Ding Dong Dead Part 1

Ding Dong Dead.

by Deb Baker.

1.

Doll museums can be found in the most unlikely places. Doll shop owners know how to locate the museums that aren't publicly advertised. Shops tend to be family affairs. Grandma might have been a serious collector who had a private collection on display for friends and family. You never know when a door will open and you will have the opportunity to view a rare and valuable museum-quality collection.

-From World of Dolls by Caroline Birch

Gretchen Birch looked down at the ten-card spread, wishing her aunt had chosen a different preoccupation. Nina wore a head scarf for dramatic effect. "You drew all bardo cards!" she whispered in her husky voice. "Out of a deck of seventy-eight tarot cards, only thirteen of them are negative. How could this happen?"

Nina stared at the cards, worry creased on her forehead.

Gretchen glanced over at the contemporary doll reference book she had been using to research a one-of-a-kind Shirley Temple. That was before Nina had burst into her workshop with her tiny diva dog, Tutu, and distracted Gretchen from her real work. She was a doll restoration artist and needed to restyle a unique Shirley Temple doll's hair exactly as it had been in the 1930s. The customer expected the doll back today.

Nina cleared her voice. "You are in imminent danger unless you overcome external influences. The cards show despair and futility!"

Despair. Futility.

Gretchen glanced sharply across the table at her aunt. Old-fashioned words coming from the New Age queen.

"Your unconscious mind picked the cards," Aunt Nina said. "You can't blame me."

The tarot deck ill.u.s.trated full scenes, complete with figures and symbols. Gretchen's ten cards, all faceup, depicted steely swords and women wearing blindfolds, their arms pinned to their sides with bindings. Had Gretchen believed in this stuff, she would have been concerned. She pointed at one of the cards. "Three swords slicing through a red heart. What does that mean?"

"Sorrow and strife. It's your final outcome card, the results of the other influences, and your destiny, if you don't change your path."

Wobbles, Gretchen's companion cat, stretched out on the sofa, watching the two women. The black tomcat was missing a back leg, consequences of a hit-and-run car accident, but he had adapted well to his disability. He stared at Gretchen without blinking.

"Aren't you supposed to give me positive guidance?" Gretchen asked. "This is all doom and gloom."

"I'm only the interpreter. I can't help it that you selected negative cards."

"Can we reshuffle?"

Nina shook her head. "No. See this?" She held up a card. "The nine of wands. This card means you have a hidden enemy. My advice is to quit your present path."

"How do I do that?"

"Don't do the museum project, or at least turn it over to someone else."

"I can't do that." The Phoenix Dollers Club was hard at work on a luncheon and play presentation to benefit a house that they were converting into a museum, an unexpected opportunity they couldn't pa.s.s up. "We've started rehearsals," Gretchen said. "The play must go on."

"I can't force you, of course. You've always been willful. But I'm warning you, Gretchen. Don't take a pa.s.sive approach to your life. You can change your future."

Aunt Nina had come a long way with her readings. Last month she'd still been using an instruction booklet. She didn't need it any longer. "After the information presented in these cards, I'll have to stay close by and protect you from yourself."

"I'm a big girl, Nina."

"Even big girls make mistakes." She held up one of the other cards on the table.

"The nine of swords," Gretchen's aunt said. "Misfortune! Ruin! Pain!"

2.

May Day. May 1. Instead of dancing around a maypole with multicolored ribbons streaming behind her, Gretchen was crouched on the rough ground, surrounded by desert shrubs and cacti. Yet in spite of her surroundings, Gretchen felt like the May Queen.

"There," Matt said, squatting on the ground next to her. The wonderful and familiar aroma of his Chrome cologne wafted through the air. "That's the spot." She heard excitement in his voice. She was right there with him, feeling it, too.

She could think of worse things than spending the final hour right before dusk on the hard earth of Phoenix's Camelback Mountain beside the man she'd been l.u.s.ting after. Not that she would ever admit to l.u.s.ting. But she was.

In fact, she was l.u.s.ting this very minute. Three months into their relationship and they still were performing the opening act of the mating ritual, as they had agreed. First-base kid stuff. Both of them were recovering from bad relationships; Gretchen from discovering that her longtime lover had a fidelity problem, Matt from a marriage to an unfaithful wife that had ended in a messy divorce. They had agreed to take it slowly, not rush into anything too intimate.

Slow was okay with Gretchen, but according to Nina this was getting ridiculous. "You're adults," she'd said. "Not teenagers. Lose the clothes." At the moment, lying p.r.o.ne next to Matt on a secluded ridge on the mountain, Gretchen agreed with her aunt.

She should be savoring every moment of the romance, all the richness and wonderfully complex emotions that go with it. Instead, the s.e.xual tension was growing between them every day. Matt had to be feeling it, too, but it wasn't a subject she felt comfortable discussing with him.

They had taken to crawling around on mountains, observing the mating habits of other species. Not exactly the best solution to built-up frustration.

"Right there," Matt said.

Gretchen looked in the direction he indicated, getting her bearings before leveling the binoculars. She gasped involuntarily as she trained the lenses on a mesquite bush and found it. Yes. Another bird to add to her growing life list.

A male phainopepla-shiny black with a long tail and a tall crest, just like the picture in her bird book.

"Wheeda-lay," it called.

The female flew in and landed next to her partner.

A couple, like Matt and Gretchen. A pair. After the final heart-wrenching discoveries before her fiance became her ex, she was staying cautiously optimistic.

Gretchen could see the female phainopepla's signature red eyes. "How do you p.r.o.nounce the name again?" She was a better climber than Matt, but he knew his birds and their calls.

"Fay-no-PEP-la. Do you see both of them?"

"Yes." Still holding the binoculars to her eyes, she watched the pair take off together as though on cue.

"Did you see the white patch on top of the wing?"

"Yes."

Gretchen lowered the binoculars. Matt wasn't watching the birds fly off. He was gazing steadily at her. He flashed a smile. The guy had the best smile in the world. "Come here," he said, sitting down and reaching out to her.

She scooted over and they kissed under an enormous saguaro cactus, its white flowers closed since late afternoon. After nightfall they would open again. The romantic in Gretchen wanted to stay, watch them reopen, let nature take its course.

"I know what you're thinking," Matt said.

"Really?" She hoped not.

"Let me show you."

The second kiss should have been sweeter than the first, but instead Gretchen felt the familiar and highly annoying vibration of his cell phone.

Matt released her abruptly and raised the phone to his ear. "Detective Albright," he said, suddenly all business.

Gretchen sat up straight and allowed herself an internal moan. She wanted to throw his phone off a cliff. She was used to long hours spent apart from Steve, her ex-fiance. He was an attorney, driven to make partner, but Matt's career as a Phoenix detective seemed to consume him even more. His work cut into the tiny amount of time they found for each other. It would take some getting used to.

She saw the hard edge to his jaw, the narrowing eyes. She could feel the distance between them growing as it always did when he switched into work mode.

Just great. Here it comes.

"Gotta go," he said, snapping the phone closed and rising. "I'm sorry."

"Me, too."

They began the descent, Matt moving faster than she thought safe.

"Be careful," she warned, hopping from rock to rock. "Don't slip."

"As soon as we're in the car, call your mother. Ask her to pick you up at Eternal View Cemetery. I'll be busy for the rest of the night."

Stones gave way under his feet.

"Slow down," she warned again.

Amateurs! They thought the hardest part of a mountain climb was the ascent, but beginners suffered more injuries on the way back down by becoming too relaxed, too careless. Gretchen took a final moment to look out over the Sonoran Desert, at the city of Phoenix spread out below. She slowed to take it in and to consider lost possibilities and opportunities.

If only she'd destroyed his phone.

"Hurry up, please." Matt kept going.

"All right. I'm coming. Tell me what happened."

"A homicide."

"In Eternal View Cemetery?"

"Yes."

Gretchen glanced at Matt, taking in his broad shoulders and lean, muscled back. How could he do this job? And could she deal with the hours and the internal baggage that had to come with his work? Was this really what she wanted? A guy who seemed to crave danger, who mingled with drug addicts and pedophiles and killers and who knew what else?

Gretchen didn't know what the distant future held for them, but here in the present she knew she wanted Matt Albright.

Slow down, she reminded herself as they reached the trailhead, she reminded herself as they reached the trailhead, step cautiously in this relationship in the same way you've learned to traverse rocky terrain. step cautiously in this relationship in the same way you've learned to traverse rocky terrain.

Once in his car, Gretchen attempted to reach her mother. Caroline didn't answer the home phone or her cell. Gretchen left voice messages at both locations.

Matt was on his cell phone, immersed in a world of human atrocities and blight that Gretchen hadn't been able to understand or imagine. Tonight, she would get her first chance.

Should she try to find Nina for a ride home? As soon as she thought of her aunt, she rejected the idea. Nina would flip out if she had to enter a cemetery at night, let alone one where there'd been a recent murder. Aunt Nina avoided places where negative energy lurked. One of her many quirks, right up there with her claims of colored auras and psychic messages.

Matt sped along Twenty-fourth Street and turned onto Camelback Road, heading toward the cemetery. He reached over and squeezed her shoulder, sending an electrical charge down her spine.

"I really am am sorry," he said. sorry," he said.

"It's okay."

"We were having such a great time."

"Wonderful," she agreed. "And I have a faynodoodad to add to my life list."

Matt laughed, but with an edge that told her he was paying only slight attention. His mind was elsewhere. "You're going to have to learn to p.r.o.nounce its name properly. That's one of the most important birding rules."

"You made that up."

"On the spot."

Ahead Gretchen saw lights flashing. Matt rolled down the window when a police officer walked up to the car. Matt flipped out identification, so impatient to get to the scene that the wheels still inched forward. "Let Caroline Birch through when she arrives," he said once the cop recognized him and waved them through.

"You're taking me inside the cemetery with you?" Gretchen had hoped he would, but hadn't expected it. He could have dropped her at the entrance to wait for her mother. Instead, she really would have the opportunity to observe him in the field.

How romantic!

"A gorgeous woman like you? The cops would be all over you. No way am I taking that chance." He flashed a quick smile. "And you know how vulnerable a woman alone is. I want you to wait in the car. Keep the doors locked until your mom gets here."

Another cop waved them through a second checkpoint.

"It happened in the old section," Matt said, driving toward the back of the cemetery. He parked behind a line of cars. A van was already positioned between the headstones, its back doors wide open. Gretchen could see a gurney inside. She looked away.

"The medical examiner beat us," he said, swinging out of the car. "Be good. Stay in the car."

He walked rapidly away before Gretchen could reply.