Maybe he didn’t handle it in the way Madam Z was handling it, but turmoil was present. Maybe it was about the woman who’d owned the house before him? Melinda?
We needed to get some Wi-Fi out here so I could scour the Internet when he wasn’t looking. Until then, I had Dan and Liza to talk to.
I only hoped they’d talk to me, the rumored town murderer.
“You bought me a car?” I was trying really hard to hold a grudge with Win after our conversation this morning, but he was making it almost impossible.
When I’d opened the front door to grab the paper, also delivered courtesy of Win, I saw the car at the end of what I hoped would turn into a driveway and wondered if Enzo had gone economy. But Win, in his own stiff-upper-lip way, informed me that cute little thing was all mine.
Back in Paris, I’d had a bike—which presented a problem when I’d decided to move across the country. And now I had a car. My own car.
“It was supposed to be here yesterday, but the dealership was delayed, or so that’s what I gathered when I eavesdropped on the salesman reminding the delivery driver it would be fine if it was delivered a day late because there wasn’t much I could do about it, seeing as I was dead. Little does he know what awaits him when he gets home tonight and reads my little message on his bathroom mirror written in the lipstick of his latest conquest.”
I froze. “Wait. I thought you said you can’t move things?” Oh, this could be bad. Very bad.
“I told you, I can’t move-move things, but his girlfriend, the one he callously dumped, was easily manipulated and highly suggestible…”
Once I heard he couldn’t move anything terribly important yet, I mostly stopped listening to everything Win was saying. I was too busy admiring my new car, my heart clenching in gratitude. I tucked my hair into the hood of my raincoat and gave my cute new red convertible Fiat the once over.
“It’s in my favorite color, Win! How did you know what my favorite color is?”
“The afterlife enjoys a good gabfest. I thought I told you that? Or did you tell me?”
I couldn’t stop grinning. “Who cares? You gave me a car, Win. Look, Bel, Win gave us a car! No more taxi rides, no more standing in the rain when the bus shelter is full, waiting for the bus.”
Clicking the key fob, I unlocked it to the tune of a tiny chirp and climbed in, taking a deep sniff of the white and red interior. Then suddenly I was overwhelmed. Win’s attention to detail astounded me, but his generosity blew me away.
Closing my eyes, I fought for composure as I gripped the steering wheel. “Thank you, Win. This was beyond generous. I don’t know what to say other than you’ve thought of everything to make me comfortable, and I appreciate it. Say thank you, Bel.”
“Thank you, Winterbutt. Oh, and thanks for my bed, too. Jolly good show on your part.”
But Win didn’t acknowledge our gratitude. He was all brisk business as usual. “You’ll need transportation if you hope to pick up some of the items I need for the house. There are many trips to Seattle in your future. I couldn’t let you squander your newfound fortune away on cab and bus fare, could I?”
I made a face and started the car, pressing the address I’d managed to find for Dan and Liza Martoni into the GPS system. “You just couldn’t go with the warm-fuzzy, could you?”
“I’m unfamiliar with warm and/or fuzzy. Unless we’re talking a cashmere coat on a Brazilian model. Now let’s review, shall we?”
I pulled away from the curb and nodded, flipping on the heated seats. I had heated seats. Booyah! No way was Win going to spoil that for me. Not after a month in a flea-infested hotel room. I’d do that twenty times over for a cute car like this one.
“Okay, so here’s what we have so far. MZ is dead from strangulation as confirmed by Sandwich. Neither Liza nor Dan is going to willingly talk to me because they probably think I murdered MZ, like everyone else does. We have two clues that make absolutely no sense à la MZ, via the strange and puzzling words cluck-cluck associated with her son Dan, and fish and chips. Forrest said he thought he heard a yelp when he was opening the coffee shop, but he wasn’t sure if it was from the kids on their way to the bus stop just down the road or it actually came from MZ. The tarot cards suggest she was doing a reading for the person who killed her, but we can’t say for sure because they were in a jumbled mess on the floor. Oh, and we still have no official time of death and the Senior Alert necklace is still bothering me. Our list of suspects is virtually nonexistent.”
“Why are we ruling out your boyfriend?”
“My what?”
“Sherwood Forrest. We can’t rule him out. We can’t rule anyone out.”
My eyes rolled. “His name is Forrest Sherwood, and don’t be ridiculous. What’s his motive to kill MZ?”