Chicks Kick Butt

some give to it. Not much, but the wood in my hands made all the difference.

It was terrifying how fast he dropped, making a thud as his body hit the tile.

Katie stifled a scream, staring down in horror, not breathing.

He wasn’t breathing, either, but that didn’t bother me. I hadn’t killed him, being far too late for it. Goodness knows when that had originally happened or how.

I went to Katie and made her look at me. “He’s out for the count. Wood does that to his kind. You’re okay.”

She shook her head. “He’ll come back. I’ve seen it.”

“I bet you have, kid. Splash water on your face.”

While she pulled herself together I went through the guy’s pockets. My boyfriend and his partner do private detecting work, and I’d picked up some useful bad habits to add to a few of my own.

An ancient, long-expired driver’s license identified him as Ethan Duvert. No surprise.

I was shocked at the thick wad of money casually folded into one pocket. The bills were twenties with half an inch of crisp C-notes keeping them company. I’d bet it had come to him the easy way; he’d have floated invisibly into a bank vault and taken it, leaving some hapless accountant to try to explain the loss. I put the money in my purse for safekeeping. Honest. I’d find a way to give it back somehow.

Then—a policeman’s badge, a real one.

I nearly had a heart attack. If my boyfriend could be a private eye, then there was no reason why Duvert couldn’t be a cop, and I’d just clobbered him. Oh, God, I’d gotten everything wrong. …

“It’s something he uses,” said Katie, drying her face. “He made our chief of police give it to him to get out of tickets.”

It also gave him instant legitimacy with any cop between here and … “Sheldon, Ohio?” I read from the badge.

“My hometown. Used to be. Before he came.” Her face started to crumble and she hiccuped like a toy machine gun.

I knew the signs and stood, hands on my hips. “Hold it, sister,” I ordered in my harshest tone.

That derailed her. She gulped back a sob.

“Listen up, you can bawl like a baby later, but I need you to be a grown woman for the next three hours. Can you do that?”

She hiccuped again, but nodded. “Three hours?”

“The sun will be up by then.”

Katie looked like I’d smacked her with a wet fish. “How do you know ?”

“You first. Sheldon, Ohio—your family’s there?”

“Everyone is. It’s small, but we have a Carnegie library and there’s a private college on the other side of … oh, that doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me what does. Tell me about him .” I didn’t have to point at the body.

“He came to town last spring. He seemed to be everywhere. Everybody liked him. They’d just look at him and like him. First he was at the mayor’s house, then with the chief of police, then the minister, then my parents. My father’s a judge, and he and all the men who run the town know each other, and Ethan met them all.”

“And they liked him. No one thought that was strange?”

“If they did, he’d hear about it, then he’d meet them and change their minds.”

“I bet he did. How did you meet him?”

“I was at the movies with my friends, and that was when he noticed me. We’d seen him with our parents, and he was so handsome, all us girls had crushes on him, even the ones with boyfriends. He started coming by the house to see me and I was so excited that he’d picked me from so many others. At first Father and Mother thought he was too old for me, but he talked with them … and things changed. My parents started agreeing to ideas they’d never think of in a hundred years.”

“Like what?”

She swatted at her hair. “This.”

“You used to be blond like me.”

“I was already blond, but it was…” Her cheeks went red.

“A more natural color?” I said helpfully.

She nodded, relieved. “ He wanted it like yours. One day my mother took me to the town beauty shop and told them what to do.”

“You didn’t have a say?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know why I didn’t fuss. I wasn’t even surprised when Mother did that. She and I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world for me to get my hair bleached out like Jean Harlow.”

Maybe that was normal in Hollywood with a stage-obsessed mother looking to land her willing daughter a part in the movies, but not for a judge’s respectable wife and daughter in a small town in Ohio. “Anyone tease you at school about it?” Schoolgirls who dyed their hair were “fast” and instant outcasts. I should know.

“I stopped going. My parents didn’t mind, the principal and teachers didn’t mind— I didn’t mind.”

“Down deep you must have.”

“It wasn’t important. There was just Ethan. My whole life was for him … and it was wonderful. Absolutely perfect . I’d never been so happy. Every day I just loved him more and more and more. He had clothes sent to me—grown-up gowns from New York, real silk stockings, real gold jewelry. He—”

“I get it. Then he proposed?”

“It’s a blur now, like a dream. A wedding gown arrived, and I was fitted for a trousseau.”

“He had pictures taken.” I showed her the one I’d recovered.

“I look so happy, but it’s wrong. It has to be, the way I feel now.”

“You married him.”

“ He married me, ” she said sharply.

That anger was sweet to hear. Anger was good for her. She’d earned the right.

“My own father performed the wedding on my sixteenth birthday. But I was always going to marry George Coopley from across the street. We’ve been going steady since ninth grade. First I’d go to that private college and come back and be a teacher, and George was going to work in his dad’s bank, and it was like everyone forgot, even George. He was the one who gave me away to Ethan.”

I looked down at the still form of Ethan Duvert. Words clogged my throat, most not fit for Katie’s ears. I needed release, so I smacked him in the gut with the broomstick. I hoped he felt it.

Katie gasped at the violence. I didn’t apologize.

“He had it coming,” I said, debating whether to hit him a third time.

Her face twitched. It might have been a smile trying to break through her misery.

That was encouraging. “So you were married and living happily ever after in Sheldon, Ohio?”

“In the mayor’s house. It’s the biggest in town and the best. He moved his family to that horrible old drummers’ hotel by the tracks. Ethan said that was funny and everyone laughed.”

“Including the mayor?”

“More than anyone else. Did everybody go crazy?”

“No. They were hypnotized. You, too.”

“But—”

“Think about it. Ethan looks everyone square in the eye and next thing you know he’s running the whole town—except for drunks and the crazy people, and they didn’t matter. Right?”

“Were you there?”

“No. But I know what he is.” I started to say how, then thought better of it. If I told her about my boyfriend she’d lose confidence and assume I was another hypnotized victim. That kind of work gave my Jack a nasty headache, so he avoided using it. Duvert must have thought the pain worth it if the result allowed him to own a whole town and everyone in it. “So do you.”