Family Jewels (Dix Dodd Mystery #2)

bed.

~*~

“Oh my God! He’s been here! Right here in this very room last night!”

Crap! Busted!

Weirdly, this felt like the time in high school when I’d been caught sneaking Cody McNally into the house late one night. (We were just going to watch a movie together, I swear.) Not that I thought I was in for the same lecture now as I’d gotten then. But still … Dylan Foreman’s presence at all was something I necessarily had to keep a secret from mother.

And the other stuff … that I definitely wanted to keep under wraps.

“I … I can explain, Mother,” I sputtered.

Mother looked at me like I’d lost my last marble. “Why would you explain anything?”

“Guilty conscience, Dix?” Mrs. Presley’s grin spread across her entire face. “Something we don’t know you’d like to tell us about? Something about last night?” Mrs. Presley gave an exaggerated wink.

Damn, she knew. Her catlike smile confirmed it.

Thankfully, while I was silently instructing Mrs. Presley (okay, pleading with hands clasped together in prayer and mouthing no, no, no) not to tell Mom about my visitor, Mom was crouched down staring at the floor. I joined her.

There was a puddle of water on the hardwood floor. A very small puddle. Barely noticeable, in fact. Mother picked something up as I looked at the lock on the patio door.

Goddamn it! I knew that door had been locked when I’d gone to bed! But now it was open. And no one had been out yet this morning. The lock itself was unscratched. Very few lock pickers can actually do the job without there being at least one or two tell-tale nicks and scratches (present company excepted, and Dylan, too, it seemed). The unannounced company of last night had either had his or her own key, or been damn good at what they were doing. This was no hack job.

“Did Frankie have a key, Mom?” I asked.

“Of course! How else would he have gotten in.”

Was she finally ready to admit Frankie could be the culprit? Was she finally admitting that the man remained in human form after all? Was she —

“Though it’s beyond me how his little green arms could reach all the way up to unlock the door,” she said.

Crap.

I crouched and touched the water on the floor. As I suspected, it was cold. I looked at it on my fingertips as I rubbed them together. Nothing out of the ordinary. I smelled the water — odorless.

Okay, in case you’re wondering, no way in hell was I going to taste it.

It had not rained last night. Florida weather is unpredictable at best, but a quick check of the weather station this morning confirmed what the tanned, blond, bubbly weatherman had promised last night. No rain in sight.

So where did the water come from?

I looked up at the ceiling. No drips.

Open door, water on floor — there really was only one answer.

Someone else had broken into my mother’s home while I’d slept soundly through it. That unsettled me. Big time. They’d have seen me sleeping. They might have watched me, and I had not stirred. They might have stood right over me….

“Mother!” I gulped. “Go check the lucky diamond.”

“But Frankie would never—”

“Just humor me, okay?”

She tsk-tsked, but went to the wall safe. Discreetly, with an ‘I’d better go pee again’, Mrs. Presley headed to the bathroom rather than be there when Mother opened the safe.

Mother laid the picture of me and Peaches Marie flat on the table. I watched over her shoulder as she worked the clicking dial. Not that I was trying to see the combination. I knew it, of course, Peaches and I both did — 2 left, 18 right, 4 left. But what red-blooded offspring wouldn’t be at least a bit curious to see what their parent kept in their wall safe. It was like snooping through the bottom dresser drawer when your parents are out. Finding a lost love letter in someone’s old coat pocket — you had to read it, it was practically the law, wasn’t it?

But it’s not like Mother was trying to hide the safe’s contents!

My heart beat hard and fast as the safe door swung open. I looked and….

The ring box was there. Safe in the safe. And the small box was solitary in its occupation of that 12-inch square box.

“See,” Mother said. She waved a hand to the opened safe for emphasis. “It’s right here.”

“Open the box,” I urged.

This time there was no protesting tsk-tsk. She snapped open the box with a flick of the wrist. And before she opened her mouth to say the ring was there, I knew that it was. I could tell by the look on her face as she gazed lovingly at the gift that Peter Dodd, her husband/my father, had given her.

“You know, your Dad was so proud on the day he gave me this diamond. I guess I’m so used to having it there. Safely there. It’s like a part of Peter’s still with me, you know. I always felt … that nothing bad would truly happen to our little family as long as we had that diamond.” She gave half a mocking laugh. “I just don’t know what I’d have done if I’d opened that safe and that diamond had been missing.”

Nor did I. I sighed my relief.

“I knew it would be here,” Mother said. “Frankie would never take my lucky diamond. He’s crazy about me and he knows how much it means to me. Besides, Frankie Morrell knows damn well better than to come in here without wiping his feet, I mean his flippers … I guess.”

“Mother,” I said. “This insisting that you turned Frankie into a frog really isn’t helping.”

“Then how do you explain this?” She held her palm flat, and in the center of it lay was a little heart-shaped piece of green. Not quite grass, not quite a leaf…. It was more like —

“It’s a piece of lily pad,” Mother asserted. “And it’s a gift from Frankie.”

Okay, I’d heard of cats bringing dead vermin ‘gifts’ to their owners as a show of affection. When we were kids, Peaches Marie and I had a great big tabby that left field mice at the foot of our beds. Great fun to tiptoe to the bathroom in the dark at our house. My grandmother supposedly tamed a great big bobcat (she called him Bently) when she was a girl in Northern New Brunswick, and he used to bring her bunnies.

But a lily pad gift? As a show of affection from Frankie the frog? That would be assuming a lot, most particularly that Frankie really had become a frog.

This was just getting too weird.

“Let me see it,” I said.

She held her palm out, but didn’t hand over the little piece of greenery. It was kind of heart shaped. It could very well have been a lily pad. But one thing for sure — it was a clue.

“Hang on to that, Mother,” I said. “Put it … put it in the fridge to keep it fresh.”

She looked at me strangely, a look to which by this time I was immune.

The toilet flushed and a few seconds later, Mrs. Presley emerged from the bathroom.

“I don’t know, Katt,” Mrs. Presley was said as she tucked her flowered shirt into her Capri pants. “You’d think Frankie would be showing up with something a little more substantial. Like an apology for being an ass. An apology, flowers and dinner for two.”

Oh, God, dinner for two from the swamp.

Mother said, “Frankie’s not cheap. He is one for flowers and candlelit dinners, Jane. Oh, and did you see that watch he got me? It’s beautiful.” She pushed up her sleeves and touched her left wrist first before then touching her right. “I must have set it down somewhere. I love that watch,” she said worriedly. “I certainly hope I didn’t lose it.”

“That would be a shame, Katt,” Mrs. Presley said. “It’s a beautiful watch. I’ll help you look for it.”

“No!”

My head shot up as my mother raised her voice. It wasn’t an angry raising of voice so much as a panicked one.

“Sorry, Jane,” she said. “Didn’t mean to shout. I just … I just don’t want your visit to Florida to be all about