Page 14 of The Rainbow Recipe
He shivered. The big old house had bad central heating.
Evie muttered under her breath, glanced up in exasperation, then widened her eyes. “Oh, that’s not good. Take your hands off.”
Jax lifted his hands and thought about finding a sweater.
Evie glared at him. “Kit-Kat, he’s taken. You’re dead. Cut it out.”
Okay, not going there.Jax retreated to his recliner. Evie continued to glare at where he’d been sitting. Nice to know that she wasn’t glaring at him. He tried to see what she did, but he simply lacked anything close to super abilities.
“If you want his attention, tell us who wanted you dead.”
Jax winced at being offered as bait for a ghost. Maybe he’d join Reuben in the cellar and hunt suspicious characters on the internet.
As if called, Reuben slammed into the kitchen. The cold dissipated. Evie shook her head in disappointment and flung a pillow at their houseguest when he entered the parlor, carrying a beer and a sandwich.
“What?” With the reflexes of an athlete, the top-knotted nerd lifted his grub out of the line of fire. The pillow bounced harmlessly off his muscled chest.
“I had Kit-Kat right here. You scared her. Or maybe I scared her by asking questions. I think I’m calling for a sage cleanse. She’s the most useless ghost ever.” In disgust, Evie stood, dusted off her shorts, and plopped down on the rickety bamboo papa-san chair. “So, what exciting news do you have for us?”
Professor Nerd shrugged and dropped to the aging sofa. Since falling into Larraine’s clutches, Rube’s wardrobe had gone from ripped T-shirts and cutoffs to fitted khakis and the fanciest pullovers Jax had ever seen. This one even had a collar. But it was still the anarchist hacker with a PhD beneath the designer apparel.
“Nothing exciting. We already know Vincent Gladwell is a fraud. His famous farm in Tuscany doesn’t exist. He does buy high-quality from the Ugazio farm—in Umbria. But he also buys a lot of low-quality junk from anywhere he can get it cheapest. I’m not a chemist and can’t figure out how oil is used in production, so I’ve sent a bunch of crap to someone who might understand. And I still have no idea what this has to do with anything.”
“Because Pris says Kit-Kat was scared, and someone was happy when she dropped dead. It stands to reason one of the men around her wanted her out of the way, and what other reason would there be except the business?” Evie hugged a pillow and went into one of her third-eye blank faces.
“Without any evidence of a crime, the sheriff didn’t have any reason to hold non-US citizens on limited visas. Vincent has gone back to the UK. The half-brother and some middle managers are staying to take over the boutique chain. We don’t have a lot to work with on this case—not that anyone has actually hired you,” Jax reminded them. “Pris and Larraine will come out fine eventually. You should put your energy into something more profitable.”
Reuben bit into his sandwich and waited for Evie to return to this plane. It wasn’t as if Jax’s former intelligence officer had ever paid attention to orders anyway. Evie had offered Rube the acceptance his family and the military couldn’t provide. She had an uncanny way of drawing people to her.
She popped back and regarded them blankly for a second. “Our lady of the olive oil hates the boutique’s lotions. Maybe we should check them out.”
She stood and wandered up the stairs, leaving Jax and Reuben to work that one out.
“I’m not going to bed with a ghost,” Jax shouted after her.
“Neither am I,” she called back. “She likes you better than me.”
Rube snorted beer and headed for his hideaway. “Better you than me, man. Sometimes it pays to be Black and gay.”
Deciding Evie could damned well keep him warm if her apparition put in another chilly appearance, Jax grabbed an extra blanket and followed her upstairs.
What he couldn’t see or hear couldn’t hurt, could it?
Ten: Pris
Italy
In the early morning hours,Pris located the villa’s limited wi-fi, ascertained it had no passcode, and checked her email and messages. She didn’t have a European chip for her phone and wasn’t paying a daily ransom to use her data roaming if she could avoid it—not after burning through her savings with no future income on the horizon.
She caught up on family emails and confirmed that Gladwell didn’t own the olive oil farm. Well, heck, where did that leave her? There had to besomeconnection to Dante.
Could she possibly have imagined that terrified cry? She wasn’t very imaginative except when it came to food.
Since it was still dark outside, she glanced at the online news. Jane the Lawless gossip monger had no new scandal to add to the murder investigation. That didn’t stop the columnist from drumming up an audience by speculating that Larraine had been jealous of the attention Kit-Kat was receiving and had somehow persuaded Pris to do the dirty deed with poisonous blowfish.
That was a particularly creative addition. Did blowfish cause heart attacks? Could she feed them to scurrilous reporters? In sushi, maybe. Probably not caviar.
Sensing the rest of the house stirring, she shut down her phone. She’d hoped to play tourist today, poke around the village, learn more about Katherine and her family...But Dante had cut her off at the pass. The knowledge that the Gladwells didn’t even own the farm—dang. Recalculating. She’d spent a fortune just to be harassed by a man who hated her?
