Wicked Appetite

CHAPTER TWELVE

There were three bedrooms upstairs. I stepped into the master first, immediately turned to leave, and bumped into Diesel.

“Out of my way,” I said to him. “You can’t make me go in there.”

“Of course I can,” he said. “Look how big and strong I am. And I’m insensitive, too.”

The bed was a tangled mess of twisted sheets and lumpy pillows without pillowcases. Empty liquor and beer bottles were everywhere. Drawers were open with clothes spilling out, and dirty clothes were scattered across the floor, interspersed with crumpled fast-food wrappers, half-eaten bags of chips, two roaches the size of lab mice taking a feet-up permanent siesta, and another rubber chicken.

“I’m not touching any of this,” I said to Diesel. “And I’m especially not touching whatever is hanging on the doorknob.”

Diesel checked out the doorknob. “It’s underwear.”

“Ick!”

“He’s a single guy,” Diesel said. “This is the way we live.”

I looked at him, and I think my eyes went blank for a moment and my mouth dropped open.

“Not me,” Diesel said, smiling. “But some guys.”

I did serious mental eye-rolling. “Where do we begin?”

“Look for something that might contain a charm, and be careful not to explode yourself.”

I cautiously picked through the mess, testing out watches, shoes, beer bottles, belt buckles, and the rubber chicken. Nothing glowed or felt warm.

“This is stupid,” I said to Diesel. “It’s none of these things. We should be looking for a booby trap.”

“Problem is, most of the time you don’t recognize a good booby trap until it’s too late,” Diesel said.

“Have you ever been booby-trapped?”

“Yeah, and it’s usually not pleasant.”

It took a while to get through the master, but things went faster with bedrooms two and three. The furniture had been removed from these rooms, leaving only a few dents in the carpet as evidence of habitation.

“Looks to me like the Missus backed the truck up to this house before Lenny even knew she was leaving,” Diesel said. “He got picked clean.”

We went downstairs and searched the living room. Not hard to do, since the furniture consisted of a matching brown leather couch and chair that had seen better days. Probably picked up at a yard sale after his ex-wife took the good stuff. No furniture in the dining room. That left the kitchen, and I’d already handled everything that wasn’t nailed down in the kitchen.

“Let’s think about this for a minute,” Diesel said. “We’ve done the object-touching routine, and I’ve had my eyes open for anything remotely resembling a booby trap or secret hiding place. What have we missed?”

“Maybe it’s not in the house. Maybe it’s in his car or his office.”

“If we’re to believe him, he was drunk when he hid the inheritance, so it had to be something fairly easy to do. I think that leaves out his office, and probably his car. Most likely, he set the device when he was relatively sober and then walked around the house with a bottle of liquor in his hand, trying to decide on a hiding place.”

“We didn’t check appliances,” I said, peering into the microwave, flipping the door down on the dishwasher. I opened the oven and burst out laughing. There was a rubber chicken in the oven.

“What’s with these chickens?” I asked Diesel. “He’s got a rubber chicken fixation.”

I took the chicken out of the oven, held it by its long skinny neck, and a metal-and-glass cylinder fell out of its butt.

“Uh-oh,” Diesel said.

An instant later, he had his hand clamped onto my wrist, pulling and shoving me out the kitchen door, half carrying me in a sprint across the small backyard. We were maybe thirty feet from the house when there was an explosion, followed by a second mega-explosion. The second explosion blew the back of the house apart and sent us sprawling. I felt Diesel roll on top of me, and all around us, debris was falling out of the sky. Bits of paper and wood and flaming chunks of mystery material. Diesel got to his feet, dragged me up beside him, and we moved into the adjoining backyard.

“Looks like you found the booby trap,” Diesel said.

I had my fingers curled into his shirt in a death grip, and I was babbling. “What the? How? Who?”

Diesel pried my fingers open. “Honey, I love that you’ve got ahold of me, but I think you’ve got some chest hairs in there.”

Flames raced up the side of what was left of Lenny’s house and black smoke billowed into the sky. Sirens screamed a couple blocks away and people were stepping out of their houses and gathering in the street.

“There isn’t going to be anything left of Lenny’s house,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.

“Yeah,” Diesel said. “The historical society’s going to be pissed.”

“It’s so horrible. Everything’s gone. All his treasures from high school. All his sheet music. All his clothes.”

Diesel had an arm wrapped around me. “Don’t forget his paddle collection, and his inheritance.”

“Omigosh. His inheritance! It must have gotten blown up into smithereens. We’ll never find it.”

“No, but Wulf won’t find it, either. And that’s what we really care about.”

We walked around to the front of the house and watched the spectacle for a while. A police car was the first on the scene. A fire truck arrived seconds later. More cop cars and fire trucks. Two EMT trucks. They’d responded fast, but the house had burned even faster. By the time the hoses were working, there wasn’t much left to save.

I stood with arms slack at my side, pretty much dumbfounded by the whole incomprehensible event.

“The booby-trap gizmo was so small,” I said. “How did it make such a disaster?”

“I suspect it ignited a gas line. I don’t know what else would account for the second explosion and fire.”

We left the scene, buckled ourselves into Diesel’s Porsche, and motored off, giving one last look at the smoldering rubble that used to be Lenny’s house. The FOR SALE sign was still standing, and behind it, the brick skeleton of the fireplace was blackened but intact.

I choked back emotion, overwhelmed by Lenny’s loss and the destruction of a house that had survived for over a hundred years.

Diesel reached over and tugged at my ponytail. “It’s okay,” he said. “No one was hurt. And everything will eventually recycle.”

“Recycling sucks.”

Diesel nodded. “Sometimes it definitely does suck.”

It was a little after seven o’clock, and now that I was away from the action, I was hungry. I’d had some bites of muffin around three but nothing since, and I’d expended a lot of energy being terrified.

“I’m starving,” I said to Diesel. “And you’re going in the wrong direction. Marblehead is south.”

“I’m not going to Marblehead. I’m going to Beverly. When Wulf finds out Lenny’s inheritance isn’t available, he’s going to go after the remaining piece to the puzzle.”

“Mark More.”

“Yeah. We need to get to him first.”

“What about dinner?”

“Keep your eyes peeled for fast food.”

“There!” I said. “On the left. It’s a cluster fast-food stop. Burgers, doughnuts, chicken, subs.”

“Which do you want?”

“I want them all.”

“Pick one,” Diesel said.

“Burgers. No wait. Chicken. No, no. Burgers. Definitely burgers. With extra cheese. And fries. A large size. And a chocolate shake. And doughnuts.”

Ten minutes later, we were back on the road with bags of burgers and fries and a dozen doughnuts. I ate my double cheeseburger, finished off my fries, and eyed Diesel’s fries.

“Are you going to eat all those fries?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” Diesel said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Just asking.”

I opened the box of doughnuts and almost passed out. Boston cream, maple glazed, jelly, strawberry with sprinkles, chocolate, lemon pudding. I grabbed the Boston cream and devoured it. “Oh man,” I said. “Oh jeez, this is good.” My second doughnut was the maple glazed. “I bet I could eat all these. I bet I could eat them in record time.”

Diesel reached for the chocolate, and I sucked in some air.

“What?” Diesel asked.

“You took the chocolate.”

“There are two of them. We got two of everything.”

“I didn’t realize there were two. It’s fine. I’m good.” I finished the maple glazed and snatched the second chocolate out of the box.

“Ordinarily, I like a woman with strong appetites,” Diesel said, “but you’re downright scary. I’m afraid when you finish the doughnuts, you’re going to start gnawing on my arm.”

“Sorry. I panicked over the chocolate.”

Diesel handed me his phone. “I have the GPS working. Copilot me to Mark’s business address.”

I had the phone in one hand and my strawberry doughnut in the other.

“Turn left at the next street,” I told him. “And then go one block and turn left again.”

Marblehead is quaint. Salem is weird. And Beverly is a normal, hardworking town. Mark More lived and worked in a part of Beverly that was devoted to commercial real estate. Warehouses, light industry, a seafood processing plant. I followed the directions to a two-story redbrick cube of a building with a two-bay loading dock on one side. The sign on the front said MORE IS BETTER.

The sun was low in the sky and lights were on in what I assumed was the office. One car was parked in the lot. The bay doors were closed. Diesel parked next to the car in the lot, and we walked around to the street entrance.

“After seeing what the inheritance did to Shirley and Lenny, I’m almost afraid to go inside,” I said to Diesel.

“According to my assistant, Mark is the local distributor for Momma Jane’s Green Mints. So I guess we’ll find a lot of mints.”

“You have an assistant?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name? Where is he? Do you have an office?”

“Her name is Gwen. And I’m not sure where she is. And no, I don’t have an office.”

Diesel opened the glass-paned door, and we stepped into a small room with a desk at one end and a couple utilitarian plastic waiting room chairs at the other. A hallway led to the innards of the building. Somewhere down the hallway, we could hear machinery at work.

We followed the sound of machinery, stopped in front of an open door, and looked into the large warehouse. The floor was polished cement, the ceilings were high, and the walls were cinder block. The area was well lit. Cartons of mints, shrink-wrapped on pallets, were stacked along one wall. A forklift had been parked in front of them. A pile of what looked like assorted junk filled a corner on the opposite wall. The junk was one-and-a-half stories high and extended about a third of the way into the warehouse. Mark More was rearranging the pile of junk with the help of a backhoe. I recognized him from the street encounter with Shirley. He was average height, with light brown hair cut too short on the sides for his Dumbo ears. I guessed his age at late thirties. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t fit, either. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, and he looked like he was concentrating hard on his job.

Diesel and I walked halfway into the room, and Mark spotted us and cut his engine.

“Can I help you?” he called out.

“We need to talk,” Diesel said.

Mark swung down from the backhoe and crossed to us.

“I hope this is about mints,” he said. “Because I’ve got a lot of them.”

“I’ve never heard of Momma Jane’s Green Mints,” I told him.

“They go to hotels and restaurants, mostly,” Mark said. “They’re the crummy little things they put on your pillow or have out in a bowl.”

“I’m interested in your inheritance,” Diesel said to Mark.

“From Uncle Phil? What about it?”

“I’d like to see it,” Diesel said.

“No can do,” Mark said. “Uncle Phil wanted it kept secret.”

“The object you inherited might be putting you in danger,” I said. “Has anyone else approached you about it?”

“Nope. Just you. And there’s no way it could put me in danger, except from Uncle Phil.”

If I looked over Mark’s shoulder, I could see the mountain of junk glittering under the overhead lights. It appeared that most of the pieces were silver or brass, with an occasional small splash of color. I left Diesel to talk to Mark, and I wandered closer, skirting the backhoe to get a better look at whatever was filling an entire corner of the warehouse. It took me a moment, but then I got it. I was looking at a mammoth collection of padlocks. Some were large, some were small, some were real, and some looked like trinkets.

I returned to Diesel and Mark, and from both men’s body language I assumed things weren’t going well.

“So,” I said. “What’s happening?”

“Your friend is a nutcase,” Mark said to me. “He thinks my inheritance is possessed.”

“I didn’t say it was possessed,” Diesel said. “Possessed implies that demons or other disincarnate entities have temporarily taken control of a body. I said the inheritance was possibly infused with a dangerous energy.”

“How about I infuse you with a bullet up your butt if you don’t leave,” Mark said. “I have a gun.”

“I’m curious,” I said to Mark. “This was the only address we could find for you. Do you live here?”

“Just about. My wife got the house and the dog in the divorce settlement, so I found a little apartment not far from here.”

“Is the divorce recent?”

“It’s been a couple years. She said I liked my collections more than I liked her… and that probably was true. I get a lot of satisfaction from my lock collection here. Lately, I pretty much eat, sleep, and dream locks.”

“Boy, that’s really interesting,” I said.

“Yeah,” Diesel said, cutting his eyes to the junk corner. “Interesting.”

“Well, I guess we should be moving on,” I said to Mark. “Sorry if Diesel was an annoyance. I’ll take him home and give him a pill.”

“I know Uncle Phil was weird,” Mark said, “but he wasn’t some voodoo guy.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Did you ever see him change a cat into a fry pan?”

“No, but I saw him change an opossum into a flowerpot. I could never figure out how he did it. It was Uncle Phil’s best trick. It was like one of those Vegas magicians making a school bus disappear.”

We said adios to Mark, let ourselves out, and climbed into Diesel’s SUV. Diesel drove half a block down the street, made a U-turn, and parked.

“Waiting for Mark to leave?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Do you know what he inherited?”

“No, but I know where to start looking. If it’s a charm in the shape of a lock, it’s probably going to be at the bottom of the pile, since it would have been his first lock.”

“This could be fun,” I said. “I always wanted to run a backhoe.” I looked at my watch. “It’s going to be a long night. We should get some snacks to tide us over. Maybe a bucket of chicken.”

“Honey, you just ate ten doughnuts.”

“But what if we get stuck here and there’s no food?”

Diesel grinned at me. “Maybe you should let me hold Shirley’s ladybug.”

“You don’t suppose I’m turning into a glutton, do you?”

Even as I asked the question, I was thinking I should stock up on pork chops and graham crackers.

“A couple more days of carrying Shirley’s inheritance, and you’re going to have a snout and a tail,” Diesel said.

I fished in my pocket, found the charm, and handed it over. “No one said anything about Uncle Phil having any of these obsessions. Is it possible it’s all mental with Lenny, Shirley, Mark, and me? The SALIGIA Stone story is pretty far out there.”

“Personally, I’m a lazy kind of guy, and leaving the door open on the mystical saves me work. I don’t have to stress my brain trying to explain the unexplainable. It’s magic. End of discussion.”

“So you’re buying into the SALIGIA Stone fairy tale?”

“Yeah. I’m believing the whole enchilada.”