Dangerously Dark (21 page)

“Hayden!” Tomasz ran into the bar's back room, his face full of shock and dismay. He headed toward me. “What happened?”

I heard his dapper brogues crunch on the glass. I winced.

“I don't know. One minute, I was”—
sneaking out Declan's iPad
—“taking a picture of your antique cacao bean roaster for my Instagram feed. The next, everything was crashing toward me.”

I decided to omit the distinct
push
I'd experienced before that. I didn't want to sound paranoid. It was better to look like a complete klutz than to suggest someone had attacked me.

I held up my phone for confirmation of my story, then gave a shrug. “Got it!” Trying to smile, I tucked away my phone in my purse before Tomasz could ask to see my phantom snapshot.

“You're hurt.” Tomasz crouched beside me. He caught hold of my wrists, his dark brows arrowing down with concern. “Can you move? Is anything broken?” He crunched more glass, heedless of the potential for damage to his fancy shoes. “Did you hit your head? Do you remember my name? Or your name? I'll call 911.”

His touch was ridiculously gentle. I swooned a little.

“Don't call. That won't be necessary, Rupert.” I smiled at him. “I'll be fine. Nobody brings down Thumbelina that easily.”

He gawked at me, not understanding that I was joking. I knew he wasn't Rupert (whoever that was). I knew
I
was
me.

“Tomasz, I'm fine!” I suddenly hated being vulnerable and hurt, stuck on the floor amid all the mess. “I'm me. Hayden Mundy Moore. Superhot chocolate expert extraordinaire.”

He widened his eyes. Then shook his head. “You scared me!”

I'd scared
me,
too. Given his good opinion of me, I couldn't cry, though. Or show fear. I opted for breezy bravado, instead.

“Help me up?” I asked jauntily.

Tomasz did just that, carefully and powerfully hauling me to my feet. It was less an assist than an overtaking. But his hands were kind and his whole demeanor was concerned, and in my current (ouchy) state, both of those things were comforting.

“Oh, my god!” Lauren hurried in, her stilettos clacking. She stopped well short of the mess, protecting her high heels. “I was in the ladies' room when I heard something crash back here!”

Mmm-hmm.
Suspiciously, I peered at her, craning past Tomasz's shoulder to do so. “Why were you using the bathroom in here?” I wanted to know. “There's a perfectly good Porta-Potty outside.”

Lauren made a repulsed face. “Gross. Those are for customers, not us.”

Bad-temperedly, I wondered what
else
she was too good for. Law and order, maybe? Letting Declan marry Carissa? I didn't trust Lauren—
or
her coincidental appearance at that particular moment. Before the shelf had fallen, I'd heard a sound—one that had sounded
a lot
like the noise I'd heard before Lauren had pushed Austin into traffic. That couldn't be happenstance.

What better way to hide,
Danny would have said,
than right out in the open?
I was onto her. If I could have done it without crying or wobbling, I would have marched over to Lauren and let her know it. I settled for: “Too good for the Porta-Potties, huh? Typical. Anyway, I thought you'd be gone already.”

As fiery ripostes went, I'll admit it was lacking gusto.

Lauren blinked with pseudo innocence. “Gone where?”

Humph.
“You know where. Chocolate After Dark. You want to take over my tour.”

She glanced worriedly from me to Tomasz. “She's concussed, Tommy. We have to get her to a hospital or something.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” I hitched my purse higher on my shoulder. “I'm not going anywhere. Not until I—”

Find out who murdered Declan.
Belatedly, I realized I should probably keep my mouth shut. Already someone had tried to crush me with an industrial shelving unit. They'd spackled me with glass shards and made me hurt my knee, my hip, and my elbow. There was no telling if they were still lurking nearby.

Of course, if the culprit was Lauren, she knew she'd failed. Mostly. Those zillions of glass pinpricks really hurt.

“You're not going anywhere, period,” Tomasz interrupted before I could come up with a substitute rejoinder. “I don't think you're concussed, but you might need medical attention.”

That was when Danny strolled in. I saw him blanch, probably at the destruction all around me. I'm sure I looked awful.

My bodyguard's gaze roamed over me, astutely taking in my glass-encrusted clothes, my bloody hands, my sparkly glass-dappled hair, and all the rest. His attention lingered on Tomasz's hand on my waist. Then he gave a brief frown. “Newsflash, genius. This isn't the ladies' room. I thought you were going for a pee break before the chocolate tour started?”

He sounded disgruntled. I
felt
disgruntled.

Where was the concern? The caring? The smoke screen?

Danny shouldn't have been looking for me at all. Not if we didn't want anyone to know I'd stashed Declan's iPad back here.

Reminded of my disastrous retrieval mission, I glanced toward it. Danny noticed. I hoped he'd be smart enough to grab it. And clean it. It had pickled cocktail-onion goo all over it.

“Ooh,” Lauren gibed, casting me an “I should have guessed” look. “Too good for the Porta-Potties, huh, Hayden?”

Well, I deserved it. I glowered at Danny, wishing he'd come up with a better off-the-cuff excuse for my presence there.

“I thought you were taking a picture of the roaster,” Tomasz broke in, looking confused. “To Instagram it.”

Oh, right. That's what I'd told him.
I was really going to need to step up my sleuthing game if this continued.

On the other hand, the last thing I wanted was another suspicious death to look into. Two were two too many.

“Danny hates my Instagram habit. He's not much of a tech guy.” I frowned. “We were just arguing about that a while ago.”

Now it was Danny's turn to glower. He didn't like my maligning his technical prowess. It served him right.
Pee break?

He had the last word, though. “I'll tell Austin he can lead the tour after all,” my security expert said. “He's been waiting around with a clipboard, desperate to be the next man up.”

Oh, was he now?
I couldn't help finding that suspicious.

Austin would have had no reason to suspect I might not lead the inaugural Chocolate After Dark culinary tour—unless he'd
created
a reason . . . say, by mimicking Lauren and shoving something big and heavy (in this instance, a shelving unit) on top of me.

Austin could easily have killed me, then scampered outside with his clipboard and pretended to “hope” I didn't make it.

Weirder things had happened here at Cartorama—at least one death by liquid nitrogen–induced oxygen deprivation, for starters.

If Carissa had been around, I'd have had a trifecta of suspects—a superfecta, if I counted Tomasz. (If you don't follow horse racing, like my uncle Ross did, then you might not know that means either three or four suspects, all in order.) Either way, there was an abundance of people to consider. If Carissa hadn't been mourning Declan, she'd have been at the gate, too.

“If
someone
doesn't do it pretty soon,” Danny put in, “Carissa's going to. She showed up five minutes ago, crying, and started ‘networking' with all the people waiting for the tour.”

Oh no.
“I've got to go help her.”

She had to be trying—however brokenly—to help Declan. Wanting to support my friend, I tried walking. My injured knee had other ideas. So did all those pinpoints of sharp glass. Cut short, I faltered, unable to hold back a pain-filled whimper.

Tomasz was next to me in an instant. His hand hovered near my shoulder. “I'm afraid to touch you and accidentally make all the glass dig in.” He shot me an anxious look. “You've got to take off all these glass-filled clothes before you cut yourself.”

Danny guffawed. “That's a new one,” he said wryly.

I ignored his cynicism. “Do you have anything I can change into?” Oftentimes, restaurant and confectionary staff kept their civvies on hand in their lockers during their shifts. If one of Tomasz's Muddle + Spade workers would let me borrow some clothes temporarily, I'd be ready to go. “Because of all the glass, I'm afraid to sit down anywhere, least of all a car. I can give everything right back. I'll change, go straight home, change again, maybe get bandaged up, and come back to the bar.”

Tomasz gave me a dubious look. “I don't think I have anyone your size. Janel was on duty earlier, but I gave her the night off. Aside from her—”

If he thought Janel and I were the same size, he needed a closer look. Or maybe glasses. For a man with a fine Arnys suit and
GQ
-worthy shoes, Tomasz seemed surprisingly clueless about women's clothes. Maybe he was only good at coaxing them off?

“I've got you covered, doll,” Lauren interrupted, startling me. Aside from pondering Tomasz's sartorial weaknesses, I was also wondering why Janel had needed the night off. Lauren assessed me. “Everything I own is going to look weird as hell on you. But for tonight, at least, what's mine is yours.”

“Thanks, Lauren.” I wanted to help Carissa. If that meant playing dress-up in a potential killer's over-the-top glamazon wardrobe . . . well, I was up for it. “That's nice of you.”

She flicked a flirtatious glance at Danny. “I'll get you all kitted out,” Lauren told me in her raspy voice, “then we'll talk about what you can do to pay me back for my kindness.”

I got it. She thought I would hand over Danny like a hunk on a platter. Fat chance, knowing my security expert and his lifetime stubborn streak. But I played along. I needed clothes.

Danny, typically, seemed oblivious to all the drama.

He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “I'm driving the tour van, so I've got to run. I'll check in with you later.” He shifted a keen glance to Tomasz, winked at Lauren, and was gone.

That's when I realized . . . I wasn't safe anywhere. If
everyone
was at Cartorama tonight, then any one of my suspects could have just tried to kill me. Danny might not be worried, but I was.

I wasn't sure how many more “accidents” I could survive.

Twelve

Not much later, I stood in the bathroom of Lauren's small house—a bungalow handily located within walking distance of Muddle + Spade—staring with dismay at the pinup-worthy clothing she held out to me. “Don't you have anything normal?” I asked.

“Normal?” She wrinkled her forehead with bafflement. “You mean like normcore? If you're a devotee, I guess that
would
explain your wardrobe.”

Whoops. I'd forgotten I was in hipster heaven. I wasn't looking for self-aware, intentional dullness (à la fleece tops, boxy khaki pants, and blindingly white athletic shoes), a trend that could have been born (and worn) in Portland as easily as Brooklyn. I realize I'm smack-dab in the Millennial demographic that's into that stuff. In the rest of the world, however, purposeful “theories” of ugly clothing don't say
trendy,
they say
tourist.

“No, ‘normal' as in something that's not straight out of a burlesque show.” I was grateful to Lauren for her help, but the outfit she'd offered me was a bridge too far. For one thing, it was strapless. I don't begin to have the goods to hold up something like that.

“A ‘burlesque show'?” She brightened with childlike delight. “Good eye, doll! It
is
from a burlesque show. It's from
mine
!”

I should have known. “You're a burlesque performer?”

Lauren nodded, eyes shining. “I used to be this super-gawky, totally ugly teenager,” she confided. “Now I'm not. Give a girl a few years to grow into her curves, plus a set of falsies and the right wardrobe, and voilà! Instant bombshell!” She leaned closer, still looking tickled pink. “Some of those boys who looked right through me when I was younger are my best customers now. They don't guess a thing. They tip big, too.”

“Wow.” I bet they did. “It was that dramatic a change?”

“You'd better believe it. My show is a huge hit!”

Confirming as much, Lauren smiled more broadly. Coupled with her sophisticated look, her happiness was incongruous . . . and all the more touching because of it. Her naïveté sneaked right past my defenses. I couldn't help it. Somewhere underneath all that scarlet lipstick and leopard print was an innocent girl who'd transformed herself from an ugly duckling into a swan.

Or a cold-blooded killer. I still wasn't sure which.

“If it's that successful, why don't you quit Cartorama?”

“Quit my cart?” She shook her head and disappeared into the adjoining bedroom, giving me a chance to snoop-ily examine her bathroom. Its skirted pedestal sink, kitschy pink tiles, and profusion of toiletries suited her. “I love Sweet Seductions. Anyway, it's all part of my brand. My treats are dangerously delicious, and so am I.” She reappeared. “Presto! How's this?”

Well . . .
hoochie
came to mind. But given the various options Lauren had trotted out so far, I didn't want to argue over this (relatively innocuous) choice: a pencil skirt and body-hugging Bettie Page sweater. Even if I didn't quite have the curves to fill out either of them, at least they wouldn't fall off me.

“That'll be fine. Thanks.” I glanced at my brine-splashed flats, which I'd barely managed to rescue from the trash bag into which Lauren had stuffed all the rest of my glass-damaged clothing. “I think I can clean those and keep wearing them.”

Flats plus a pencil skirt. Maybe it would add up to a chic Audrey Hepburn vibe? I needed to be able to move during Declan's tour. I still intended to rejoin Chocolate After Dark. Soon.

Fortunately, I'd changed out of my funeral clothes earlier, so at least I hadn't destroyed my all-purpose “fancy” black dress. I'd opted for less formal jeans and a knit button-up shirt for the tour—something that would have enabled me to crawl behind displays, wrestle with chocolatiering equipment, and/or tromp into a dusty wine cellar for the perfect Vin Santo del Chianti Classico to pair with a nice milk chocolate with nuts.

So long, favorite jeans,
I thought now. Whoever had attacked me with that shelving unit had a
lot
to answer for.

Lauren hesitated, examining my shoes. After the tussle we'd had over tossing my clothes earlier, I expected a fight. Lauren would probably push a pair of sky-high stilettos on me, I knew.

“Good idea.” She whisked my shoes from my hand. “I'll do it. You get started on your hair. There's a dryer right there.”

Hm. Or maybe I was wrong. I grabbed the hairdryer on autopilot—careful of my now-bandaged hands, which looked like they belonged to the Invisible Man's mitten collection, they were so thoroughly covered—feeling taken aback by Lauren's kindness for what had to be the sixth time that day. I might have had her typecast all wrong, I reflected as I switched on the hairdryer and automatically went through the motions of styling my hair. Because so far, Cartorama's resident bombshell had been nothing but kind to me—at least since my accident at the bar, she had.

Maybe Lauren was trying to throw me off her (murderous) trail. Or maybe she was just hoping I'd talk her up with Danny.

But neither of those excuses explained why, earlier tonight, Lauren had cleaned and bandaged my hands herself, pooh-poohing my objections with a story about growing up as “the big sister” in her household—someone who'd spent part of her childhood “doctoring” her younger brother, Will. Or why Lauren had spread a plastic shower curtain on her bathroom floor, made me stand in the center of it, and then patiently combed glass shards out of my hair. Or why Lauren had shared her home, her shower, and even her (predictably vintage) silk chinoiserie robe, which I was still wearing after having gotten cleaned up.

I had to admit, those weren't the actions of a homicidal maniac. Lauren had been genuinely
nice
to me. After everything that had happened, I didn't know whether to double down on my suspicions of her, abandon them altogether, or wait and see.

Still trying to decide, I finished my hair and then got into Lauren's pencil-skirt-and-sweater combo. It was lightweight enough to be workable for springtime—especially a chilly Oregon springtime evening—but on me it lacked a certain va-va-voom.

“Are you decent?” Theatrically covering her eyes with her hand, Lauren edged sideways into the bathroom. “I just texted Danny to find out his location. I think we can still make the next stop of the Chocolate After Dark tour if we hurry, so . . .”

So hurry up
was her not-so-subtle insinuation. I got it.

“I'm decent.” I almost laughed as Lauren uncovered her eyes and then goggled at me. “Come on,” I protested, feeling like a beanpole little sister next to her. “It's not that bad.”

“No, but it's supposed to be a
look.
Maybe some lipstick?”

She came at me wielding a tube of fiery scarlet. I balked. “No, thanks. Really. You've done too much for me already.”

I escaped into her bedroom with my lips thankfully bare and headed for the house's minuscule living room. Partway there, I caught a glimpse of something heart-shaped and sequined. A photo in a frame on Lauren's bedroom nightstand. I stopped, struck.

“Hey, isn't that Declan?”
And you?
In the photo, they were snuggled together like lovers. Lauren was giving Declan a lipsticked smack on the cheek while he laughed delightedly.

As I stared at it, transfixed, I felt Lauren's presence.

She was behind me. Maybe getting ready to stab me. Or bludgeon me. Or electrocute me with a hairdryer in the bathtub.

After the difficult day I'd had, I wasn't really up for a showdown. The fight had gone out of me at Muddle + Spade.

I thought about being found dead while wearing Lauren's clothes. I thought about the fact that she'd probably add some lipstick and false eyelashes to my corpse. I turned to face her.

But Lauren merely looked wistful, not criminally insane.

“Yes,” she told me. “That's me and Declan, in happier days.” I expected her to laugh off their cheeky pose as a joke, to hide the affair that I had suspected—and Janel had hinted about. “He never saw me as that ugly girl I used to be.”

Oh. That was . . . okay, it was actually very sweet. It didn't mesh with the Declan I'd (kinda, sorta) come to know, though.

I played it dumb. “Oh, you two were an item?”

She nodded. So much for having to arduously sleuth to obtain confirmation of Declan's infidelity. I guessed sometimes my imagination got the better of me and made things seem more difficult than they were, because Lauren seemed to want to talk.

Maybe, it occurred to me, former ugly ducklings (and current man-stealing burlesque stars) didn't always have a ton of girlfriends to confide in. Especially when they were low.

I may have mentioned before—people tend to open up to me.

“Declan and I were . . . very close.” Lauren picked up that photo. She grazed it with her fingertips, her expression an unreadable blend of emotions. Sadness. Nostalgia.
Remorse?
“We had a lot in common. Declan loved all the same things I did,” she said in her husky, affecting voice. “Sushi, modern art, bungee jumping, muscle cars . . .”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was getting spooky hearing everyone's disparate images of Declan Murphy.

I butted in, unable to help it. “Movies?” I prodded.

For Janel, it had been Wes Anderson movies. For Carissa, romantic comedies. Austin hadn't mentioned films, per se, but he had said that Declan had shared his interest in gaming and Nintendocore. So far, Declan's supposed hobbies ranged from vegan ice cream to
tacos de lengua
to soul food, from anime to Broadway musicals, from shopping and doing DIY to going bungee jumping. It wasn't impossible one man had all those interests.

But it seemed pretty unlikely to me.

“French cinema vérité,” Lauren confirmed with a nod.

That was pretty different from the other entertainment options Declan had supposedly “loved,” but Lauren didn't know that. Her eyes got misty. Her hand trembled. She sighed.

I felt sorry for her. Whatever her shortcomings, Lauren seemed to have sincerely fallen for Declan. It couldn't have been easy to be in love with an engaged man. My sympathies still remained with Carissa, of course, but Lauren seemed so . . . lost.

A moment later, she snapped out of it. “I didn't believe him, of course. I mean, seriously? Cinema vérité? Please. That's pretty obscure.” With a wry look, she pursed her lips. “But I was flattered, all the same. Declan went to a lot of trouble to get my attention—to get me to like him. He thought he needed to do that.” She shrugged, elegantly. “He didn't know I'd be sympathetic to that feeling of not
quite
being good enough.”

I recalled her ugly-duckling story about the boys she'd known growing up—the ones who'd ignored her then but had later admired the reinvented woman she'd become . . . all without knowing the effort Lauren had put in with clothes and makeup, hair and falsies, to become a bodacious burlesque performer. It was pretty clear that Lauren hadn't felt
quite
good enough, either.

She and Declan had had something in common, then. Something that had drawn them together—and maybe pushed them apart, too. Moments ago, I'd thought Lauren had meant that she'd found the admiration of those boys (now men) validating. Or pleasing.

But maybe she'd found it
infuriating.

Maybe she'd secretly resented not being admired sooner.

“That's why Declan did it, of course,” Lauren said. “Why he pretended to be everything to everyone. He wanted to be loved.”

Yeah, by every woman he ever met, I thought. Carissa, Janel, Lauren . . . and probably others. But I couldn't say that.

“But most people morph into slightly different versions of themselves while dating someone, don't they?” Lauren broke into my thoughts with an easygoing wave. “Declan was no different.”

“I'm not sure you
can
really be loved if you're not being yourself,” I said. “Don't you have to be honest first?”

Another shrug. “Honesty isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

“Hmm, maybe not.” What did I know? I had three ex-fiancés and a pair of men in my life who couldn't get along with each other. I wasn't an expert. Plus, was I truly expecting a potential killer to agree with me that honesty was the best policy? “But isn't honesty a good starting point, anyway?”

Lauren surprised me with a slight smile. “My starting point with Declan was
completely
honest. He saved me from dying.”

That
wasn't what I'd expected to hear. “Really? How?”

Evidently, my (authentic) tone of amazement came through.

“I met Declan at a bar. Another bar, not Muddle + Spade,” Lauren explained, catching my alert look. “At the time, those cocktails frozen with liquid nitrogen were all the rage. They
do
have that neat smoky effect, like a bubbling cauldron. . . .”

She trailed off, seeing my horrified expression.

“I know, ironic, right? Given the way Declan died?” Lauren glanced back at that photo, then shook her head. “Anyway, there I was, about to dive into a nice frozen caipirinha—”

She paused as though wondering if she should explain the drink she was referring to—a cocktail made of Brazilian cane-sugar hard liquor, sugar, and lime. I nodded to let her know that even if I didn't wear leopard print, I still got out some.

“—when Declan rushed over and knocked the glass right out of my hand! There was boozy lime juice everywhere—mostly on him.” Lauren laughed and shook her head at the memory. “It turns out that if I'd taken a drink of that cocktail, I probably would have
died.
” She gave me an eager, macabre look. “Turns out, the bartender is supposed to pour the liquid nitrogen into a glass, swirl it around until it vaporizes and the glass is frozen, then pour in the cocktail. But Declan could see that the bartender had used too much liquid nitrogen. It hadn't vaporized yet. It was just there, floating in little droplets in my cocktail.”