Icing Allison Read online

  Nick’s booming voice made me jump. I heard “No way!” and “That’s not possible!” and a lot of very bad words, shouted at high volume.

  Skye shoved me out of the way and yanked the door open. I’d been so intent on eavesdropping, I hadn’t noticed her lurking behind me. “What did he say, Nick?” she demanded, at full volume. “How much are you getting? Tell me!”

  “Jane?”

  I turned to see a worried-looking Joleen coming down the hallway toward me. Her husband trailed after her, along with Poppy and Beau. Meanwhile the door to the office stood open and Nick was still hollering and cursing.

  “She put me in her will,” he yelled. “Right after we got married. She left most of it to me.”

  I caught Beau’s eye. “It’s nothing. I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you just get everyone...” I flapped my hand.

  He seemed to get the message. So did Poppy. The couple steered Allison’s parents back toward the living room. “Jane has this under control,” he told them.

  Oh yeah, I thought, I have this so under control. I slipped inside the office and shut the door behind me. “Guys, I need you to hold it d—”

  “I saw the damn will,” Nick snarled, getting right in Sten’s face. The lawyer didn’t blink. “She showed it to me. I get two-thirds. I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, old man, but you won’t get away with—”

  “Allison recently changed her will.” Sten’s voice was steady, the pace of his speech as leisurely as always. I’m sure he’d handled far tougher customers in his nearly five decades of legal practice. “I am assuming you have not seen the revised version.”

  Nick gaped at him, his face blotchy with rage. Had I really considered this guy painfully handsome? “She cut me out? I don’t believe it. Allison wouldn’t do that. She loved me.”

  “He’s the husband!” Skye screamed, her own face practically crimson. “He has rights!”

  “Normally that would be the case,” Sten drawled. “In New York a spouse has what’s called a ‘right of election’ to one third of the estate.”

  Nick turned to me. “Can this guy talk any faster?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “So he gets a third,” Skye said. “That’s still a lot, right? I mean, Mitchell left her about twelve million bucks, right?” I could see her doing the math in her head.

  If you’re wondering why Skye cared so much about Nick’s inheritance, what her stake was in all this, then all I can say is, you’re pretty slow on the uptake. I figured it out right away, just listening to the two of them harangue Sten. I mean, think about it. What would prompt a wife to cut her husband out of her will? What’s the first thing that pops into your head? Oh, come on, the darn thing’s waving sparklers and screaming into a megaphone.

  Now you’re getting it. And with her best friend, no less.

  “A third’s better than nothing,” Nick said. “I can live with a third.”

  “I said normally a spouse is entitled to that amount,” Sten said. “A spouse can choose to forfeit the right to inherit.”

  “Well, I don’t choose to forfeit anything,” Nick said with a smirk. “Why would I do that?”

  “You already did it,” Sten said, “when you signed your antenuptial agreement before the wedding.”

  Nick frowned in confusion. “My ante-what? What are you talking about?”

  Sten switched to the less lawyerly term. “Your prenuptial agreement.”

  Skye wheeled on Nick. “You signed a prenup?”

  “No, wait a minute.” Nick raised his hands as if to forestall the inevitable. “That was just a formality, you know? Like, if we got divorced I couldn’t take all her money.”

  “That prenup,” Sten said, “included a waiver of your right of election. Allison was under no legal obligation to leave you any of her assets.”

  “You idiot!” Skye shoved Nick’s chest, hard. “You slipped up. She found out about us.”

  “No! I never said a word. There’s no way she could have known.”

  “Wake up, Nick!” Skye got right in his face. “She was going to divorce you.”

  “No way! Allison loved me.” Uncertainty turned the statement into a whine. He turned to his late wife’s lawyer. “Is it true? Did Allison want a divorce?”

  Sten said, “Anything I discuss with my clients is confid—”

  “Tell me!” Nick cried. “I have a right to know.”

  Sten remained silent, his expression stoical.

  It was answer enough. Nick’s eyes bulged. A vein throbbed in his temple. I tensed, ready to throw myself at him if he went after the older man. “I was tricked into signing that prenup,” he said, spittle flying. “I want to see that thing right now.”

  “You have your own copy,” Sten said. “If you’ll recall, you did not see the need to engage a separate attorney to protect your rights. However, I insisted you do so, specifically to forestall a future challenge to its legality. Does any of this sound familiar, Nick? We are talking about events that occurred only four months ago.”

  “Then my lawyer was incompetent,” Nick blustered. “I’m going to get this thing overturned.”

  Skye stabbed a finger at Sten’s chest while he stood tall and sober. “And then we’re going to sue your sorry ass. You’re going to lose your license to practice law. When you pull slimy crap like this, there are consequences!”

  Nick pulled her to him, wrapped his arm protectively around her shoulders. “Don’t get so worked up, bunny,” he told her. “Think about the baby.”

  This just kept getting better and better.

  Oh, please. With everything these two were throwing at Sten, I wasn’t allowed to get my snark on? Not even a little? Boy, are you strict.

  “Your attorney was perfectly competent,” Sten told Nick. “The document was fully explained to you, and you expressed comprehension of its contents. Naturally, you are free to pursue a challenge, but it would be expensive and you would lose.”

  Skye threw off Nick’s arm as if his touch revolted her. “So who did she leave it all to?” she demanded.

  “The beneficiaries have yet to be notified,” Sten said. “Until they are, I have no intention of divulging—”

  She interrupted him with a savage curse and flung open the door, startling a gaggle of eavesdroppers, who leapt back as one.

  “Bunny,” Nick pleaded, “stay here with me. I need y—”

  “Go to hell!” She shoved past the gawkers and sprinted down the hallway.

  3

  A Fungi to Guess Passwords With

  THAT NIGHT I GOT ready for bed around eleven o’clock but realized I was too wound up from the events of the day to go to sleep. I tied the sash of my fuzzy yellow robe and padded back downstairs in my slippers. Sexy Beast followed me, grumbling. He’s a creature of habit and believes in retiring punctually at a civilized hour every night. But his strong pack instinct won’t let him sleep alone while his alpha female is rattling around downstairs, getting into all sorts of mischief and risking attack by whatever beasts and intruders he imagines might crawl through the window in his absence.

  In the kitchen I poured myself a small shot of excellent añejo tequila, a gift from Martin during the summer when he’d been trying to talk me into letting him bunk at my place for a while. Okay, that’s not strictly accurate. By the time I’d discovered his intentions, he’d already moved in. The insanely expensive tequila had been intended as both a distraction and a bribe. If I tell you it worked, will you think less of me?

  You were supposed to say no.

  And for the record, the padre had slept in the first-floor maid’s room and never once tried to slip into the master bedroom. I would have been ready if he had. You may take that any way you want.

  “Cheers, SB.” I took the first small sip and shivered as a trail of golden heat streaked down my gullet. Sexy Beast emitted a snort of disapproval. He can be so prissy sometimes.

  Suddenly I remembered the mushroom-shaped salt shak
er Allison’s mom had given me. My purse sat on the granite kitchen island. I rooted around in it, located the little piece of pottery, and unwrapped it. It looked even prettier and more distinctive by itself, away from the rest of Allison’s pottery collection.

  Well, no reason not to use the shaker for its intended purpose. I retrieved the cylindrical box of salt from a cabinet and pried the small cork from the bottom of the shaker. That’s when I got my first surprise.

  Stuck to the inside surface of the cork was a blob of soft putty, the kind people use to attach posters to walls. The end of a small metal object was stuck into the putty. I peered closely at it, turned it this way and that. It appeared to be a flash drive. Jeez, these things were getting smaller all the time. This one was just over an inch long.

  I plucked the flash drive off the putty, which had kept it from rattling around in the shaker. I’d have to call Joleen in the morning and arrange to get it back to her.

  I set the little object down on the granite and stared at it. For a long time. Yep, that’s what I’d do, all right, return this thing to Allison’s parents pronto. No matter who ended up inheriting her belongings under her revised will, it rightly belonged to them and, based on the pains their daughter had taken to hide it, probably contained information of a personal nature.

  I certainly wasn’t going to insert this flash drive into my computer and check out the contents. That would be a violation of Allison’s privacy. Right?

  I picked up the tiny thing and turned it in my fingers. I set it back down. On the other hand, it was entirely possible the contents of this drive might be shocking or hurtful to her folks. I mean, it could be anything. Did Joleen and Doug really need to see, I don’t know, their daughter’s sex tapes? Not that she’d seemed the type, but what did I know? I’d met the woman precisely twice.

  Her parents had hired me to assist with the funeral arrangements and stuff. Okay, I just added that and stuff. There was nothing in our agreement about stuff. But I felt an ethical and moral obligation to minimize the pain they were going through in any way I could. It was another part of that Death Diva code of honor I mentioned earlier.

  An unwritten code of honor can really come in handy at times like this.

  And yes, I was curious as hell, but that wasn’t the only reason I carried the little device into the maid’s room, which I’d turned into a sort of cozy office. I turned on the floor lamp. The room contained a daybed, an overstuffed chair, and a small antique lady’s desk, currently occupied by my laptop computer.

  Without giving myself time to reconsider, I sat at the desk, opened the computer, and inserted Allison’s flash drive into one of the USB ports in the side of the machine.

  A window popped up, demanding a password. I muttered a naughty word. Well, of course she would have password-protected the drive. After all, she’d gone to the trouble of hiding the thing in a darn salt shaker.

  I leaned back, drummed my fingers on the desk. That was it, then. I’d scarcely known the owner of this drive. There was no way I could guess her password.

  My fingers stopped drumming. But I knew someone who might be able to. Hadn’t the padre deduced my own computer password last spring when he’d let himself into the nasty little basement apartment I’d been living in back then?

  No, I hadn’t given him a key! I’d just met the man, for heaven’s sake. Back then I didn’t know about the adorable set of lock picks he never left home without.

  And yeah, so my password had been my wedding anniversary. Pitifully easy to guess. What’s that you say? You chose your anniversary as your password after having been divorced for how many years? It’s just that I’m sentimental, that’s all. I already told you, I’m not still hung up on Dom. I mean, he’s getting married again, right? For the fourth time! How could I possibly still be hung up on him?

  Okay, you know what? Let’s move on to something else. Like what the heck is on this flash drive. I was curious before I’d tried to peek at the contents. Now that I’d been presented with an impregnable roadblock in the form of a password, I was rabidly curious.

  I’d left my cell phone on my nightstand. I sprinted upstairs for it, a process that took longer than you might think, considering the size of my house: five bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, home theater, gym, et cetera. It was your basic mini mansion, squatting on five of the most exclusive and expensive acres on Long Island.

  If you’re wondering how I could afford such luxurious accommodations after having lived in the aforementioned basement apartment in a working-class neighborhood far from this rarefied burg, the answer is, I couldn’t afford it. Irene McAuliffe left me the house in her will. No, that’s a lie. She left the house to Sexy Beast. And she asked me to be his guardian, which meant I got to live there with him. What can I tell you? That was Irene. She also left enough money to maintain the property, but I still had to work for a living. Overall, not a bad deal.

  I called Martin as I resumed my seat in front of the computer, setting the phone to speaker and placing it on the desk near me.

  “How’d the funeral go?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “You missed the fireworks,” I told him. “It turns out Allison disinherited the boy toy she married a few months ago.”

  “I heard. He was banging the bestie.”

  “Are you at work?” I asked. “Sounds like it.” I heard a hum of voices in the background, conversation and laughter. Martin tended bar at Murray’s Pub, a popular local watering hole that had been a Crystal Harbor fixture since the late nineteenth century. No doubt it was hopping on this Saturday night. He lived in the apartment over the bar.

  “Hold on a sec.” I heard him take someone’s order for a Manhattan and a glass of Pinot Noir.

  I said, “Well, did you hear—”

  “That the boy toy and the bestie are looking forward to a blessed event?” he said.

  I wasn’t surprised the news had gotten back to Martin. Even before he started tending bar at Murray’s, he’d had a way of knowing everything that went on in town. I said, “Listen, I need your help with something.”

  “I get off at two,” he said. “Wear that green lace teddy.”

  He knew about the teddy? I’d bought it ages ago. It still had the tags on. I’d get to use it one of these days. Or nights, rather. And yeah, the padre was an irrepressible flirt. I think you’ve learned that by now. As for his knowing the contents of my closet, well, the infuriating man came and went as he pleased. Remember that set of lockpicks? I’d gotten used to it. Well, sort of.

  “I need you to crack a password,” I said.

  “For what?” He didn’t sound at all surprised. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  “A flash drive.”

  “Whose flash drive?” he said.

  “Allison Zaleski.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Did she have a pet?”

  “Just the new husband,” I said.

  “Try his name.”

  I typed Nick into the little box and hit Enter. “That’s not it,” I said.

  “Try all lowercase and all caps.”

  I did. “Nada. Let me try the first husband, Mitchell. He was the, you know, real husband.” That one didn’t work either.

  “Did she have any kids?” the padre asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I assume you’ve tried password?” he asked.

  “That’s why I called you,” I said.

  “No, I mean the word password,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many people use that as their password.”

  “For real?” I tried it. “No.”

  “Welcome,” Martin said. After a few moments he said, “Jane? You still there?”

  “I thought you were talking to a customer. You want me to try the word welcome?” I asked.

  “Yep. And qwerty.”

  “What?”

  He spelled it. “The first six letters on your keyboard. That’s another common one.”

  “Nope. Maybe she was too smart for these
obvious passwords.” It was probably some completely random and unguessable combination of letters, numbers, and symbols.

  “There are a few more we can try,” he said. “What kind of car did she drive?”

  “I don’t know. I never went into her garage.”

  “Favorite movie?” The sound of rattling ice in the background. “Color? Hobby?”

  I perked up. “Photography. She was a serious shutterbug.”

  “Try any words associated with that,” he said. “Camera, snapshot, stuff like that.”

  After we’d exhausted photography-related words, Martin made a bunch of other suggestions, including obvious strings of numbers and, yes, her birthday and wedding anniversaries, which I didn’t happen to know.

  “I can come around tomorrow,” he offered, “see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, but don’t bother. Maybe it’s just as well. I really shouldn’t be snooping like this.”

  “That’s a joke, right?” he said.

  After I hung up, I sat staring at the screen and that tormenting little password prompt. “Come on, Allison, talk to me,” I muttered. “What are some of your favorite things?” This line of thinking installed that song from The Sound of Music in my cranium. I shook my head vigorously, determined to keep it from turning into an earworm.

  I kept at it, trying her parents’ names, the words pottery and ceramics, and all the words I’d already tried in combination with numbers, including her street address. I knew it was a losing battle, knew I should go to bed and start fresh in the morning, but at that point I was too invested to stop.

  What were some of her favorite photographic subjects? I thought of her nature shots. The picture of white mushrooms growing on a fallen log popped into my head. It wasn’t the only photo of mushrooms adorning the walls of her home. I thought of the little ceramic mushroom that had concealed the flash drive. What was it Joleen had said? Allison had loved mushrooms.

  I typed in mushroom, singular and plural. Nothing. All caps. All lowercase. I tried tacking on 123, her street address, and other alphanumeric combinations. Was there another word for mushroom? Fungus, I typed, and fungi. Another one came to me. I typed shrooms.