Nip, Tuck, Dead Read online

  The door swung open just as I was bending down to look in the cabinet below the counter. “Where is the gravy, Mom?”

  I heard a throat clear and swung up just in time to smack my head on the counter. “Ouch!”

  Jagger Whoever stood there, grinning yet again.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you if you make a face like that it will freeze?” I asked, rubbing my head to feel for a bump or fresh blood.

  “Excuse me?” He walked closer until we were eye-to-eye.

  Yikes.

  “Never mind,” I said and started to bend down again, all the while rubbing the top of my head.

  Jagger took my arm and pulled me back up. Then he touched the top of my head and said, “Sorry about that.”

  For a second my usually brilliant mind turned to gravy. “The gravy!” I yelled, very thankful for the stupid diversion. “I have to find it before Mother comes in. Where is she anyway?” I leaned past him to see if the Gestapo mother was on her way in.

  Nothing.

  “Your mother is in the living room. She said she’d be here in a few minutes to help.” He smiled.

  I pushed his hand away from my head before the top started to burn from his touch. How pathetic was I? Maybe I should start using the thongs. Geez, I couldn’t even think about those garments with Jagger so close. “I have to make the…”

  What the hell was I going to do?

  He looked at me, and I swear wanted to grin. “Gravy, Sherlock. You are in here to make some gravy. You know, that pork smells good. Think it’s done?”

  I pushed at his chest. “Don’t you start. Don’t tell me how to cook. I know when a pork roast is done.”

  “The longer you cook a pork roast, Pauline, the more tender it becomes,” Mother said, walking in.

  I hoped she didn’t see me touching Jagger even if it was only a poke. “Right. Cook longer. Yeah, got it, Ma.”

  “Mother,” she corrected and perched herself on the “observation” stool.

  Jagger sat next to her.

  I growled inside and bent down again, this time being very careful about my head. “So where is the gravy, Mother?”

  “What?”

  I stuck my head out of the cabinet and repeated, “The gravy? I don’t see any.”

  “Pauline Sokol. How could you see something you haven’t even made yet. I think that job is way too much for you. You need to go back to nursing, so you’ll remember you don’t find gravy under a counter.”

  I shook my head and ignored Jagger’s look. “I’m happy in my job and thought you’d keep the cans of gravy down here with the cans of vegetables.”

  Mother gasped.

  Obviously in order not to grin like a fool, Jagger bit his lip. “Where I come from, gravy is made from scratch with the drippings from the meat,” he said.

  I reached inside the cabinet for a can of anything to fling in his direction.

  “Pauliiiiiiiine,” Mother said.

  Soon my hand was back, empty, and I was standing up. “Okay, I give. How the hell do you make gravy?”

  “Stop using that longshoreman language, Pauline, and I’ll walk you through it.”

  For some reason I was more amazed that Stella Sokol used the term “walk you through it” than the fact that she thought “hell” was used by long-shoremen.

  I stared at the tiny white lumps in the pan. Oh…my…God. Mother was not going to ever let me forget about this. When I took the spoon and started to poke at them, hoping against hope that they’d dissolve, I watched them pop back up like little inner tubs afloat in a sea of mud.

  Pauline’s homemade gravy. Yum.

  At least I’d been successful (and had the foresight) to shoo Jagger and my mother out of the room earlier with the pretense of having appetizers in the living room after throwing a few slices of cheese and crackers on Mom’s wooden cutting board.

  Actually I think at least one of them was glad to leave.

  Mother, however, kept kibitzing from the living room.

  The gravy stared back at me and bubbled. Twice.

  There had to be some secret, some trick that she deliberately didn’t tell me so I’d fail at this chore. Mother was not a vindictive person, far from it, but cooking was her life and her main function in this world-and I’d bet my last paycheck that she didn’t want anyone taking over the lead.

  A splatter of gravy sputtered into the air, landing on the front of my top.

  Mother had nothing to worry about.

  “Pauline, I’m getting very hungry,” she said.

  “Have another cracker and cheese, Ma.” Okay, I called her that deliberately so she’d start to fume in the living room and forget that I was in the kitchen from hell speckled in brown.

  Suddenly I had an idea and grabbed my cell phone from my pocket. I hated to disturb anyone but this was an emergency.

  “Miles, I need help now!” I whispered into the phone, still managing to sound as if I were drowning in the damn gravy.

  “Oh, God. What is wrong, Pauline!”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to alarm you, Miles. Tell Gold hi for me. Hope you two are having a ball, but I have a food emergency-”

  “Oh, Lord, Pauline. I never should have let you go to your mother’s house to help out cooking alone. It’s all my fault.” I could hear him interpreting every part of our call for Goldie in the background, who occasionally shrieked or gasped. And why wouldn’t he?

  They knew my mother very well, and knew me even better.

  After several minutes of Miles’s instructions on how to revive a dying pan of pork gravy, I searched through the kitchen for his suggestion of a strainer. Everything I found had holes that looked way too big for what I needed. The tiny clots of flour would just pass right through.

  Wait. I had visions of working the renal unit back in my nursing days and thought about straining for kidney stones. Now a kidney stone was the size of an uncooked piece of rice that tried to pass through a piece of spaghetti-uncooked too. So that theory might apply here.

  Maybe my nursing skills really were still useful.

  I looked around the kitchen and found the only thing that seemed plausible to use. Mother’s white dish towel. Had to be cotton. Had to be clean as a whistle since it was in the drawer, and had to be dye-free since it was white.

  I draped it over a bowl in the sink, poured the mess of clots into it, and stepped back.

  “I’m guessing your family wants to eat this century.”

  I swung around to see Jagger only inches away, looking at my invention.

  “Dinner will be served in a few seconds.” I turned away and looked at the gravy.

  Not one clot had budged. It seemed rather thick.

  “Damn it, Jag-” I looked over my shoulder.

  Once again my buddy had disappeared like the north wind.

  After many minutes, which, of course, there at 171 David Drive felt like years, I threw in the towel. Literally. I threw the entire mess into the garbage and decided I was going to tell my folks that gravy had way too much fat in it and their cholesterol levels might skyrocket if they ate it, so I was cooking “heart healthy” tonight. Gravyless pork.

  It looked naked on the serving platter.

  I sucked in a breath, blew it out as if that would give me more courage, and started to shout, “Dinner is-”

  “Going to be in five minutes,” Jagger finished from behind.

  I swung around to chastise him when I looked at his hands.

  Two cans of pork gravy.

  Before I could think, I swung my arms around his neck, winced when the gravy cans poked into my chest but managed a smack of thanks on his lips…that I will always remember.

  Mother tried to cut her meat using her cast-covered arm and following my instructions. She managed to get most of it cut since it was so overdone the pulled pork fell off the bones. I kept encouraging her to do things herself, knowing that I couldn’t stay any longer than tomorrow.

  Thank the good Lord.

&n
bsp; Daddy did his best to help, and before the meal was done and Uncle Walt had taken his usual nap at the dining room table, Stella Sokol had gone from wounded martyr mother to accomplished pink-cast-covered heroine who could care for her family despite rain, sleet, snow or fractured humerus.

  You go girl!

  And I could go too.

  Buzz. Buzz.

  Mother, who was reaching for another helping of my “gravy,” looked at me. “None of those phone things at the table, Pauline. Where are your manners?”

  The hours I’d slaved over the meal got to me. “I have perfect manners, Ma, but this is business.” I got up, took my phone and went toward the hallway. “Hey, Adele. What’s going on?”

  Jagger must have heard me talking because before Adele could tell me about her daughter coming to town, he was at my back.

  “So, chéri, you must meet Lilla. She is a darling-most of the time.”

  I smiled to myself. “I’d love to. And about Mrs. Wheaton-Chandler?”

  Silence.

  Damn, Fabio probably had the cheapest phone service available. “Adele? Adele?”

  “I am here, chéri.”

  “Oh, thought I’d lost the connection.” I turned my shoulder away from Jagger to give him the hint that this was a private conversation. Too eager to hear what Adele had to say, I didn’t want to argue with him right then. “So? What do you know about Olivia Wheaton-Chandler?”

  “She didn’t exist twenty years ago.”

  Thirteen

  “Excuse me, Adele? Excuse me? Olivia Wheaton-Chandler did not exist twenty years ago? What does that mean?”

  My gut told me I knew exactly what it meant, but I wanted to-no, needed to-hear it from Adele to make it more real.

  As if I wanted that monkey wrench in my case to be real.

  If Mrs. Wheaton-Chandler had no record of living in Newport, then what about Lydia? Where did she come from and what the hell was going on?

  “Adele, I can’t wait to meet Lilla. I’ll be there in a few minutes. You mean Mrs. Wheaton-Chandler didn’t live in Newport twenty years ago?” Okay, I told myself, that is really reaching for straws, but I’ll go for it.

  “No. No, chéri. There is no record for her anywhere. Not in Newport or any other state.”

  I felt Jagger’s breath on my neck, ignored it as best I could, and yes, it took a Herculean effort, but I managed to say, “What about overseas? Maybe she’s foreign?”

  Another pause.

  Great. I half expected Adele to set up another roadblock in my case with some other tidbit of info that she’d gleaned about the woman. Actually, I really didn’t know if Olivia had anything to do with my case.

  Only going on my nursing premonition abilities and gut instincts.

  “Adele?”

  “Adele is very thorough, chéri. She always checks foreign and domestic before reporting to any of the investigators.”

  Oh, no. I had Adele back to her old habit of talking about herself in third person. When we first met, I found it kind of eerie, but now I was used to it. At first I thought it distanced us, but now I accepted it as friendly…yet odd. “I am so sorry, Adele. I didn’t mean to insult you. You know I think the world of you. Hey, have you eaten yet?”

  “No. Lilla and I were going to go out as soon as Fabio rolled himself in, but the sheet hasn’t shown up yet.”

  I loved the way she called Fabio the “sheet” instead of the “shit.”

  “Sit tight. I’m coming over with food.” I clicked my phone shut and turned, smacking right into Jagger. Before I could apologize or yell for his invading my space, he looked at me.

  “Interesting. Very interesting,” he said.

  I hurried into the kitchen with no idea what the hell he was talking about, but figured it was the thing about Olivia since Jagger surely had eavesdropped on my entire conversation.

  Good. Maybe he could be of help.

  I’d learned early on in this profession not to be too proud to use him.

  For work, that was.

  And it sure was easier taking his suggestions for help when I thought I was using him.

  After I’d made sure my entire family was set, including a few more lessons on using a pink cast for Mother, I had thrown together some pork sandwiches for Adele and Lilla.

  Jagger had sat on the counter stool watching the entire time.

  Good for him, and even better for me since it was a good lesson in ignoring him or anyone else so that I could concentrate. Okay, I was concentrating on pork, but I figured I could transfer the newly learned skill to my investigating.

  I really couldn’t wait to get back to work!

  It was a comforting feeling to know that I loved my job that much, and no way was I going to let the notion that I partly wanted to leave 171 David Drive so very badly interfere with that thought.

  On the way to Fabio’s, Jagger and I exchanged very little words. I had been thinking more and more about what Adele had said about Olivia. Where the heck had she come from if Adele, snooper extraordinaire, couldn’t find out?

  “So, what are you thinking?” Jagger asked.

  “Hm?” He’d taken me by surprise, and I wasn’t ready to discuss any of the case with him anyway. Truthfully, that was because I had nothing to discuss. Damn.

  “I asked what you were thinking.”

  “In general?”

  “Look, Sherlock, if you’ve got nothing, say you’ve got nothing.”

  I curled my lips as I turned away from him. “I’ll have something very soon.” There. That should shut him up.

  But I noticed his reflection in the window. That stupid grin.

  “I hope the pork is all right since it’s probably cold by now,” I said for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time Adele said it was fine and Jagger shook his head. Oh well, I wasn’t immune to making a fool of myself to get a conversation going. As I watched her eat, still with her white gloves on since her hands had been burned in the “joint,” as she’d once told me, the front door opened.

  Half expecting, and fully regretting, that it might be Fabio, I tried not to look. But then I noticed Jagger-staring.

  Nothing about Fabio would cause a Jagger-look like that.

  I turned to see that walking across the waiting room was a woman who looked like a Victoria’s Secret model-dressed. Actually dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, and sunglasses propped on her head-very eerily Jagger-like in appearance.

  Long brown hair bounced across her shoulders as she made her way closer until her spike-red spike, that is-heels clicked on the linoleum floor that bordered the stained carpet. Her eyes were enticingly large and deep brown, and I’m sure Jagger hadn’t missed that she was proportioned just so and knew it.

  Yet there was a friendly air about her, and I knew I liked her on the spot-which sure as hell stunned me.

  Adele flew up from her seat, knocking over her cup of coffee but not caring as she grabbed the woman in a hug.

  “Chéri, Jagger, this is my Lilla. Lilla Marcel. Lilla, she is my fourth child and also married four times!” Both mother and daughter broke out into laughter.

  Jagger and I remained silent, but I forced a smile and held my hand out toward Lilla. “Nice to meet you. Your mother is a peach.”

  She eyed me with mascara-covered lashes, looking very chic, though a scent of cigarette smoke wafted from her. But I just knew she had a way of puffing that made her sexy.

  Adele sat back down and started to tell Lilla to eat something. With her figure, I wondered if she ate more than once a year.

  “What is this peach?” Lilla asked.

  “Oh,” I chuckled. “It means that your mother is a doll. Priceless. She finds things out that no one else could.”

  Lilla’s eyes darkened.

  Oops. Wonder what that was about but figured I should keep my mouth shut since we’d just met. We made small talk, and I found out that Lilla, after signing her fourth set of divorce papers, moved in with Adele after leaving Canada t
o get away from ex-husbands two and four. Yikes. Talk about a double dose of trouble.

  Both she and Adele seemed thankful that Lilla didn’t have any offspring with any of the spouses. But she was near destitution, as hubby number four took her to the cleaners, and she had to move down here with her mother. Since it could only be temporarily until she got her emigration paperwork in order, she needed to work.

  And somehow I got the impression that legal or not, Lilla was going to be working there.

  First thing that popped into my mind was: What can I get her to do to help with my case?

  Jagger almost tripped as he stood from his seat to shake hands with Lilla. Hm. Maybe Adele needed help filing. Nope. I wasn’t the jealous type, and besides, what did I have to be jealous about?

  Not that I thought I was some great beauty, but there was nothing between Jagger and me. Okay, a few rogue kisses, but possession apparently was not nine-tenths of the law when it came to men.

  Lilla looked toward Jagger and mumbled, “Attaboy!”

  He hadn’t done a thing to warrant any congratulations and the way she’d said it sounded more like a “wow.” I looked at Adele, who in fact mouthed the word “wow.”

  Apparently French Canadian wasn’t that difficult to interpret.

  “Okay, Adele, if you couldn’t find anything out about Olivia, that must mean she wasn’t around anywhere.” I tapped a nail to my tooth. “Hm. You think she’s not real?”

  Jagger looked at me. “Ask Lydia.”

  “I know she’s a real person, but is she really who she says she is? And why, if she isn’t, is she pretending to be who she is?”

  The entire room gave me a well-deserved collective look of confusion.

  I raised my hands. “Okay. Okay. That didn’t come out right, but you all know what I mean.”

  “If she is an imposter,” Lilla said, “ça suce.”

  This time Jagger mouthed, That sucks.

  I made a mental note to buy a French dictionary on my way back to Newport. Then again, I think the Canadians probably had a different version. And speaking of Newport, I stood up. “I really have to get going and back to my job. Goldie’s surgery is tomorrow.”