Licensed for Trouble (6 page)

At the other end of the room, she found the kitchen, in sore need of updating, from the 1970s apple green stove to the matching refrigerator. A butler's pantry contained the cookware and heirloom dishes of a family accustomed to entertaining. Shelves covered all the walls but one, at the far end of the pantry. PJ closed the door and paused in front of the fridge, noted the rust pooling on the peeling linoleum floor.

How had elderly Agatha lived here?

PJ wandered through the rest of the house, past what looked like servant's quarters just off the kitchen, then out through the screened porch to the flagstone terrace with the rusty iron furniture and ancient grill, and finally meandered down the shaggy lawn, admiring the view. The lake spewed the debris of summer onto the shore—sticks and seaweed, trash from careless boaters. From the looks of it, the beach hadn't been raked since Carter was in office. But beyond it, on the indigo blue, white sailboards bobbed in the rolling waves, their farewell nod to summer.

Back in the house, behind the kitchen, she found another staircase, took it up, and landed in a long hall covered by a formerly pink or perhaps mauve carpet, with empty rooms she guessed had been bedrooms. The French doors at the end of the hall—the ones she supposed might lead into the master bedroom—remained locked. She tried the key. Nothing.

But it didn't matter because she'd found the jackpot. Yes, suddenly, she had become Cinderella and probably Snow White, definitely Belle, and every other fairy-tale character swept into a story line beyond their belief.

A library.

PJ stood at the door; her breath caught. Floor-to-ceiling shelves. Filled with books. Old books with fraying bindings. A stack of
National Geographic
magazines. A pile of what looked like romances. Thousands of books.

All hers. Along with eight thousand square feet of lakeshore and history and prestige.

She was . . . rich. Wealthy.

A Kellogg.

At least for the next two months.

She reached for her phone and the number rang once before she stopped herself. Closed the phone. No, she couldn't call Boone.

Not anymore.

She dialed Jeremy instead. Of course, it flipped to voice mail. She didn't bother leaving a message. She didn't want to interrupt him taking down a vicious criminal.

She ran her finger along the bindings of a row of books, ratty volumes worn by age. She pulled one out, blew off the dust.
Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow. She wiped off the cover and replaced it on the shelf next to a hardback yellowed copy of
Robinson Crusoe.

Scuffing to the window, she peered out over the driveway. She spotted her Vic, waiting patiently for her in the weeds below.

Maybe she could live here. She had to admit, her thoughts had immediately run toward selling this “money pit,” as Connie put it. But what would it be like to sit on the terrace sipping lemonade as the sun dipped into the lake? or sink into a leather chair and bury herself in a book in her very own library?

She bounded down the far stairs, her feet falling hard on the risers. She couldn't wait to show—

The step cracked even as she came down on it, and she reached out, grabbing the rail before she went through. Her heart wedged into her throat. “Yeah, that would be good. Get trapped in the house on your first night, only to perish in the basement.” Her voice was thin in the layers of age and expanse of the house.

She laughed. Okay, maybe she would call Boone. Because, well, he'd also had a fascination with this house when they'd been teenagers. More than once they'd driven by it, and PJ whispered her dreams into his ear.

Yes, she'd call him. Just for old times' sake.

She walked out the front door, toward the fountain of sludge, her phone to her ear. Boone's voice mail picked up. “Hey . . . it's me. PJ. You'll never guess where I am—the old Kellogg house! You're not going to believe this, but I inherited—”

The ground beneath her sagged, groaning, and then, as if it yawned beneath her, waking from slumber, it gulped her whole.

She screamed as she fell into open space and landed fast, jarred by the earth. Her hand planted in what felt like fresh, sucking cement.

Ow. She fought to catch her breath as her landing shuddered through her. She'd bruised her arm, and her leg burned—probably a wicked scrape up the side. But otherwise, she felt intact. In a moment her eyes adjusted to the wan dusky light streaming from eight feet above. From the torn patch where she'd caved through, she guessed she'd stepped on a rotted door.

A storm cellar? She remembered the stories of tornadoes ripping through the Minnesota prairie. In the early 1900s when the Kellogg home had been built, they would have added protection from the storms. It reminded her of her parents' apple cellar, built into the basement of the house, where her mother stored summer apples and potatoes.

But this seemed less of a cellar and more of a . . . tunnel.

Oh, this couldn't be good. Not from the pungent swamp smell or the texture of goo under her.
Please don't let me have fallen into an old sewer drain.

“Help!” She patted the . . . mud? . . . around her, searching for her phone, but came up empty. “Help!” Not that anyone would hear her. Or if her phone was still on, somewhere—“Help! Boone!”

Oh, she hated to admit that, again, she needed him.
Come and rescue me, Boone.
The child's voice rang in her head, and she shook it away. Maybe Connie had figured her right—she didn't know how to live a life without Boone in it.

She got up and searched the walls for steps or perhaps a ladder, but nothing remained from the past to rescue her.

She trekked to the end of the fading light, peering into blackness.

Uh, no.

Finding a dry place, she sat down, staring at the ragged square of twilight. Perfect. No, she wouldn't spend her first night in her new home. She'd bed down thirty feet outside it. Maybe never to be found again. She drew her knees tight to herself and wrapped her arms around them.

Breathing slowly through her mouth, she mentally made a list of the things she wouldn't think about. Her stomach growled. Like pad thai from the cute little restaurant
To Thai For
in Dinkytown. Or an Italian sub sandwich from the sub shop. Or a pizza—oh, a pizza—with lots of pepperoni, delivered by one broad-shouldered former Navy SEAL.

And speaking of, she certainly wouldn't think about Jeremy and the way he had pulled her into his arms this morning, the taste of him lingering on her lips. And especially not the fact that after the lawyer left, Jeremy had grabbed his stack of manila files and glued himself in front of the computer, tracking down suspects.

She'd strike off her list the desire for a warm shower, even a dip in the lake. Which meant she also wouldn't think about the many late-night dips in the bay just outside the house, nor the memory of Boone, his hair glistening wet in the moonlight.

Clearly, she couldn't think about Boone's face when he'd walked away from her Sunday. Right after the words,
“People don't change, PJ. You should know that by now.”

They left a burn there, his words. Because
she
could change, would change.

“No one is calling you Nothing but Trouble anymore but you.”

PJ sank her head onto her knees. Definitely, she wouldn't think about Connie's words and the fear that she might be right. Because if she wasn't trouble . . . who was she?

* * *

“PJ?”

She lifted her head. Darkness had swept over the mouth of her prison, engulfing her in soupy shadow. She pushed her hands against the sides of the cellar. “Here! I'm down here!”

“PJ?” A light whisked across the opening.

“I'm down here in the cellar!” Yes! Someone had gotten her call, tracked her down, hadn't left her to rot in a hole outside her new mansion. “Over here!”

The light poured into the hole, and she wanted to chortle with glee when she spotted her phone in the muck.

“Are you okay?”

She peered around the light, smiling at the hero on the other end. He moved the light off her face and it reflected just enough for her to recognize Boone, staring down at her, wearing an expression of horror, as if he'd just found her buried alive.

“I'm not even sure where to start with the questions.” Boone lay on the ground, his arm extended, and PJ took a jump for it, finally grabbing his hand.

“Get me out and I'll come clean; I promise.” She clamped her other hand onto his as he growled, pulling her from the hole. She kicked at the dirt, trying to assist him.

“Just let me pull you out—stop trying to help,” he grunted. He pulled her up to head level. “Now grab my neck; climb out over me.”

PJ wrapped her hands around his neck.

“Try not to knee me in the face—
ow
!”

“Sorry.” She scrabbled over him, Boone pulling her up by her waistband as she kneed him again—“Sorry!”—and then finally rolled onto the grass beside the opening.

“You smell like you slept under a bridge. So much for coming clean.” He wanted to smile, she saw it, but fought the urge with a grimace that had any warmth locked tight.

“Thanks for that. I'm not sure what I fell into.”

“You okay?”

“I think so. Just a few bruises.”

“Good. I'd help you up, but you're covered in muck.”

“Oh, you're a real hero.” She climbed to her feet and got her first good look at her rescuer. In a pair of jeans and a leather jacket, he looked a little like he might be going out. On a date? “How'd you know I was in trouble?”

She waited for him to say it, hearing her own voice provoking him.
You're always in trouble, PJ.

“I used all my detective techniques . . . and the little scream on the end of your voice mail was a slight hint. Thanks for that. Now, what were you saying about inheriting something?”

“Aggie Kellogg left me this place. Her entire estate.” PJ faced her house, eerie in the wan light of his flashlight. “It's mine. The Grimms' fairy-tale house is mine.”

Boone stood speechless for what seemed too long a time, so long that PJ turned to him. “Did you hear me?”

“I'm not sure what to say.”

“How about congratulations. Or even, wow. Do you not remember the way I fawned over this place every time we drove by it?”

“Oh, believe me, that kind of adoration is hard to forget. But my thoughts run more to . . . escape while you can.”

What?
“Escape? What on earth are you talking about?”

Boone had picked up his flashlight, was now scanning it into the hole. “Rumor says there was a tunnel leading from the house down to the caretaker's cottage.”

“What rumor?”

The light panned her face, and she put a hand up, flinching. He seemed not to hear her as he walked toward the house and then along the front. “Boone? What rumor?”

“The one surrounding Joy Kellogg's murder.”

“Murder?”

Boone kept walking, now peering into windows, finally rounding to the back. PJ scrambled behind him, grabbing a few wide leaves from a monstrous hydrangea to wipe the muck from her hands. “Murder?”

Boone ran his light across the patio. Then he flashed it toward the lake, now dark and restless. “You didn't hear about the murder? It happened before we were born, but it's an unsolved case over at the station.”

“No one found her killer?”

“There're a few leads, but nothing panned out. And some people said it might have been a suicide. The police didn't have enough evidence to hold the chief suspect, Joy's husband, so they let him go. He left town shortly after that.”

He kept walking across the yard, his legs swishing through the long grass. “As the story goes, Joy was a troublemaker, ran away from home when she was sixteen or something. She eventually returned and married a local guy—although I think there was a scandal involved there because years later, they found her floating in this lagoon.” He shone his light across a murky cutout of the lake, an inlet with shaggy willows and a covering of algae. “She left behind a teenage daughter.”

“That's terrible. What happened?”

“No one knows. She had a terrible fight with her husband apparently. And some say she'd been drinking.”

“What happened to the daughter?”

“I don't know. Not much was heard of the Kelloggs after that. Agatha, the matriarch, was still around—I remember seeing her at your play practices occasionally, in those crazy hats.”

“I liked them.”

“Of course you did.” He walked to the door of the screened-in room. Tried the lock. “I guess we need a key.”

“Like this one?” She pulled the key from her sodden pocket. He took it, meeting her eyes with a question.

“I told you, I inherited the place. It's mine.”

He inserted the key. “You baffle me more every day. Who are you?”

PJ pushed past him. “I guess, a princess.” She gave a twirl like she might be at a ball. “I've inherited a castle.”

He strode by her, trying the lights by the door. Nothing.

“How do you know all this about the murder?” She bumped up to him as he passed his light into the kitchen.

“When I joined the police force, I looked into some of the cold cases down in the basement. I remembered your fascination with this house . . . that sort of drew me to it, I guess.”

He walked over to the sink and tried the faucet. Something rattled deep inside the house, but nothing emerged. “I think the plumbing might be gummed up, too.”

“That can be fixed.”

He shot her a dubious look. “The place smells as if it's sitting on a swamp. I'll bet the plumbing burst over the winter, and the basement is flooded with sump water.”

“So it needs some work. It's old. Built in the early 1900s. It's bound to have a few glitches.”