Strong Spirits [Spirits 01] (38 page)

      
“I certainly do.” I wasn’t altogether clear on the rest of her speech, however. Her voice had picked up strength as she said the above, although it still didn’t sound like hers. But I think I caught the gist of her message, even though I still didn’t know if her husband was alive or dead. If it hadn’t been Quincy who’d offed the buzzard, I’d personally prefer the latter scenario, although I didn’t say so to Mrs. Kincaid. “Um, what exactly has happened, Mrs. Kincaid?”

      
“The Coast Guard caught Mr. Kincaid. And he hadn’t got very far. His steamer was just about four miles out to sea, heading to Portugal or Spain or Istanbul or one of those countries over there.”

      
I hadn’t even thought about Portugal or Istanbul, because I hadn’t thought a Spanish phrase book would do Mr. Kincaid much good in either place, but I didn’t quarrel with her about it. Rather, I said, “Hmmm,” mysteriously.

      
“It happened just as you said it would, Daisy. I told that Detective Rotund that he should listen to your suggestion. He balked at first.”

      
Naturally. He would.

      
“But in the end, since they were having no luck finding him anywhere else, he decided to call upon the Coast Guard to search for a vessel containing Mr. Kincaid. And you were right, Daisy. They found him. With the bearer bonds. You were right!”

      
By darn, I
had
been right. Good for me. And take
that
, Detective Sam Rotondo! I couldn’t understand why Mrs. Kincaid insisted on calling him Rotund. He wasn’t fat. He was just big.

      
“I’m so glad they found him alive,” I said, thinking it was the right thing to say even if I didn’t mean it.

      
“Hmph,” said Mrs. Kincaid. “I wish they’d drowned him. Oh, Daisy! He’s going to go to
jail
! However will I withstand the gossip and talk. Think of the humiliation of having a husband in
jail
?”

      
That beat me, so I remained silent, hoping she’d take my silence as something to do with seeing mystical auras and so forth.

      
“I
need
you, Daisy! I know you need to rest your powers, but haven’t they been rested enough? Are you able to come over to the house? Please, dear? I need you
so
much!”

      
Interesting, thought I, that she should call on a stranger—and a fake, at that—rather than her own daughter, when she was in trouble. Harold had an excuse for not being at his mother’s beck and call each and every day, since he actually worked for a living. But all Stacy ever did for a living was get into trouble and annoy people.

      
Still in my spiritualist voice, I said, “Of course, Mrs. Kincaid. I shall come as soon as may be.” Calculating frantically in my head everything I had to do before I jaunted off to the Kincaids’ mansion, I added, “I should be there within the hour.” I didn’t want to leave my cream-colored silk lying in a heap on the floor, nor did I want to leave the sewing machine set up in the back parlor, because it was in the way should Billy want to wheel himself in there for some reason.

      
And, of course, I had to change clothes. Right then, I looked like any old housewife who’d decided to make herself a new dress with fabric bought on sale at Nash’s, but I wasn’t supposed to be any old housewife. I was supposed to be a spiritualist.

      
I also had to break the news to Billy. I caught him reading on the sun porch and, after sucking in a gallon or two of air to brace myself, told him I was going away again. He took it fairly well, probably because I’d been home for several days running, which didn’t happen often. True, a couple of ladies had come, by appointment, to have me read the Tarot cards for them, but Billy didn’t mind that, since I did it in the back parlor (yes, the same room in which Ma, Aunt Vi, and I did our sewing) and we didn’t get in his way.

      
“Sorry the old man’s alive, but I’m glad Quincy’s cleared of murder charges,” he said.

      
“Me, too, on both counts. I wonder if Mrs. Kincaid allowed Quincy to stay at her place, or if they locked him in a cell once he was able to get around. He was in bad shape the last time I saw him.”

      
“Must have let him stay at the Kincaids’,” Billy said knowledgeably—he’d been talking to his favorite detective a lot lately and knew more about police business than he used to. “They can’t very well arrest a person for murder if nobody can find the corpse, unless they have a whole lot of circumstantial evidence. From what I’ve gathered, they don’t have anything against Quincy except people overhearing an argument in the old man’s library.”

      
“Well, they have the old man himself now. And the bearer bonds.”

      
“Aha!” Billy actually smiled at me, something that seldom happened when I was running away from home. “So they found the bonds on the old devil, did they?”

      
“According to Mrs. Kincaid.” I was surveying my wardrobe, trying to decide on an ensemble that would be eloquent of tragedy but not overwhelmingly gloomy and one that would, moreover, create the impression of a person in communication with the Great Beyond. Sounds complicated, but my wardrobe was geared to such conflicting necessities.

      
I settled on a light-weight, dark blue, poplin summer suit with shiny blue bias tape sewn on the long pointy collar and around the jacket pockets. I wore the suit with a white lawn blouse and topped it off with a moderate-brimmed blue hat with one white flower adorning the brim, modest cotton stockings, and white bag, gloves, and shoes. If I say so myself, I looked pretty classy. But arcane. Always arcane. I never allowed myself to forget the way I made my living. I walked out to the sun porch.

      
“Do I look mystical enough?”

      
“You look super, Daisy. You always do.”

      
“Thanks, Billy.” I bent and kissed him. “I hope this isn’t going to take all day.”

      
“Me, too.”

      
As I might have predicted, had I been possessed of real psychic powers, it took all day.

Chapter Seventeen
 

      
I drove the Model T since neither Pudge Wilson nor Pa was available to harness Brownie to the pony cart. I’m sure that made Brownie happy, or would have, had he been capable of happiness. I think Brownie enjoyed his sulks.

      
Cranking the blasted Model T wasn’t any fun, either, but I did it. The days were getting much warmer, and the haze, which I understood had always existed in this area, blurred the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. According to Miss Carleton, a librarian at the Pasadena Public Library on Raymond and Walnut, the Indians who used to live in the San Gabriel Valley called this area “The Valley of Smoke.” Pasadena was still a beautiful town to live in, though, even if you weren’t rich and the day was hazy.

      
Gardens were bursting their buttons with roses and other flowers. I hate to say it, because she’s such a terrible gossip and I don’t really like her, but Mrs. Longnecker’s garden was spectacular, especially her dahlias and roses.

      
Mrs. Weber, who lived a couple of blocks from us, had planted a hedge of gardenia bushes several years earlier. On hot days, the fragrance of the blossoms seemed to get trapped in invisible clumps in the air. When the Model T drove through one of those airy clumps, the fragrance all but knocked me out. We had one gardenia bush in the back yard. I decided then and there, while under the influence of hundreds of gardenia blossoms, to plant at least one more.

      
And then there was the jasmine. Mrs. Phipps had jasmine that bloomed during the day and jasmine that bloomed at night, so you were treated to glorious fragrances no matter what time of day you passed her house. Not to mention the honeysuckle vines crawling all over her front fence. And all this glory was in our own modest neighborhood.

      
When I made a left turn onto Orange Grove Boulevard and started tootling through
that
neighborhood, the beauty was enough to make a person cry, if she were that sort of individual. I’m not. But I sure did enjoy the drive. Roses, roses everywhere, not to mention stock, ranunculus, dahlias, anemones, impatiens, hibiscus, bougainvilleas, wisteria, geraniums, bird of paradise, and approximately three million and ten other flowers the names of which I didn’t know. Our own native California poppies, bright orange in the sunshine, grew in places where people hadn’t settled yet, making the entire trip as lovely as if I were on a magic carpet flying through a rainbow. It seemed a shame that I was in our clunky old Model T.

      
And the lawns. My word, those lawns were really something. Nowadays you can’t find lawns like that. Some of them seemed to roll along forever, dotted here and there with trees. Coral trees, palm trees, jacaranda trees, pepper trees, avocado trees, weeping willows, the occasional sycamore or oak, and even a few eucalyptus trees and monkey-puzzle trees imported from Australia. I tell you, you could do a lot of swell gardening if you were rich.

      
I got to the Kincaids’ within the hour I’d specified, in spite of the beauty surrounding my drive there—I tended to slow down and gawk when I passed the most spectacular of floral yard displays. Since I imagined that Quincy must still be feeling pretty puny, and since James was probably doing Quincy’s work as well as his own and didn’t need my machine to fuss with, I decided to park spang in front of the mansion, in the Kincaids’ circular drive. If Featherstone didn’t like it, too bad for him. Two other automobiles, one of them Harold’s snappy red Bearcat, were already parked in the drive, so I wasn’t creating a precedent or anything.

      
Featherstone gave no indication either of liking or disliking my choice of parking spaces, but opened the door with his nose in the air, as ever, and I walked in. “Cheers, Featherstone,” said I because I couldn’t help myself.

      
He made no response other than a chilly, “Mrs. Majesty.” He never did respond to my jolly greetings. Rather, he turned and I followed him down the hall to the drawing room. I guess it was inevitable that the first person I saw as I walked through the door was Sam Rotondo. I suppressed my sigh and braced myself for Mrs. Kincaid’s greeting. Her greetings, since Stacy’s arrest and her husband’s bolt to unknown ports, had been a trifle hard on my own personal body.

      
Sure enough, as soon as Featherstone announced me in a voice that sounded like that of a judge pronouncing the death sentence on a murderer, Mrs. Kincaid squealed like a stuck pig and fairly flew off the chair in which she sat. It wasn’t until she’d stopped hugging me and, I’m sure I need not say, crying all over me, did I get to survey the room.

      
All the people I was beginning to think of as regulars were there: Sam, Harold, Father Frederick, Algie Pinkerton, and, to my distaste, Stacy, all occupied space in the drawing room. There was no sign of Mr. Kincaid. I hoped this meant he was already in jail. Stacy looked at me as if she’d like to shoot me dead. I ignored her, although I greeted all the others.

      
“Good day to you, Harold, Father Frederick, and Mr. Pinkerton.”

      
They good-dayed back at me.

      
Before Algie could ask me to call him Algie instead of Mr. Pinkerton, I turned to Sam. I still didn’t like him, but he was being very kind to my Billy—mainly by behaving as if he wasn’t trying to be kind—so I smiled at him, too. “Detective Rotondo.” I wanted to ask him, “Do you
live
here?” but didn’t, although he’d asked me the same question in a snide voice once. I felt rather virtuous for my restraint.

      
He nodded. No smile. Even when I tried, I couldn’t get on that man’s good side. If he had one. Oh, very well, I knew he had one, or he wouldn’t play gin rummy with Pa and Billy so often. But it was irksome to have wasted a smile on him.

      
“Come sit beside me, Daisy, dear. I need you today
so
much.” Mrs. Kincaid had reseated herself on one of the sofas and patted the space beside her.

      
I heard Stacy mutter something under her breath, although I didn’t hear the words.

      
Harold, who was apparently as fed up with his sister as I was, barked at her, “If you can only be ugly, Anastasia Kincaid, leave the room. You’re a bigger pain in the neck than anyone else I know! Other than our father, that is.”

      
Mrs. Kincaid said, “Oh, dear,” and pressed a hand to her plump cheek.

      
Stacy said, “Don’t be such an ass, Harry.”

      
Mrs. Kincaid, her head whipping toward her daughter, and her eyes bulging like some kind of South-American frog I’d seen once in an issue of
National Geographic
, whispered, “Stacy!”

      
She sounded so shocked at her daughter’s vocabulary that I nearly shook my head in wonder. I mean, if you’re a mother, and you have a daughter as rebellious and unpleasant as Stacy Kincaid, wouldn’t you notice something was wrong before she said a word like
ass
in your presence? The word
ass
is even used in the Bible, so it’s not nearly as bad as some words I’ve heard. Or even, I blush to confess, spoken from time to time.

      
Sam Rotondo turned toward Stacy, too. “If you please, Miss Kincaid, I believe you needn’t be involved in this conversation. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave the room.”

      
Stacy’s mouth dropped open until her chin almost knocked against her breastbone.