Wicked Charms

  “Sorry, hon,” she said. “We don’t carry grog. You’ll have to settle for beer.”

  “You see this?” Josh said. “This is another example of how mainstream society refuses to serve the needs of my people.”

  “Your people?” I asked. “Do you mean pirates?”

  “We prefer the term ‘Buccaneer Americans,’ ” Josh said.

  “So does the Buccaneer American want beer?” the waitress asked.

  “Aye,” Josh said.

  “I can’t help noticing that you talk like a Buccaneer American even when you’re not at work,” Nergal said to Josh.

  “ ’Tis a terrible curse,” Josh said. “I speak Buccaneer all day, and then I can’t stop. My brain doth think in Buccaneer.”

  “I like it,” Glo said. “Sometimes he says I’m winsome.”

  “True enough, ye be a winsome lass,” Josh said to Glo.

  “Fortunately, I can stop speaking in coroner,” Nergal said.

  Josh nodded. “Speaking in coroner after hours wouldst be a bummer.”

  “It seems like an odd occupation,” I said to Nergal. “Why did you become a coroner?”

  “I was in debt after med school and this opportunity happened along. I know it seems gruesome to the average outsider, but it’s really very interesting work. Why did you become a baker?”

  “I flunked gravy when I was in culinary school, but I was good at making cupcakes.”

  I felt someone lean into me, and a long arm reached out for the breadbasket. I recognized the arm. It belonged to Diesel. He scraped a chair up to the table and positioned himself between Nergal and me.

  “So what’s new?” Diesel said, giving my ponytail a playful tug.

  I was momentarily dumbstruck.

  “Where the heck were you?” I said to him. “One minute you were in my house and then next thing you were gone. For all I knew you were dead. I haven’t heard a word from you in weeks. You didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “I was on a job. And I’m pretty sure I said goodbye.”

  “The last thing you said to me was ‘I’ll be back.’ ”

  “And?”

  “ ‘I’ll be back’ is not ‘goodbye.’ ”

  Diesel took a roll from the breadbasket. “This is why I don’t work with women.”

  “You do work with women. I’m a woman.”

  “Yeah, but I have no choice. I only had two options and Wulf snagged option number one. He got to Steven Hatchet first.”

  I thunked my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Unh!”

  Steven Hatchet is the only other person with the ability to recognize a disguised stone. It’s sort of insulting that Diesel would consider Hatchet to be the number one choice since Hatchet is flat-out nuts. He looks like an underbaked dinner roll with legs. He has scraggly red hair, is around my age, and thinks he’s a medieval minion, serving his liege lord Wulf.

  “You’re crowding the table,” I said to Diesel. “This table only has room for four.”

  “You’re bummed, right?” Diesel said.

  “Yes! Go away.”

  The waitress returned with our drinks and asked if we wanted to order food.

  Glo ordered a burger, Josh ordered fried clams, Nergal ordered a lobster roll, and I ordered rice pudding.

  “I’ll have a lobster roll, too,” Diesel said.

  “No, he won’t,” I said to the waitress. “He’s not with us.”

  “He’s sitting with you,” the waitress said.

  “He’s a squatter,” I said. “Don’t encourage him.”

  The waitress gave him a full body scan. “If it was me I’d totally encourage him.”

  “I’ll have a beer with my lobster roll,” Diesel said.

  “No, he won’t,” I said.

  “What kind of beer do you want?” the waitress asked Diesel.

  “Surprise me,” he said. “And I’ll have a second lobster roll to go. My monkey’s in the car and he’s hungry.”

  “That is so adorable,” the waitress said. “What’s your monkey’s name?”

  “Carl,” Diesel said. “And it would be great if you could hurry things along because Carl is probably gnawing on the steering wheel. We just got back from Sri Lanka, and he’s still freaked over the elephants. There were lots of elephants.”

  “This is Theodore Nergal,” I said to Diesel. “And the guy with the patch on his forehead is Josh the Pirate.”

  “Aargh,” Josh said to Diesel. “Who be you?”

  “I be Diesel,” Diesel said.

  “What were you doing in Sri Lanka?” Nergal asked Diesel.

  “This and that,” Diesel said.

  “Ah, one thing and another,” Nergal said.

  Diesel ate half his dinner roll. “You got it.”

  “Was it difficult getting your monkey into the country without a quarantine period?” Nergal asked.

  There was a long pause where no one spoke and everyone looked at Diesel.

  “He’s a service monkey,” Diesel finally said.

  Not to mention, Diesel doesn’t fly by ordinary means.

  “You’ll never guess what happened tonight,” Glo said to Diesel. “Josh was giving us a tour of the Pirate Museum and one of the exhibits came crashing down at our feet, and it turned out to be a real dead guy. That’s how we got to meet Dr. Nergal. He’s a coroner, and he was awesome. He figured out that the guy had been shot, and he knew all about the gun and everything. And he figured out the guy had been shot over ninety years ago.”

  “Impressive,” Diesel said.

  Nergal shook his head. “Not at all. It was obvious.”

  “The head fell off when the dead guy hit the floor,” Glo said. “And it was as if the instant Dr. Nergal touched the head he knew all this stuff!”

  “He had a bullet hole in the back of his skull, and the round was still contained in the cavity,” Nergal said to Diesel.

  The waitress brought the food, and we all dug in. Nergal was halfway through his lobster roll when his phone buzzed. He read the text message and tapped in a response.

  “This has been fun,” he said, pushing back from the table, leaving his share of the bill, “but I have to be going. Duty calls.”

  “He seems nice,” Diesel said to me when Nergal left. “You should consider going out with him.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  A half hour later we left the restaurant. Josh walked Glo to her car, and Diesel and I walked up Wharf Street to my tan Chevy clunker.

  “I sense a disturbance in the Force,” Diesel said.

  “Gee, I can’t imagine why. Maybe it’s because one minute we’re in bed together, and then all of a sudden you get dressed and leave, and I don’t hear from you for three weeks. And then I find out you’ve been in Sri Lanka.”

  “Well, where did you think I was?”

  “I don’t know…a drugstore. I thought you were going out for condoms.”

  “Yeah, looking back I could see where that might have been a possibility.” He slung an arm around me and nuzzled my neck. “Maybe we should take up where we left off.”

  “You’re actually willing to risk one of us losing our abilities?”

  “I think I could work around it.”

  “No way. I’m not taking the chance. Besides, I’m not even sure I like you.”

  “Of course you like me. I’m fun.”

  “I had an earlier run-in with Wulf, and now you’re here,” I said to Diesel. “What’s going on?”

  “Do you know about Martin Ammon?”

  “I know he’s a billionaire.”

  “Martin Ammon is a publishing and media giant,” Diesel said. “He owns a bunch of newspaper and media outlets in England and the U.S. He also has a reputation as a devourer of companies, big and small. He’s an eccentric, power-hungry megalomaniac. His great-grandfather was Billy McCoy, a notorious rumrunner during Prohibition. McCoy’s partner was Peg Leg Dazzle.”

  “Was Peg Leg related to the bakery Dazzles?”

>   “I imagine all the Salem Dazzles are related, but I don’t know where Peg Leg fits in. Anyway, McCoy and Peg Leg at some point in their illegal endeavors came across a diary and an accompanying coin. The diary belonged to a pirate name Palgrave Bellows, and it detailed a treasure he’d hidden on an island off the coast of Maine. The coin was supposed to help read Palgrave’s treasure map. Unfortunately for McCoy and Peg Leg, the map wasn’t with the diary and the coin, and they were never able to find the treasure.

  “A bunch of years ago the diary fell into Ammon’s hands, and he became obsessed with finding the treasure. He bought a house on Marblehead Neck, and he buddied up with a history professor. The two of them put a lot of time and money into the project, but nothing came of it.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It wasn’t a secret. There were newspaper articles about the diary and the lost treasure of the Gunsway.”

  “The Gunsway?”

  “That was the name of the ship that Palgrave plundered. It originated in the Far East, and according to the diary it contained unimaginable riches both ordinary and magical.”

  “Wow. Magical.”

  “Yeah, that’s where Wulf and I come into the picture. The magical part of the treasure, if the diary is to be believed, is the Avaritia Stone. The Stone of Avarice. Ammon never made a big deal about the stone in all his interviews, but I suspect his real goal was to get his hands on it. He’s made joking references in the past about his drive to acquire more and more money, and says that it’s appropriate his parents named him Martin. If you combine his first initial with his last name it spells ‘Mammon,’ one of the seven princes of hell and the personification of wealth and greed.”

  “That wouldn’t be my first choice for a prophetic name.”

  “Yeah, me either. I’d rather my name was B. Eergut.”

  It took me a beat to figure it out. “That’s gross,” I said.

  Diesel grinned and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his touch giving me a rush that went from my ear to my doodah.

  “Want me to try again?” Diesel asked.

  “No. I want you to finish telling me about the treasure.”

  “Ammon managed to get hold of the map that Palgrave Bellows fashioned. It was discovered during a ship restoration project. Ammon tucked the map under his arm, and he still has it.”

  “So now Ammon has the diary and the map.”

  “Yep. Problem is, the directions to the treasure are in code, and the code can’t be read without the special coin. Ammon hired a team of cryptographers, but they weren’t able to crack the code without it. So all attention turned to finding the coin.”

  “How long have they been looking for the coin?”

  “Years. Ammon’s had a private investigator on the case.”

  “Looking for the coin?”

  “Yes, but eventually looking for Peg Leg. After interviewing a lot of people, the PI discovered that the coin and the diary were originally found together, but because McCoy and Peg Leg didn’t completely trust each other, McCoy took the diary and Peg Leg took the coin. Shortly after that, Peg Leg disappeared and was never seen again. It was thought he was shot over a keg of rum, but it never went beyond rumor. Last week the Pirate Museum hung the prisoner cage, and it caught the attention of the detective. The cadaver had been dressed in pirate rags, but the peg leg had clearly been made in more modern times.”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said. “It just looked like a wooden peg leg to me. And you know all this how?”

  “The organization that employs me has had a man watching Ammon’s detective.”

  Diesel is a sort of cop. At least that’s what he tells me. He works for a loosely organized hierarchy of People with Special Abilities. His primary job was to keep his peers on the straight and narrow. When he was assigned the task of finding the seven SALIGIA Stones, the cop part of his job became secondary.

  “I was being brought back to Salem to get you into the museum when you took matters into your own hands,” Diesel said.

  “It wasn’t intentional. I was just on a tour with Glo’s new boyfriend. How does Wulf know about this?”

  “Wulf has his own underground and his own agenda. Hard to say how Wulf knows things sometimes…he just does.”

  “So the idea now is that the coin is somehow attached to the pirate skeleton?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the history of the skeleton will lead to the coin.”

  “When I touched the cage I felt a vibration just before it broke loose and fell to the floor. It wasn’t especially strong, and I thought it was probably just my imagination.”

  “Honey, your imagination isn’t that good.”

  “I happen to have an excellent imagination. Sometimes I imagine my life is normal.”

  “Yeah, that’s a stretch,” Diesel said. “So maybe the coin was in the cage.”

  “If it was, it had to be hidden somewhere. I didn’t see a coin.”

  “Who had access to him?”

  “The only one who actually touched the skeleton while I was there was Nergal. I’m sure the EMTs had their hands on him, but I left before they zipped him up and carted him off.”

  Diesel unlocked my car and opened the driver’s side door for me. “I have stuff to do,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  —

  My house looks like it was sprinkled out with a lot of other houses from the big house saltshaker sometime in the 1700s. The neighborhood is a mix of small houses built by cod fishermen, shoemakers, carpenters, and mariners, and a few larger houses that were owned by merchants and ship captains. Most of the houses still have a wooden sculpture of a golden cod above their doorways, a symbol of good luck. My golden cod was getting a little worn around the fins, and I’d had “paint your fish” in my mental to-do list for a while.

  I was later getting home than usual, and Cat was waiting at the door. I snatched my mail from the mailbox, said hello to Cat, and went straight to the kitchen. I poured some kitty crunchies into Cat’s bowl, adding a slice of cantaloupe as apology for his delayed dinner. I browsed through my mail while Cat ate.

  Bills, junk mail, more junk mail…Uh-oh. Letter from a publisher. A while back I’d had an idea for a cookbook, Hot Guys Cooking for Hungry Women. I packaged up my ideas and recipes, and my manuscript was making the rounds of New York agents and publishers. Unfortunately, no one wanted it, and I’d come to dread opening the letters that were inevitably rejections.

  “What do you think, Cat?” I asked. “Should I open it? Do you have a good feeling about this one?”

  Cat was sinking his fangs into the cantaloupe and didn’t appear to care a lot about the letter.

  “Okay,” I said to Cat. “Wish me luck.”

  I tore the envelope open and read the letter. Rejection. Crap!

  “It’s a great idea,” I said to Cat. “And the recipes are perfect. I’ve kitchen-tested them. I don’t know why no one wants to buy my book.”

  I went into my small living room and turned the television on. I flipped through channels until I came to the Food Network. I watched a half hour of cooking and moved on to Property Brothers on HGTV. They cooked in an entirely different way.

  Cat had followed me into the living room and was curled up on the couch next to me.

  “This is what I need,” I said to Cat. “I need the Property Brothers. They work cheap, they always deliver on time, and they’re cute.”

  I heard the front door open, and Cat gave a low growl. His ears rotated in the direction of the door, and he listened for a moment. He settled back with his nose tucked under a paw when Diesel and Carl walked into the room.

  Carl jumped off Diesel’s shoulder, scuttled over to Cat, and sniffed him. Cat opened his one working eye, and Carl shrank back and wrapped his arms around Diesel’s leg. No one messes with Cat.

  “Well?” I said to Diesel.

  Diesel slouched onto the couch next to me, so that I was bookended between Cat and Diesel.

>   “I checked out the cage, and I went over the entire floor of the exhibit room,” Diesel said. “The coin wasn’t there.”

  “And the dead guy?”

  “I took a look at him, too. He was taken to the morgue and stored for an autopsy. No coin on the dead guy.”

  “What about Wulf?”

  “I talked to Wulf. He hasn’t got it.”

  “There were two EMTs who handled the corpse. And probably someone checked him into the morgue.”

  “And there was Dr. Death,” Diesel said.

  “Nergal?”

  “Yeah, my money’s on Nergal.”

  “I thought you liked him. You told me I should date him.”

  “He would have gone over the body and collected evidence before they closed the bag. He’s the logical person to have found the coin.”

  “Did you go through his office?”

  “Yeah, and the coin wasn’t there,” Diesel said. “It also wasn’t listed in the evidence log.”

  The Property Brothers signed off, and I stood and stretched. “Bedtime,” I said. “I need to be at the bakery early tomorrow.”

  “No problem,” Diesel said, taking charge of the remote. “I’ll be up later.”

  “ ‘Up’? No. There’s no ‘up.’ You need to go home.”

  “I was thinking this was home.”

  “This is my home. Don’t you have a home?”

  “I have a beach house in the South Pacific, but it’s kind of a far commute.”

  “Where did you live in Sri Lanka?”

  “Monastery. Longest three weeks of my life.”

  “You used to have your own apartment here. What happened to it?”

  “The guy who owned it came back to town.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I shut the alarm off at four-fifteen. There was no big guy next to me. The sheets were cool. Nothing smelled like gingerbread. Hard to tell if I was happy or disappointed.

  I showered, dressed for work, and trucked down to the kitchen. No big guy there, either. I gave Cat a fresh bowl of water and some kitty crunchies. I got coffee brewing, popped a frozen waffle into the toaster, and shrieked when Wulf appeared without warning.

  “Jeez Louise,” I said. “I hate when people just materialize. How did you get in here?”