Purrfect Secret

Chapter 5

True to his word, Chase showed up right on the dot. Odelia grabbed her purse, took one final glance at her grandmother puttering away in the backyard and stepped out.

Chase pressed a quick kiss to her lips, then took a firmer hold of her, dipped her down and laid a real smoocher on her.

When he returned her to perpendicularity, she was swooning a little. Great way to start the day!

“And hello to you, too,” she said, following him to his pickup, parked at the curb.

“You’ve got your grandmother to thank for that,” he said with a grin.

“She give you pointers on technique?”

“As if. No, ever since she decided to stay with you I’ve been forced to become this pining, lonesome, sad figure, watching from afar.”

“Somehow I’m having a hard time imagining you as a pining, lonesome figure.”

“Well, it’s true,” he said, getting behind the wheel as she slid in right next to him. “I’m sitting there all by my lonesome, in your uncle’s big, old house, thinking of you.”

“If it’s any consolation I’m thinking of you, too.” Especially since her grandmother was a poor substitute for having Chase’s warm body next to her in bed at night.

“Maybe we have to educate your grandmother in the ways of the world.”

“Gran is beyond education. Nothing I say or do has any effect on that woman.”

Grandma liked Chase, no doubt about it, but recently she’d developed this old-fashioned idea that the male of the species should propose to the female of the species before they actually moved in together and slept in the same bed. No idea where this idea came from, exactly. Then again, Gran did watch a lot of those daytime soap operas and maybe some former mob boss’s identical twin and reformed serial killer turned art therapist’s illegal adoptive brother who was also a Navy SEAL had at some point conceived a son with an OB/GYN and Gran felt that if only they’d gotten married they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.

Yes, Odelia enjoyed her occasional dose of the soap opera machine herself, too.

“She’s redoing the garden now,” she said, slumping down in her seat and putting her pink-and-yellow polka-dot Chuck Taylors up on the dash. “Says she’s going to turn it into the kind of garden Louis Quatorze would have been proud of, water-spewing cherubs and all.”

Chase laughed. “She’s doing that just to spite your dad, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yes, she is.”

Grandma had always been in charge of Tex and Marge’s garden, until she decided to skedaddle and move next door. But in spite of the fact that she’d hoped Tex would be pining for her and begging her to come back, instead Odelia’s father had flourished and had never been happier. Getting his meddling mother-in-law out of the house had been a lifelong dream ever since the old lady had moved in when her husband Jack had taken his philandering ways to the seventh heaven or maybe in his case the seventh circle of hell.

Now, by turning Odelia’s garden into the cream of the horticultural crop, Gran probably hoped to inspire a raging jealousy in Tex, as the latter was oddly proud of his own backyard and this had been the one thing he and Grandma had in common: a green thumb.

“Maybe I should ask Dad to take the first step and reconcile,” said Odelia now.

“Fat chance. You’d have better luck asking your mother.”

“Mom says to let things cool off. That Gran will come to her senses soon enough.” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure. Gran seems to like this new arrangement, and so does Dad.”

“Looks like your dad and grandma have reached a stalemate.”

Chase was navigating his pickup through morning traffic and had reached the town limit. “So why did you want me to bring a clothespin, exactly?” Odelia asked.

“You’ll see. It’s not pretty.”

“Don’t tell me he got blown up. I just had breakfast.”

“He wasn’t blown up. In fact, as far as we can see, he drowned. Or I should probably say he suffocated.”

“He drowned in his pool?”

“He drowned in a pool,” said Chase mysteriously.

“A pool… of his own blood?”

“Duck poop.”

“Duck poop?”

“Duck poop.”

“Huh. And you’re telling me this wasn’t an accident?”

Chase looked grim. “Absolutely not. Dick Dickerson was murdered.”

It only took them about fifteen minutes to reach their destination. Dick Dickerson lived in one of those huge McMansions right outside of Hampton Cove, built almost on the coast, with access to a private strip of beach, a heliport, a heated pool on the patio, jacuzzi, too many rooms and bathrooms to count, and a fleet of servants at his every beck and call.

When Chase had directed his pickup down the asphalt driveway and parked in front of the house, Odelia wondered why it was that all the celebrities who came to Hampton Cove had a habit of getting murdered at one point or another. Within the past few months she’d visited the homes of singers, reality stars, actors… This small Hamptons town of theirs was quickly becoming the murder capital of the state if this worrying trend kept up.

She admired the ivy-covered brick exterior of the tabloid magnate’s house, and the stone steps leading up to heavy oak doors.

“Security?” she asked as she followed Chase inside.

There was a hubbub of police activity, and Odelia nodded greetings to several Hampton Cove PD officers she personally knew. Having a police chief for an uncle awarded her a lot of advantages as a reporter for the Hampton Cove Gazette: often she was the first one on the scene, and the first one to glean interesting bits of information. And sometimes, like now, she was even invited to join in on the investigation. The only thing she didn’t have was one of those windbreakers with the word WRITER printed across the front and back.

“Oh, he had security,” said Chase, “only whoever did this was smart enough to know their way around the system.”

They walked through an ornate entrance hall, every bit of wall space covered in laminated covers of the National Star. Clearly Dick Dickerson had been proud of his work.

They took a right turn past a huge statue of Dickerson dressed like Napoleon, complete with prancing black stallion, and walked into what looked like the tabloid king’s private study. And that’s when she saw it: a trail of greenish sludge on the floor, leading to the biggest safe she’d ever seen. It looked like one of those ginormous bank safes.

And then she caught a whiff of the smell and she winced.

“It gets worse,” Chase said when he saw her expression.

And it did. As they approached the safe, she saw that the floor was covered with two inches of the same green-and-white sludge, and the stench was beyond horrible. Inadvertently she brought a hand up to her face to cover her mouth.

Lying face up in all of that muck, was Dick Dickerson.