a bullet between her teeth. Lili could see Einstein was going to be a problem.

Vamoose.
The cat was born to be queen of the manor, and the minute she jumped down, her tail high, the flock on the kitchen floor dispersed right along with her.

Lili clasped her hands in her lap. And bit the bullet. “I discovered that Fluffy witnessed a murder sometime last night.”

She expected anger. Maybe even fury. Instead, Tanner Rutland leaned an elbow on the table, covered his mouth with a big hand and looked at her with those sky-blue eyes. One one-thousand, two one-thousand. She counted up to five waiting for the inevitable explosion.

Instead, he laughed.

Tanner had issues. The poor man had a muddy-blue aura like Fluffy, but he also had a lot of gray. Gray was bad. It meant his fears, and perhaps some sort of resentment, festered inside him. The man would give himself a heart attack at an early age. Lili had a feeling he was pining for his wife. He probably had scads of messy emotions about her death, and Lili would be willing to bet he’d never talked about them.
Never.

Right now all his muddy blue-gray had morphed into a playful bright yellow. What he needed was more laughter in his life.

Only this wasn’t the time for him to be laughing.

He controlled himself, swiping a hand down his face. “Sorry, but that’s the last thing I expected you to say.”

“What did you expect?”

“Maybe that Bigfoot chased Fluffy.”

He
was
laughing at her, and he did think she was a ditzy airhead. It didn’t matter. “I wouldn’t joke about it.”

“I don’t mean to sound doubtful. I know you believe everything you’re saying.”

Translation: “You may believe it but no one else in his right mind will.”

She hadn’t a clue how to convince him. Except to appeal to his good sense. “Haven’t you seen Fluffy? He’s really shaken up.”

“I’ve seen Fluffy.” And that was all he said.

“If I tell you how I talk to animals, that might explain —”

He held up a hand. “It’s not necessary.” Then he gave her a quizzical look, as if he were debating how to phrase his next words. “I assume you’d like to do a second reading on Fluffy.”

She couldn’t help smiling, glowing actually. He got it! “I can clear up everything if I spend a little more time with him. Maybe what I saw —” she spread her hands in apology “— isn’t what I thought I saw.” It was a possibility. Even a hope.

Tanner leaned back in his chair, crossed one running shoe–clad foot over the opposite knee and held his ankle with both hands. Then he switched, the other foot to the other knee, and took a long,
long
time to ask his next question. “How much do you charge for something like that?”

This time she gasped. “I don’t charge. I
help
animals. I would never ask for anything in return.”

His gaze flitted around the kitchen, then returned to hers, almost reluctantly. And she knew what he was thinking.

“I didn’t
ask
Wanetta to leave me the house.”

She was used to being judged crazy or silly or stupid. But no one had ever accused her of using her skills for profit. Or worse, to swindle an elderly lady out of her house.

He cleared his throat. “I’m not trying to be insulting —”
trying
being the operative word, because she was insulted. “Wanetta was sharp. She’d never let you get away with it.”

“Is that the
only
reason you don’t think I’m guilty?”

His gaze traveled her face, then settled on her lips, and she heated from the inside out, then the outside back in.

“Not the only reason.” He raised his eyes to hers, and she was caught by the blueness. “I don’t think you know how to lie.”

It was a backhanded sort of compliment, but she took it anyway. “Thank you.”

He dropped his voice to a husky whisper that shivered along her arms. “And Wanetta knew a good heart when she met one.”

Now
that
compliment made her cheeks flush hotter than his lingering gaze on her lips.

As he sat back, the intimate moment dissolved. “How you got Wanetta’s house isn’t my main concern right now.”

“What is?”

“I don’t want my daughter involved in anything.”

Her hand to her chest, she whispered, “But this is
murder.
”

He leaned forward once more, until they were so close she could see her reflection in his pupils. He smelled good, like sun-dried laundry and mellow after-shave. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what —” he made a visible effort not to gulp “— you saw.”

She told him everything, minus the gory descriptions, but in her mind, she could hear the awful sound of each blow.

Tanner drummed his fingers on the table for a long moment. “What is it you want me to do?”

There. That was it. What did she expect him to do? Make the problem go away? Take it off her shoulders? Yes, as feeble as it sounded, she wouldn’t mind the big, strong man making everything better. She’d never realized she could be so weak. “I’d like to talk to Fluffy. If I can get him to show me where he was, then I can direct the police myself.”

At least he didn’t laugh. “You might have this thing wrong. The cat was purring when I left.”

“He felt better after he told me.” Just as she would have felt better if Tanner Rutland had said he’d take care of everything. As pitiful as that sounded.

His gaze on her, his eyes inscrutable, he said, “I’m willing to go to the police with you to tell them what you saw.”

She noticed he didn’t say she could tell them Fluffy saw it. “Will you back me up?”

“I don’t see how I can do that.”

“Because you don’t believe me?”

“I can’t attest to something only you saw.”

Which was a diplomatic way of saying he didn’t believe her. “If you don’t believe me, how do you expect the police to believe me? They’ll think I’m nutzoid and write the whole thing off as nonsense. I have to have some evidence to take to them first.” She clasped her hands, hunched her shoulders and whispered, “Like where the body is.”

Lili figured she’d rendered Tanner speechless for good this time. He opened his mouth, closed it, then closed his eyes, and finally,
finally
looked at her again. “Which means you want to talk to Fluffy again. Then you’ll look for the body.”

“Yes.”

His fingers drummed in staccato beats. “I made a reasonable offer. We go to the police together. That’s my
only
offer.”

Lili digested that without a word.

“Try to see it from my point of view. If there
is
a body out there,” he continued, “the last thing I’ll do is allow Fluffy, and hence my daughter, to be brought into this.”

“But I wouldn’t —”

He held up a hand. “We’ll let the police find the body. It can’t take that long. That’s the sensible thing to do.”

She looked at him in horror. There was a dead man out there. There was a
murderer.
How could they play wait and see? She shouldn’t have told him how Einstein got her name or the carnivore/Bigfoot thing. Both were a strike against her. She’d known “being herself” wasn’t a good idea.

“So I can’t talk to Fluffy?”

This time he gave no hesitation at all. “No, you can’t talk to Fluffy. Or Erika.” He shot her a stern look. “Or Roscoe.”

He’d covered all the bases. She didn’t blame him. He didn’t want Erika involved. Either with Lili or her animal talk, or, God forbid, with murder. She could appreciate that, really she could. Yet it meant only one thing.

She’d have to find the body on her own.

T
HE EVENING WINDS HAD PICKED
up, as they usually did around sunset. Tanner pushed his way through the opening in the driveway hedge that Erika and Roscoe had used to get over to Wanetta’s house. He wondered at what point they’d all stop thinking of it as Wanetta’s place instead of Lili’s house. Maybe never, since Wanetta had lived there long before Erika was born.

Dealing with Lili was like starting up a subsidiary in a foreign country. The laws were completely different and required months of research.

Tanner couldn’t say he one hundred percent
didn’t
believe Fluffy told Lili about a murder. A person could never be one hundred percent sure of anything. A little doubt was healthy. But the odds were ninety-nine percent against her. Not that he thought Lili was a total mental case, either. She was a dreamer. In many ways, she was like his wife, like Karen. Effervescent, sweet, happy, but she didn’t have both feet planted on the ground. People deluded themselves for a variety of reasons. He didn’t think Lili was outright lying. She simply saw what she wanted to see and for some reason, she’d gotten it into her head that Fluffy had witnessed a murder, capitalized, underlined and bolded. Maybe it made her feel useful or worthwhile or important. He couldn’t begin to guess what Lili got out of it. That would take those months of research to figure out.

Whatever emotional need Lili was filling for herself was academic at this point. While halfway through the conversation he’d been willing to allow Lili to play animal behaviorist, he drew the line at letting Erika contemplate whether her cat had actually seen a man bludgeoned to death.

When he’d set out for Lili’s house, it had been to protect Erika from a silly woman’s nonsense. Not quite an hour later, and with a head full of Lili’s charm and sweetness, everything had become about protecting Lili…from herself.

The only way to do that was to deny her access to Fluffy.

Even if he was ninety-nine percent sure there was no body to find. Maybe
because
he was ninety-nine percent sure.

“H
ERE YOU GO, HONEY BUNCH
.” Manny pushed Lili’s mocha across the countertop and took the fiver she’d laid down.

Lili snapped on a lid, squirting a dollop of whipped cream through the top hole. Not wanting to waste a smidgen, she scooped it up and licked her finger. She couldn’t start a Friday — or any day — without a white mocha. Benton had only one coffeehouse, but the girls behind the counter at the Coffee Stain made the best mochas ever. Better than Manny, though with him being the Stain’s owner, she’d never say that.

Manny counted out her change, then leaned forward. “Got any gossip from the animal kingdom?” It was supposed to be a whisper, but Manny was a large man and his whisper was a boom. It was rumored that he’d once been a big-time wrestler before he opened the Stain a couple of years ago. He certainly had the flattened nose as evidence. She’d offered him Pug, Wanetta’s black on white with the squashed nose. Lili thought they’d be a perfect match, but Manny claimed he wasn’t home enough for a cat. She wasn’t giving up yet, though. After all, Pug didn’t refer only to his nose; it could be short for Pugilist.

Manny always kidded her about talking to animals. It didn’t bother her, honestly, but she couldn’t resist giving him back his own medicine. Tit for tat, so to speak. “The only animal I’ve talked to today is that cockroach by the front door. He’s got an army of friends on the way to meet him.”

Manny frowned, then looked at the line of customers streaming to the door and the full tables behind her. “That’s not funny, Lili. Besides, cockroaches aren’t animals.”

She patted his hand. “I was kidding. A cockroach army wouldn’t take
you
on.”

He wiped a drop of sweat from his brow. “Whew,” he said, then boomed out, “Next!”

The Stain was packed as usual: morning commuters, moms with children getting together for a morning gab, a couple of oldsters gossiping between sips from huge cups of milky coffee. Time moved slower in Benton, and Manny usually stopped to say a few words with every customer. Lili recognized a lot of faces, but she couldn’t say she knew any of them except to smile at. She shoved a couple of napkins in her Danish bag and slid her mocha into a java jacket to protect her fingers from the heat.

And started thinking about Tanner all over again as she headed to the door. Last night, it had been clear he wouldn’t help her. Lili should have left that question unasked.
I can’t talk to Fluffy?
If she hadn’t asked, she could rationalize that he hadn’t said no. As it was now, she couldn’t go behind his back and ask Roscoe or Erika to help her.

It was too bad she liked Tanner. Even worse, he was hot enough to make her feel like Einstein in heat. Except that Einstein didn’t have the female-heat mechanism anymore. Lili didn’t do a lot of dating because, well, people could be judgmental. Somehow, her relationships — and that went for the majority of her people interactions, not just dating — were usually about what she claimed she did with animals, not about who she was as a human being. Most men she’d been out with never got past the fact that she
thought
she could talk to animals. Either they ran for the hills, or they wanted her to teach them how to talk to their pit bull. There was no happy medium. But while Tanner had semi-insulted her, he’d taken it all back with that one-liner.
Wanetta knew a good heart when she met one.