Riddle in Bones: An Abishag’s Third Mystery (The Abishag Mysteries) Read online

  “What?” I said. “Do I have pizza sauce on my face?”

  “Donovan Reid was there?”

  “Yeah. Florence brought him to execute the marriage contracts.”

  “He wanted you to be the Abishag wife?”

  “Yeah,” I said again, wondering why Kat had fixated on Donovan when she didn’t even like him. We needed to talk about Doc T and how I would be able to bring him comfort and peace when all I felt like doing was screaming.

  “What did Reid say?”

  “Stuff about the good publicity for the agency to have a prominent academic as a client. Something about how regular people would like an Abishag marrying someone like them.” I remembered his promise if I agreed. “Oh, and that he’d be my boyfriend again if I did it.”

  Kat exploded. “The son of a…”

  “Kat,” Dog said mildly.

  Startled, I turned to the kitchen door. Dog and Sebastian stood in its frame. I wondered how long they had been standing there, but Sebastian only said, “You tell her about the murder?”

  “Uh,” I looked at Kat who straightened alertly. “Theoretically, not a murder yet. Doc T’s still alive. Sort of. Someone shot him.”

  Kat glared at Sebastian. “You didn’t say he’d been shot, just that it was sudden.”

  “Well it was,” Sebastian said. “There’s no case this time, so don’t go Nancy Drew on us. The police are investigating, but it was a random thing.”

  I blinked. Why had he said that? It was totally not random. I didn’t say anything, because we needed to stop Kat from launching her own investigation. A killer nearly shot Kat at Thomas’s house, and another bashed her over the head at Jordan’s.

  “You poor thing,” Kat said. I blinked again. Her sympathy was directed at me. “You saw him shot. No wonder you’re freaked.”

  “I didn’t see Doc T shot,” I said. “Didn’t see the shooter either, just his truck and Doc T bleeding afterwards.”

  “Poor thing,” she said, absently scratching a tat on her arm, her thoughts obviously elsewhere, a calculating look on her face.

  “Kat,” Dog and I said in unison.

  “What?” She widened her eyes innocently. “Just wondering what I can do to help.”

  “Dog told me you’ve done some archaeology,” Sebastian said. “Maybe you can help me finish his last project.”

  “Sure, I’d love to help.”

  Dog and I exchanged a wary look. Kat was acting very unlike herself, which was cause for alarm.

  Tentatively, I said, “I’m sorry you had to give up your vacation.”

  Dog shrugged. “Pleased to help. I’ve got my medical books, and it’s better to be earning money than spending it.” Always the pragmatist.

  Kat patted my hand. “That cabin was pretty pokey compared to this. Nice to be styling again. Besides I can always paint that canyon from the pix I took.” She yawned. “Well, I should settle in, and Dog should change into scrubs before the professor arrives.” She grabbed her half-finished OJ, tucked her arm in Dog’s, and headed down the hall.

  Conscious of Sebastian’s gaze on me, I smiled reassuringly. “No worries. How much trouble can she get into? We don’t know anything.”

  “So Donovan said he’d date you again if you married Henry?”

  So he had heard me. “Yes. Everyone was piling it on to get me to marry Doc T. You should have heard what my mother said.”

  “Is that why you agreed to be his Abishag wife? To date Donovan again?”

  I’d forgotten that about Sebastian. Normally a pacific person, he would do a slow boil when angered. And he was definitely angry.

  “No,” I said. Even to my ears, I didn’t sound very sure. Sebastian wheeled around and stalked outside.

  I took a step but stopped. He needed to cool down before he’d listen, really listen, to anything I said. As if being outside in 120-degree heat could cool anyone down.

  I slumped against the counter. Sebastian had just started talking to me again, and him going ballistic wasn’t helping me find the serenity I needed to be Doc T’s Abishag.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I drank iced tea in the kitchen for an hour, but Sebastian hadn’t returned. I thought about changing, but I looked more the Abishag wife in the Juicy Couture sparkly top with white slacks and white sandals than in a tank and shorts. I missed the headband with the trailing pink feather, but Florence had stuck it in her purse. I’d probably never see it again.

  I set out some hamburger meat to thaw, hoping that the guys would take the hint and barbecue. The patio had a grill. If it were still blistering hot at dinnertime, we could always broil them inside. The kitchen had everything.

  Remembering the burgers Doc T and I used to split, I felt a pang. Neither of us had been able to eat an entire hamburger served at the diner near the museum. For the eleven days I’d worked for him, we ate lunch and dinner together. Burgers at the diner if we were working at the museum, otherwise fish tacos at a Mexican restaurant in the mall near the Institute. In those eleven days, we became like an old married couple, me automatically handing him the tomatillo sauce at the restaurant, him finishing my fries at the diner.

  I felt that surge of dread again, so I tried to think of something else.

  I looked around the kitchen, trying to picture Thomas there with his first wife Carol. I couldn’t do it. I’d never known that Thomas, just the small, comatose man who had been my husband. I could picture his daughter Tina washing dishes. This had been a home for Sebastian and his brother Duarte, whom I knew scarcely at all.

  Finally I gave up waiting for Sebastian. Either Dog or Kat was in the shower. Since the water roared at full-strength, it was probably Dog. Funny the things you pick up about your housemates. Kat was moving around in the middle bedroom, but the door was shut so I walked past it.

  I unpacked my suitcase and set aside my bath things and a nightshirt. I didn’t consider nightshirts proper Abishag wear, but I had nothing else. Maybe I could check the mall tomorrow. If someone would take me.

  Dispirited, I threw myself on the bed, rolling abruptly to the other side when something with sharp corners jabbed me. A shoebox. I shook it, hearing bones rattle. I remembered the box that Doc T had asked Sebastian to return to his office in Los Angeles. Sebastian had been heading there three days ago, when the professor had been shot.

  One of us had brought it in, probably me. My purse had been sitting next to it. I put it on my bureau. I’d ask Sebastian for his keys and put it back in the car tonight—if he was speaking to me by then.

  The doorbell rang. Thinking that Sebastian had forgotten his key, I dashed to the door. Instead I found a tall, slim brunette with a Julia Roberts’ smile—lots of teeth and loads of charm.

  “Yes?” I hoped she didn’t need directions or a cup of sugar.

  “Is Sebastian here?” She had a cute French accent, but I didn’t like the way she looked at my pink sleeveless top in a disparaging way. Someone who pairs tight jeans with a scoop-necked tee with “Measured in Tablespoons” splayed across her chest, shouldn’t throw stones. I’m just saying.

  “He stepped out. May I take a message?” Spoken like his secretary or something when I really wanted to ask if she was Sebastian’s girlfriend.

  “I’m the housekeeper.” She giggled which gave me a bad feeling. “You are Sebastian’s grandmamma, yes?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Yes. You’re from the service?” I didn’t hide the disbelief. She made me feel like his mother when I knew she was older than me. I motioned her in. I wouldn’t have objected to letting her melt from heat exhaustion, but Sebastian was already peeved.

  She assessed the living room while pattering in mangled English. “Yes, I am a college student with exquisite skills in the kitchen and laundry. Perhaps I do a new arrangement of the furniture as it is so, how do you say, misfortunate. But no—Sebastian says I should start this evening with the preparation of dinner for four peoples and later, the turning on the beds.”

  “Turn down.”
I corrected. Did Sebastian seriously think we could put up with Marie Antoinette possibly for weeks?

  “I do the furniture tomorrow as we cannot abound in it any longer. I bring my own tools for the cooking. Do you have a muscular man to carry them in for me? Show me the kitchen now, please.”

  Bemused, I yelled down the hall, “Dog.” I pointed through the archway: “That’s the kitchen.”

  Appearing in the foyer, Dog took in the Eiffel Tower staring in horror at the package of hamburger meat without a blink of an eye. “Need something?”

  She whirled around. “Ah, the muscular man. Please, bring in the case from my Mini Cooper just so. My keys.” She pressed the keys into Dog’s hand, smiling with all those teeth before she returned to pondering the hamburger.

  “Sure,” Dog said and headed for the car. Blessed with dazzling good looks, Dog seemed unaware of his own beauty or that of others. Kidneys, aortas, and lymph glands interested him. With love in his eyes, he used to show us housemates pictures of spleens and dissected bowels. Kat made him stop after Heather barfed on the dinner table.

  Maybe he’d show our French Fry something gross from his medical books and she’d run screaming. I could suggest it to him.

  Sebastian came into the house, brushing past me as if I wasn’t there, yelling: “Dèsirèe!”

  “Mon amì,” she said, kissing him on one cheek and then the other. I loathed her.

  Grabbing his arm, she pointed to the packaged meat with a dramatic finger. “This. What do you suspect I do with this?”

  He grinned at her sheepishly. “I thought you were starting tomorrow. I can barbecue them on Granddad’s grill tonight.”

  Dog dumped a case on the counter. “Let me know when the professor arrives.” He disappeared down the hallway. Lucky man. I’d disappear down the hall, too, if I didn’t have to uphold my duties as an Abishag wife.

  Shaking her head sadly, she tipped the meat into the trashcan. “I cannot allow such a thing. I find something else here or procure dinner in other ways. Now go. I avert this catastrophe or kill myself trying.” She made shooing motions, and I escaped.

  The Brioche could make all the meals she wanted, but if she made anything from snails or frog appendages, I’d eat Captain Crunch.

  Sebastian followed me from the kitchen, a smile playing on his lips, which also didn’t bode well for my digestion. I wondered if Dèsirèe and he had a history. At least he seemed to have forgotten his anger.

  “She’ll make something quick,” he said. “I called the hospital for Henry’s ETA, and they’re saying it’ll be another 90 minutes. That’ll give us time for dinner. You okay?”

  Earlier I would have said no, told him all my fears, and let him explain how I should cope. Now I didn’t want to disturb the fragile peace between us.

  “I’m fine.”

  He nodded and headed for his room. Dismally I heard his door click shut.

  Dèsirèe poked her head from the kitchen. “Not to despair. I crate a masterpiece from air as there is nothing digesting in the house. Tomorrow I bring decent ingredients, and you will see formidable meals.”

  “Great.”

  I decided to hide in my bedroom till forced to eat her crated masterpiece of air.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dinner was both wonderful and puzzling. Wonderful, because the “crated masterpiece” turned out to be extraordinarily light asparagus Gruyere cheese omelets with a summer salad and baguettes still warm from the oven.

  I had to hand it to Dèsirèe: the food was perfect, the table set perfectly, and the apron she extracted from her case almost perfectly covered the “Measured in Tablespoons” across her chest. She was no Mrs. Timmons, Thomas’s housekeeper who retired after his death, but she was pretty spectacular on her own merit.

  The meal puzzled me, because no one talked and not just because we’d been rendered speechless by the omelets. I’d feared after our earlier meeting that Dèsirèe would chat throughout the meal. Au contraire. Except for a few spare questions (like “More butter?”), she served us silently.

  She did pat Sebastian on the shoulder every time she passed him. He smiled each time, a perfunctory smile, but annoying all the same.

  Everyone but me brought something to read at the meal, which I’d been taught was rude. Dog read medical books, which he did at the house, too, but really? We were guests here. As our host, Sebastian led by bad example. He too had his nose in a book, probably something on bones. I couldn’t see the cover from my angle. Kat had a small, brown leather notebook, which she read intently, crunching noisily on carrots as she flipped pages.

  I stared at a pat of butter melting into the crevices of Kat’s bread. Did no one care that I’d been bullied into marrying a man who had been shot, a man I knew? In two hours, I would be on duty, lying next to him while everyone else slept. Another wedding night and my stomach churned.

  For dessert, Dèsirèe served stewed peaches over vanilla ice cream. I elected to eat it in my bedroom, pacing while I ate, waiting for the doorbell to ring.

  Doc T had always started each day in the lab or in the museum with a cup of coffee, surveying the work he had set before us, “girding his loins for battle,” he’d say. When the doorbell finally sounded, I set the ice cream bowl aside, took a deep breath, and girded my loins for tonight’s sentinel duty.

  Standing in a corner of the master bedroom, I watched Dog talk to the doctor while the orderlies settled Doc T in the bed. From the kitchen, I heard the clatter of dishes being washed, the rumble of Kat and Sebastian talking, and the alien sound of the French girl’s laughter. I crept from my corner to squeeze Doc T’s hand. He didn’t look like himself: his head wrapped in gauze, bones beginning to show through flaccid skin, and his lively eyes now hooded, lids bluish, and almost transparent.

  As the orderlies took the gurney back to the ambulance, Dog and the doctor wired Doc T to monitors and hooked him up to glucose and other bags whose elements remained mysterious to me. When they brought out the catheter, I fled. Some things about one’s comatose husband should be left to the imagination.

  While the doctor and Dog finished preparing Doc T for long term hospice care, I checked the kitchen and found Kat still hunched over the old journal at the dining room table. No Sebastian. No Dèsirèe.

  “Where’s Sebastian?” My voice may have been over-loud and sharp. Kat jumped.

  “Sheesh, Les. You almost gave me a heart attack. Sebastian drove back to Claremont. Needed to pick up some things of the professor’s.”

  Even if he wasn’t speaking to me, he could have mentioned it. “And Dèsirèe?”

  She looked vaguely around the kitchen. “Must have finished cleaning up. Said she’s returning mid-morning.”

  The kitchen gleamed. How had Potpourri cleaned so thoroughly in so little space of time?

  I sat down across the table from Kat. I wanted to talk to Sebastian. Kat wasn’t my first choice for comforting wedding night jitters, but she’d have to do.

  “You know what this is?” Kat tapped the antique journal.

  I shook my head. So much for talking about my issues.

  “The professor’s journal. Someone from the museum brought his stuff to the hospital and gave ‘em to Sebastian.”

  Now I remembered it: Doc T was always scribbling in it. I hadn’t seen it that last day at the Institute. “We, Doc T and I, were at the museum Wednesday. He must have left it in his desk then.”

  She pulled a small e-tablet from her pocket. “The police gave this to Sebastian, too. To return to the university, as it has some student data on it.”

  I frowned, suddenly suspicious. “What are you doing with his journal and tablet?”

  She smiled in that narrow way she had when up to something nefarious. Innocently enough, she said, “Sebastian asked me to look over the journal as some of it’s in German and some in Scandinavian.”

  Growing up around the world and having a knack for languages, Kat spoke most European languages fluently. She could get by
in a half dozen Asiatic and South American Indian dialects too.

  “And the tablet?”

  “That I took. I think Sebastian meant to return it to the college but forgot. I thought it might have some useful data.”

  I studied her suspiciously. “Took it before he left or after?” Suddenly I remembered the box of bones in my room that needed to go back to the college too.

  “Might have been before. We need it for the investigation.”

  I reached for the tablet, but she held it out of my reach. I growled, “There is no investigation. Except by the police. Give me his stuff.”

  She shook her head, her expression softening at the rough sorrow in my voice. “I will. But not yet.”

  Reason did not work with Kat, so I tried seasoning it with guilt. “I didn’t choose to be an Abishag wife this time, but I agreed to be one for lots of bad reasons and a couple of good ones. The thing is, when I did this before, you were hurt or nearly hurt both times. I couldn’t bear…”

  She put her hand over mine. “It’s okay, Les. I’ve learned my lesson. Painfully. Believe me, I won’t go near the bad guys.” She held up the cracked journal. “Sebastian asked for my help. I can do this.”

  “Why do you need the tablet?”

  “To read the journal in context. I’m reading both backwards starting with the day he was shot. Did you know Doctor Telemann was meeting someone at a deli shortly before be was shot at the Institute? His schedule is on the tablet.”

  I nodded. “Doc T said he was meeting an old friend for dinner.”

  “Do the initials EE mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head. “Remember, I only worked for him for eleven days. I took some messages for him, but I can’t remember anyone with those initials.”

  “I didn’t figure so. That’d be too easy. Since he didn’t have the journal with him at the Institute, I don’t have any notes for that day. What was he working on?”

  Three days since the shooting, and my time at the museum and Institute was blurring. “Mule bones. And he had these awful bits of an old harness. Researching the premise that the early 1900s harnesses used in the desert caused a type of mule spine and hip displacement unique to here.”