She's No Angel

“Mutt,” she repeated. “That’s all?”

The driver shrugged. “I tried other names. It’s the only one he even remotely answered to. So it stuck.”

Wonderful. A guy so cryptic and self-contained he couldn’t even be bothered to name his dog. Good thing he wasn’t in the running for Mr. Personality. And good thing she wasn’t in the running for a man. Uh-uh, no way.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like men—despite her books, she did like them. She especially liked having sex with them. Not that she’d had any recently—like, since her first book had been published and her then-lover had read it. He’d been out the door before she’d done her first book signing. Which had also been one of her last book signings considering the number of men who’d shown up to yell at her for ruining their formerly docile girlfriends and wives. Or shown up to make her see the error of her ways by using smarmy charm to try to pick her up. Ick.

That had been two years ago, and since then, the former Single in the City girl hadn’t had as much as a date. But she sure had made friends with the UPS delivery woman who regularly brought the plain brown wrapped packages Jen ordered from sites like havesexalone.com.

Not that it mattered. Her life was too full to deal with any more complications…male ones in particular. Especially moody, six-foot-two piles of hotness like the one sitting beside her. Whether sex with another person was involved or not.

She just couldn’t afford any distractions, not today when she was involved in World War III. Because they might have won the first skirmish by leaving her out here in the middle of nowhere and stealing her car. But when she found Ida Mae and Ivy, the war was really going to begin.

CHAPTER TWO

Widows get to wear black…which is so much more slimming than divorcеe red.

—Why Arsenic Is Better Than Divorce by Jennifer Feeney

THOUGH HER SISTER WAS ENTIRELY convinced they’d taken care of their “little problem,” Ivy Feeney Cantone Helmsley—now just Feeney again—was still hiding.

Ida Mae might think they’d put a stop to the schemes of that girl, but Ivy wasn’t so sure. Despite not being a true Feeney—not one by blood, anyhow—the girl had shown some surprising resilience and spunk over the years. Ivy should know…she’d tried to break the child more than once. But the stubborn chit had kept coming around.

So Ivy wasn’t taking any chances. Which was why she was skulking, alone, in her basement. This was her regular hiding place, her security zone. She felt safe here, with Daddy clutched in her arms. Well, half of him, anyway.

“Force us out of our house,” she whispered, keeping her voice nearly inaudible. “She thinks she can make us leave our home? Well, she’ll have to find us first, won’t she, Daddy?”

That wouldn’t be easy. The one place the girl had always been frightened of was this cellar. Ivy couldn’t see why. Personally, she found the dankness of the musty, cavernous room completely comforting.

She supposed the girl’s fear could have something to do with the fact that she’d been locked down here for a few hours when she was ten or eleven. Ivy didn’t regret shutting her in. The little sneak had needed a lesson, and no real harm had been done, even if Jennifer’s father, Ivan, had read Ivy the riot act over it.

Funny…the girl had later stepped forward, telling her father she might have twisted the lock on her own, by mistake. Ivy had almost liked her that day, as much as she could like any nosy intruder. That was saying a lot since Ivy didn’t like many females, her sister included most times. Plus, her young niece had always been much too pretty for Ivy’s liking.

Ivy was the pretty one in the family. She always had been.

But she didn’t like the girl today—or trust her. Which was why she remained hidden.

Here in the dark, oblivious to the dampness of the rough stone walls, Ivy was free to look at her treasures without fear of interruption. Not from the girl, not from the girl’s parents, not even from Ida Mae.

If Ida Mae suspected what was hidden beneath the stairs, she might force her way down them. Which was why Ivy never let on that this was where she kept her most prized possessions. Let Ida Mae think they’d all been burned up in the fire that had killed Ivy’s husband and destroyed their home up in New York City back in sixty-six. Ida Mae didn’t have to know all her secrets.

To this day, Ivy remained frightened over just how close Ida Mae had come to finding out the most important one. Over a year ago, her sister had stumbled upon Ivy’s most precious container. When Ida Mae had seen Mama’s old knitting box in Ivy’s room, she’d demanded to know how Ivy could still possess it when it should have long since ceased to exist.

Ivy had had to protect the box and the secrets it contained, fighting Ida Mae with all her strength in order to do it. Then, though it had nearly killed her, she’d sent the knitting box away, far from Ida Mae’s prying eyes. Because her sister, too, knew the secret of the box, and she would easily find that which Ivy had for so many years concealed. And might try to force Ivy to destroy it, to protect that secret.

How ironic that she’d given her greatest treasure to the safekeeping of the very girl she now wanted to murder. Jennifer.

Ivy had actually entrusted the case and its precious cargo to Jennifer last year when her niece had been working on one of her books. The combination of her desire to hide the case from Ida Mae and her own vanity—since Ivy had been thrilled to think of her story immortalized in print—had made her entrust the container to Jennifer’s young hands.

Right now, she was angry enough with the girl that she wished she’d never given it to her. “No, no, not safe,” she reminded herself.

She didn’t fear Ida Mae. Ivy had felt a strange presence lately, as if someone had been in her house, touching her things. She’d been hearing whispers of people who couldn’t be there, seeing odd shadows on the floor. Finding things moved or missing. Getting calls from hateful-sounding strangers. So though she didn’t like to admit it, her most important possession was still safer with Jennifer.

Unless, of course, she and Ida Mae decided to kill the girl, in which case Ivy would still get her box back, since she, alone, knew where Jen had it hidden in her apartment.

“There’s still the rest,” she whispered, sitting in her usual spot and gazing across the basement as she so often did.

Every day, while her sister was next door taking her nap, Ivy would visit her past in the cellar. She’d lovingly open the sealed plastic bins and unwrap her treasures, one at a time. Like her photo albums. Her autographed LP’s from her favorite stars like Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

What an almighty crime that they’d all three gone down in a blaze of glory at the same moment. If any of them had been clients of her first husband’s, she’d have suspected him of tampering with the small plane they’d been traveling in. Such things weren’t, as she knew, beyond producer Leo Cantone, whose soul had been darker than Ritchie Valens’s thick, black hair.

Ivy thrust off the thoughts of Leo, whom she’d once loved, then grown to hate, and stroked the urn holding her father’s ashes. Well, half his ashes. Since the dust-up over Ida Mae’s hiding him in a sugar canister last summer, filling his real urn with ashes from her charcoal grill, Ivy had insisted they split him rather than passing him back and forth. She liked to think her half included Daddy’s big, strong arms and hearty belly laugh, but not his black, cheating heart, which had been the reason Mama’d probably killed him.

The women in her family could never abide cheaters. Or abusers. But especially not cheaters.

“My lovely things,” she whispered. Ivy longed to creep over there and open them, to lose herself in the images of her youth. Like the framed, autographed photo of her standing on a stage, flanked by Frankie Avalon and Bill Haley after one of Alan Freed’s rock-and-roll revues at the Paramount. Or the newspaper clipping showing a laughing, soaking-wet Ivy in a slinky gown rising out of a fountain after a party at the Ritz. A snapshot of her doing the twist with Leo at the Peppermint Lounge, him only as tall as her forehead, though seeming bigger because of his money and his presence.

But she couldn’t risk it, couldn’t make any noise at all in case the girl returned and heard.

She made do by mentally going over all her other treasures, also contained in the bins. Like the fork Ricky Nelson had used when they’d dined with him in Chicago. And the silk scarf she’d stolen from Cass Elliott’s dressing room. All lovingly preserved in plastic, kept in waterproof containers, and hidden beneath stacks of old newspaper and dusty sheets.

None, though, were as good as the knitting case, which held a secret within a secret. A hidden pocket that even the girl didn’t know about held the most treasured remnants of him.

Eddie James.

Ivy had to close her eyes for a moment, letting only a few of the memories—good and bad—creep into her head. Much more and she’d go crazy, she surely would.

Some would say she already had…on that day, the last time she’d seen Eddie. Or Leo. It had been a violent, bloody day on which she’d also lost her beautiful home to fire. Lost everything, everyone…maybe even her mind.

“Enough now,” she whispered, still clutching the urn, immediately clearing her thoughts of her old life, of which Daddy would never have approved.

Shifting on her rickety lawn chair, she sighed, wishing she’d thought to bring a nice, quiet magazine down with her. One of those ones with pictures of today’s movie stars, all bawds and cads, but entertaining just the same.

She also wished she’d brought one of her fancy hats. The damp air was no good for her thinning hair. “Drat Ida Mae and her thick hair,” she muttered sourly, before clapping a hand over her mouth. She’d forgotten to whisper, so she kept her hand there, listening intently for any sign of life from above.

Silence. Thank goodness.

She’d wait another hour or two, then creep upstairs and see what she could see, not sure which she hoped for more: the girl to be gone, or Ida Mae to be wrong about something for once.

Ida Mae had felt sure her plan would work, instead of Ivy’s. As usual, she had bullied Ivy into going along. So they’d thrown the girl’s clothes in her suitcases and dumped them outside next to her fancy car. The keys were in the ignition and the message couldn’t be clearer. So maybe she had returned to town, seen the car, gotten in it and driven away, having received the answer to her ridiculous suggestion that they move from this place.

Or maybe she hadn’t—maybe Ida Mae had been wrong, and the girl was right now preparing to drag them from their homes.

Ivy stroked the urn harder, pursing her lips, wishing her sister had just gone along with one of her ideas for a change. It certainly would have been more assured of success.

After all, the girl couldn’t be plotting against them if they’d waited for her to get back, tied her up, thrown her in the trunk of her car, then pushed it off a cliff.

“YOU KNOW, YOU REALLY don’t have to keep clutching that thing. It’s not like I can leap over and attack you while I’m trying to drive. Especially not on these windy roads.”