Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

O n day three of what was shaping up to be the second worst week of my life, I was trying to glue a blank doll's head (I'd stripped off all its paint with acetone) to a very old bottle of paregoric (a medicine made of alcohol, honey, and opium, which was sounding pretty good to me right then) when somebody rattled the front door to the secondhand shop where I worked. I thought the CLOSED sign on the front door pretty clearly communicated that we weren't open, but this was Rocky Start. Not a lot of people obedient to signs here. I didn't look up as I was focused on putting that head on that bottle. Something I could control.

I was standing behind the old marble-topped counter, trying to be Upbeat and Positive About Life, but it wasn't working. I'd put Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" on the iPod because that always started the day right, but today . . . just no. So I'd switched over to Lenka's "Trouble is a Friend" because that had an aura of plausibility. We were in big trouble, but maybe that would turn out to be a good thing . . .

No. No, it wouldn't. My boss and landlord had died two days ago, my future was unknown which meant my daughter's future was also unknown, and I just wasn't in the mood to cheerfully sell junk.

The door rattled again .

Ozzie had been a real character, aka an irreplaceable pain in the ass and a great guy. The weather-beaten sign out front said "Oddities. Mostly Old Junk Nothing You Want," and I'd tried to get Ozzie to get rid of the second line for nineteen years, but no luck. Ozzie hadn't been a fan of customers. I did take down the sign that said "You break it, we shoot you," but that was as far as I'd gotten. In nineteen years. Change had not been Ozzie's byword. Until two days ago when he'd died on our kitchen floor.

Change is bad.

So now I was trying to glue a doll's head on an old paregoric bottle Ozzie had given me—"This looked like something you'd want," he'd said as he'd handed it over—without getting glue on my apron, which was hard because the stuff was going everywhere because the head kept falling off and rolling away.

I was losing my head.

Joke.

Kind of.

Where was I ?

Right. My aprons are frumpy with huge pockets so I can keep the things I'll need close by, but frumpy is actually good because nobody pays attention to a middle-aged woman in a frumpy apron, unless the apron has glue on it because people do like to judge. The last thing I needed was for people to notice me.

Lenka finished up explaining that trouble was a pal with her last "oooh oooh," and that was when I realized I was using the wrong glue. My mind was all over the place.

The door rattled again, and I finally looked up to yell at them to go away only to see Coral Schmidt, my good friend and the proprietor of Ecstasy, the amazing German coffee shop and bakery next door. (I was pretty sure Coral named the shop that so she could say, "This is Coral in Ecstasy," every time she answered the phone.) The CLOSED sign didn't mean a thing to her; Coral tended to go where she wanted to go.

I started around the counter to let her in, but then I heard her key scrape in the lock, and she came in, saying, "Rose? Why didn't you open the door?"

"I was coming . . ." I started and then stopped because Coral was dressed head to toe in tight, shiny, black mourning, topped with a huge black picture hat. She looked like the Angel of Death. If the Angel of Death were a voluptuous blonde in her seventies

Ozzie would have loved it.

I'd known Coral would be in mourning because Ozzie had been one of her friends-with-benefits, and she loved him and drama, but I was not expecting Elvira, Queen of the Dead.

"That is a lie, you have not come in years, Rose," she said as she closed the door behind her. "I do not know how you stand it." She handed me a necklace. "Can you fix this, please?"

I took a deep breath, and then I took the necklace. Coral was a good person who was never rude, so I was sure she was just upset about Ozzie dying. It would be bad if I snapped at her from grief, rage, anxiety, and sexual frustration. That I did not have because who needs sex? All that naked thrashing about with somebody who lies to you? I mean, really. I never think about sex. Or men. I try to keep a positive outlook on life.

I spread the necklace out on the counter. It was a beautiful, ornate locket that she'd once told me had locks of hair from her lovers—big locket—but its chain had tangled and knotted as chains kept in jewelry boxes often do, so I began to isolate the knot carefully; the necklace was old and finely made, much like Coral.

"I worry about you, Rose," Coral was saying, standing on the other side of the old counter, frowning at the blank doll head beside Ozzie's paregoric bottle as I teased out the knot in her necklace. "It is not good to go without sex for years. And years. And years." She looked closer. "Is that one of Betty Baumgarten's old dresses under that horrible apron? You have been thrifting again. Are you braless? You are fifty years old, Rose?—"

"I'm not fifty until Sunday," I told Coral. "And the shop's closed, there's a sign and everything, so underwear is unnecessary. And uncomfortable." I looked down at the top of my loose apron. "How could you tell I'm braless in this?"

"You are a C cup and things were shifting under there." Coral shook her head. "Beauty is pain. Put on a bra. Somebody wonderful could walk through that door at any time, and there you would be. Not ready."

Coral was always ready.

I kept working on the knot in her necklace.

She was flashing enough seventy-four-year-old cleavage—D cup—over a wasp-ish waist to cast doubt on her mourning, although I had to give her credit for maintaining her figure or at least corralling it with powerful undergarments. She would have pulled it off, too, except for that thing on her head, resting on her long dyed blonde hair: a wide-brimmed black picture hat full of black tulle bows with a black spotted veil that she could lower to swathe her face.

"That hat needs a crow," I told her, squinting at it as I handed back her now unknotted necklace.

The thing was huge. I would have put a crow on it, first thing out of the box.

"No," Coral said, rejecting my crow. "Thank you for fixing my necklace." She clasped the locket in her hand, pressing it against her heart, and moved on from my nonexistent sex life and my equally nonexistent underwear. "Have you heard from Barry?"

"Barry?" Barry Mason (Ozzie always said somebody in witness protection had a sense of humor) was one of two lawyers in Rocky Start, the other being my good friend Lian Kwan. Lian is clever, honest, fit, well-dressed, and professional. Barry is sly, under-handed, potbellied, badly dressed (baggy white suits speckled with cigarette ash), and a criminal lawyer, emphasis on the "criminal" part. So of course, he was my boss's lawyer. "Why would I hear from Barry?"

"About Oz's will. "

Coral really loves drama. I think it's the heat from the ovens at her place and all the caffeine.

"Do you think he left anything to me? "

Coral leaned forward, and her breasts came with her, threatening the black satin that bound them. Ozzie used to call her "The Couch" because he said she was well-upholstered. "I'm spending the night on The Couch," he'd say, "If anybody calls, tell them I'm in Ecstasy," and then he'd head over to her apartment above her bakery. He didn't call her "The Couch" behind her back, he said it to her face. Ozzie didn't go in for tact. He didn't go in for people, either, although he went into Coral with surprising frequency for a seventy-eight-year-old misanthrope.

Damn it, I missed the old bastard.

"He surely left Pike something," Coral was saying. "They were so close."

Well, she would know. Pike, her other friend-with-benefits, was her younger man. Seventy-two. I was pretty sure that Ozzie and Pike were two of the locks of hair in her heart-shaped locket, although there were probably more in there. It was a pretty big locket. I don't mean to be disapproving at all. I admire Coral for having threesomes in her seventies. I'd been mostly dating myself for nineteen years.

The bell rang again on the shop door, and a man came in: middle height, maybe in his forties, tanned and dark-haired, expensive suit, probably carried his wallet in his inside breast pocket—his right hand was more calloused than his left, so right-handed, so the wallet would be on the left—good-looking except for his beady eyes and air of superiority. Your basic upper-class weasel who shared Coral's inability to read a CLOSED sign.

Trouble, I thought, but not Lenka's kind of trouble. I always figured Lenka's kind of trouble would be kind of hot. This guy was just sleazy. Here-to-sell-you-a-gold-Bible sleazy.

Still, I flashed the weasel the smile I gave everybody who came into the shop, the smile Poppy called "The Cheery Boost." It's about as authentic as Coral's hair color. "We're closed."

"You must be Rose Malone." He smiled at me with cold, dead, weasel eyes.

"Must I?" I don't like strangers who know my name, but I kept smiling anyway, hiding my instant dislike behind my teeth because that's what I do. I smile at people and I fix things so everybody will like me and not rat me out to the cops if they come looking for me.

"Rose Malone, my father's right-hand woman and who knows what else," he was saying. "Unfortunately, since my father is dead now, he doesn't need a right hand."

"Wait a minute," I said, losing my Cheery as Coral swiveled to look at him.

He smiled at me, weasel to the teeth. "I'm Oz Oswald's son, Joseph Oswald-Stafford, Junior, and I've inherited this building and the business. I'm sorry for your loss, but you have to go."

I just stared at the jerk for a moment, my nightmare come true. He was evicting us.

But he looked nothing at all like Ozzie. And he didn't seem to have any proof of ownership. Just a huge sense of entitlement.

So no on that.

When I didn't move, he said, "What part of this don't you understand?"

He smirked and I hate smirkers, and he was ordering me around, and if you want to see me go ballistic, try telling me what to do (unless you're Ozzie), plus under all that bravado, he was nervous, so he really was a weasel and this was definitely a scam. I walked out from behind the counter and around him, opened the front door, and pointed to the street. "Out, Limb of Satan."

His smirk got smirkier. "Don't be ridiculous."

"This is a con, a truly stupid one," I said to him. Twelve years traveling the magic circuit with Poppy's father and then nineteen years working with Ozzie, and I had mad skills for spotting the crooked. Just not for avoiding them. I picked up the heavy reproduction of the Maltese Falcon from the shelf by the door, the statue that Ozzie had called our security system, feeling all my grief and tension and fear and frustration spiraling into rage. "Get out, Junior, and I won't beat you to death with a movie prop."

"Oz never mentioned a son," Coral murmured from behind Junior.

"Look." He reached into his left inner jacket pocket, retrieved his wallet—told you so—and took out a paper. A photo fell out as he did, and he held the paper out to me as Coral scooped up the photo. "Here's the DNA report. Oz Oswald was my father."

I took the paper, which was basically a bunch of numbers I didn't understand under abbreviations I didn't understand, but at the top it stated that Joseph Oswald-Stafford was a 97 percent match as a son of Joseph Oswald. "This is just a paper," I said, handing it back to him. "Anybody could have typed this up. And his first name was Ozzie, not Joseph."

He shook his head. "My mother gave me that. It's real. She would know who my father is. I'm Oswald Junior."

Coral was looking at the picture, rapt. Then she came to the door and showed it to me.

A young man with a sharp face, dressed in dull green fatigues, was looking at a tall slender woman with the blackest, straightest hair I'd ever seen, framing skin so pale she looked dead. Beautiful but dead. Morticia Addams in the flesh.

"That's my mother, Serena Stafford," Junior said, still smirking. "And my father, the man you knew as Oz Oswald. We thought he was dead all these years."

"That could be anybody," I said and gripped the heavy Falcon tighter, but Coral shook her head.

"It is Oz," she whispered as if seeing a ghost. "I remember. God, he was so handsome then. Six-pack abs. He could crack a walnut with his glutes."

I glared at her, not pleased to know about Ozzie's glutes and even less pleased that she was supporting Fake Ozzie Junior and his fraudulent DNA test. "I don't care if it is Ozzie. He's just standing next to a vampire, that doesn't mean they made this guy together."

"This is ridiculous," Junior said, frowning now. "You need to get out of here now ."

I opened the door wider and gestured with the Falcon. "Ozzie's estate hasn't been settled yet, so nobody has any idea who gets what. And I have a bottle that needs a head. Get. Out ."

Coral was still staring at the photo, lost in her walnut-cracking memories, but Junior took it from her and put it back into his wallet with the DNA test and tucked it away in his inside jacket pocket, his eyes darting all over the shop as if looking for something.

Then Poppy appeared in the kitchen doorway, home late from high school, dark curly hair flying every which way, tall and beautiful and eighteen and not like me at all. Well, I'm tall.

"I saw the lasagna. Is that for our wake tonight?" she said to me. "Ozzie would have loved that."

Junior moved toward her. "Hel lo . You can stay."

" No ." I moved around him fast to block him from my daughter, Falcon in hand.

He grabbed my arm to move me out of the way as Poppy said, "Mom?"

I tried to jerk my arm away and said, "Get out!" as Coral reached up and pulled something out of the crown of her hat. He didn't let go, still smiling a creepy invitation to Poppy, so I whacked him hard on the shoulder with the Falcon.

Trouble is a friend, my ass, Lenka.

He yelled and staggered back, and I drove him toward the open doorway, swinging the Falcon at him, fully expressing my inner Rose as I snarled, " Stay away from my kid, you perv! " until he was out the door, dragging me with him as he stumbled onto the sidewalk.

Poppy said, " Mom! " and Junior let go and backhanded me.

I went dizzy from the blow for a moment, but Coral snarled and lunged at him, and I saw a line of red blossom on his sleeve as I slapped my left hand on his chest to push him away. I started to swing the Falcon again with my right hand as I slid two fingers into his jacket and onto his wallet while his eyes went to his reddening sleeve and then the incoming bird. When he pulled away from me half a second later, the movement of his body pulled the wallet out of his pocket, the lift hidden in his motion, and I dropped the wallet into my right apron pocket, the one where I keep the scissors and the craft knife. He reached into his jacket and I thought he'd felt the lift after all—I am a very good pickpocket so that would be unusual—and I swung the Falcon in an arc, low and hard, aiming up for his hot spot, just like Ozzie had taught me?—

And then he disappeared.

Momentum from the missed swing to the nuts kept me moving and I staggered a little, but I could see Junior sprawled out in the street now, courtesy of a new guy standing in front of me who turned to look at me with no expression at all: middle-aged, dark hair with gray at the temples, weather-beaten, unshaven, gaunt in dusty black, a man who looked like he'd traveled far and hadn't enjoyed it and hadn't eaten much on the way. He was carrying a massive backpack, and beside him was a big black wolf.

Trouble in the flesh.

I frowned at the new guy. My cheek throbbed, and I was still dizzy, so I snapped at him.

"I had that," I said, annoyed because I do not need rescued, and I'd really been looking forward to neutering Junior.

"You did not have that," he said calmly, which irritated me further, another one of those Master of the Universe guys, but then I saw Junior get up off the street and charge him.

I yelled, "Behind you!" and the wolf barked, and the new guy took a step sideways and took Junior down with a sweep of his foot.

His expression never changed. Stoic "R" Us.

Okay, I was beginning to warm to him.

Junior rolled to his feet, his arm bleeding from whatever Coral had done to him. The new guy shrugged off his ruck, dropping it to the ground. The two of them looked at each other, sizing each other up, the wolf dog baring its teeth by the good guy's side, and I thought, This is dangerous. Junior was looking actually threatening now, but the new guy was scarier, grim and expressionless, just waiting.

Then Lian ran out of her law office across the street with her pink taser, and Coral was at my side with a long, skinny knife I was pretty sure she'd pulled out of her hat and then out of Junior's arm, and Poppy came out of the shop with Ozzie's shotgun, which was a nice gesture but useless since I'd taken the shells out a long time ago .

"I called Pike!" Lian yelled, and I glared at Junior.

"Pike's the local law, and you hit me in front of witnesses," I snarled, the side of my face aching from his blow. "And my friends are armed and dangerous. I'd leave if I were you."

Junior ignored me, staring at the new guy, who stared back, expressionless, almost bored, like he didn't give a damn. Then a dark window in the rear of a large SUV across the street powered down, and a woman's low voice called out. "Joseph Junior. Enough."

Junior said, "I'll be back for what's mine," and walked to the car. He opened the passenger door, and the woman said, "Go, Jane," and the car was moving before he shut the door.

Lian reached us, breathless, taser at the ready. "I saw what happened. Are you okay, Rose?"

"Yes." I said, ignoring my throbbing cheek as I watched the massive car roll down State Street. "Did you really call Pike?"

"Yes. As soon as I saw that guy hit you, I yelled ‘Oddities!' into the phone and grabbed my taser." Lian looked at the new guy. "And you are?"

He nodded at her once as he picked up his pack and shouldered it. "Just passing through. You ladies have a nice day."

" Wait! " Poppy called and came down the steps with her shotgun. "Your dog?—"

" Wait! " I said at the same time, feeling guilty now. The guy had helped and I'd snapped at him, the least I could do was . . . something. Offer him a drink? Lasagna? My body?

Okay, that last one was Coral's fault.

But he really was sort of attractive, if you liked serious, dusty, underfed, expressionless, middle-aged men with cheekbones and an overwhelming aura of gravity and menace who looked like trouble but rescued you.

Which, evidently, I did. Weird how after years of going with "men are the devil," I was suddenly having possibly warm feelings for somebody who looked devil-adjacent.

So of course, he shook his head at Poppy, nodded to me, and walked away with his dog—not a wolf, I could see now, but big and dark—down State Street, the same route the Mercedes had taken, his back straight and his stride strong except for a slight limp on his right side. He was evidently not having warm feelings about me.

"Stripes," Poppy said.

That's the family code for danger. I used to panic and Ozzie would say, "Rose, if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Unless you see stripes. Then come get me." So our code for danger has always been "stripes." Except now we couldn't get Ozzie. Damn it.

"That dog hasn't been brushed in months," Poppy said severely. "That's neglect ." She handed me the shotgun and started down the street after the guy and his dog.

This was all wrong. Ozzie dies, Coral comes in looking like First Mourner, a jackass in a Mercedes tries to take my home, and then Trouble with a wolf shows up just in time to protect me?

No. Poppy was right, we were looking at stripes.

"What the hell is going on?" Lian asked.

"I don't know," I said, looking down the street after the stranger. "But I don't like any of it." Except maybe him.

Except I have terrible taste in men, so not him.

I looked around for Coral but she'd disappeared, which was not like her, not in the midst of drama.

"You know," Lian said, watching the stranger, "that guy was attractive in an experienced Johnny Cash man-in-black kind of way."

"He didn't look anything at all like Johnny Cash." Springsteen, maybe.

"No, the vibe," Lian was saying. "Like he had been interesting places and done dangerous things. I find that very hot."

"Then stop dating younger men."

Lian waved that away. "So what are you going to do about this?"

I gave it two seconds' thought. "Go after Poppy so she doesn't annoy that last guy about his dog. Lift his wallet to find out who he is and why he was in town just in time to interfere with Junior because two strangers here in the same ten minutes is suspicious. Put the lasagna in the oven so we have dinner tonight." I looked at Lian. "Thank you for coming to tase the enemy. You are a good, true friend. "

"Here." She handed me the taser. "In case a stranger gets ugly again. That last guy was not ugly, but if he catches you in mid-lift of his wallet, that might change." She looked off down the street. "No, he still wouldn't be ugly."

"He's too old for you," I said and handed her the empty shotgun so I could go hunt zebras.