Death by Devil's Breath Read online

  “Technically . . .” Nick grabbed the Closed sign and propped it in the window before he walked me outside and shut the door behind us. “You’re not going anywhere. Not without me.”

  The look I gave him was more simper than smile. “Even to a wedding chapel?”

  Nick rolled his gorgeous baby blues. “Heaven help me, it’s the one and only time I’d ever even think of it. Yes, to a wedding chapel, Maxie. You and me.”

  * * *

  The last time I’d been to the Love Chapel, I’d waited in the reverend’s office, but when Nick and I got there, there were pieces of scaffolding and piles of tarps stacked outside the office and the smell of fresh paint wafted from behind the closed doors.

  “So . . .” We sat side by side on a bench next to neat mounds of paintbrushes and rollers, drop cloths and blue painter’s tape, waiting for Reverend Love to finish what her secretary called the Deluxe Renaissance Hand-Clasping (complete with a horse-drawn carriage out front). With a guy like Nick, I knew better than to pry because it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Still, I couldn’t help myself. There was something about the hushed atmosphere, something about all those yards and yards of plush carpeting at our feet and the mirrors that gleamed from the walls. There was something about the chapel, something that made a weird idea pop into my head.

  Maybe it was the remnants of all the promise and possibilities the place had seen over the years that still echoed within its walls.

  Or maybe, like the shingles virus that never leaves the body, the leftover vibes of weddings past stick around so that they can rear their ugly heads and leave the poor suckers who suffer from them miserable.

  I gave Nick a look out of the corner of my eye. “Did you ever think about getting married?”

  His sidelong glance was just as fleeting. “You?”

  I had. To Edik. When he was the be-all and end-all of my universe. Which was all of the two years, three months, and four days we were together and did not—in any way, shape, or form—include the last two weeks of our so-called relationship when I found out what a cheatin’, lyin’ weasel he was.

  “Nah.” When I shuddered, I hoped Nick thought it was because the very idea of marriage gave me the heebie-jeebies rather than that even four months after our epic and very ugly breakup, reliving the Edik disaster still made me feel weak in the knees and sick to my stomach. “You?”

  He didn’t answer right away, and that didn’t surprise me. Nick is not exactly Mr. Chatty. I guess that’s why I was surprised to see his shoulders rise and fall. “I have thought about it,” he said. “A time or two.”

  “But you’ve never—”

  “Nah. Never the right time. Never the right person.”

  I sighed. “Amen to that.”

  “But if the right person came along—”

  “Really?” My nose wrinkled, I turned on the bench to get a better look at Nick. “What about the Showdown?”

  Whatever he’d expected, I guess it wasn’t this, because Nick raised his chin. “You can’t possibly think I’d make a crucial life decision based on—”

  “What?” I was already on my feet and I glared down at him. “Based on what you think is some stupid little traveling show full of stupid people who care about stupid things like making sure the people who come to the show have a good time, and buy excellent products and can show off their cooking skills and—”

  “Well, I’m guessing you two aren’t my next bride and groom.”

  I twirled around when I heard Reverend Love behind me. The way my voice bounced against the mirrors that lined the hallway and my fists on my hips told her pretty much all she needed to know about Nick and my relationship.

  When she looked from one of us to the other, the reverend’s smile was sleek. “Since it’s obviously not a wedding, what can I do for the two of you?”

  “We’re here about your doll,” I told her before Nick could, even though he stood up to say something. “We want to see it.”

  For a moment, the reverend narrowed her eyes, then a smile broke through the confused expression. “The doll in my office! The one you saw the other day when you stopped by to talk to me.”

  “That’s the one.” Nick edged in front of me. “We were hoping you could tell us something about it.”

  The reverend folded her hands at her waist. “If you’re interested in dolls, I hear there’s a collectors’ convention in town. There are probably plenty of dolls there you could buy, and probably plenty of people who know far more than I do about collecting and history and such.”

  “We don’t care about that.” I stepped to my left to angle myself in front of Nick. “We care about your doll. It might be tied to a—”

  “We’re interested in the doll’s background,” Nick butted in. “We saw one that was similar at the collectors’ show and the guy who’s selling it claims it’s valuable, but he doesn’t know much about the history of the doll. We wondered if it could possibly be worth what he’s asking and thought you might be able to help.”

  “So you’re looking to buy.” Reverend Love’s gaze slid from Nick to me and her smile froze. “How sweet.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Anything for Maxie,” he said, and honestly, the reverend would have had to be an idiot to miss the irony in his voice.

  Maybe she was. Or maybe she, too, was so overwhelmed by the happily-ever-after sense of the place that, after all these years, she couldn’t think straight.

  I wasn’t sure if it was the idea of doll collecting or the one about being in love that bothered me more; I only knew that even when I shivered, Nick didn’t remove his hand.

  “Like I told you . . .” Reverend Love checked the Rolex on her left wrist. “I have another wedding starting in just a couple minutes. Cavemen.” The reverend laughed. “Who am I to question what paying customers want?” She looked my way. “Like I told you the other day, Maxie, the doll was given to me by my Aunt Louise. She made it especially for me for my tenth birthday.”

  “We don’t think so.” I kept talking, even though Nick squeezed my shoulder. “We think someone else made the doll.”

  The reverend’s expression clouded. “But I’ve had it all these years and . . .” She shook her head. “Are you telling me that Aunt Louise lied to me about my doll?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Nick said.

  She inched back her shoulders. “Well, I can’t see why it matters to anyone but me. If there’s another doll like it over at that doll convention, maybe the person who made it used the same pattern Louise did. Or maybe both Louise and this other person saw a similar doll somewhere, and both of them decided to make a copy of it. If you love the doll you saw at the show . . .” The reverend glanced from me to Nick. “If you’re looking to make Maxie happy and the doll is important to her, that’s all that matters, not where it came from or who made it. Why do you care about my doll?”

  Before I could tell her, Nick squeezed again.

  “If we could just see it,” Nick suggested.

  The reverend took another look at her watch before she offered us a smile. “I wish I could help you, but I am in something of a hurry. Besides, the doll is in storage along with everything else in my office. The painters will be done in a couple days. If you’d like to come back then, I’ll be happy to show you the doll.”

  The reverend turned and walked toward a group of people in Flinstone-esque garb who’d just entered the chapel. Honestly, if I wasn’t so busy considering everything she’d just said, I would have gone over and offered my opinion of the faux saber-toothed tiger print the bride wore.

  “I bet she’d be happy to show us her doll,” I grumbled and turned toward the nearest exit. “Did you catch the vibes, Nick? It took everything she had not to tell us to get lost. She doesn’t want us to see that doll.”

  “Convenient that she just happens to be paint
ing,” he said when we stepped outside.

  “But why—”

  “The reverend is a smart woman. She knows it’s none of our business.”

  “But if she has nothing to hide—”

  “It’s still none of our business.” Nick got his phone out of his pocket. “But it might be interesting to the local cops. I’ll call the detective in charge of the case.”

  “And maybe . . .” We stepped to the front of the chapel and I looked up at where that red neon heart once dangled over the sidewalk. Chicken? Maybe I am. Or maybe I just have the brains not to want to go somewhere I’ve already gone before. Like back to the ER with a needle and thread going through my arm.

  I crab-stepped to the side. “While you’re at it, ask that detective if there’s any way I can see the doll they found in Jarret’s room.”

  Nick held up a finger to tell me to wait while he left a message. When he was done, he swiped a finger over the screen of his phone. “I don’t need to ask. I took a picture,” he told me. “When they invited me to see what they’d found. Here.” He angled the phone so I could see the screen. “What do you think?”

  What I thought was that the doll looked mighty familiar.

  Well, sort of.

  She had the same skinny stuffed arms and legs I’d seen on both Tout Sweet, Reverend Love’s doll, and Honey Bunch, the doll for sale in George Jarret’s booth, and her pink satin dress looked to be an exact duplicate of the one I’d seen on Tout Sweet.

  Except . . .

  I squinted for a better look, and when that didn’t work, I grabbed Nick’s phone and enlarged the picture on the screen.

  The pink satin dress and black felt scarf on the doll from Jarret’s room did look exactly like Tout Sweet’s, but unlike that doll’s brown hair, this doll had black hair, and hers wasn’t styled in a bob like Tout Sweet’s. The long felt strips of this doll’s hair were braided into pigtails that hung over her shoulders.

  “What?” I didn’t realize my mouth had fallen open until Nick’s voice brought me back to reality. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost. No. Of course not. It’s just that the doll looks similar to the one I saw in Reverend Love’s office and . . .” Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t say anything else. For one thing, my tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of my mouth. And for another, well, if I told Nick I’d just had an idea about who killed Dickie Dunkin—and why—something told me he wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  Not without a little more proof.

  CHAPTER 17

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years I’ve traveled with the Showdown, it’s that a lot of the people who walk through the turnstiles consider themselves experts.

  There are chili experts, of course, who want nothing more than to tell you everything they know about what kind of meat to use, and why real chili can’t possibly contain beans, and how they garnish their bowls of spicy goodness with everything from sour cream to avocado, chives to cheese.

  Then there are spiciness experts who most of the time don’t want to talk about peppers and how they can enhance the taste of a chili as much as they want to brag about how they can tolerate more Scoville Heat Units than just about anyone else on the planet.

  There are also the bean experts (kidney or pinto? great northern or black?), tomato experts, and people who insist the only way to make a really good base for their chili is to add things like beer or beef broth or (I swear, this is true, I actually met a person in Nashville who claimed it was the only way to go) clam broth.

  None of this may seem like the stuff detective work is made of, but trust me, the information was always there, swimming around in my head, part of my DNA, and because of that, I got to thinking. Thinking, I arrived back at the Showdown, told Nick I had something I needed to take care of, avoided the Palace and Sylvia, and hotfooted it right across the street.

  See, if there are chili experts at chili cook-offs, it stands to reason that there are doll experts at doll conventions.

  Doll experts.

  Doll enthusiasts.

  Doll fanciers.

  And the obsessed.

  Exactly what I was counting on.

  It didn’t take me long to find exactly the expert enthusiastic fancier I was looking for. It helped that within two minutes of sitting down next to Minnie Cranston, I also knew she was obsessed.

  “They’re all so lovely, aren’t they?” Minnie was resting her doll-weary self on a bench along the far wall of the showroom, and when she looked around at the vendor booths and the dolls displayed in them, her eyes twinkled. She was a woman of eighty or so (one of the reasons I’d chosen her), and as we spoke, she pulled a bagel out of her purse along with a can of V8 juice.

  “Lunch,” Minnie said, giving me a smile and a wink. “If you’re smart like me, you can avoid spending money in the hotel restaurants and save a ton. That gives you more to spend on dolls. Oh, how I love the dolls!” She glanced around again and poked her chin toward the opposite side of the showroom. “There’s a Just Me over there that I’m dying to get my hands on. You know, one of those sweet German character dolls made by Armand Marseille. And over there”—she turned in her seat, the better to look in the other direction—“there’s a two-and-a-half-inch-tall French bisque doll for sale at that booth over there. I swear, if I had an extra one hundred and forty-five dollars, I’d snap that one right up. But I’ve already spent five thousand on dolls this weekend.”

  When my mouth dropped open, Minnie poked me in the ribs with her elbow and wagged the bagel. “Hey, kid, why do you think I swipe my lunch from the free hotel breakfast buffet? Money is money, and I need every cent I have for more dolls.”

  “Dolls.” I hoped my thin smile didn’t betray the fact that just thinking about dolls gave me the creeps and being this close to so many of them made that feeling escalate way past the creepiness stage and all the way to the point where I felt as if I were about to crawl out of my skin. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See, I’m pretty new to collecting.”

  Chewing, Minnie slapped a hand against my knee. “You’ll get the hang of it, kid,” she promised me.

  “But there’s so much I have to learn. There’s a doll over at George Jarret’s booth.” I didn’t have to look that way to know there was no one manning the booth. As far as I knew, Jarret was still in police custody. The spotlights over his booth weren’t turned on; his tables were covered with cloths. “She’s called Honey Bunch and she’s so cute. But he’s asking seven-fifty, and I don’t know, I think that’s pretty pricey.”

  “Not if Honey Bunch is the only one of Noreen Pennybaker’s dolls still around,” Minnie informed me. “You know the story, don’t you? That’s part of the reason that doll is so valuable. Noreen, see, made a bunch of those dolls, back in the seventies.”

  A bunch.

  I liked the sound of that, mostly because a bunch of the dolls is what I swore I saw right before I got tossed into that steamer trunk.

  “Noreen’s dolls were perfect little darlings,” Minnie went on. “But the whole thing . . .” She shook her head. “Well, more’s the pity. That whole situation was just awful, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what people are saying.” They weren’t, at least not to me, but Minnie didn’t have to know that. “But nobody’s giving me any details. The dolls are so adorable, so what’s the story?”

  Minnie scooted closer. She was as small and as thin as a chile de árbol and I couldn’t help but wonder if she packed as much of a punch. “Went crazy, you know,” Minnie said, leaning in close to share the confidence. “Noreen, that is. She went crazy making all those dolls of hers.”

  I had to ask because, let’s face it, it’s one of those catchall sorts of things that people say when they really mean something else. “Like went crazy and made a whole lot of them? Or like went crazy really crazy, crazy
in the head?”

  Minnie nodded. “Like went crazy really crazy in the head. See, Noreen was a stay-at-home mom. She had two little boys.”

  “Lawrence and Dickie.”

  “Those might have been their names.” Another nod. “Only it hardly matters, does it?”

  It did. Desperately. But I didn’t want to interrupt the story so I didn’t bother to mention it.

  “So Noreen, she answered one of those ads. You know, at the backs of magazines. Well . . .” She gave me a look. “Maybe you don’t know. You kids, you don’t read like we used to back in the day. You’re always on those phones of yours. Or messing with your pads or pods or whatever you call them. But back then, we women had plenty of magazines to keep us busy. Not just Good Housekeeping or Life or things like that, but romance magazines and magazines full of true confessions. And every one of them had ads at the back. You know, for women who wanted to work and still stay home with the kids.”

  My own mom had always worked outside the home, as the Chili Chick, of course, but later, when I was a kid, she did ten-hour-a-day shifts behind the bar at a local tavern.

  “Noreen had talent,” Minnie went on. “If you’ve seen Honey Bunch, you know that. So naturally, her interests went toward the craft ads.”

  “Crafts as in . . .?”

  “As in assembling crafts at home.” Minnie already had enough wrinkles to cover an elephant, but when she frowned, a few dozen more furrowed into her cheeks and forehead. “Bet they don’t do anything like that anymore, either. But it was a big business then. You paid some small amount of money, maybe two or three dollars, and the company, they sent you the materials to put together a craft that they’d turn around and sell. You know, like a flower arrangement or a balsawood airplane.”

  “Or a doll?”

  “You got that right.” Minnie finished one half of her bagel and brushed crumbs from her hands. “Trick is, what a lot of people didn’t know was that some of these work-from-home craft companies were phony balonies. See, they’d get you to spend three dollars on supplies, you’d assemble the craft, and send it back to them. The idea was that then they’d pay you a percentage of what they sold it for. But what usually happened was that they’d say what you’d sent them wasn’t good enough. That you didn’t paint something carefully enough. Or that your stitching wasn’t any good. Or that you left off parts.”