Dearly Departed Read online

  There was no more room for Paris in that life.

  We pulled into the driveway and Paris shut off the car. The sudden silence was deafening. I focused on unbuckling my seatbelt as if it were open heart surgery. My body was a rung-out dishrag and it was still hours before Daisy’s bedtime. All I wanted was to pull the blankets over my head and sleep for days.

  “Why is your bedroom light on?” Paris asked.

  I ignored the pang in my chest at her remembering such a simple detail and narrowed my eyes at the small brick ranch. In an effort to keep the energy bills reasonable, I had a self-adjusting thermostat and never left lights on, except the porch light. So why was my bedroom light on?

  We had been running behind after Daisy spilled juice on her first outfit. I’d rushed out of my bedroom to help her clean up. Could I have left it on?

  “I’ll check it out,” she said, unbuckling and climbing out of the car.

  “That’s not necessa—”

  She closed the car door, then pulled her gun from a hidden holster and located my front door key on my chain.

  I opened my car door. “The alarm’s on!” I warned, then growled. “Daisy, stay here.”

  Daisy gave me a thumbs-up from the back seat, too engrossed in her game to care. I wished I could relax at that level. I shook my head and hurried after Paris while fumbling to grab the stun gun out of my purse.

  I jumped up the porch step and barreled through the door and directly into Paris. She spun and grabbed my forearms to steady me. I sucked in a breath at the contact before rushing out, “Sorry! Didn’t expect you to be standing in the entrance.”

  “I thought you said the alarm was on?” She let go of my arms and gestured to the panel.

  “It is.” I looked at the panel which read disarmed. “How is that possible?” I grabbed my phone and opened the alarm app. Armed at 4:37pm via keypad. Disarmed at 5:15pm via app. It was now 5:45. I held up my phone to show Paris. I didn’t trust her farther than I could throw her, but she was still an active agent.

  “Did you hit it by accident? Who else has your code?”

  “Only the people at dinner,” I explained. “And I don’t remember turning it off, but maybe?” This whole day was super fuzzy. I usually only used my alarm via keypad, but after the time I forgot to turn it on a few weeks ago—although, I swear I had armed it—I downloaded the app. While the keypad couldn’t tell me how and when the alarm was activated, the app could.

  “Wait here.” She side-stepped down the hall, peering into the living room, then the kitchen. I looked through the storm door to check on Daisy, who was still safely inside the car.

  “Living room, kitchen, and Daisy’s room are clear,” Paris called.

  I inched deeper into the house, looking around for anything out of place. I paused at the picture frame on the entertainment stand of Daisy and me at her last birthday party. My arms were around her shoulders as she blew out a candle on top of a pile of waffles with whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles, both of us wearing tiaras at her insistence. Paris had taken the picture.

  The photo had been moved.

  I hadn’t had time to dust recently with Daisy’s schedule, Jake nearly being killed, and Poppy returning. I ran my finger over the rectangular patch of dust free wood where the photo used to sit, as if it could give me answers. I turned around when I heard Paris’s footsteps.

  “All the windows are closed, locked, and untampered with. The front door was locked,” she offered.

  “Who would have a key and the alarm code and just sneak in to do nothing? Why would they leave the light on in my bedroom and not reset the alarm code? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You came home early.”

  A chill ran down my spine. She was right. We usually went to my parents’ every Sunday night for dinner until eight. What if I hadn’t come home early? Would they have reset the code and turned off the light? I glanced back at the photo.

  “This was moved.” I gestured to the dust-free patch.

  Paris studied the photo then searched my face. “I’ll run it for fingerprints. I’ve got a kit in my—” she made a face. “I don’t have my truck.” All active field agents had a SHAP-issued SUV, black with bulletproof glass, strengthened body, and top-of-the-line safety features.

  I gestured toward the front door. “Let me get Daisy inside and I can bag the photo for you, as long as you promise to bring it back.”

  “I will.”

  When I got to the front door, Daisy was already walking up the porch stairs. “Finished the level,” she said by way of explanation. “Didn’t even use magic this time.” She’d yawned most of the sentence.

  “Proud of you.” Having a daughter with swiftly developing magical powers who hated to lose was a lesson in patience, for both of us.

  She handed me the tablet as she walked into the house, then shrugged her jacket off and let it fall to the floor.

  I cleared my throat.

  “So tired,” she complained, but bent down and scooped it up, then shoved it onto her coat hook.

  I studied her, noticing she looked paler than she did a half an hour ago. I cradled the side of her face in my hands for a full three seconds before she shoved me away. She didn’t have a fever, but she looked like she hadn’t slept for days. I’d been warned that the strength of her magic at such a young age would be hard on her. If we knew what kind of witch she was, there might be ways to mitigate her magic fatigue.

  That information, however, died with Ben. My attempts to contact his parents or dig further back through his family tree had proved unsuccessful.

  “Do you have the energy to shower?” I asked.

  She lifted her shoulders. “I guess.”

  “Shower and I’ll make you a snack. We can watch that ghost show you like.”

  She nodded and moved to her bedroom with no enthusiasm. She paused in front of Paris. “I miss you.”

  Paris looked as if Daisy had punched her in the stomach. “Me too,” she whispered back.

  This was not a good idea. I cleared my throat. “Daisy…”

  She huffed a dramatic sigh, then turned and went into her room.

  I set the tablet on the counter, then grabbed a clear storage bag and carefully maneuvered the frame inside without touching the glass. I handed it to Paris.

  She took it from me and studied it, smiling. “She looks so happy here.”

  I smiled back. “It was a great birthday.”

  “You’re a great mom.”

  I blinked. That wasn’t what I expected her to say. “I—thank you.”

  She nodded, her eyes unfocused, her thoughts clearly somewhere else. “I’ll work on this.” Her gaze sharpened and she looked up at me. “Unless you want me to stay?”

  Her offer weighed heavy between us. If it had been before, if it had been someone else with identical beautiful brown eyes the color of dark chocolate, silky dark hair that I wanted to run my fingers through, and creamy skin with a small scar on her chin I’d kissed a hundred times, I would’ve said yes. I didn’t want to be alone tonight, knowing I wouldn’t sleep. Waking up at every sound, even after I changed the alarm code.

  I shook my head. “How are you getting home?”

  “I called a car.” She lifted her phone. “I’m sorry about tonight.”

  “Wasn’t your fault.” This was one thing that wasn’t Paris’s fault. No, that blame rested solely on my parents’ shoulders. “Thanks for driving us home.”

  “Anytime,” she rushed out. “Eliza…” She took a step forward as her phone buzzed. She looked down, hesitated, then nodded. “Car’s here. I’ll text.” She hurried out of the room as if it were on fire.

  I followed her to the door and locked it, then changed the alarm code and armed the system. I stood in the middle of the hall, inhaling the remnants of Paris’s perfume. I needed to change, make something for dinner since we hadn’t finished eating, and find a way to shove all these inconvenient emotions into a neat little box I could put in the corner of my mind.

  Daisy padded across the hall to the second bathroom and turned on the shower.

  This jolted me from my spiraling. “Call me when you’re ready to comb!” I loved that she got my thick, curly hair, but it was a learning curve for a kid who still forgot in what order to use shampoo and conditioner. I’d installed a dispenser and told her to start on the left, which seemed to help.

  I unbuttoned my shirt as I walked to my bedroom, yanking it off and unhooking my bra. I sighed at the release. I slipped into my sweats and hung up my dinner outfit.

  The closet door was halfway closed before I gave into the urge. I shoved the door and clothes aside, revealing a false back. Fitting my fingers into small holes at the top and bottom, I slid it to the side revealing my evidence board.

  I reached up and touched the photo of Ben. He was wearing a navy-blue suit for a friend’s wedding, hands in pockets, and smiling. Then I moved my finger to the list of people in the case file investigating his death.

  Jim Summers

  John Franklin

  Adrien Ramsay

  Justin Waterstone

  Celine Joyner

  Paris Evans

  I grabbed a pen from the shelf and circled Paris’s name for the fifth time. Why did it have to be her? Why was I always destined to lose what made me happy?

  Loving Ben had been like jumping into a sports car with no seat belt and driving toward a concrete wall at a hundred miles an hour: fun, thrilling, terrifying, and knowing we were trapped on a one-way street, about to crash. We’d made it work because we wanted to raise our daughter together.

  Loving Paris was like the beginning of spring, when everything came back to life, when the sun shone down from an endlessly blue sky, and there was this overriding feeling of hope
. After too many years of pain and grief, Paris had been my own personal springtime. Until she turned into a brutal winter.

  I stepped back and looked over the board, blue glitter yarn from one of Daisy’s forgotten craft projects connecting the dots between the hours before his death. The police report was only one page long, ruling Ben’s death an accident, that the motorcycle flipped over the Folk River Bridge and he drowned.

  Ben taught courses on pursuit driving and was a licensed deep-sea diver. He didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. I checked the printout of the weather report for the eight-hundredth time. Dry and fifty-five degrees. Wind speed topped at twelve miles an hour. Sunset had been only ten minutes before. Traffic was clear.

  So what had really happened that night?

  My phone buzzed and I yanked it from my pocket.

  Jake: You make it home safe?

  Me: We’re fine. You okay? Poppy?

  Jake: Yeah

  Jake: All things considered. Wanna talk?

  Me: Not tonight.

  Jake: *thumbs-up emoji* See you tomorrow.

  Jake: Want me to grab a pizza?

  Me: I’ll want to cook

  Jake: k. Love you

  Me: night *sleeping emoji*

  Me: Ps. Changed the alarm code to 9022

  Jake: Why

  Jake: What happened???

  Me: Everything’s fine

  “Mom! I’m ready,” Daisy shouted.

  I jumped at the interruption, then secured the closet’s false back. “Be right there!” I promised.

  I moved the clothes back into place and then closed the closet doors. As I hurried out of the bedroom, a whiff of evergreen made me freeze in my tracks. I breathed sharply through my nose, then again. It was gone.

  Had I imagined it? Did I want to talk to Ben so badly that I was phantom-smelling his cologne? I shook my head. It was probably just exhaustion from all the betrayal.

  Chapter Two

  Paris

  I held my breath as I dusted the picture frame for prints, hoping, wishing, praying that this was the answer. That whatever I found would be the key to finishing this vixen case and Eliza and I could go our separate ways. Being apart from her was heartbreaking but working with her was torture.

  My former partner Jake and I had discovered vixen—an oral powder vampire venom street drug—while investigating an oral liquid venom source. Vixen promised to cure any ailment…with the side effect of turning the human into a vampire-human hybrid. It may have worked if the distributer hadn’t laced it with fentanyl for her own scheme, which also revealed a leak at SHAP. We’d secured all remaining liquid venom and vixen after the lab was destroyed, and since then things had been eerily quiet. Now, Eliza and I were forced to work together until we closed the case, since our boss refused to trust anyone outside our group.

  The irony that we were the only two he could trust when Eliza would never trust me again was not lost on me.

  I refocused on my task, trying to keep my eyes on the glass and not the photo beneath. I’d taken that picture the morning of Daisy’s birthday back in May. I sucked in a sharp breath, the memory still so strong, for a moment I believed I could fall into the photo. I’d thought I was one of the lucky ones who’d found everything she wanted, and I would get to love and cherish them for the rest of my life. Then, four days later, the dream imploded. Guess it was a good thing she’d kept me a secret.

  Focus. Stop looking at the photo. An impossible task. Eliza’s cheeks pink, her smile relaxed. Her eyes were practically hearts as she looked up at me, her arms around Daisy, who looked just as happy.

  Logically, I knew that pictures never told the whole story. Daisy had broken a glass that morning with her magic when Eliza wouldn’t let her have orange soda for breakfast. Eliza had cut herself with a knife, and I’d burned my hand on the stove. Despite the rough start, the morning had been full of joy and celebration.

  I knew that having kids, especially ones with magical powers, was difficult, but I’d never seen my own mother as happy as Eliza was in this moment. Especially not around my birthday. I’d been the surprise.

  I got it. I couldn’t imagine being in my early twenties and suddenly having a surprise daughter. I’d escaped detection until six minutes after my brother was born. For a young couple who’d scrimped and saved and prepared for a boy, to have not only a second baby, but a girl, was a shock I don’t think they ever recovered from.

  I shook my head. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I was thirty-three years old. Sure, my parents weren’t the most emotionally available people on the planet, but I always had enough food and a roof over my head. When I finally got a family of my own, I could make amazing memories with my kid. I just needed to find someone I cared for as much as Eliza and Daisy, because it was clear we were never going to be the happy family we almost were.

  My stomach twisted and I swallowed hard. Eliza was not an easy woman to get over and being forced to close this case together was torture.

  Tell me what happened that night, she’d demanded, her blue eyes glacial.

  It was my fault, I’d whispered.

  We’re done.

  I rubbed my eyes and let out a long breath. I needed to get out of my head. I grabbed the remote for my stereo and turned on my streaming channel. I picked a throwback pop playlist and turned it up as loud as I dared with Doris Manalin, Countryside Village Apartment’s nosiest neighbor, across the hall. The music pushed out all errant thoughts as I concentrated on a partial print on the edge of the frame. It was a larger diameter than the other two prints, which were likely Daisy’s and Eliza’s.

  I turned on my handheld scanner then held it over the print I’d dusted, isolating it on the screen and taking a high-resolution scan. While this technology was still new, it was one of my favorite projects from when I worked in research and development. It would save so much time if we could run prints at a crime scene, instead of lugging samples back to the lab. The scanner should connect to the SHAP database and display results within twenty-four hours.

  It was still recommended to run the prints through the lab for accuracy, but since we hadn’t pinpointed the leak yet, I wasn’t going to take my chances. This print could too easily go missing or be misfiled. After typing in a code name for my investigation, I plugged in the device to my SHAP laptop.

  My stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t finished dinner. I picked up my phone to text Eliza and see how she was doing but opened a message to Jake instead. The fact that he still spoke to me likely meant Eliza had never told him about my role in Ben’s death. Guilt pressed down on my chest as I typed.

  Me: Checking on you and Poppy

  Jake: *thumbs-up emoji* Made very alcoholic hot chocolate and watching a romcom

  Jake: sorry dinner went wild

  Me: No apologies needed! Been to a few dramatic dinners myself

  Me: I’m here if you need to talk

  Jake: Thanks *smiling emoji*

  I set my phone down and moved to the kitchen, shuffling in time to the music. I put a slice of gluten-free bread in the toaster and grabbed peanut butter from the cupboard. With a banana microphone in hand, I slid across the kitchen in my socks, throwing up my arm for the chorus of “The Best” by Tina Turner.

  When the toast popped, I slathered it in peanut butter then cut up the banana to put on top. I had a mouthful when I two-stepped back into the living room and past my phone. It lit up with six missed calls.

  I tossed the plate onto the coffee table and nabbed the phone as it began to ring again. Unknown number. I swallowed and winced at the half-chewed mouthful, muted my speakers, and then answered.

  “It’s me,” my twin brother, Dallas, said. “Secure line. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Didn’t hear my phone.”

  “Why are you running prints on a Sunday night?”

  I paused, gaze flashing to the device on my desk. “What are you talking about?”

  “You assigned the model numbers to the devices, P. Of course you picked our birthday. Also, I monitor all our equipment, just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  “Just in case…you need help running a print on a Sunday night.”

  I sighed at his deflection. “Someone may have broken into a friend’s house. We’re not sure.”