Lacey studied Armstrong and Honey with some empathy. She decided for the moment that their private relationship was none of her professional business, unless it had something to do with fashion or murder. And judging from Honey’s get-up, fashion was out. Lacey’s friend Stella had already cornered the style market on spandex, and Lacey hadn’t figured out a graceful way to write about it. Stella, on the other hand, might have appreciated Honey’s outfit.
“Who can blame her?” Inez said. “That cop is hot. I wouldn’t kick him out of my bed.”
“Looks like someone might get lucky tonight.” Sykes winked at Inez. She dissolved into giggles and fell onto his shoulder, her black braid tickling his chin. Maybe Sykes was talking about himself.
“You’re right.” Lacey smiled brightly. She didn’t want the conversation to downshift into who might be hooking up with whom tonight. “Can you give me a little local history? Where did the name Black Martin come from?”
Hank Richards drew Lacey an invisible map on the table with his finger. “You come into town off the highway across that little creek? That’s the Little Nottoway River. Town started there. Used to be two little settlements, Black’s Ford and Martin’s Crossing. They kind of grew together, way back when things were booming hereabouts. That’s been a while.”
“I guess it’s been a while since you had a murder here too.”
“We may not have many,” Blythe said, “but what we got are pretty spectacular. Why, we got the ghost taxi murders! And they’ve never been solved.”
“The ghost taxi? Oooh! Tell me more.”
Inez jumped in. “Back in the Fifties, a man and a woman were found in a burned-out taxi parked in the local graveyard. Nothing left but charred remains. They never even identified the bodies. No DNA or anything back then. Course legend has it they were the driver and his female passenger. But no one knows for sure.”
“Ghost taxi.” Lacey wondered how she could work that into the story. “Are there ghosts to go with it?”
“According to anybody who ever walked there at night,” Inez said.
“Round Halloween, we can’t keep the local kids out of the cemetery.” Sykes had a raspy chuckle. “One year some high school punk boosted a big yellow taxi from out of town just to park it in the graveyard. The town nearly had a meltdown.”
“That punk was you, Dirk,” Blythe said.
“Can’t prove that, Blythe.” Sykes was laughing hard. “Now they say the lady and the cabbie drive around these parts at night, trying to find their killer. Sometimes they drive silently through town in a ghostly taxicab. If it vanishes before your very eyes, it’s them. If you call a cab hereabouts and it never arrives,
it’s them
.” Everyone laughed.
“We got a community haunted house to raise funds for charity,” Hank said. “And every year the legendary haunted taxicab bit gets bigger and more ridiculous. Actors jump out of the car now in these half-burned-up clothes, fake flames coming out of everywhere, screaming bloody murder.”
“My kids nearly wet their pants at that,” Blythe said.
Sykes just grinned. “I wonder what they’ll make out of the Blue Devil this Halloween. Bet it’ll be good. Maybe Dominion will donate that big steel spool for a prop. Or maybe we should just steal it.”
“That is in really bad taste,” Kira said. She lowered her eyes and reached for another chip to crumble.
“Don’t be a poor sport, Kira,” Sykes said. “Scary got nothing to do with good taste.”
“Lay off her, Sykes. She’s taking this thing hard,” Hank cut in. “But you’re right: A velvet spool might have to be liberated, in the cause of a good scare.”
“My ears are ringing.” Lacey shook her head to clear them outside La Puerta Roja. The air was getting even colder as they walked back to Vic’s Jeep. “It was hard to escape that place.”
“Something else hard to escape: Valentine’s Day is coming up,” Vic said.
Lacey moaned. Her friends were all in a lather over Valentine’s Day. Stella and Brooke were rhapsodizing in harmony over how romantic it was. As for Lacey, it was something to avoid at all costs.
“I heard that moan,” Vic said. “What does that mean? Is that what Valentine’s Day does to you?”
“Valentine’s Day? Let me see. It means—false hopes and endless disappointment.” Lacey was half-serious, or more than half. “You might say I haven’t had the best of luck with the day of hearts and flowers.” In fact, her past Valentine’s Days were a series of disasters that did not fade with the passing of time.
There was the boyfriend who sent her a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day—to break up with her. He included a note:
Like Mick Jagger says, these roses are living to be dying by your side. But we can still be friends.
Another boyfriend never even showed up for their big Valentine’s date—because it was too much pressure. He didn’t send flowers. One Valentine’s blind date set up by “helpful” friends showed up two hours late and drunk as a skunk. And another time—No, there was no sense in brooding over the past, now that she was with Vic. She squinted up at him.
Yep, still there. Still handsome.
“Don’t torture me,” she said.
“Maybe they knew about you.”
“Knew what about me?”
“That you used to flee at the first sign of commitment.”
Lacey’s mouth dropped open. There was perhaps a
tiny
grain of truth to this accusation. “So they had to choose Valentine’s Day to humiliate me?”
“Darling, your luck has changed.” He leaned in for a kiss, but she pulled away.
“Tell me more about my newfound luck in love.”
“You’ve got me now. But I remember those days. You have an interesting past.”
She stopped walking and looked at him. “You’re never going to forget I left Sagebrush, are you?”
“Me and everyone else,” he smirked. “No, Lacey darling, it’s
how
you left. Cowboy asked you to marry him and you hightailed it out of town so quick his head spun clear around.”
Sagebrush was the wild and woolly Western Colorado town where Lacey cut her teeth as a news reporter. Vic had been the chief of police there. It had been almost seven years since she’d left that small town behind. And since Vic had unexpectedly come back into her life, the cowboy who had asked Lacey to marry him seldom crossed her mind—except around Valentine’s Day.
“Most people called him Tucker. And he was a rancher, not a cowboy.”
“What’s the difference?” Vic was teasing. He knew the difference very well.
“You were the cowboy cop. If you have to ask—Anyway, I hate small towns and big gossips.”
“Isn’t that why you’re a reporter, Lacey? So you get to be the one spreading the gossip?”
“The
news,
darling, the
news
. There’s a difference. Most of the time.”
Vic laughed. “Most of the time.” He opened the Jeep’s door for her.
“It wasn’t just Tucker I was fleeing. I was escaping Sagebrush.”
And you
. At the time, Police Chief Vic Donovan seemed to occupy more of her thoughts than the man she was dating. Tucker had made it clear he would never leave Sagebrush; it was his home and Lacey would have to be the one to compromise. After all, she was the
girl.
It seemed like some silly, primitive man-woman thing. Sagebrush was Tucker’s territory, his tribal homeland, and if she married him she’d be stuck there forever. It made her crazy. Did Tucker really like living in a place where the winter temperatures dipped to forty below zero? Did anyone?
“Besides,” she went on, “Tucker married somebody else right after I left town—and on Valentine’s Day!” Six short weeks after Lacey fled the icy winter of Sagebrush, Tucker wed a woman he had just met, adding injury to insult by choosing Cupid’s little holiday to seal the deal. “It was the ultimate betrayal.”
“People do have to go on living after you leave, honey,” Vic said. “Hard as that may be.”
“Six weeks, Vic! He married the first woman who crossed his path!”
Lacey remembered how her heart sank at the news. Tucker could have waited a decent interval. Just because she couldn’t live in Sagebrush didn’t mean she hadn’t loved him. She had loved him too much to marry him and then hate him for making her live there, in the middle of freezing nowhere. But she didn’t love Tucker the way she loved Vic.
Have I told Vic that? He knows. Doesn’t he?
“What do you expect? He knew he could never meet another Lacey Smithsonian, with her big eyes and long hair and quirky charm.”
“Quirky?”
Vic leaned over for a kiss. “Marrying another woman was like throwing himself off a cliff. Couldn’t marry you, so he didn’t care
who
he married. Just get it over with.”
“Ha. It seems he forgot about me pretty darn quick,” she said.
“He couldn’t possibly forget you, Lacey. Even if he was a dumb cowboy. And I never forgot about you.” He brushed her hair off her face and tipped her chin up for another kiss, then pulled the Jeep onto the road.
“See how pretty you can talk when you put your mind to it?”
“Do you still love him?” Vic asked. “Even a little?”
“Come on, it was so long ago. He’ll always be my first big heartbreak, but how can I think about him when I’m with you? Unless you bring up that miserable holiday again!”
“Right. I’ll be careful. Not another word about it. So, what do you want to do about Valentine’s Day?”
“You’re impossible.” She glanced sideways at him. “V-Day hasn’t worked out well for me.”
He laughed. “You were just betting on the wrong horse. Besides, we have to do something.”
“Like what?” Now she was suspicious.
“Nadine is planning a Valentine’s party.”
“Your mother? She’s planning a
what
?” Lacey blew out a breath of cold steam. “I suppose that’s only fitting. She drives a bright pink Cadillac. It’s practically the official vehicle of Valentine’s Day.”
“She’d die if she heard you say that. It’s not
just
a pink Cadillac. It’s a 1957 Eldorado Biarritz.”
“So it’s a pretty pink Cadillac. With fins. Nadine’s probably had a lifetime of perfect Valentine’s Days to let her tempt the fates like that.”
“We’re invited.”
“No!”
Warning! Disaster ahead!
“You should see your face right now.”
“I don’t even want to think about the ramifications,” Lacey said. “Something horrible could happen, Vic.”
“Don’t be silly. But—” He hesitated. “She’d like you to make some kind of dessert. That’s one danger with impressing my mother. You have to keep doing it.”
“She wouldn’t be impressed if she’d seen the cake batter on the ceiling.”
“Come on, you know she likes you. And the chocolate almond torte you made for Christmas turned out great. So about this dessert—”
“I can’t be thinking about that right now. I still have to write an article about the factory.”
“You could always ask your food editor friend to whip something up and you could pay her for it. She’d love that.”
“It’ll be a cold day in Hell, Sean Victor Donovan, before I’d ask Felicity Pickles to do my cooking for me. She’d probably manage to write
Felicity was here
in icing or something. And she’s not quite a friend.”
“About Valentine’s Day?”
“You’ll have to ask me later.”
They were headed to a local motel, a cheap one-story affair. Lacey didn’t care. All she really needed was hot water, clean sheets, and a good wireless connection. Lacey hadn’t been sure whether they’d be heading back to Northern Virginia after the day was over. But since taking her private investigation course, she prided herself on having her PI “go bag” ready in case of emergency. It was a necessity, her instructor Bud Hunt had said, if a stakeout ran into the next day, or a surveillance carried you far afield.
It made sense to stay in Black Martin overnight. Lacey had interviews to finish in the morning, and Vic had work to do, rewriting the Dominion Velvet contracts and reworking his plans for their ancient security system. The Jeep turned into the motel parking lot.
“You don’t really want separate rooms, do you?”
“This is a small town, Vic.” She got her bag out of the Jeep. “Our every move is no doubt being monitored.” Her smile carried an invitation. “Maybe we could get two rooms with a connecting door.”
“Nobody cares, you know. This is not Sagebrush, Colorado.”
“It might as well be. Besides, I need to work on my story, write interview questions, sort out my notes, check out whatever Mac posted on the paper’s Web site.”
He sighed and walked her to the motel lobby. “I’ll be out late, anyway.”
She stopped short. “What are you up to?”
“A little security work. Call it reconnaissance.”
“Around the factory?”
“Yep.”
“So that’s what you talked to Nicholson about.”
“No comment.” He shook his head. “You’re not getting anything out of me, lady.”
“I’ll make you talk, Vic Donovan.”
“Oh yeah? How are you going to do that?”
She stood on tiptoes, grabbed his lapels, and kissed him hard. “I have my ways.”
Two rooms with a connecting door.
Chapter 8
The moon was half full. Vic opened the front door to the darkened Dominion Velvet factory with a key Nicholson had given him. He turned off the alarm system, which Nicholson had said didn’t work anymore anyway. They peered through the gloom. The police had cordoned off the dye house with crime scene tape, a ribbon of yellow leading them into the darkness.
Lacey had finally convinced Vic to take her with him. She pointed out that the experience might help her if she ever decided to be a private investigator. And she’d already done the class work.
“I just let you come to keep you out of trouble,” he said. “You know how you are.”
“I hope you don’t think that passes for witty banter,” Lacey replied.
“Ha. I have not yet begun to banter.” Vic motioned her in ahead of him, and he followed.