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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

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BOOK: Head Games
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Magnum whined. Maggie didn't notice. Her heart stuttered. Her chest hurt. Her gut clenched.
It was just a plain white envelope. Nothing more. Her name and address in black ink.
She couldn't bear to open it.
Holding it tight in her hand, she looked up into the shadows, struggling for breath.
Not now. Oh, not now. I can't deal with any more tonight.
It was such a stupid reaction. So embarrassing. She was standing alone in the most secure house in the city of St. Louis, and she was suddenly afraid. She was checking shadows and startling at noises because of a plain white envelope.
But she'd gotten four others, and they'd frightened her, too.
She wanted to just stand there. She wanted to hide. She wanted to feed the damn thing to her dog. She opened it instead.
DIE BITCH
 
Not even original. Not particularly poetic or flowery. Not something that should cause palpitations.
But it wasn't the words that upset her. Heck, she'd been called worse by Sasha. It was finding them tucked away in her mail like spiders in a basket. It was the subterfuge of a plain white envelope and careful printing. It was the black, slashing letters inside that tore right through the paper, as if words alone couldn't possibly express the rage.
It was not knowing who sent them. Or why.
She'd called the police. They'd said to save the notes, and let them know if anything escalated.
She guessed she'd have to call them again.
Molly was just turning toward the kitchen to do that, to feed Magnum and let him out to maul her sleeping bulbs in the backyard, when she realized that she wasn't out of surprises for the night.
For a moment, she just stared into the darkened living room. Dared the precise shadows of her house to reassemble themselves into their correct pattern. The pattern she'd seen no more than twelve hours earlier.
“Magnum,” she muttered, suddenly really afraid. “Just who did you let in here tonight?”
The late Catherine Louise and Martin Francis Burke, Sr., had spent their lives traveling in the service of the government and collecting tasteful collectibles with what was left of the family inheritance. As far back as Molly could remember, the Burke house had held the finest that Waterford, Chippendale, and Sèvres had to offer, not to mention the odd Feininger oil or Hopper watercolor. Molly knew each one like an adversary and checked on its health more frequently than her remaining family's. Which was why she would realize so quickly that there was an empty square of wall space over the Steinway. A square where the Rembrandt sketch had always resided.
Molly's spirits, already dangerously low, sank straight to her toes. She looked at the wall. Around the room. Back over her shoulder as she tried to remember whether she'd set the alarm properly that morning. She walked on into the room and checked behind the furniture and potted plants, as if she really could have taken the damn thing down and then forgotten where she'd put it.
“Please let this just be an episode of
Twilight Zone,
where I'm in an alternate universe that doesn't include Rembrandt,” she begged.
Almost in response, Magnum started barking again. Molly jumped a foot. Her night had been bad enough. But this was seriously teetering toward chaos. She held on to that note, as if it were her only proof of sanity, and turned to the kitchen.
Magnum was delirious to see her. Molly almost ended up on her butt beneath eighty pounds of sloppy enthusiasm, but she managed to get him out the back door, and then she turned for the phone.
Molly had managed to punch no more than the nine when Magnum started barking again. A second later her doorbell rang.
“With my luck,” Molly groused to herself, trying hard to ignore the
sudden reacceleration of her heart, “it's the Water Mother coming back for her sacrifice.”
Even so, she grabbed her portable phone and headed for the front door. And noticed on the way what was missing from the Queen Anne cabinet in the corner.
Molly took one look through her peephole and laughed. “I'd heard response times were getting better,” she said when she got the door open, “but this is ridiculous.”
The cop on her doorstep reminded her a lot of Magnum. Huge, a little sloppy, kind of clumsy, and smiling. Dee, or Delight Jackson Smith, was one of the local uniforms who walked a beat in the Central West End. Because a certain amount of Molly's calls for the Medical Examiner's office also happened to be from the same general neighborhood, she saw a lot of Dee.
Tonight she was particularly glad to find him on her porch.
“You lookin' for me?” he asked in his deceptively slow voice.
“I was. I've been robbed.”
Dee scratched his bald head. “No kiddin'. Wanna hear a coincidence? No more'n half hour ago, I sees this kid hoppin' fences with a picture under his arm. One of your pictures, I'm thinkin'. Admired it when I was over 'bout those notes you been getting. Tried to call you at work but you already gone.”
Molly was astounded. “You found my Rembrandt
before
I reported it stolen? You deserve a raise, Dee.”
His grin was huge and shambling. “From your mouth, girl. Thing is, I got a kid here says how can he steal somethin's his anyway? Well, I figure, 'fore I smack his head for bein' a smartass, I should aks you. Be sure. This your painting?”
He held up his burden. Ten-by-twelve inches of faded yellow paper that held a red-charcoal-sketched girl in peasant dress, all wrapped in enough carved gilt to deck out a ship's figurehead. Molly sighed in relief. Well, at least one of her problems was solved. “It is.”
“Well, then, who's this?”
At which point he reached out to his right and yanked over Molly's third or fourth surprise for the night.
She gaped. “Oh hell.”
Magnum had started up again. It was after one in the morning, and her dog was throwing himself against the back door and howling. Molly had to take care of it.
In a minute.
“He lyin' to me, Molly?” Dee demanded, shaking the teenager like a rat in his meaty grasp. “'Cause I already told him what'd happen, he was. And bein' you be gettin' those threatening notes and all, I thought I might jus' be sure.”
As achy and tired and overwhelmed as she already was, Molly damn near sat right down on the floor and cried.
He was sixteen. Beanpole tall, waiting to fill out. Blessed with the face of a poet and the grace of an angel. Molly took in thick, curling strawberry blond hair, a soft auburn goatee on a young, fey, triangular face, huge, lashheavy hazel eyes that were now leaking tears of frustration. She saw the five-hundred-dollar leather-and-khaki duster, work pants, plaid flannel shirt, and, ruining the gangsta image, Bruno Maglis.
He was the very last thing Molly needed tonight. She almost told Dee she'd never seen him before and shut the door.
“Well?”
Molly shook her head. “He isn't lying, Dee. He does own it. Kind of. Stand up straight, Patrick. You have some explaining to do.”
“I'm sorry, Aunt Molly,” he all but whispered in a marginally masculine voice.
Molly sighed, stood aside, and wished hard for something stronger than aspirin. “Might as well come in. This is going to take some time.”
“I bet,” Dee agreed, pushing the boy in the door ahead of him.
“I didn't mean it,” Patrick insisted in aggrieved tones.
“Of course you didn't mean it, Patrick,” Molly assured him drily. “It was an accident that you got a thousand miles from your house in Virginia, to walk off with the Rembrandt”—he'd just about been ready to step past her when she grabbed a corner of duster—“and the jade hung-ma.”
“The hung what?” Patrick echoed innocently.
“The
jade
what?” Dee echoed much more darkly one step behind.
Molly didn't take her eyes off her nephew. “Believe it or not, I do notice those things, Patrick. The small carving on the third shelf of the Queen Anne cabinet in the dining room—the deep blue one that looks
like it's part horse, part dragon? It's missing. It was also a good choice. It's quite rare.”
Tears welled all over again and he gulped. “I needed to get away. I didn't think you'd care.”
She didn't. That was the worst part. No, the worst part was having her only brother's older son on her doorstep four weeks before Christmas when the only thing she possessed less of than yule cheer was Christian charity. Especially toward her family.
“You've been getting threats, Aunt Molly?” the boy asked as she closed the door behind them. “Maybe I could stay and help … uh, protect you, okay?”
“You get in the kitchen and sit down,” she commanded. “As soon as you hand over the hung-ma.”
Magnum was going to wake up the baby at the end of the block. Pointing to her nephew, Molly addressed her friend the cop. “Don't let him out of your sight. I'll be right back.”
“But Aunt Molly—”
But Aunt Molly was already stalking through the kitchen, where she could just make out Magnum's massive head outside the door.
He had something. Something he dropped every time he started barking, and then picked up again, like a furry bellboy with room service.
Something white.
That shouldn't have given Molly the creeps. Tonight, it did. It looked like a flower box, the kind long-stemmed roses come in.
Probably something that had been tossed over the fence from the neighboring streets. Molly's yard sided along Euclid, where an eclectic crowd frequented the trendy shops and restaurants tucked all along the Central West End. Since she'd moved home, Molly had found everything from condoms to a full-sized mannequin dressed as Fidel Castro in her backyard.
But the way Magnum played with that box made her think she had more than Castro on her hands.
Pushing the door open, Molly reached out, and Magnum obliged, dropping his prize in her hand. Slick with dog drool and ragged with careful gnaw marks, it was, indeed, a flower box. And it wasn't empty.
“Uh, Dee?” she called, suddenly even more worried about those notes she'd been getting than she had been. “Can you come in here?”
He did, which set Magnum off all over again. Molly shushed the dog and motioned the policeman over as she laid the box on her kitchen table and opened it.
She saw the glint of gold first. Nestled in layers of white tissue. Heavy and solid. But not all gold. Decorated in gold. Painted with gold hearts. Gold hearts and red crosses.
And letters. Words.
“What the hell—” Dee muttered, leaning in for a closer look as Molly pulled the last layer of tissue apart to fully reveal what lay within.
“It's a fake,” Molly insisted, even though she knew better.
She didn't touch it, even though she wanted to. She didn't pick it up or tilt it over just to make sure she was right.
She didn't have to, really. After all the time she'd spent in EDs and Medical Examiner's offices, it was virtually impossible for her not to recognize a human thighbone.
A thighbone painted with the salutation “This is for Molly Burke.”
This is for Molly Burke
.
Painted on that bone in gold. Painted in careful, precise gold letters right down the shaft.
Like an invitation.
Or an accusation.
“You wouldn't know anything about this, would you?” Dee demanded of Molly's nephew.
Patrick couldn't seem to do much more than stare at Molly's find. “What the hell is it?” he demanded, tentatively reaching out to touch it.
Molly grabbed his hand and closed the box. “Probably something somebody tossed over my fence by mistake,” she said. “Happens all the time.”
“It's a
bone
,” Patrick insisted, as engrossed as he was appalled.
He probably thought she spent all her evenings like this, Molly thought wearily. If she weren't so nauseous, she would have laughed.
Dee scowled. “I'm calling the detectives.”
“I didn't do it!” Patrick immediately protested.
“He didn't say you did,” Molly assured him quietly. “He just said that you haven't given back the jade figurine yet.”
For just a second, Patrick challenged her. “It
is
going to be mine.”
Molly damn near smiled. “Going to be, Patrick. Future tense. For the present, the figurine is part of a trust that nobody can touch. And your dad and I are in charge of the trust. Not you. Not for a long time. So hand over the figurine till it's your turn.”
“But what about that bone?” he demanded, his hand dramatically thrown out toward the box. “The bone that's addressed to
you
?”
Molly deliberately looked away. “That is probably going to keep me up all night while we poke and probe and find out it's just a gag from some medical supply shop.”
“I'm calling anyway,” Dee insisted.
Molly simply nodded and let him use her kitchen phone while she dosed herself with ibuprophen. She hurt like a kickboxing victim, her stomach was doing cartwheels over the surprise on her table, and the night was looking to get a lot longer.
Beside the gleaming steel stove, Magnum grumbled in his throat, his great head swiveling back and forth between Dee and Patrick. Molly gave him a good scratch behind the ears and pointed to the floor where he settled with an indignant huff.
“And now,” she said to her nephew as Dee hung up. “To you.”
She'd already seen the bulge of the carving in Patrick's duster pocket, but she wasn't in the mood to just take it. For a brief, petty moment, she wanted to make him give it up. Patrick, who had everything. Looks, intelligence, money, stability. A life of privilege in an upscale community with parents who indulged him and his brother shamefully.
As opposed to his aunt, who had no inheritance, no living parents with deep pockets, and a hole in her pocketbook big enough to require two jobs to fill it.
And yet, here was Patrick lifting family heirlooms in the middle of the night four weeks away from Christmas. Molly guessed that she was going to get to talk to her brother Martin during the holidays whether she wanted to or not.
In the meantime, she crowded Patrick a little so he was caught between her and the wall of police Dee represented. No matter what else was going on here tonight, she needed to immediately impress on Patrick that the road he'd chosen was now closed.
“I'm not going to press charges this time,” she said and saw Patrick go white all over again. “As long as I get the carving.”
“You wouldn't press charges,” he insisted, the bravado a little thin in that young voice. “I'm family.”
Molly scowled. “I don't care if you're my mother. You don't steal things
without suffering consequences. Don't your parents take you to church? They're Catholic, for God's sake. They should have dosed you up with enough guilt and responsibility for you to be in therapy. God knows
they
were.”
Her answer was a stiffening of the spine. A darting of the eyes toward the policeman, who wasn't family. Well, Molly thought disparagingly, he's certainly learned that all-important Burke lesson. Hold firm to the family facade.
“You said
this
time,” Dee prodded, so he could get back to what really interested him.
Molly nodded. “Take a good look at this face, Dee. 'Cause if you catch him again, he's all yours.”
“But Aunt Molly—!”
She lifted a finger and fleetingly thought how fond her mother had been of that gesture. “You and I will discuss it after this nice gentleman gets back on his beat.”
Molly got silence, a flash of rage, a hint of disdain and tears. But Patrick kept quiet, and in the end, reached into his coat pocket.
Even Dee sucked in a breath when he saw what Patrick pulled out. Molly didn't blame him. Most people didn't really notice the workmanship on the jade figurines her father had collected, because he'd bunched them all on five shelves of glass like a display at a discount store. But one by one, they did, indeed, take the breath away.
This figurine was a deep lapis blue, alive with the light rippling along the lines of the tiny creature like water. Exquisite. And at least six hundred years old. Molly accepted it with good grace and walked it in to replace it carefully along with its companions on the backlit shelves.
“One final thing,” she said to her now-impatient nephew as they rejoined Dee. “Do your parents know where you are?”
His laugh was way too old for that beautiful face. “You kiddin'? They're on a fact-finding mission to China. They won't know I'm gone for two solid weeks. And by then …” Molly saw the flicker in his eyes, the reshuffling of thought. The halfhearted shrug. “I could be dead.”
He was right, of course. His parents were true Burkes, born to serve and succeed. His father was the new Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs or Fiscal Responsibility or something, and his mother was the perfect Washington wife, delivered up of the heir and spare, and semiemployed in a job
that wouldn't interfere with or outshine her husband, after whom she tagged like a patient, well-groomed dog.
Which meant that Molly would have to call Patrick's nanny or boarding school, or whoever was caretaking the boys these days, but she didn't have to worry that his parents were out pacing the streets of Virginia searching for their oldest son.
It didn't take Molly much to transfer her anger from her hapless nephew to the real culprits of the piece.
“We set to get on with this bone business?” Dee asked, his police pad open, his posture almost as impatient as Patrick's.
Molly fought the urge to clean the red-tile counters, rearrange the African violets that slept on her windowsill. Knit an afghan. Instead she nodded and sat down at her kitchen table.
“Might as well.”
“You think this has anything to do with the notes you gettin'?” Dee asked as he seated himself across from her. Patrick, left uncertainly on his feet, claimed the third chair.
Molly gave an elaborate shrug. “Your very own department considered those notes harmless, Dee. Who am I to argue?”
Dee cocked his head. “Bones change things, don't ya think?”
Molly wanted to walk again. She was a trauma nurse. She did her best thinking walking. It was also the best way to run far and fast. But Dee wasn't going to let her, and she wasn't ready to let anybody else know how unnerved those damn notes were making her.
Not to mention a bone with her name on it.
So she threw Dee another shrug. “I don't know. To be perfectly frank, I haven't really paid much attention to the notes.”
He obviously didn't see her nose growing. “You called us.”
“Only because I'm a public official. It's kind of office policy, ya know?”
Dee didn't bother to comment. “You still have 'em?”
“Of course I do.”
“Four notes, right?”
She sighed, resettled herself, fought against a fresh surge of nausea. “Five. I got another one today.”
Dee perked right up. “Same as the others?” he asked, scribbling on a crumpled, coffee-stained page.
“Same as the others. ‘Die, bitch,' or variations thereof. Delivered to the house, mailed in St. Louis.”
“Wow,” Patrick breathed. “Don't they scare you?”
Molly managed another shrug. “Occupational hazard.”
Dee focused on his notebook. “And now that bone.”
That bone, which was still sitting not two feet from Molly's elbow. She fought the urge to open the box again, just to check and see if it was still there. Make it somehow less weird. Maybe magically turn it into real flowers from a secret admirer.
That just gave her the shivers all over again.
“I'm telling you,” Molly protested, rubbing at the area directly under her sternum that churned from chronic abuse, “it's going to be a mistake. Somebody's idea of a joke. The wrong yard. Something.”
Dee looked at the box, too. He nodded without noticeable conviction. “Uh-huh.”
“
I'd
be scared,” Patrick said to himself.
“Can you get me the notes?” Dee asked.
Molly creaked to her feet. “Sure.”
The latest note she just handed over. The rest were in her room, tucked into her bottom drawer in evidence envelopes into which long training and habit had compelled her to stash them. Four notes, the first showing up in her mail not four weeks before. Addressed with a heavy hand on plain white bond paper in plain white envelopes, the real messages saved for inside. On the surface unimpressive, each and every one.
Just die
.
Fuck you
.
You'll scream
. And for a little poetic license,
Bitch witch
. All now residing beneath her carefully folded sweaters like old love letters.
The notes bore no identification, no indication of why or where or when. Molly had just assumed they were from either a dissatisfied customer, or a customer's dissatisfied family. It only made sense, since she happened to practice two professions that produced the highest incidence of stressedout clients in the city.
Molly often gave bad news in the ED, and always gave it in the Medical Examiner's office. It could take no more than one slip of the tongue for somebody to hate her forever.
If it hadn't been for that handwriting, those little rends in the sturdy paper, she wouldn't have been that concerned. The notes didn't contain flights
of ideas or escalating threats of violence. She hadn't been told she belonged to the writer or needed to be sacrificed for him to assure his immortality. She'd just been getting expressions of rage, and Molly understood rage.
But for some reason, these particular expressions of rage made her wake up in the middle of the night to watch her dresser drawer, as if she expected them to crawl out and claim her. She was more than happy to get them out of the house, and with them that silent, strident voice.
Not to mention that bone. Molly might have understood rage. She did
not
understand bones.
Giving her old iron bed a brief, longing glance, she sighed and headed back down to the kitchen, where Magnum still kept a weather eye on her guests from his place by the stove.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Molly asked, dropping the envelopes in front of Dee on the empty teak kitchen table.
“Beer?” Patrick asked with a half-brash smile.
Molly just smiled back at him.
Another problem. Another stressor with hopeful, half-pleading eyes. It seemed lately that it hadn't so much been rage populating her life, but people with half-pleading eyes. The population of her winter.
Rubbing hard at her own gritty eyes, she turned to the fridge for some carbonated chemicals when Magnum lifted his head and huffed a small warning. Molly braced herself for a full broadside of barks, but they never came. He just tilted his head and perked his ears. Then the doorbell rang.
“I hope you're just quiet because I'm here,” she threatened him. He happily wagged his tail, as if she'd praised him.
A bagged letter in each hand, Dee started to shuffle to his feet. Molly held him off on her way by. “Probably the detectives. I'll get it. You keep an eye on my silver.”
At any other time she would have checked the spyhole. As tired as she was, she just neutralized the alarm and threw open the door, ready to greet one of the Fifth District detectives. When she saw what was standing on her porch instead, she remembered just how dangerous it was to assume.
“What are you doing here?”
He smiled like an evangelist with a fresh soul in sight. “It's good to see you, too, St. Molly. How am I? I'm fine. Although it is a little wet out here.”
BOOK: Head Games
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