Wicked Appetite

  “Suppose I guessed the inheritance?” I asked Lenny. “Would that be okay?”

  “It’s a free country,” Lenny said. “I can’t stop you from guessing. Anyway, you’ll never guess it, and even if you do guess right, you’ll never find it. It’s hidden and booby-trapped.”

  Diesel opened an under-the-counter drawer and pulled out handcuffs attached to a heavy chain.

  “Sometimes I’m a bad boy, and I need to be punished,” Lenny said. “I have more stuff in my bedroom if you want to see.”

  “No!” I said. “Gee, look at the time. I have to go now.”

  Diesel wrapped an arm around me. “We can take a couple minutes to check out the dude’s bedroom,” Diesel said. “I bet he keeps his inheritance in there.”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care,” I said.

  “Has Shirley seen your inheritance?” Diesel asked Lenny.

  “Nope. Nobody’s seen it but me and good ol’ deader-than-a-doorknob Uncle Phil. And nobody’s gonna see it, either, because I can keep a secret. You can ask my wife. Oops, I mean ex-wife. She didn’t know about lots of things. And then when she found out, she turned into a real party pooper.”

  “Did you tell her about your inheritance?” I asked.

  “No. I told her about my paddle collection and my cyber slut. I thought she’d be excited, but she packed her bags and left.”

  “Gosh, go figure,” I said, thinking I’d touched the Ping-Pong paddle, wondering if I had hand sanitizer in my purse.

  “When did you start collecting paddles?” Diesel asked Lenny.

  Lenny rocked back on his heels. “Five or six years ago. One day, it just came over me that I needed a good whacking. And now I can’t get enough of it.”

  “Jeez,” I said.

  Diesel leaned close, his lips brushing my ear. “At least it’s not fattening.”

  If I had to make a choice between getting disciplined by the cyber slut or gaining a hundred pounds, I’d probably go with the cupcake obsession.

  “We need to talk to you about the inheritance,” I said.

  “Sure. What about it?”

  “Where is it?”

  “That’s for you to know and me to find out,” Lenny said.

  Diesel and I exchanged glances. Lenny was snockered. Helpful for extracting information. Not helpful if he didn’t make any more sense than Shirley.

  “Is it in the bedroom?” I asked.

  “Used to be.” He looked into his glass. “Empty,” he said. “So sad.”

  “He needs food,” I said to Diesel.

  Diesel opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “A half-empty bottle of Aquavit, a can of Crisco, and a rubber chicken. That’s it.”

  “There’s no food in here,” I said to Lenny.

  Lenny stuck his head in the fridge. “There’s a chicken.”

  “It’s rubber,” Diesel said, looking like he was going to rupture something trying not to laugh out loud.

  “Is that bad?” Leonard asked.

  I looked around the kitchen. No bread. No fruit. No coffeemaker. No kitchen knives. No cookie jar. The lone metal spatula I’d tested was propped up in the dish drain. I now had new concerns about its use. I ransacked the cupboards and came up with a box of granola bars. I gave one to Diesel and one to Lenny.

  “About the inheritance,” I said to Lenny.

  “Can’t get it,” Lenny said. “It’s booby-trapped.”

  “Yes, but you know how to disarm it, right?”

  Lenny shoved half a granola bar into his mouth. “Nuh. Didn’t think of that. It was during the divorce, and the party pooper took the toaster, and so I got this idea that she was after my inheritance, so I hid it and booby-trapped it. I was doing recreational drinking at the time. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s a piece of junk.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said to Lenny. “It turns out your inheritance might be . . . enchanted.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “Of course you care. It’s a Gluttonoid.”

  Diesel grinned at me and rocked back on his heels. “Gluttonoid. Boy, that’s a great name. How’d you ever come up with that one?”

  Lenny slumped against the counter. “What’s a Gluttonoid?”

  “It’s an object that turns people into gluttons. In your case, you’re a glutton for punishment. If we remove the object, there’s a good chance you’ll return to normal,” I told him.

  “No more hanky panky spanky?” Lenny asked. “What if I’m a bad boy?”

  “Dude, you’re freaking me out,” Diesel said. “Get a grip.”

  “This is creepy. And I don’t like the whole booby-trap thing,” I said to Diesel. “Why don’t we let Wulf get this one? With any luck, he’ll blow himself up.”

  Diesel looked at Lenny. “Tell me about the booby trap. Are we talking major explosion?”

  “Not atomic,” Lenny said.

  “Would it kill Superman?”

  “You’d need kryptonite to do that.”

  “Okay, how about Batman?”

  “I don’t know. Batman is tricky.”

  “So the let-Wulf-get-the-charm plan won’t work,” Diesel said to me. “Doesn’t sound like we can count on it to kill him.”

  The house was around two thousand square feet. Living room, dining room, kitchen, powder room, mudroom leading to the back door. The bedrooms were obviously upstairs. Impossible to know if Lenny had gone to the dark side because of the charm, but going on the assumption that this was the case, I thought the charm most likely was in the house. Hard to believe any of this was real but even more difficult to believe the charm could leak onto someone without consistent exposure. And if I booby-trapped something in my house, it wouldn’t be in a high-traffic area. I’d want it out of the way, hidden from sight.

  “Do you have a cellar?” I asked Lenny.

  “Yep.”

  “Did you hide your inheritance in your cellar?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know for sure?”

  “I’d had a lot to drink. A real lot. And I tried a bunch of different places before I settled. And it was a long time ago.”

  “Your wife’s only been gone for three months,” Diesel said.

  “She was a party pooper,” Lenny said. “Did I already tell you that? Anyway, you can look around the cellar if you want, but I’m not going. It’s scary down there. And I might have booby-trapped it.”

  Diesel opened the cellar door and went down the steep, narrow stairwell. He got to the bottom and looked back at me.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Are you coming down?”

  “No.”

  He was wearing jeans and a cream-colored cotton crew-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. His teeth were white against his beach bum tan. And he was looking very big in the small cellar.

  “There are some things I’d like you to hold,” he said.

  “I bet.”

  “I meant potential charm things.”

  “I knew that. Are you sure it’s safe down there?”

  He did arms outstretched. “No bad guys or obvious booby traps.”

  “What about spiders?”

  “Haven’t seen any.”

  I cautiously crept down the stairs, stood next to Diesel, and looked around. The cellar floor was crudely poured cement. The walls were mortar and stone. A bare 60-watt bulb lit the space. The air was cool and damp and smelled musty, like rotting wood and mildew. The ceiling was riddled with pipes, and wires running along support beams. The water heater and furnace were to one side. The rest of the cellar was cluttered with plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

  “You don’t expect me to go through all these bins and boxes, do you?” I asked Diesel.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll take hours. And what about the hiding and the booby-trapping? This stuff’s just sitting here.”

  “No stone unturned,” Diesel said. “No pun intended.”

 
Okay, let’s get this out in the open. First, I’m a big coward. I don’t like the idea of getting blown up, and I don’t like spiders. I know at first glance we don’t see any spiders, but they’re sneaky. They hide in places and then jump out at you. And second, what about my muffins and my cookbook? I don’t have time to save the world. I need cookbook money to fix my foundation, or my house is going to fall over. And third, this whole thing is weirding me out. It would make a good television show, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen in real life.

  “If we go back to my house, you can eat more muffins,” I said to Diesel.

  “If we stay here and go through these bins, I’ll get out of your bed.”

  “Really?”

  “Scout’s honor,” Diesel said, wrangling the lid off a plastic bin.

  I looked inside the bin and found it was filled with sheet music for classical guitar. The second bin Diesel opened held CDs. Opera, guitar, symphonies. A lot of Haydn and Mozart and artists out of my scope of knowledge.

  “Hey, Lenny!” I yelled up the stairs. “Do you play the guitar?”

  “Used to,” he said. “Traded it for a fraternity paddle used in the movie Animal House. It’s a collector’s item.”

  “That’s so sad,” I said to Diesel. “He had a whole other life before his inheritance.”

  “Focus,” Diesel said. “At the risk of seeming insensitive, I don’t care about his life then or now. I care about the charm. Anyway, he’s got the paddle used in Animal House. I’m jealous.”

  Fortunately, the rest of the bins contained neatly folded men’s clothes, which was sad only in Lenny’s sometimes unfortunate choices in ties. I ripped through the bins in record time, and Diesel opened the first of the boxes.

  “Are you okay up there?” he called to Leonard.

  “I want a pizza.”

  “We have three boxes to check out, and then it’s pizza time,” Diesel told him.

  The boxes were filled with the sort of junk you acquire over a lifetime and can’t discard but no longer need. A baseball mitt, a broken stapler, a bunch of photos, Hardy Boys books, a commemorative chunk of the Berlin Wall, a cassette player, a bicycle chain, his high school yearbook, a kitty litter scooper.

  I was making my way through the last box when there was a whoosh of air, the cellar door slammed shut, and the light went out, throwing us into utter blackness. Diesel moved flat against my back, his arm tight around my waist. There was thirty seconds of wind screaming on the other side of the door, and then all was quiet and the light blinked back on.

  “What was th-th-that?” I asked, my heart knocking around in my chest.

  Diesel took my hand and tugged me up the stairs. “That was Wulf.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Not anymore.” Diesel opened the cellar door and stepped into the kitchen. “And neither is Lenny.”

  “Where’d they go? Are you sure Lenny isn’t here?” I looked around the kitchen. Nothing was out of place. No sign of struggle. No damage from the howling wind. “It sounded like a tornado blew through here. Why aren’t things tossed around?”

  “I guess that wasn’t part of the show,” Diesel said.

  “And you think it was Wulf?”

  “I know it was Wulf. I can sense his presence.”

  “How?”

  “I know his scent. The air pressure changes. I get a cramp in my ass.”

  I didn’t notice a change in the air pressure, and my nose was still stuffed with cellar smells. Fine by me. I didn’t want to add any more special skills to my Unmentionableness. I already had one too many. I could deal with baking Unmentionable cupcakes. I’d like to lose the empowered objects thing.

  “Where did Wulf take Lenny?” I asked Diesel.

  Diesel shrugged. “Someplace to talk.”

  I had a really icky feeling in my stomach. Lenny was creepy, but he didn’t seem like a bad person, and I wasn’t happy about him being whisked away.

  “Wulf won’t do the death claw on him, will he?”

  “Not as long as he needs him,” Diesel said. “A dead man can’t tell you where the treasure is hidden. If we weren’t here, I’m sure Wulf would have stayed and had Steven Hatchet sweep the house.”

  “So now what? Do we chase Wulf down and duke it out with him?”

  “That would be the movie version. In the real-life version, we go through the rest of the house and look for the inheritance.”

  I wasn’t crazy about either of the versions. I wanted to get back to my muffins.

  “The muffins will wait,” Diesel said. “Let’s start upstairs.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There were three bedrooms upstairs. I stepped into the master first, immediately turned to leave, and bumped into Diesel.

  “Out of my way,” I said to him. “You can’t make me go in there.”

  “Of course I can,” he said. “Look how big and strong I am. And I’m insensitive, too.”

  The bed was a tangled mess of twisted sheets and lumpy pillows without pillowcases. Empty liquor and beer bottles were everywhere. Drawers were open with clothes spilling out, and dirty clothes were scattered across the floor, interspersed with crumpled fast-food wrappers, half-eaten bags of chips, two roaches the size of lab mice taking a feet-up permanent siesta, and another rubber chicken.

  “I’m not touching any of this,” I said to Diesel. “And I’m especially not touching whatever is hanging on the doorknob.”

  Diesel checked out the doorknob. “It’s underwear.”

  “Ick!”

  “He’s a single guy,” Diesel said. “This is the way we live.”

  I looked at him, and I think my eyes went blank for a moment and my mouth dropped open.

  “Not me,” Diesel said, smiling. “But some guys.”

  I did serious mental eye-rolling. “Where do we begin?”

  “Look for something that might contain a charm, and be careful not to explode yourself.”

  I cautiously picked through the mess, testing out watches, shoes, beer bottles, belt buckles, and the rubber chicken. Nothing glowed or felt warm.

  “This is stupid,” I said to Diesel. “It’s none of these things. We should be looking for a booby trap.”

  “Problem is, most of the time you don’t recognize a good booby trap until it’s too late,” Diesel said.

  “Have you ever been booby-trapped?”

  “Yeah, and it’s usually not pleasant.”

  It took a while to get through the master, but things went faster with bedrooms two and three. The furniture had been removed from these rooms, leaving only a few dents in the carpet as evidence of habitation.

  “Looks to me like the Missus backed the truck up to this house before Lenny even knew she was leaving,” Diesel said. “He got picked clean.”

  We went downstairs and searched the living room. Not hard to do, since the furniture consisted of a matching brown leather couch and chair that had seen better days. Probably picked up at a yard sale after his ex-wife took the good stuff. No furniture in the dining room. That left the kitchen, and I’d already handled everything that wasn’t nailed down in the kitchen.

  “Let’s think about this for a minute,” Diesel said. “We’ve done the object-touching routine, and I’ve had my eyes open for anything remotely resembling a booby trap or secret hiding place. What have we missed?”

  “Maybe it’s not in the house. Maybe it’s in his car or his office.”

  “If we’re to believe him, he was drunk when he hid the inheritance, so it had to be something fairly easy to do. I think that leaves out his office, and probably his car. Most likely, he set the device when he was relatively sober and then walked around the house with a bottle of liquor in his hand, trying to decide on a hiding place.”

  “We didn’t check appliances,” I said, peering into the microwave, flipping the door down on the dishwasher. I opened the oven and burst out laughing. There was a rubber chicken in the oven.

  “What’s with these chickens
?” I asked Diesel. “He’s got a rubber chicken fixation.”

  I took the chicken out of the oven, held it by its long skinny neck, and a metal-and-glass cylinder fell out of its butt.

  “Uh-oh,” Diesel said.

  An instant later, he had his hand clamped onto my wrist, pulling and shoving me out the kitchen door, half carrying me in a sprint across the small backyard. We were maybe thirty feet from the house when there was an explosion, followed by a second mega-explosion. The second explosion blew the back of the house apart and sent us sprawling. I felt Diesel roll on top of me, and all around us, debris was falling out of the sky. Bits of paper and wood and flaming chunks of mystery material. Diesel got to his feet, dragged me up beside him, and we moved into the adjoining backyard.

  “Looks like you found the booby trap,” Diesel said.

  I had my fingers curled into his shirt in a death grip, and I was babbling. “What the? How? Who?”

  Diesel pried my fingers open. “Honey, I love that you’ve got ahold of me, but I think you’ve got some chest hairs in there.”

  Flames raced up the side of what was left of Lenny’s house and black smoke billowed into the sky. Sirens screamed a couple blocks away and people were stepping out of their houses and gathering in the street.

  “There isn’t going to be anything left of Lenny’s house,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.

  “Yeah,” Diesel said. “The historical society’s going to be pissed.”

  “It’s so horrible. Everything’s gone. All his treasures from high school. All his sheet music. All his clothes.”

  Diesel had an arm wrapped around me. “Don’t forget his paddle collection, and his inheritance.”

  “Omigosh. His inheritance! It must have gotten blown up into smithereens. We’ll never find it.”

  “No, but Wulf won’t find it, either. And that’s what we really care about.”

  We walked around to the front of the house and watched the spectacle for a while. A police car was the first on the scene. A fire truck arrived seconds later. More cop cars and fire trucks. Two EMT trucks. They’d responded fast, but the house had burned even faster. By the time the hoses were working, there wasn’t much left to save.