Absolutely, Positively (2 page)

“I’m getting older,” Mum said. “I need to be more careful about my weight. I’m taking a Zumba class, too.” Her eyes brightened. “You should come with me, LucyD!”

“A zoo what?” I asked.

Dovie laughed and launched into a cha-cha, her long legs lithe and graceful. When she was younger she danced Burlesque at a club in Manhattan—it’s where she met my grandfather. After they married and secretly divorced, she continued her dance training and eventually became a choreographer. These days she mostly used her talents for local musical theater and social events, but it didn’t take much for her to randomly break into dance. “Zumba. It’s an exercise program featuring dancing.”

“Fun!” Suz squealed. “When and where? Count me in!”

Diet
and
exercise? I stared at Mum. Who was this woman? Certainly not
my
mother. “What’s going on? I mean, what’s
really
going on? You’re not sick, are you?” She didn’t look sick, but it would take something as monumentally life-changing as a chronic illness to get her to break a lifetime of (bad) habits.

“Do I need a reason to better myself?” Her nose twitched.

Aha! She’d stumbled on the word “better.” She wasn’t as keen on all this diet and exercise as she let on. The nose twitch was a dead giveaway she was hiding something.

Dovie was still cha-chaing. “Oh go on, Judie. Tell her. It’s past time.”

Mum shot her an evil look. Good thing the two of them were the best of friends, a relationship Dad absolutely hated. His mother. His somewhat-ex wife (technically they were still married). It was a nightmare for him when they ganged up.

“What? What-what?” I pleaded.

Dovie dragged Suz into her dance. The two held hands as Dovie counted aloud, “One two three, cha cha cha.” She thrust a hip and singsonged in the same cadence, “Judie has a boyfriend, cha cha cha.”

I gasped. “You do? Who?”

“Just someone,” Mum said.

“Spill!” I urged. Though my parents were happily separated, it had been years since Mum had anyone serious in her life. Her little on-and-off flings with my father hardly counted.

“Where’s Sean today?” Mum asked.

She was referring to Sean Donahue, the supersexy PI who worked upstairs and partnered with me in Lost Loves. We were partnered in other ways, too. Just thinking about him made me go all warm and gooey inside.

For almost fifteen years my abilities had been a closely guarded family secret until a skeleton, a lost little boy, and Preston Bailey changed my life forever.

She’d “outed” me in the
Boston Herald,
and I’d been swarmed by the media. It had been quite an adjustment. But after a long talk with my father, Lost Loves was born. I now used my ability to help reunite lost loves whenever possible by using old letters, jewelry, photos. Though my gift had limitations, it had proved invaluable for some of my and Sean’s tougher cases.

“Don’t change the subject,” I said.

“I was simply asking a question, LucyD,” she said, using her pet nickname for me. My mother was a rabid Beatles fan, and I’d been named after the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” When I was very little, my mother used to call me Lucy Diamonds, but it had been further shortened over the years to LucyD.

The door crashed open. Startled, I jumped as Preston stormed in, limping.

“How can he just vanish?” she asked, throwing her hands in the air. “Poof. Gone. How? You’d think that a man who was tossing twenties like rice at a wedding wouldn’t escape unnoticed. Hello,” she said, taking notice of Mum and Dovie. She kissed their cheeks. My family had taken Preston under its wing—whether I liked it or not.

“The Lone Ranger?” Dovie asked.

“Struck again,” Suz said, setting her desk to rights. She was fussy about what went where, and Dovie had obviously been rifling for a while before we caught her. “I had a hundred and forty dollars before Lucy made me give it all away to a homeless guy.”

“He’ll probably just drink it away.” Mum sipped her coffee.

“That’s what I said!” Suz shot me a look.

I sat on the edge of the couch. I could argue, but I was outnumbered.

“Well, I didn’t get anything.” Preston sighed. “Not any money, not a story, not anything. And I broke my heel.” She sat next to Mum and peeled off her boot. The heel dangled sadly. “Someone had to have seen something.”

“Doubtful.” Dovie patted her hair to make sure it was still in place. Her stunning signature white locks had been loosely twisted into a knot at the base of her neck. “Once money starts flying, no one’s going to notice anything but the green.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Preston said, leaning back. “But there has to be a way to catch him.” There was a look in her eyes I was coming to recognize. She was hatching a plan.

I checked my watch. Preston and I were meeting with a new client soon. The whole new-boyfriend conversation with Mum would have to wait until I had time for a more prepared inquisition. “Are you two in town for a little shopping?” I asked Dovie.

“Actually, no,” she answered.

I tipped my head at her serious tone. “A court hearing?” She and Mum had been arrested not long ago for disturbing the peace. I thought everything had been worked out, but—

“Time served.” Mum sounded like a felon who’d been locked up for decades instead of a protester sentenced to serve community service.

Dovie pulled the latest issue of the
South Shore Beacon
from the hobo bag at her feet and handed it to me. “We actually came to see Sean.”

“Sean? Why?” I scanned the headline.

L
OCAL
M
AN
S
TILL
M
ISSING

“I’m hoping you won’t mind sharing,” Dovie said, “because I want to hire him.”

2

Macalaster Gladstone had been missing for six weeks.

Talk about poof, gone.

He’d last been seen walking his golden retriever, Rufus, along Cohasset’s picturesque side streets just after the New Year. Rufus had come home; Mac had not.

The black-and-white photo on the front page showed a smiling older man with a thick shock of dark hair and full beard (who, I noticed—and not just because I was hungry—looked a lot like the Gorton’s Fisherman). His arms were looped around a beautiful dog. A dark bandanna was tied around the dog’s neck, and Rufus looked to be smiling, too, with his tongue lolling, his eyes bright and shiny.

Preston snatched the paper from my hand. I’m not sure why she needed to see it—she had written the story. “So sad. By all accounts they were inseparable.”

“Exactly,” Dovie said. “Something awful had to have happened to Mac. The police have run out of leads, so I want Sean to look into it. Fresh eyes.” Her voice grew thick.

“Do you know him well?” I’d heard about the story, of course—it was hard to live in Cohasset and not. There were open conversations about what had happened to Mac at the local coffee shop, the pizza parlor, the produce department at Shaw’s. I hadn’t known Dovie was so invested.

“Not well,” she conceded. “His wife, Betty, used to be in my Scrabble club. From what I know of Mac, he was a sweet man. One of those strong, silent types. He was a bit of a recluse, especially after Betty died, but still a big patron of the local theater and all the arts. He was an illustrator, you know.”

I’d never personally met Mac, but his name was well-known in not only the South Shore community but the art world as well. His work was on par with Norman Rockwell’s and J. C. Leyendecker’s.

Preston handed the paper back to Dovie. “The police aren’t doing much because they think he’s dead.”

“And that may be so, but I want to know the truth. Where’s his body? What happened to him? His daughter, Jemima, isn’t exactly going out of her way to get answers. She thinks he committed suicide. Ha!”

Mum tsked and sipped her coffee.

“Isn’t it possible?” I asked softly, not wanting to be at the wrong end of a Dovie tirade.

“Anything is possible, but there was no note. Plus, I can’t imagine Mac would willingly leave Rufus behind. From everything I’ve heard, that dog was Mac’s best friend.”

“What’s the story with Jemima?” Suz asked, propping her elbows on the desk and her head in her hands.

Dovie stood, paced. “At eighteen she married a man almost twice her age, some rock star she met when she dropped out of college and became a music groupie. You can imagine how Betty and Mac felt about that.”

Mum shook her head like the decision had been a fate worse than death. “Poor parents.”

I was suddenly relieved my vast résumé didn’t include “music groupie.”

“Mac and Betty never approved,” Dovie said. “Betty hinted there was something in Rick’s—he’s the husband—past that made them nervous, though she never said what. And of course, who wants a rock-star lifestyle for their baby girl? Unfortunately, they didn’t have a say.”

“Is he anyone famous?” Suz asked.

Dovie tipped her hand in a “so-so” motion. “Rick Hayes.”

“
The
Rick Hayes? I’d say he was famous.” Suz blinked. “Wow.”

Rolling her eyes, Dovie said, “Maybe. At one time, a
long
time ago. Now he’s a down-and-out aging rocker. Rumor is he’s trying to put together a reality show about his family as they deal with him trying to make a comeback. He’s not finding the financing, however.”

“Is he broke?” Suz asked, clearly infatuated with his story.

Dovie said, “Completely. He and Jemima have been living with Mac for a while now, but he’s been supporting them for years. I wouldn’t doubt if they’re just chomping at the bit to go to the courts and declare Mac dead so they can get their hands on his bank accounts. From what I hear, Mac had been threatening to cut them off financially if Rick didn’t drop this whole reality project.”

Preston, I noticed, had perked up, her broken heel all but forgotten. “I haven’t heard any of this. Do you think his daughter or her husband had something to do with his disappearance?”

Arching a snow-white eyebrow, Dovie said, “I don’t know, but the possibility needs to be explored.”

Preston reached for her notebook. Obviously this was one angle to the story she hadn’t probed. “Have you mentioned all this to the police?”

“Of course.” Dovie still paced. “I believe they looked into it for precisely half a second. That’s why I need Sean.”

Sean. My blood thrummed at the sound of his name. We’d been dating since the fall and things were heating up and getting serious. Really serious.

Which was exciting and scared the hell out of me at the same time.

Valentines and commitment didn’t exactly go together, despite the fact that we matched others for a living.

The problem was Cupid’s gift to us had also come with an attached curse: Valentines could match others based on their auras, but we couldn’t see our own—or one another’s—color. Which made finding true love nearly impossible. Not one relationship in the Valentine family had withstood the test of time. Not. A. Single. One.

I’d grown up in two different worlds. One where true love existed, thrived. And one where my parents lived separate lives and my grandmother was left scarred by a secret divorce and delusions of happily ever afters. And though, technically, Dovie wasn’t a Valentine, she often said she was cursed by association, which doomed her every relationship.

“He’s due back any minute,” I said.

Sean, a former firefighter, had been working as an investigator for his brother Sam’s PI agency for almost a year now. Lost Loves, which had been created to reunite long lost loves by employing Sean’s private investigating and my own special sleuthing abilities, was now an official division of not only Valentine, Inc., but SD Investigations as well.

Dovie plopped down in a wing chair. “We’ll wait, then.”

“What about using Lucy?” Suz asked, wiggling her fingers like a magician over a magic hat.

I didn’t take offense, though my abilities were hardly on the hocus-pocus level.

“Wish I could,” Dovie said. “Mac disappeared with only the clothes on his back. No jewelry, no cell phone, not even his wallet.”

I checked my watch again. My new client was due in five minutes. “Were any of his clothes gifts?”

There were essentially two rules to how my gift of finding lost objects worked. The first being that I could only do readings on the person who owned the lost object. The other was the object couldn’t be human or animal. I couldn’t find lost dogs. And I couldn’t find lost people. Just inanimate objects.

There was one big exception to Rule #1. Gifts. It was the only time an object had more than one owner. This exception had led to the creation of Lost Loves and explained why my work with the Massachusetts State Police had been so successful.

“I asked Jemima. She said no.”

“We believe she’s lying,” Mum added pointedly.

Preston scribbled. “You don’t think she wants him found.”

Mum winked at her. “You got it.”

Preston beamed. Sometimes she reminded me of a long-haired Chihuahua, with her spiky hair, eager eyes, and love of attention.

“Where is Sean? Shouldn’t he be here if you have a client coming in?” Dovie asked.

“He’ll be here soon. He’s apartment hunting. But you don’t need to wait. He’s coming over tonight. We can pop in at your place.”

Easy enough. I lived right next door to my grandmother, in a little beach cottage on her vast oceanside property. For my pride’s sake, she allowed me to pay rent, but I knew she was putting the money aside to give back to me one day.

Everyone looked at me. “What?”

“Apartment hunting?” Suz asked. “Why not just move in with you?”

“He
does
spend a lot of time there,” Dovie said, a knowing smile lurking on the corners of her lips. She was desperate for great-grandkids and was hopeful Sean and I were just one missed birth control pill away from producing one—or six.

A rush of warmth climbed my neck, settled in my cheeks. “It’s too soon.”

Mum said, “Nothing wrong with shacking up, LucyD.”

Preston said, “You should definitely ask him.”

I should have known she wouldn’t take my side. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?”