The Hitwoman and the Neurotic Witness (4 page)

“Help?” she asked, looking no worse for wear after crashing into a corner of the dining room table.

“You’d think with a houseful of people someone could come give me a hand,” I muttered. “Where is everyone?”

“Are you asking me or the dog?” Leslie asked.

“The dog.”

My aunt nodded like that made perfect sense.

“Furniture,” the dog replied.

Before I could tell her that her answer was confusing, I heard the unmistakable sound of a piece of furniture being pushed across the floor overhead.

“Why don’t you sit down here?” I kicked a chair away from the table, lowered Leslie into it, and guided her so that she could rest her arms and head on the table.

“Watch her,” I ordered the dog before hustling upstairs in search of the furniture movers.

I ran upstairs trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

I didn’t have to go far. I heard the unmistakable scraping noise coming from the Primrose Room on the second floor.

Peering inside I watched Patrick, Marshal Griswald, and Aunt Susan struggling to push the giant four-poster bed across the room.

“What are you doing?” I asked from the doorway.

“They’ve all lost their minds,” God shouted. Looking around, I saw that the cup he was in was on top of the dresser.

Marshal Griswald sagged against his corner of the bed, breathing hard, Patrick straightened and crossed his arms over his chest, and Aunt Susan charged toward me.

“Help us,” Susan ordered, grabbing my wrist and dragging me into the room.

“What are you doing?” I asked again, bewildered as to the how and why she’d managed to rope a US Marshal and a police detective into being her impromptu moving staff.

“We have guests coming,” Susan said, pushing me toward the unmanned corner of the bed.

“Guests?”

“Yes,” Susan said snippily. “Those people that pay to stay here. This
is
a business after all, or did you forget that?”

“We’re moving it to that corner,” Patrick interjected, jerking his chin toward the farthest corner.

“Well did you?” Susan demanded, ignoring the redhead’s attempt to diffuse the tension.

“Of course I didn’t,” I replied to my aunt. “It’s just that with all that’s going on….”

Shoving at her corner of the bed, forcing us all to join her in the effort to move the bed, she muttered, “I took the reservation a week ago. Way before your father escaped from prison, your boyfriend tried to kill you, your---“

“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” I interrupted sharply.

Patrick raised his eyebrows.

Susan shook her head and continued on her tirade. “As I was saying, I took the reservation before your sister came home and before your apartment blew up. Besides, the request was made by a former guest. I couldn’t very well say no.”

“And what does any of that have to do with moving the furniture in the middle of the night?” I asked as the bed finally bumped up against the desired wall.

“Feng shui. It has to be far away from the door,” Susan said.

“Why?” I asked

“Feng shui.”

“Yes, you said that,” I said, trying not to lose my temper. “We’ve never moved furniture for a guest before.”

“Apparently she’s very particular.” Straightening, Susan rolled up the sleeves of her flannel gown. “She needs the bed to be against the wall and lots of blue in the room.”

“Okay. So you’re going with a
the customer is always right
theme,” I said slowly. The explanation didn’t explain the presence of the Law Enforcement officers.

“Don’t start, Margaret,” Susan snapped.

“Start what?” I asked. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. You’re moving furniture in the middle of the night.”

“Because Loretta and Templeton have gone to the airport to pick them up.”

“Dressed like that?” I gasped.

Susan narrowed her gaze. “Dressed like what?”

Swallowing hard, I shrugged.

I was saved from answering by a massive crash downstairs.

Everyone in the bedroom jumped, startled.

I winced. “That was either DeeDee or Leslie.”

“Boom Leslie,” the dog barked.

“I’m guessing it’s Leslie,” I told Susan.

“For heaven’s sake,” Susan practically growled. Ripping open the room’s closet, she grabbed a large garbage bag, stuffed to the gills, and threw it at me.

Instinctively I batted it away. It fell to the floor with a soft thud.

“Fix the bed,” she ordered before hurrying out of the room.

“Don’t go alone.” Marshal Griswald hurried after her. “Someone could have broken in.”

I could only hope.

Rolling my eyes, I grabbed the corner of the pink hand-knit spread and yanked it off the bed. As I rolled it into a ball, I could hear Susan’s agitated voice coming from the dining room, but I couldn’t understand what she was complaining about.

I glanced over at Patrick and realized he was staring at me in abject horror.

I whirled around to see what upset him, but saw nothing behind me. “What is it?” I asked, turning back to face him.

“You’re not going to fold that?”

I looked down at the rumpled mound of material pressed to my chest. I frowned. “Oh, you’re one of
those
people.”

“Those people?” Moving around the bed toward me, he held out his hands.

“People who believe in folding things.” I tossed the spread to him.

“You don’t believe in folding things?”

“Not if they’re going to need to be unfolded.”

“But they don’t get wrinkled if you fold them.” He folded the bed covering with the efficiency of a world-class origamist.

I eyed him suspiciously. “I bet you own an iron, don’t you?”

“I do.” He carefully laid his perfectly-cornered creation on top of the dresser. “And I know how to use it.”

I shook my head, reaching for a pillow. “And here I’d been thinking you were practically perfect.”

“I’m far from that,” he murmured in a self-recriminating tone.

We stripped the bed in silence. He folded all the removed bedding while I pulled a fresh set from the garbage bag. It was blue, as the guest had requested, but I didn’t know what she’d think of the tiny anchor pattern. Personally I thought it clashed with the floral patterns in the Primrose Room.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said, as Patrick moved to help me make the bed.

He tilted his head to the side. “I don’t mind.”

“Why not?”

“I own an
iron
, Mags,” he teased. “Imagine the pleasure I get from making a bed.”

My heartbeat doubled as he flashed a good-natured smile at me.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs.

“Susan,” I told Patrick.

Sure enough, she popped her head into the room. “He’s trying to get Leslie sobered up before she hurts herself.”

“Who?” I asked, confused.

“Griswald,” Patrick supplied helpfully, sending a sheet billowing across the bed toward me.

“Where are you going to sleep, Margaret?” Susan asked. “I already gave Marlene your old room since we’d turned hers into a guest room years ago.”

“I can stay in one of the extra guest rooms.” Patrick and I pulled the corners of the fitted sheet around the mattress as I spoke.

“No you can’t,” Susan said tiredly. “I rented both of them too.”

“To who?” I asked, unable to remember a time in recent history when all four guest rooms had been rented out simultaneously.

“To the Marshal and his brother.”

I stared at her, an uneasy feeling pooling in the pit of my stomach. She was renting rooms to a US Marshal
and
an FBI agent just when her niece, the hitwoman, was moving back home. This did not bode well.

My panic must have shown on my face because Patrick said, “Catch.” He sent the upper sheet my way, while giving me a warning look.

Swallowing hard, I did my best to look composed. “I’ll sleep in the ship.”

“You’re terrified of the ship,” Susan said doubtfully.

“I was afraid when I was eight,” I told her. “I’m pretty sure I can handle it now.”

“Well that would be a solution,” she said slowly.

“Problem solved,” I told her with a fake cheery smile. “I’ll finish everything in here and then set up the ship.”

Susan nodded. “I’ll go check on Leslie.” She left, her footsteps clattering down the stairs.

“Ship?” Patrick asked, stuffing a pillow into its case.

“It’s the basement.”

“You call your basement a ship?”

“We called the shed The Barn. We call the basement The Ship.”

He pulled a blue bedspread from the bag and we smoothed it over the bed.

“Thanks.” I stowed the carefully folded bedding in the garbage bag and put it back in the closet. “I don’t know why Aunt Susan’s knocking herself out to accommodate this guest.”

“Maybe it’s the stress from everything else that’s going on,” Patrick mused. “Maybe being able to actually help someone, meet their needs, is important to her.”

“Probably.” I headed toward the door, but before I reached it, he reached over my shoulder and pushed it closed.

When I glanced over my shoulder to see what was going on, he caught my chin and kissed me. Unlike the soothing pressure he’d applied in the car, this kiss was giving and taking, lips and tongue, hot and hotter. Then we heard the footsteps climbing the stairs and jumped apart like two guilty teenagers, both trying desperately to catch our breath and look composed.

“…so it looks like a ship,” I said with a fake laugh, hoping that it would sound like we’d been in the middle of a conservation and weren’t really ready to rip each other’s clothes off and mess up the freshly made bed.

Aunt Susan popped her head into the room and surveyed our progress on the makeover with a critical eye. “Very nice. Someone taught you well, Detective. Domestic duties were never one of our Margaret’s strengths.”

Stung, I looked away, pretending to focus on God, who’d curled up in the bottom of the cup that I snatched off the dresser. It wasn’t that what she said was untrue, I was never going to fool anyone into thinking I was a Domestic Goddess. But I felt like she’d been picking on me since the moment I’d walked in the door and I had no idea why.

Biting back as sarcastic retort, I asked quietly, “Did you need something else?”

“Loretta called,” Susan replied. “They’ll be here in less than five minutes and Leslie and that dog are both sprawled out on the kitchen floor.”

“I’ll move the dog, you move your sister,” I said, hurrying past her and rushing downstairs.

“DeeDee come,” I ordered, stalking through the dining room toward the kitchen.

Leslie, Agent Griswald, and the dog all watched my hurried progress across the room with identical befuddled expressions.

“Now,” I said, blinking back tears. “Please.” Logically I knew that I was overreacting to Susan’s irritability, but all I really wanted to do was have a good cry.

“Hurry up, beast,” God demanded from the cup. “Can’t you see she’s upset?”

“Wrong Maggie something?” DeeDee asked, getting to her feet.

Shaking my head, I stumbled into the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. “Down you go.”

DeeDee put her front paws on the top step and whined pitifully, “Dark.”

“You’re a Doberman,” the lizard reminded her, as I fumbled to find the light switch. “You can’t be scared of the dark.”

Switching on the fluorescent bulbs, I nudged her butt with my knee, forcing her to scamper down the stairs. I followed her, making sure I pulled the door closed behind me.

While she ran around sniffing every nook and corner of the place, God said, “I want out of this stupid cup.”

“Floor or furniture?” I asked.

“It’s a
basement
,” he replied disdainfully. “By definition the floor is cold.”

Taking that to mean he preferred furniture, I tipped the cup over on the oak bar in the corner of the room. Peeking his head out to survey the new landscape, he cautiously crawled out of the cup.

Crossing the room, I flopped on the old worn couch, listening to the rumble of footsteps and voices overhead. Hearing the unmistakable squeak of the door opening, I closed my eyes, hoping that I could convince whoever it was that my exhaustion had caught up to me and I’d fallen asleep.

I focused on keeping my breathing shallow and even as footsteps padded closer to me.

“Are you playing dead, Mags?”

I opened my eyes to find Patrick standing over me trying to disguise his bemused expression.

“Are you okay?” he asked, sitting down beside me, his hip resting against mine.

“Sure,” I muttered.

He cocked his head to the side, silently calling me on my lie.

“I don’t know. I thought Aunt Susan and I were getting along so much better, understanding each other, and now it’s like everything I do is wrong.”

“She’s had a tough couple of days,” Patrick said slowly.

I shot him a dirty look. I needed him to side with me, not her.

“Not that I’m making excuses or defending her,” he said hurriedly. “I’m just saying Kowalski trying to kill you, DeeDee getting hurt, your father escaping from prison, and Marlene coming back into your lives,
was
a lot to take in.”

“But why’s she taking it out on me?”

“Because you can take it?” he proposed.

“What’s that mean?” I asked petulantly.

“No offense, but Loretta’s a histrionic narcissist, Leslie is a drug addict, and saying anything to Marlene could have her disappearing for years again.”

“She doesn’t have to pick on me,” I pouted.

“She shouldn’t,” he agreed, brushing my hair away from my face. “But she’s not perfect. Nobody is.”

“You’re annoyingly reasonable,” I told him.

“You’re surrounded by some of the least reasonable people I’ve met. Maybe I’m just what you need.”

God made a gagging sound from the bar. “I’m going to be violently ill if this treacly nonsense continues.”

Surprised by the lizard’s squeaking, Patrick turned in his direction. It was the first time he’d really looked around the room and I watched his eyes widen in disbelief.

“Now you know why it’s called The Ship,” I said. I tried to see the room like someone who’d never set eyes on it before. They might say it was a work of art. I called it evidence of insanity.