You know what you have to do first, she reminded herself. You were planning it anyway, deep down. But that had been planned for some time in the unforeseeable future.

  “Do the Wylers have a rifle? Does Donnie Donaldson? Plato? Hello?”

  Ophelia dragged herself back to the present. “Everybody has a rifle out here. Well, maybe not Plato, but he would defend me to the death. Why were you harassing him last night?”

  “I wasn’t harassing him.” Gideon lathered up the soap and handed it to her, then quickly soaped himself all over. “He told me he intends to keep an eye on your place.”

  “Like he doesn’t do that already. You don’t mind him—uh—worshipping me?”

  “His problem, not mine. I have his goddess in my shower.” He took the soap from Ophelia, lathered it up again, and set to work on her. “Do you go down to the river regularly?”

  “Most evenings. Mornings, too, if I’m not busy.” She closed her eyes, but the images of what she had to plan, what she had to do, wouldn’t go away. She leaned her forehead against Gideon as he soaped her, his big gentle hands comforting and kind. A dream garden. Excellent sex. Seemed okay with the fangs. Not prone to jealousy. Liked housework. She had to go through with it. The unforeseeable future was now. “Ooh.” She sagged against him.

  “Hello?” Gideon’s hand left her clit to take down the showerhead. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying? Now I know how my mom felt.”

  Ophelia chuckled. “Maybe she was using the wrong methods to get your dad’s attention.”

  “Jeez.” Gideon rinsed her right armpit and then her left. “Not something I want to think about. Bend over.”

  Ophelia obliged. “Why not? They must have done it more than the twice it took to produce you and Art. Coming from such a screwed-up, inhibited family, I’m amazed you turned out so well.”

  “I planned it that way.” He tapped her lightly on the rear, turned off the water and hung the showerhead on its hook. “Who, besides your neighbors, knows you go down to the river?” He handed her a huge, fluffy white towel.

  “The people who live in the houses across the water from my property. We wave hello now and then. Sometimes the construction workers whistle at me, but none of them have gotten close enough to get hit by my allure, so they don’t see me as anything but another attractive woman.” She pondered a moment. “A real-estate agent who’s selling homes in the new subdivision next to the golf course. He insisted on a tour of my land, although I told him I’m not planning to sell anytime soon.” She shrugged. “None of these people have any reason to harm me. You can’t possibly expect me to wear only that!”

  Gideon grinned down at the oversize T-shirt he was holding out: a double-extra-large Constantine Dufray shirt, of all things, the back sporting an iron-on photo of a shirtless, wild-haired Constantine on stage. “Art won it, but it was too big for her, so she gave it to me.”

  “How am I going to get home? I can’t walk down the highway half-naked, and your car’s at my place.” She pulled the T-shirt over her head.

  “I’ll get someone to pick us up. There, see? Constantine’s covering your ass, which I assume he’s done many times in the past. Is that why you’re so blasé about somebody trying to kill you?”

  Ophelia scowled. “He’s been a good friend to me. Don’t you dare dis him!”

  Gideon calmly pulled on khaki pants and tucked in his shirt. “I’m not dissing him. But you’re not taking this situation anywhere near seriously enough, honey. I want to know why.”

  Ophelia shifted a shoulder. How could she run this game? Because that’s how she had to see it. She had to make a game plan and carry it through, and stay as close to the truth as possible.

  “I guess I assume you’ll take care of it, just like Constantine and Lep have done in the past. I have other things to think about. I have to buy more maple trees and plant them for a customer. Unless you got my trees out of jail?”

  “Not the trees, no, but your pocketbook and clipboard are in my car. Not the work boots. Theoretically—and no, this is not my idea—there may be evidence on the soles.”

  Ophelia narrowed her eyes. “You know perfectly well—”

  “I know perfectly well that if I don’t appear disinterested, the chief will take me off this case. People will find it way too easy to start with the ‘corrupt and incompetent’ crap again, after that fiasco with Constantine last year. Which will piss me off, because this case is my business, and which will piss my boss off, because in order to keep his cushy job, he’ll have to do the work himself. We’re a small outfit. We don’t have to investigate many homicides, because when your underworld friends are annoyed with someone, they just make him disappear.”

  Ophelia muttered something unconvincing about corruption, her mind elsewhere already. Trees, estimates, and a major purchase, all today. “Do you have a computer? Can I get online?”

  When Joanna Wyler’s bus pulled up in front of the middle school, thirty minutes late due to a breakdown, Zelda Dupree experienced a miraculous turn for the better.

  “The cramps are gone,” she told the nurse. “Sometimes a little horizontal time is all it takes.” Never mind that she had spent most of the last half hour bolt upright, glaring out the window of the school clinic, the only room at the front of the school to which she had access at this hour of the day, and had only started her period two months ago and been so far cramp free. She grabbed her hall pass and zapped out of the clinic and through the front doors of the school, pushing herself neatly in beside Joanna as she exited the bus.

  “You said you liked my aunt Ophelia!” Zelda said. At the sight of Joanna’s blotchy face and swollen red eyes, her tender side reluctantly emerged. “What’s wrong? You look terrible.”

  Joanna burst into tears and walked faster.

  “Don’t cry, dummy,” Zelda said. “You’ll look even worse.” She rooted in her jeans for a tissue and found nothing. All the better. She couldn’t afford to soften yet.

  “I can’t help it.” Joanna wiped her nose on her sleeve, and the books she carried slipped askew. She clutched them against her unwieldy chest and hurried ahead.

  “Wimp,” Zelda said cruelly, feeding on her anger, knowing Joanna couldn’t take it and not caring. She kept up with the other girl, stride for stride. “You are in big trouble. Do you know how many people told me this morning that Ophelia had sex with you? Sixteen!”

  “Oh, no!” Joanna scurried around the end of the building. “Everyone will think I’m a lesbian slut!”

  Zelda grabbed Joanna Wyler by the scruff of her preppy striped button-down shirt and yanked her against the dull cinderblock wall of the middle school. Joanna shrieked and dropped her books. Her homework danced away on the breeze. “I don’t care what people think about you. Nobody lies about Ophelia and gets away with it. You hear me?”

  “I never said Ophelia did it!” Joanna cried. “My homework! It’s getting away.”

  “Your homework won’t matter when you’re dead,” Zelda hissed in Joanna’s face. “Which you will be if you don’t fix this, right now!” She scowled at the small crowd that had gathered. “For God’s sake, stop gawking. Somebody go pick up her homework!” She rounded on Joanna again.

  “My parents just assumed it,” Joanna squeaked. “I told them Ophelia didn’t touch me. I told them she didn’t take those pictures, but they didn’t believe me. It’s my mom’s fault. All she ever does is sit on the phone and gossip.”

  “What pictures?” Zelda broke in.

  Joanna’s gaze shifted from side to side and a flush crawled up her cheeks. “Dirty pictures,” she whispered.

  “Ooh,” said a boy. “I wanna see them. Will I get to see your tits, Joanna?” Some girls giggled. One solitary kindhearted boy was chasing around the parking lot after Joanna’s homework. Zelda considered slugging the hoverers and decided against it. Joanna deserved humiliation, so humiliated she would be.

  “Well then,” Zelda said, easing her grip slightly, “this is easily solved.”

  “It is?” Joanna sucked in a deep, throbbing breath.

  “You’re going to tell your parents who did take the pictures. Better yet, you’re going to tell me, right now. Tell all of us”—she glared at the semicircle of rubberneckers—“so we can spread the truth around instead.”

  “I can’t!” Joanna howled. “I can’t tell anyone, ever!”

  “Is somebody threatening you?” Zelda demanded. “If they are, telling us is the best thing to do. There are six of us as witnesses. Seven,” she amended, as Rick from art class showed up with Joanna’s homework. He crammed it at Joanna, his eyes glued to Zelda’s face. Some do-gooder. “They can’t threaten us all. Who did it?”

  “No!” Joanna’s chest heaved. “I’ll never tell! I’d rather die!” Her eyes flickered up and behind the crowd, and her voice rose. “Leave me alone, you bully! It’s not my fault!”

  Fury such as Zelda had never before known swelled inside her. Her jaw ached, her lips contorted in a snarl, and she drew back her fist to deck this girl good.

  “Wow, Zelda,” Rick said in an awed, worshipful voice. “You’re so hot when you’re mad!”

  Zelda got in one solid punch at Rick before the administrator took her arm.

  When the red Cadillac pulled up in front of the house, Gideon held his breath, waiting for the storm. It didn’t come. Ophelia stiffened at the sight of the car and its buff blond driver, and then abruptly, immediately relaxed.

  Huh, thought Gideon. Seen this before.

  Her tone was disgusted but placid. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “You need protection,” Gideon said, “and I can’t provide it. No bud get for attempted-murder victims, and I have work to do. What choice did I have but to call Lep?” He watched the bodyguard check himself out in the side mirror before heading gracefully toward the front steps. “That dude belongs on the cover of one of Jeanie’s romance novels.”

  “That’s what he thinks, too. Let’s go. I have work to do, too.”

  “You’re not going to freak out? Argue? Yell at me?”

  “I might yell at you next time I see you,” Ophelia said placidly. “Several hours of Reuben’s tall, blond, and hypermasculine presence should get me good and pissed off.”

  Gideon’s lips twitched. “You’re not acting like the Ophelia I’ve gotten to know.”

  Ophelia hunched a lazy shoulder and yawned. “I got laid. It relaxes me. Takes the edge off my allure, too, so poor Reuben won’t have to fight himself so hard not to come on to me. However, I refuse to get into his car without a little more clothing.” She snatched a throw off an old rocking chair in the corner and wrapped the fabric around her bare hips.

  “You don’t seem any less alluring to me,” Gideon said, closing his eyes to shut out the view. He had to work.

  “Thanks.” Ophelia yawned again. She knotted the ends of the throw, sarong-style.

  “Sure you’ll be okay with this dude?”

  “He won’t kill me.”

  And that was that. She parted from him amicably, even absentmindedly, and yet…and yet something warned him of tension hidden underneath that pleasant, distracted exterior.

  Good old instinct, thought Gideon. I’ll figure her out.

  The blonde bitch was at the station when Gideon hared through a few hours later, between one set of fruitless interviews and the next. Her strident voice carried all the way to Gideon’s office in the back. “I heard it on the news. There was a body in Ophelia Beliveau’s truck. You knew it might be my Johnny, and you didn’t call me!”

  The chief regarded her blearily. “We had no reason to believe the victim was your husband. We now have a tentative ID, someone else entirely.”

  “Tentative? What good is that? You’re deliberately hiding him from me. If it’s Johnny, I have to know! How else can I collect on the insurance?” As Gideon came through the door from the back, Marissa eyed the chief. “Well, if it isn’t Vibrator Man. He’s protecting that Ophelia bitch because he’s got the hots for her, just like Johnny.”

  The chief put three shingles and a utility knife on the bench by the wall and bent an annoyed eye on Marissa. “Do you have a reason for your visit, ma’am, other than to disrespect my detective?”

  The blonde kept right on going. “He’s wasting his time, because she’s sleeping with Constantine Dufray. Otherwise, why would she be carting dead bodies around for him?”

  “If you wish to view the body, I can arrange it,” the chief said. “But since the height, weight, and coloring don’t match those of your husband, and the face was beaten to a pulp and is unrecognizable, you might want to think twice.”

  Marissa’s color faded under her makeup, ghastly against the tight purple spandex that enveloped her ripe curves. “My Johnny was beaten to death?” Her hands flapped to cover her mouth, her eyes wide and aghast. Jeanie made concerned sounds.

  Gideon and the chief exchanged glances. “Not your Johnny,” the chief said. “Someone else.” He retrieved a tape measure from under the counter.

  Marissa moaned. “Constantine killed my Johnny, and if you’d seen how he looked at me in that club last night, you’d know I’m in danger, too! Oh God, what am I going to do?”

  In an ideal world, thought Gideon, you’d leave town and never come back.

  Jeanie got up and put a hand on Marissa’s arm. “Hon, you’re exaggerating this all out of proportion. If Constantine killed everybody who got on his nerves, we’d all be dead by now. His bark is way worse than his bite.” The blonde snatched her arm away. Jeanie shrugged, her duty done. “His bite’s pretty doggone fantastic.” She ambled back to her desk and picked up her current romance.

  The chief said, “Ma’am, there’s no evidence Dufray killed your husband or anyone else. It’s all hype. Publicity for his bad-boy image.” He set a square against the shingle and cut it smoothly in two.

  “What about his wife? He poisoned her!”

  “No evidence whatsoever.” He measured and cut another shingle. Yesterday’s plywood was now a box shaped like a lean-to. The chief placed a strip of shingle on the slanted top of the box and nailed it squarely, then set another shingle in place. “Looks good, doesn’t it? The little critters will love it.”

  Marissa made a face. “What critters?”

  “Bats,” the chief said. “They keep the insect population down, and they’re delightful to watch in the evening sky. Not only that, but—”

  Marissa inhaled deeply, clenched her fists hard against her thighs, and screamed.

  “I’ve got to run,” Gideon said disgustedly. “Thank God for genuine homicides.” He tossed a credit card at Jeanie as he headed out. “Get me a new cell phone. Same number, pronto. Mine’s at the bottom of the river.”

  “In the cause of true love, what’s a cell phone?” Jeanie said.

  “This is a genuine homicide!” Marissa was shrieking. “You know how I know? Because Johnny always came back to me. He always called me when he was away. Sure he was crazy, sure he was fixated on Ophelia Beliveau, but he needed me! He fixated on other girls, too, before Ophelia, but he came back then, too. That’s how I know, in my heart and my soul, that he’s dead. That woman is suckering you, Vibrator Man, you and your no-good chief and this town!”

  An instinct nagged at him, but he shrugged. “Without a body, there’s nothing I can do.” Gideon left by the back door.

  Marissa’s voice pursued him. “It’ll be my dead body next! Constantine Dufray’s planning to kill me!”

  So help me, thought Gideon, I almost wish he would.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ophelia pulled to the curb in front of her sister’s house, the red Cadillac close behind her, just as Artemisia parked her Toyota across the street. Okay, Ophelia told herself, pretend to be normal. Calm, composed, living an ordinary life.

  “What’s that monster machine you’re towing?” Art asked.

  Help me out, why don’t you? “It’s a chipper.” Ophelia jumped down from the cab of the big macho truck, trying not to sound surly. Trying to sound…cheerful. Competent. A business owner pleased with a purchase. “I just bought it today.”

  “Eew,” Art said. “The kind of thing that chops branches up into wood chips?”

  Hopefully that’s not all it chops. “That’s why it’s called a chipper.”

  “It looks like it’s falling apart,” Art said. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “I got it cheap for one special job,” Ophelia said. “It doesn’t have to last long.” God, please let it last long enough.

  “Did you see that movie Fargo?” Art shuddered. “Just looking at that thing freaks me out.”

  Like Gideon’s sister had any concept of freaked out. Ophelia pasted on a serene face as Reuben came around the truck, sweaty, gorgeous, and pissed off. “Your brother decided I need protection, so poor Reuben’s been stuck hanging with me all day.”

  “Whoa.” Art blushed. At least she’d forgotten about the goddamned chipper.

  A howl of fury came from behind the house.

  “I will not be you!” Zelda screeched. They hurried toward the back, and Violet came into sight, dripping wet in a transparent red robe. She battled with the nozzle on the hose she held and sent a harsh spray across the garden at her daughter.

  “You are my child!” shrilled Violet. “Have you forgotten everything I taught you about violence? Manage your anger, Zelda. Fight it and control it!”

  Zelda sent an even stronger spray from her own hose, knocking Violet into the petunias, and Ophelia sprang forward before some plant that mattered was destroyed. She vaulted the gate and sprinted around the back of the house.

  “Damn it, Zelda!” Violet shoved herself up, seething, groping for her hose, but Ophelia got there first and snatched it away.

  “I am not a child! I will not be you!” cried Zelda again, her voice suffused with unaccustomed misery and rage. She sprayed the hose furiously across the garden, drenching Ophelia and spattering Reuben and Art as they rounded the corner of the house.

  “Pax!” called Ophelia. She turned off the nozzle of Violet’s hose.