Wicked Charms (7 page)

“Why me?” I asked him.

“I told you. I like your writing style. And you’re cute. You’re going to look great on television, and you’ll package up perfect. You’re a twenty-first-century Doris Day.”

“Lucky me.”

“Exactly,” Martin Ammon said.

He leaned close, and his strange pale blue eyes narrowed a little. “We’re going to spend some time together, Lizzy Tucker. I’m going to learn all about you. There will be no secrets.”

Eek.

“And now I have a surprise for you,” he said.

Crap. I didn’t need another surprise.

Ammon crossed to an elaborate silver and glass serving cart positioned against the wall. The serving cart held a single canister, which I now realized had my picture on it. Below the picture, in gold and black lettering, were the words
LIZZY TUCKER GOODIES.
Ammon lifted the lid of the canister and helped himself to a cookie.

“
Mint
chocolate chip cookies,” Martin said, holding the cookie aloft. “From page 101 of your manuscript. As soon as I read that page, I had to try the cookies to see if they were really as good as the recipe looked.”

“You made them yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. I had my chef make them. But I told him to follow the recipe exactly, no embroidering, no improvising.” He took a bite. “Fantastic,” he said. “These cookies will be the first in our product line.” He smiled so wide I was almost blinded by the brilliance. “Lizzy Tucker, you’re going to be rich beyond your dreams. We’re going to be an unstoppable team.”

I supposed this was good. This was sort of what Diesel wanted, right?

I gave him a forced smile. “Yep, we’ll be a team.”

“One last thing,” he said. “The cupcakes. I probably wouldn’t have looked at your cookbook if I hadn’t eaten the cupcakes. They were wonderful. They made me feel happy. They were the best cupcakes I’ve ever had, and I fashion myself to be something of a cupcake expert. I had my chef make your cupcake recipe, but they weren’t the same. Did you leave out an ingredient?”

“I left out the magic.”

—

Diesel and Carl were in my kitchen eating cookies when I rolled in. Diesel was eating Double Stuf Oreos, and Carl was eating Fig Newtons.

“How’d it go?” Diesel asked.

“Okay, I guess. It was weird. Not what I expected.”

“How so?”

“He hated my idea for a cookbook, but he liked my writing style. And he thought I was cute.”

“And?”

“And he offered me a big bag of money.”

“What did he want you to do for the money?”

“Rewrite the cookbook.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

I took a couple Oreos from Diesel. “It feels off. And I don’t like him. He’s creepy.”

“From what I read,
no one
likes him.”

“His butler likes him.”

“He has a butler?”

“Actually I don’t know what the guy is. His name is Rutherford, and he said he was Ammon’s devoted assistant.
Devoted.
Like he lived to suck Ammon’s toes.”

Carl ate the last Fig Newton and stared into the empty bag. He turned the bag upside down and shook it. No Fig Newtons fell out. He looked over at Diesel and shook the bag some more.

“You ate the whole bag,” Diesel said to Carl. “There aren’t any more.”

“Eeep,” Carl said, and he gave Diesel the finger.

I took another Oreo from Diesel’s bag. “I think I saw the treasure map. It was hanging over the fireplace in Ammon’s home office. The office is on the second floor, and it opens onto a wonderful balcony that looks out over the ocean.”

“Did you see the diary?”

“No. And there wasn’t an opportunity to insert it into the conversation.”

“Clara’s going to take us to talk to Gramps tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll still have his piece of the coin.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Diesel sauntered into the bakery a little before one o’clock. Clara had just finished scrubbing down her workstation, and I was bagging leftover muffins.

“Give me a minute to change my clothes, and I’ll be ready to go,” Clara said to Diesel.

Clara lives in the little apartment over the shop, so a wardrobe change was easy. Mine was even easier. I took off my apron and chef coat and stomped the flour off my sneakers.

“Are you going to be okay here alone?” I asked Glo.

“No problem,” she said. “I brought Broom to keep me company, and Clara will be back to help me close.”

I followed Diesel out of the shop and stood staring at the bright orange Dodge Charger parked in the lot.

“Yours?” I asked him.

“Yep.”

“What happened to the SUV?”

“I don’t know. The cars come and go.”

“That’s very strange.”

“No stranger than anything else in my life.”

Clara exited the building by her private entrance. She locked the door and walked over to us.

“Gramps is at the Salem Aquarium today,” she said. “He has a day care lady who takes him there once a week.”

The Salem Aquarium is a pleasant little public aquarium nestled in bustling Salem Harbor. It was built inside an old brewery, where the area with the boil kettles and fermenting tanks was nicely converted into coral reefs and shark tanks.

We found Clara’s grandfather perched on a Rascal scooter, watching the sharks and stingrays. With a few long strands of thin white hair plastered to the top of his head, pink wrinkled skin hanging from a stooped bone structure, and a nose like an eagle’s beak, he looked like Mr. Burns on
The Simpsons.
He was wearing a dark blue velour tracksuit with the pants hiked up to his armpits. He wasn’t currently sucking oxygen, but he had a tank and face mask in his scooter basket just in case the need should arise. A small Hispanic woman was sitting on a bench a short distance away.

Clara approached the woman.

“Hi, Benita. How is he today?”

“He asked me to marry him. He said he was feeling frisky.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“No way. The man would bury me.”

“Hey, Gramps,” Clara said. “How’s it going?”

“A little slow. Benita won’t marry me.”

“Did he take his meds?” Clara asked Benita.

“Yes, ma’am. If he didn’t take his meds he’d be hitting you with his cane.”

“That’s a lie,” Gramps said. “I don’t hit pretty girls.” He pointed at Diesel. “I’d hit
him
a good one. He looks like trouble.”

“These are my friends Lizzy and Diesel,” Clara said. “They want to ask you about Collier.”

“Collier’s dead,” Gramps said. “Dead as a doornail. I suppose I miss him, but at least I don’t have to listen to that damn poem anymore. He insisted I memorize it. He brought me down to the harbor near every day before he disappeared and made me recite it. The man never read a book in his life but he was obsessed with that poem. ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a light to guide her by / I must go down to the seas again, to the dazzling gypsy life / to the tern’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife.’ I’m sure the poem means something but damned if I know what it is.”

“Did he ever tell you about the treasure he was hunting?” Diesel asked him.

“Sometimes, but not much. Once he brought me back two pieces of a Spanish coin. He said to guard ’em with my life, and they’d bring me luck. And I guess they did because I made some money in my time. I invested in the stock market and made a fortune. Of course, I lost it all when I bought some swampland in Florida. But then I invested in GM. Started another fortune. Lost that. Lost another one to the dot.com bubble.”

“Anything else?” Diesel asked, smiling, enjoying himself.

“I produced a Broadway play in the sixties. Lost a bundle. It was made into a movie in the eighties and I made a bundle. Donated it all to this aquarium, so I could watch the sharks.” He pointed at the tank where a tiger shark swam around a prop treasure chest that was sitting on the sandy bottom of the fake sea. “I call that one Smiley,” Gramps said.

“Where are the Spanish coin pieces now?” Diesel asked.

“You’re looking at them,” Gramps said. “Collier was always going on about treasure chests, so I had one made, put the pieces of eight in it, and had it sunk there in the tank. You give people enough money and they most likely will do you a favor. Those pieces of eight are sitting at the bottom of the shark tank, protected by all that water and shark poop.”

Diesel looked at the Rascal. “I like your wheels.”

“Had it painted special,” Gramps said. “The ladies love it.”

The Rascal was fire engine red with yellow and orange flame detailing.

“I had it souped up,” Gramps said. “I can do fifteen miles per hour in this baby. Truth is, I don’t need it, but it gets me a lot of attention, and Benita has to run to keep up with me. I like to see her run. It makes her boobs bounce up and down.”

—

Gramps rolled off to look at the penguins, and Benita followed him. Diesel, Clara, and I remained behind at the shark tank.

“The way I see it, the problem is all that water,” Diesel said, staring at the treasure chest resting on the bottom of the shark tank.

“I’d think the problem would be the sharks,” Clara said.

Diesel shook his head. “The sharks are tame. They’re well fed. They won’t bother me if I’m quick about it. The sign says the sharks get fed at three-thirty. That’s ten minutes from now. If I go in then it’ll look like business as usual. Especially if you two create a disturbance that takes everyone away from the tank.”

Diesel left, and Clara and I started counting down ten minutes.

“What about the guy standing in the corner?” Clara asked. “He’s been staring at us off and on for fifteen minutes. Do you know him?”

The man was slim. Receding hairline. Looked to be in his early thirties. Dressed in a black long-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans.

“Nope,” I said. “I don’t know him.”

We moved into the next room and checked out the coral reef. The man moved with us. We walked back to the shark room, and he followed.

“He’s definitely tailing us,” I said to Clara. “And he’s really bad at it.”

There was a brief announcement over the public address system of feeding time at the shark tank, and a handful of people moved up to the glass. Two scuba divers carrying mesh bags full of dead fish splashed into the tank from above. One of the divers looked directly at me and nodded.

“Showtime,” Clara said.

I took a deep breath and told myself this was all part of the grand scheme of things and probably necessary in terms of saving the world. I turned, walked up to the guy dressed in black, set my hands onto my hips, and glared at him. “Why are you stalking me?” I yelled in his face.

“Who, me?” he said, panic in his eyes.

“You’ve been stalking me all afternoon.”

“No. I swear. I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady.”

I leaned forward and raised the volume. “What did you call me?”

“Nothing. I swear.”

Clara was beside me. “What did you call my friend?”

“I might have called her ‘lady.’ ”

Everyone was staring at us. Some people were hurrying from the room. Some were behind Clara, straining to get a better look at the crazy woman yelling at the crazy man. No one over the age of five was looking at the shark tank.

“Security!” I shouted. “This man is following me and calling me disgusting names.”

An elderly security guard came over to us. “What’s the problem here?”

I cut my eyes to the shark tank to see one of the scuba divers swimming down to the treasure chest and lifting the lid.

“These women are crazy,” the man in black said. “They came up to me and started yelling at me for no reason.”

“Did you or did you not call my friend a ‘lady’?” Clara demanded.

“Yes, but—”

“He admits it!” Clara said.

“Is that so bad?” the security guard asked.

“It’s the way he said it,” I said. “Sneaking up behind me and whispering ‘lady.’ ”

“There was no whispering,” the guy said. “Honestly, I didn’t whisper.”

I made a show of getting a shiver. “It was
frightening.
”

Dear lord, I thought. Isn’t Diesel
ever
going to get out of the stupid shark tank! How long did I have to keep this thing going?

“And I think he was taking pictures of us,” I said to the guard. “Up our skirts.”

“You’re wearing jeans,” the guard said.

“So we outsmarted him!” I said.

“Check his cellphone,” Clara said. “See if there are pictures of us.”

“No way,” the man said. “I have my rights.”

I reached around him to his back pocket and searched for his phone.

“She’s grabbing my ass!” he said.

“Pervert!” Clara shouted, getting into the mix, shoving her hand into his other back pocket.
“Pervert alert!”

There was a lot of yelling and wrestling around, then the guy broke free and took off at a run with the security guard in pursuit.

“Thank goodness he got away,” I said.

“Yeah,” Clara said, bending down, picking a phone up from the floor. “But he dropped his phone in the scuffle.”

I looked over her shoulder and saw Diesel and the other diver swim up and out of sight.

“What a nightmare,” I said to Clara.

The guard came back. He was red-faced, sweating, and out of breath. “Couldn’t catch him,” he said. “Sorry, but I see at least you got his phone. Have you checked for pictures?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure he’s deleted them.”

The guard took the phone and tapped the camera icon.

“Nope, they aren’t deleted,” he said. “And he was for sure following you
ladies
…if you’ll pardon the expression.”

He handed the phone to me, and I scanned through the photos. Pictures of me. Pictures of Clara. Pictures of Diesel. Pictures of Clara’s grandfather. Pictures of the treasure chest in the shark tank.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Clara and I met up with Diesel at the car.

“Did you get anything out of the treasure chest?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Diesel said. “Two more pieces of the coin.”

“You don’t seem very excited about it.”