Page 7 of The Accidental Detectives

“So the dating pool got slim and you decided to human dip?” I asked.

Wanda sighed loud enough to let me know she disapproved, smoothing the hairs on her updo that were almost never out of place. “Nina, please. Can we skip the part where you ask questions that do nothing but make us all uncomfortable?”

In turn, I made a face right back at her. The same face I always made when she said I was being too whatever I was being too much or too little of. “I’m just asking the questions that need asking.”

Brenda stared at me, her eyes wide, her painted-on eyebrow somewhere up in her hairline. “To answer your question, Miss Statleon, yes.Yes, I was tired of the same old, same old. So I joined a human dating site to see if I could shake things up a little.”

“Mission accomplished. Bravo.” I tipped an imaginary hat at her.

This time, Wanda threw a pad of sticky notes at me. A pink one, of course.

Marty gnawed at the tip of her pen, crossing her legs and leaning back in her chair. “You weren’t worried about having to tell someone you’re a vampire if things got serious?”

Brenda rubbed her weary eyes, her shoulders dropping beneath her fur-trimmed cape. “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. It was stupid—impulsive. I know that now. I was just thinking about how handsome he was and…”

“And about your downtown bits,” I grumbled.

“Nina!” both Marty and Wanda cried, matching looks of displeasure on their faces.

But Brenda actually laughed, though it was cold and full of irony. “She’s right, you know. I’ve been alone now for almost fifty years. That’s a long time without some kind of?—”

I held up a hand to thwart the inevitable images her words would create. “We get it. So, you found this guy Owen on a dating site. Did he contact you or the other way around?”

Her gaze got all wistful and sad. “He contacted me. I was as surprised as anyone. I mean, look at him.” She dug her phone from her purse and scrolled until she held it up for us to see. “I’m not exactly the hunchback of Notre Dame, but I’m not a supermodel either.”

Owen was a looker, for sure. Tall, dark, and lean, with long legs, and a chiseled jaw covered in a neatly trimmed beard. There was no filter on his pic, no photoshopping. He really was that good-looking. My eyes were not appalled by the sight of him.

And easily thirty years younger than Brenda.

Shit.

So, we had a lonely woman, hungry for attention and obviously frickin’ flattered by this young buck who’d contacted her first.

Classic romance catfish scam.

That she’d fallen for it said Brenda wasn’t as progressive as she thought. Forget her age, whoisn’tskeptical when a guy thirty years your junior in human years cozies up to a sixty-two-year-old?

Now, before everyone gets all janky, I’m sure there are lots of successful May-December romances. I’m just sayin’, there are probably more unsuccessful ones.

“How long had you been communicating with Owen?” Marty asked.

Brenda licked her crimson lips as she set her phone on Wanda’s desk. “I guess it was about six months, all told. At first it was just off and on, and then the last three months it was more frequent. We talked about anything and everything. Heunderstood me. He loved a lot of the same things I do. Movies, books… I just can’t believe…”

Tapping my finger on my desk to reroute her from another bout of disbelief, I asked the obvious. “Did ya ever ask to meet him? See him in the flesh?”

Now shereallylooked upset. She knew she’d been played for a damn fool, and when somebody started fishing around, asking all the questions you wouldn’t ask yourself because you were high on love, the reality begins to sink in, I suppose.

And before anyone says I’m an insensitive cur (see Wanda), I felt bad for this lady. Now that her fear had settled, she smelled like a nice woman who’d been caught up in her loneliness. I get it. I’m not such a shit that I don’t sympathize, but if we were gonna keep her lonely butt from the clan and certain death, we had to get to the point.

Brenda was hearing all her doubts out loud. It showed in her posture and the sad look on her face. “I did ask, but?—”

“He was working in some remote place in the world and couldn’t get away, right?” Marty asked gently, sighing with understanding sadness.

Her cheeks puffed outward, her eyes looking down at her shiny red heels. “Yes. I…I know how that sounds, too, but I was just so caught up in the whole thing, I accepted his explanations whenever I asked. They all sounded so…so plausible.”

“Did he bilk you outta any money?” That felt like it would be a given, but Brenda surprised me when she shook her head.

“Not a red cent. Not a penny. He never asked for anything.”

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