Scarlet Nights Read online

  “If it’s that brother of yours and he makes you cry again, I’ll—”

  “It’s Sara.” Tess read the text and burst into tears.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Rams said as he snatched the little machine from his wife.

  “Good cry. Good news,” Tess sobbed. “Hormones.”

  “Yeah, I know. They’re six hundred times normal.” He was pushing buttons to bring up Sara’s message. “Damnation!” he muttered. “I’m going to have to talk to my cousin about sending porno over the airwaves.”

  Tess blew her nose. “You’re a prude. Give that back to me.”

  Grimacing, he handed her the phone.

  “I’m going to get Joce to tell me the details. Oh! But I wish we could go home.” Again, she looked at Sara’s text message.

  YOUR BROTHER PUT WHISKER BURNS ALL OVER MY BODY. DIDN’T MISS A SPOT. HE ASKED ME TO GO TO FORT LAUDERDALE TO LIVE WITH HIM. SARA.

  Sara spent over an hour with Joce, helping her memorize her lines for her role as a fortune-teller. Luke had ordered a copy of a fortune-telling book published in 1891 that explained how fortunes had been told for centuries by people without any psychic ability.

  “Okay,” Sara said, “let’s go over it again,” even though she knew Joce had it down pat.

  “To an unmarried woman, I say, ‘You are often lonely, but at the same time, you enjoy your time alone.’ To a married woman, I say, ‘You often feel that your husband doesn’t understand you.’” Joce glanced down again. “An older man gets, ‘You were once unfairly punished for a good deed you did someone.’” She looked at Sara. “Do you think that’s universal enough that every old man will think it’s true?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me what you think after you’ve told a hundred fortunes.”

  Joce looked back at her cards. “Mike told me to tell every woman over thirty this one. ‘Something you’ve been planning for a long time is about to come true.’ And Luke saw on TV that if you say, ‘You are one person to the world and another one in private,’ everyone will agree with you.”

  “That’s true for me, what about you?”

  “Sure, of course. Don’t you think you should go make yourself pretty? It’s getting late. Will … will Greg be there?”

  “I don’t know. I know he’s been released, but Mike won’t tell me where he is, so I don’t know how long it’ll take him to get here. Mike wants me to be surprised when Greg shows up.”

  “A surprise is when you’re told you’re carrying two babies instead of one. Seeing a man who wants to kill you is your brakes failing on a mountain road. That is not what I’d term a ‘surprise.’” She paused. “Sara …”

  “I know. I can’t think about any of this or I’ll get scared. Mike will be there, and he’s going to talk to the Fraziers and …” She looked back at Joce. “It’ll be all right. You want to go over the cards again?”

  “No, I think I have it. Some of these things that are said to people make me sick.” She picked up a card. “The book said that older, unmarried women are the most likely to go to fortune-tellers because they’re desperate in their attempt to find a good man. It says the woman is frequently lonely and bitter, and the clue that this woman will pay for help is her use of sarcasm.”

  “Did they work hard to figure that one out?” Sara said, and they laughed.

  Waving, she left the room. As she reached the back door, she looked up and saw Mr. Lang’s old truck drive in, and the back looked to be full. “Uh, Joce,” she called. “I sort of volunteered the use of your kitchen to Mr. Lang and I said you’d chop things for him.”

  “You did what?!” Joce yelled, but Sara had already slipped out the door.

  25

  WHEN MIKE GOT in his car, he had every intention of going to Ellie’s to get dressed, but he kept thinking about Lang’s house. Earlier, while Sara and Lang had been rambling on about cookies, he was looking at the room with an eye to bringing it up to a livable code. But something hadn’t been right. He hadn’t seen anything wrong or out of place or even odd—but he’d felt it. Of course Lang was lying about most everything he’d said, but that seemed to be his MO. As far as Mike could tell, the old man didn’t seem to know how to tell the truth—or all of it, anyway. It was no wonder Lang thought Mike was his relative, Mike thought. They had a lot in common.

  Whatever Mike had seen that morning was still haunting him, so he was going back to the farm to have a closer look.

  As he pulled up next to the old house, he realized that it was because of Sara that he could make this impromptu visit. It had been her idea to replace Lang’s dogs, so the animals knew Mike. Had Lang adopted dogs on his own, Mike probably wouldn’t have been able to walk onto the property as easily. Also, Sara got rid of Lang for the afternoon. Poor Joce.

  It took Mike only twenty minutes inside the house to find what he was looking for. Electricity, he thought. Who could have imagined that electrical cords and lightbulbs would bring the downfall of criminals?

  When Mike found what so many people had been looking for, he was so jubilant he wanted to call Sara and tell her—but he couldn’t. It was better that she didn’t know what was going on. Instead, he called Luke. From the background noise, he was at the fairgrounds. “Are you busy?”

  “Everyone in this town is asking me to do so many things that I’m ready to take a pistol to them,” Luke said in exasperation. “The answer is no, I’m not busy at all.”

  “I need your help,” Mike said, “and I’ve solved the case.”

  “Did you find Mitzi or did you figure out what they want?”

  “I have what they’re after. Could you meet me at Merlin’s Farm with your truck ASAP?”

  “Ten minutes too long?”

  “Yeah. Cut it shorter.” He could hear Luke beginning to run as he held the phone to his ear. “If I call Sara’s mother, will she help me or lecture me about some damned skirt I’m supposed to put on?”

  “She’ll do whatever’s needed to protect her daughter. Want me to call her for you?”

  “Naw.” Mike could hear Luke starting his truck. “I now have a mother-in-law, and I think I should learn to deal with her.”

  “Good luck on that,” Luke said as he snapped his phone shut. Six minutes later, after Mike had called Ellie and said he couldn’t be there right now but to please not tell Sara, Luke skidded into the driveway of Merlin’s Farm. The dogs went crazy barking, but Mike told them to sit and stay, and they obeyed.

  “Let me show you what I found,” Mike said and led the way into the house to the treasure trove in the secret closet.

  A few minutes later he called Tess to find out the details about Sara’s rights of ownership of the paintings he’d found. She turned the phone over to Ramsey, for him to explain.

  Under the terms of her Aunt Lissie’s will, all the paintings were owned by Sara. “I leave all CAY’s paintings to my dear niece,” the will said. At the time the will was written, there’d been only one watercolor, the funny one with the purple ducks. But it was Ramsey’s father, Benjamin, who’d added the word “all” when he drew up the will. He’d said he wanted to be covered in case more showed up.

  “Since you now own the house,” Rams said to Mike, “there might be a case for you to sue her for ownership.” When Mike didn’t bother to reply to that, Ramsey laughed in an approving way. “You didn’t ask, but legally, the rest of the things in the closet belong to you.”

  “Everything will be given to the descendants of the owners,” Mike said quickly.

  “Good,” Rams said softly. “Let me know when it’s safe for us to go home. Tess and I miss everyone. And, by the way, I heard you and Sara are staying together. Congratulations.”

  Again, that old feeling of hating everyone knowing his business went through Mike, especially since he’d never met this man. “Thanks,” he managed to say.

  “And I guess you won’t be needing any financial help with restoring Merlin’s Farm.”

  Even though Rams said it in the to