Licensed for Trouble Read online

  “It’s not my dog.”

  He let his hand drop, flicking it out in a sort of helpless gesture.

  A second ticked by as she watched him, a different kind of frustration on his face, one she couldn’t read. But he closed his eyes again, ever so briefly, and when he opened them, the look had vanished. He cleared his throat.

  “The thing is, you have no idea who this guy is. You let him through your front door. He could be a serial killer.”

  “I highly doubt Max is a murderer.”

  “You don’t know that! He could be a rapist or a strangler, and you let him into your home without a thought. Or what if he’s after me?”

  “After you? Is there something about you I should know? Are you wanted by the mafia?”

  “There’s a lot of things about me that you should know, or maybe not know.”

  PJ whisked her hands along her bare arms, gooseflesh rising. Shoot—how quickly the shadow around Jeremy could swoop in, turn her cold. “What don’t I know?”

  He cupped his hands around her neck, weaving them into her hair. Took a step closer as he gentled his voice. “I’m not wanted by the mafia. But I’ve made enough enemies over the years to want to be careful about who I let walk through my front door.” He attempted a smile; it faded. “Who I let get near . . . someone I care about.”

  Oh.

  He looked away. “Princess, I’m sorry. I’m just . . . It’s been a long time since . . .” He closed his mouth as if pulling back the words. Let her go and stepped away.

  Oh, how she wanted to chase after him. A long time since . . . ?

  “But you still don’t know anything about him. You can’t be too careful.”

  She stood there, flummoxed, wanting to reach inside him, to pull out whatever it was he kept locked away.

  Leaves tiptoed around them. Dog bounded up and dropped a stick at Jeremy’s feet. He didn’t look at it. Finally he said, “Right. Okay.”

  Only, she had the sense the words weren’t for her.

  Then, without another word, he went inside. PJ followed him, still feeling his hands in her hair. “Are you okay?”

  But he didn’t stop, just went right to the bathroom. Stood at the door.

  Max was already on his feet. Face-to-face, the men seemed eerily similar, in stance, in expression. Except Max wore a smidge more wariness on his face. “Max Smith,” he said. He held out his hand.

  Jeremy took it. “Jeremy Kane.” PJ waited for him to add Kane Investigations, but he left that out.

  In fact, she wasn’t sure how to name what transpired, the nonverbal communication that went on between the two men as Jeremy stared at Max with what looked like some sort of promise. And Max took it in, his mouth tight, sighing.

  “All right, then,” Jeremy said.

  All right? PJ opened her mouth, but Jeremy filled in the words.

  “She’ll take your case, but you’d better make sure this place is award-winning when you’re finished.”

  Max nodded. “I appreciate it.”

  Dog bounded into the kitchen through the open patio door and dropped the muddy stick on the floor. “Dog!” Max said.

  PJ crouched in front of the animal, cupped him beneath his furry jowls, and looked into his amber eyes. “Mud stays outside, okay, Rufus?”

  Dog blinked at her.

  “Not Rufus.”

  “You’ll get it,” Max said, closing his toolbox. “I have faith in you.” He smiled down at her. Dimples again.

  Max reached into his pocket. “By the way, this was in the pipe. Must have been what was clogging it.” He held out a tiny silver locket, a design engraved on the front.

  PJ took it, opened it up. A cutout picture with ragged edges lay inside with a nearly washed-out image that looked like a man. She edged out the tiny photo with her thumbnail and held it up to the light. “I think a name is written on the back. Hugh? Who’s Hugh?”

  She replaced the picture, closed the locket, then turned it over. The letters P and J were etched on the back. She stared at them. Ran her thumb over them, a churning in her stomach.

  Jeremy leaned over her shoulder. “PJ?”

  She looked at him. “I don’t know. My mother had a friend named PJ in college. But I could never find the matching name in the yearbook. Do you think this could have belonged to a Kellogg?”

  “Maybe a maid.” Max patted his leg to call Dog. “It was in the servant’s bathroom.”

  “You’re just assuming it was for a servant.”

  Max hauled his toolbox off the counter. “You’re right. You’re the PI; I’m sure you’ll figure it out. See you tomorrow.”

  Dog scrambled after him.

  PJ pocketed the locket and noticed a large plastic bag on the counter. She peeked inside and discovered boxes of fuses. “There are still a few dark rooms in the house,” she said to Jeremy. “Thanks.”

  He lifted a shoulder, watching Max depart. Finally the door closed.

  Jeremy turned to her, and she didn’t have to be a stellar investigator to recognize a forced smile. “How about I take you out for dinner? Maybe pizza? I think you deserve it after today.”

  PJ let a swallow pass before she answered. “Would you be angry if I told you I had some already? for lunch?”

  Jeremy sighed. “Of course you did.” Still, he held out a hand. “How about Chinese?”

  Chapter Eight

  Jeremy had hit the red zone on her weird-o-meter. First he pouted all night, long after they’d picked up an order of kung pao chicken, fried wontons, and sticky rice. Then he’d scrubbed her cupboards and the apple green stove with almost-frenetic obsession. PJ thought he might actually be taking off paint.

  Then, instead of kissing her good night, he shook her hand.

  Shook. Her hand.

  Like he might be her boss or something.

  “It’s been a long time since . . .” Oh, how she ached to pry the rest of that sentence from between his clenched teeth.

  She’d have to employ her own PI skills, cajole it out of him slowly. Earn it. He never promised her that unveiling his past would be either easy or rewarding.

  In fact, he’d practically drawn a line in the sand and ordered her not to cross it.

  Maybe, however, he’d trust her for the dark, shadowy parts if he viewed her more as an equal. A partner. Someone he didn’t have to always hover over, even rescue. A real PI who could prove that Max had been simply misplaced and wasn’t an “escapee from a nearby mental hospital.” Something he’d muttered while scrubbing her oven.

  Well, whatever egged him to his over-the-top sanitation services, it had resulted in a satisfactory sheen to the apple green appliances and the stained-oak cabinets, and she went to bed in her blue oasis, exhaustion pushing her bones into the mattress. She did slightly miss the hum of traffic and the sound of Jeremy clicking away on his computer. And she would have appreciated Dog at her feet. Just to scare away any lingering ghosts of Kellogg Manor.

  How she wished Jeremy hadn’t said that. His words had awakened the story of Joy Kellogg in her head. She pondered it long after her body begged her for sleep.

  Who had killed Joy? And why hadn’t the police ever discovered the killer?

  And who belonged to the locket now secreted away in her bag?

  “You would never be forgotten.” Jeremy’s words touched her, and she let them filter through her, just for a moment.

  The Kellogg family needed a PI like PJ Sugar on the job. A PI and, like Jeremy said, one good lead.

  Maybe she’d see what Boone had on the mysterious death of Joy Kellogg.

  Outside, the wind knocked against the glass. PJ pulled her sleeping bag to her chin and stared at the shadows of ivy twining across her ceiling. What must it have been like to grow up in this house? She might have played a little basketball in the great room. Or maybe it had a grand table that held twenty, and she would have had lavish dinners of roast duck and pâté. No, not pâté. Red velvet cake. And beef Wellington.

  Why had n
o one stepped forward to claim this house, the legacy of the Kelloggs?

  And why had God given her this house? The question did laps in her brain until she finally turned on her light. It bathed the stack of books she’d unpacked—a dog-eared novel she’d been trying to finish, her journal, her Bible, perilously unread in recent weeks.

  She picked it up, opening to her bookmark. 1 Peter 2. She scanned down to her last-remembered stopping place.

  . . . for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.

  Oh, sure, her eyes would wander there, sitting in the middle of the fairy-tale house. “God often gives us our dreams to also show us something we didn’t even know we needed.” She still hadn’t worked out what she might need, but it did feel as if God had suddenly turned His full wattage on her. Limelighted her in some fanfare of blessing.

  Chosen. Royal.

  Heiress.

  She’d like to believe that, really she would. As she closed the Bible, she let that thought drift upward, then listened briefly for a reply.

  Only the wind, knocking some branch against her window.

  She turned off the light. “You can show others the goodness of God . . . for he called you out of the darkness . . .”

  Darkness . . .

  Dark . . .

  * * *

  “Do I have to smile?” Max had said when she met him at the front door the next morning with Connie’s borrowed digital camera and pushed him out into the sunlight of the yard.

  “Depends on if people might remember you with a smile.”

  He’d crossed his arms over his chest and practically glared into the lens.

  “That wasn’t very happy.”

  “I thought I’d give people a blank canvas to work from.”

  A blank canvas. The words reverberated inside her as she left Max to his list, cooed over Dog, then fired up the Vic. It seemed, at times, that she excelled at the blank canvas, reinventing herself over and over. Until she returned to Kellogg and walked into an identity already formed, the brand waiting for her. It had seemed comfortable, at first. And for the first time, her messy self hadn’t seemed as much an eye-rolling horror, but a gift of sorts. Even better, maybe God wanted her to be a little messy. It gave Him all these fabulous opportunities to save her. But . . . well, perhaps she’d been hanging on to that moniker—NBT—just a little too tightly. “Because if you were trouble, then no one could expect more from you.”

  Even herself.

  Downtown Minneapolis wasn’t made for the freighter-size Crown Vic, and PJ motored through the shadows of the high-rises, down one-way roads to Portland Avenue and the headquarters of the Star Tribune.

  She docked the Vic in the parking lot across the street, in the shadow of the Dome, and jogged across the road to newspaper central. At the front desk, they directed her to classifieds.

  She took out a display ad on Max, big enough to catch attention, and left a number—the trap phone. If anyone called, she’d have a record of their number and a starting place for her search.

  Retrieving the boat, she chugged over to St. Paul and placed a matching ad in the Pioneer Press. She tooled past the magnificent dome of the capitol glinting in the sun, her local history flooding back to her. Once upon a time, the hub of activity in Minnesota had been St. Paul, the stately manors of Summit Avenue betraying a wealth that even now fostered a girl’s wildest dreams. Most of the mansions had been turned into B and Bs. A few, like the James J. Hill home, became historical sites. She knew all about James J. Hill, railroad magnate, thanks to the railroad station he’d built in the center of Kellogg.

  As a favor to his friend and business partner, Paul Kellogg . . . father of Orton Kellogg, husband of Agatha.

  She motored back over the bridge spanning the Mississippi River. So what had happened to the magnificent, well-connected Kellogg family? How had they gone from the height of the glittering era of lumber and railroad magnates to bequeathing the last of their possessions to a former vagabond, wannabe PI?

  And sheesh, it might have been helpful to discover that answer before the plumbing went out and soiled the remains of the wine cellar. She hoped Max would be true to his word and hunt down her leaks. After all, she was certainly returning the favor.

  Some sleuthing into the legacy of the Kelloggs might help her figure out where she fit into the picture.

  PJ tapped her brakes and took the exit to the central branch of the Hennepin County Library.

  A breath of calm swept through her even as she entered through the security turnstile, the reverent hush of knowledge and learning enfolded in the rampart of books that bordered the reception desk. She remembered one of her first meetings with Jeremy, him pressing in behind her to read her computer screen while they researched ancient coins and eventually helped apprehend an international assassin.

  Come to think of it, that should count for a reference from the boss, shouldn’t it?

  Probably she’d just start calling him that. Until he figured out the difference between a handshake and a good-night kiss.

  PJ approached the librarian’s desk. A silver-haired, breakable woman who looked more like a professor than a librarian looked up from her computer. Pulling her cat-eye glasses down her nose, she raised one razor eyebrow.

  PJ leaned over the counter. “I’m looking for information on the Kellogg family. Specifically, the murder of Joy Kellogg.”

  The librarian blinked, opened her mouth, shut it, and then pushed her glasses up her nose. “I see. Well, currently, all our historical records are stored off-site. You may be able to retrieve the information in the microfiche file, but since the Kellogg library closed, all those files are still in transition. We’ll have to order them—might take a couple weeks.” She took out a piece of paper and pen and handed them over to PJ. “Write down your name and number, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  “A couple weeks? You’re kidding.”

  Clearly not, from the look she got. PJ scrawled her cell number and handed it to her.

  “There’s a suggestion box by the front door. Feel free to solve our storage problem for us.” She looked at the slip of paper. “PJ Sugar. I’ve heard that name before, haven’t I?”

  PJ lifted a shoulder. “I hope not.”

  She left the librarian, walked back out to the Vic, and surfed the rest of the way to Kellogg.

  She swung by her mother’s house. Not a hint of life. Cruise, indeed. They probably needed to enter into some sort of binding agreement about communication. She needed at least twenty-four-hours’ notice if Elizabeth Sugar wanted to leave town.

  Since when did her mother have the right to go gallivanting off to unknown Caribbean locations?

  PJ finally ended up in front of the police station.

  Boone’s red Mustang convertible sat in the lot, the top up. So he hadn’t yet replaced his stolen Ford F-150. Which meant, what? That he was holding out for a better answer to his proposal? He’d once told her he’d be willing to use the insurance money to buy them a house.

  So they could get married and start a life together.

  And she had turned him down, communicating her rejection with a rather unfortunately timed kiss from Jeremy, which Boone had witnessed.

  PJ shut the door and made her way inside. Rosie, the desk clerk, glanced at her, a too-familiar expression on her face. Oh, that so wasn’t fair—PJ hadn’t been inside the police station for nearly two months. And the last time she wasn’t wearing any cuffs at all.

  “Is Boone in?” PJ asked, swinging her car keys around her finger.

  “Detective Buckam is in his office. I’ll let him know you’re here.” Rosie picked up the phone.

  PJ waited, remembering her night—or should she say nights?—spent in the holding cells downstairs. She folded her arms, bulwarking herself.

  “Hey, PJ, what do you need?” A
ll business, just short of frigid. Nice.

  She never really got used to this Boone, in a tweed suit coat, wearing a shoulder holster, as if he’d always been on the right side of the law, with his close-cut bronze hair, a no-games look in his blue eyes. A twinge of old pain went through her, as memory swept her up into his arms. She sighed, disentangling herself.

  “I’m looking for information on my new handyman. A missing person named Max Smith.”

  Something sparked in Boone’s eyes a second before he touched her elbow. “Come into my office.” He glanced at Rosie when he said it. “I’ll fill you in.”

  He closed the door behind her, grabbed a straight-backed chair from against the wall, and set it opposite him as he leaned on the desk.

  PJ thumped her bag into it. “My instincts are saying you’ve heard of him. Who’s Max Smith?”

  Boone gave a huff, tailing it with a chilly smile. “I thought you were this colossal private investigator. Why come to me?”

  “Do you or do you not know him?

  Boone held up his hands as if the answer should be obvious. “Okay, yes. I know Max. I looked into his case a while back.”

  “And you know, then, about his amnesia.”

  “I know he hasn’t shown up on any missing person reports, so if you want to call it amnesia . . .”

  “Are you saying it isn’t?”

  “I’m saying he’s got a good reputation around town, and he’s never given me trouble. And you need help if you want to keep that monstrosity.”

  “We call it the mushroom house, with affection in our voices. And don’t think for a second that I can’t see right through you. You’re evading.”

  “Good grief, PJ. You said you wanted to be a PI, so be a PI.”

  Oh. His taking her seriously had her at a loss for words.

  “Fine. Give me a push off. What do you know?”

  He stood, considered her for a moment, then crossed around his desk to sit down. “He came here four years ago, and yes, I tried to help him. But nothing has popped on the radar about this guy.” He lifted a shoulder. “He might be telling the truth. We found him washed up on the shore, nearly dead, and not a speck of evidence linking him to a living soul. The Minneapolis police gave it a try, but it’s just not a priority. And we haven’t a clue where to start looking.”