Janet Evanovich - Love Overboard aka Ivan Takes a Wife

Melody swung through the kitchen door and stood at the table, studying the muffins.

“You can eat one,” Lucy said. “They’re certified pig-free.”

Melody took a muffin and sniffed it. “Hmmm.” She nibbled a small piece. “So,” she said to Stephanie, “are you sleeping with Rasmussen, or what?”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Jeez, Melody, why don’t you try being blunt?”

They stopped talking when Ivan pushed the kitchen door open. They looked at him for a second, then all three women blushed and turned their undivided attention to the muffins.

Ivan stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his jeans pockets. “Am I interrupting something?”

Melody pushed a strawlike strand of orange hair away from her face. “Lucy and I were just wondering if you and Stephanie are sleeping together now.”

Ivan went to the stove and filled a mug with hot coffee. If anyone else had asked that question, he would have explained about tact and privacy, but Melody was hopeless, so he sipped his coffee, looked at Stephanie, and grinned. “The ball’s in your court. You want to serve?”

“Not me,” Stephanie said. “I wouldn’t touch it.”

Later that afternoon Ivan came up from the harbor and stopped short at the sidewalk in front of Haben. A large woman wrapped in a red-and-blue shawl was sitting on a folding chair on the widow’s walk. She waved at him and smiled, and Ivan forced himself to smile back.

Stephanie met him at the door. “Did you see Mrs. Kowalsky?” Yes, by the look on his face, she could tell he had. “It turns out Mrs. Platz made national news, and we’re swamped with room reservations. Ghost groupies. I moved Lucy in with Melody on the third floor.”

She discovered that her palms were damp, and she silently cursed herself. She’d had sweaty palms too many times in her life. This time her life wasn’t on the line-only her dignity. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

“And I’d like to move you in with me. If that’s okay with you. I’d adjust your rent,” she added, faltering under his scrutiny.

He looked around and hated what he saw. Wall-to-wall people hoping to find a ghost, waiting for their turn on the widow’s walk. Poor Tess.

Stephanie sighed. “I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “But I need the money.”

“You need money this bad?”

“Ivan, I’ve invested every cent I own in this house. This is my sole source of income. Next September when you move your furniture out, I’ll need to be able to buy furniture of my own.”

“Why didn’t you think of that before you bought the house?”

“I did. I had money set aside for a down payment on furniture, and I had to sink it into repairs on this relic.”

Ivan didn’t give a damn about the furniture or her mismanaging, but he was infuriated that she’d assume he’d be long gone by September.

“Move me anywhere you want,” he said, keeping his voice tightly controlled.

He strode into the kitchen and took a cold beer from the refrigerator. He didn’t want to say something in anger that he’d regret later. She was looking out for herself, and he couldn’t blame her for that, but didn’t she know how he felt about her? How could she possibly think he’d be gone in September?

Lucy stopped stirring a pot of chowder, fished in the junk drawer for a bottle opener, and handed it to Ivan. “That’s imported lager. You need an opener. Although at second glance, you look mad enough to open that with your teeth.”

He tipped the bottle back and took a long swallow. “Your cousin is driving me nuts.”

Lucy made a sympathetic murmur, but she felt the laughter bubbling inside her. She’d always suspected when he finally fell in love it was going to be a real headfirst crash. Ivan didn’t do things halfway. “Want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I sold Haben. She bought it, and she’s turned it into a loony bin.”

Lucy sighed. “Yeah. This hasn’t worked out exactly as I’d expected. I think this ghost stuff has gotten out of hand.”

“I think my feelings for Stephanie have gotten out of hand.” He finished off his beer and looked in the chowder pot. “Smells good.” A smile creased his face. “The first day out Stephanie made the worst chowder.”

“I heard. She said you were great.”

“She said that?”

“Um-hmm. She said you even ate some of it.”

Ivan laughed. “I was hungry. Really hungry.” Mostly hungry for Stephanie, he remembered. There was something about her, right from the start, that was so damn attractive. He liked the way she’d rolled down the hill and landed on her back with a good healthy expletive on her lips. She wasn’t fragile. For some inexplicable reason that made him feel all the more protective of her.

The sound of loud laughter and breaking glass carried into the kitchen. “I’m hating this more all the time,” Lucy said.

Melody stomped in with a dustpan filled with glass shards. “These people have to go. They are boring.”

“I think we have to look at priorities here,” Lucy said to Melody. “Know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Melody said, “we have to get rid of these disgusting people. And then we have to get Ivan and Stephanie out of that little room. The bed squeaks. You can hear it all through the house. I hardly slept a wink last night.”

Ivan got another beer. He wasn’t a prude, but he wasn’t an exhibitionist either. Going public with his sex life wasn’t high on his list of anticipated accomplishments. He felt himself blushing for the first time in his life and rested the cold bottle on his forehead.

Stephanie pushed through the kitchen door, went straight to the sink, and soaked a dish towel. She plopped the towel over her head, not caring that the water was running off and dripping onto the floor.

“I’m getting a migraine. I’ve never had a migraine in my life, but I’m getting one now.” She whipped the towel away and stood up straighter. “There. That feels better,” she said, turning to Lucy.

“All these people want dinner. That means we have to have two seatings. Ivan can preside over the first seating while Melody and I serve. Then I’ll take charge of the second seating while you and Melody serve.” Stephanie looked at everyone in the kitchen. “How does that sound?”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “You think these people need a master of ceremonies?”

“No. I think they need keepers. Animal trainers. You think Sears sells cattle prods?”

Stephanie leaned against the counter. There has to be a better way of getting furniture money, she thought. Controlling this crowd of ghost chasers made police work seem tame. And Ivan was mad at her. She couldn’t blame him. She’d stripped Haben of its dignity.

She took a basket of toasted bread rounds and slid them into the microwave for ten seconds. When the house quieted down later, she’d have a chance to think. Right now all she wanted to do was get everyone fed as efficiently as possible. She removed the bread and grabbed a crock of butter from the refrigerator. “Melody, everyone starts out with a cup of chowder.”

Melody took the can of spray starch from the pantry shelf and freshened up her hair. Then she gave Lucy a thumbs-up and took a tray of chowder cups out to the dining room.

“You want some chowder?” she asked the man on Ivan’s left. Without waiting for a reply, she slammed a cup down in front of him. “Watch out for the fish eyes. I read someplace that fish eyes are poisonous. They make your tongue swell up so big it doesn’t fit in your mouth, and it turns black, then you choke to death. You ever see anyone choke to death?”

The man shook his head.

“It’s not pretty,” Melody said. “It’s slow. Real slow. Your eyes bug out of your head, your face gets purple, and your testicles swell up as big as watermelons, and when you finally die, you make a mess in your pants.”

“I read that article,” a woman at the other end of the table said. “It was in the May issue of Reader’s Digest, wasn’t it?”

The woman next to her shook her head. “I read Reader’s Digest from cover to cover, and I know for a fact that there was no such article. It was in one of those health magazines they have in doctors’ offices. I remember seeing it while I was waiting to get my blood pressure checked. I remember because the man in the photograph didn’t have any eyes. They’d fallen clear out of his head.”

Melody looked at Ivan and whispered from the side of her mouth, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s being upstaged.”

She distributed two more cups of chowder and stopped beside a fat man with a florid face. “Sometimes the poison liquid leaks out of the eyeballs and contaminates the whole pot of chowder,” she said. “But that only happens when you overcook the eyeballs, and we were careful not to do that.”

She looked at Stephanie, who was standing frozen with a basket of bread in her hand. “Lucy didn’t overcook the chowder again, did she?”

Stephanie only stared at her in astonishment. During the past couple of weeks she’d thought of Melody as a rebellious teenager, but she suddenly had a flash of insight, seeing her as an entirely different person. She suspected Melody wasn’t flaky at all. And she had serious doubts about her being a teenager. Melody was a performer; Stephanie was sure of it. And she had a wicked sense of humor.

Stephanie bit back a smile and wondered how she could have missed something that was now so obvious. She felt as if she were looking in that rearview mirror again, seeing an outlandish parody of herself as a cop being a teenager. She couldn’t even begin to guess what Melody was up to. Instinct told her it wasn’t anything bad. Self-preservation kept her from believing it one hundred percent.

“I’m sure the chowder’s fine,” Stephanie said. She leaned over Ivan’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Better not eat it, just in case. I’d hate to see you try to fit a pair of watermelons in those tight jeans.”

“I understand you’re the young lady who talks to Tess,” one of the women said to Melody.

“Yup.”

“What sort of things does she say to you?”

Melody shrugged. “We talk about Eminem a lot. She’s heavy into Eminem.”

The woman looked confused. “You talk about M & Ms?”

“No. The rapper Eminem. Jeez.” Melody began collecting soup cups. “Mr. Jackson, you didn’t eat a drop of your chowder. How are you going to grow up big and strong that way? Oh, Mr. Billings, you didn’t eat yours either.”

“I’m saving myself for the main course,” Mr. Billings said. “What are we having tonight?”

Melody’s mouth curved ever so slightly. “Ham.”

Stephanie left the cranberry glass hurricane lamp burning in the downstairs hall and crept up the stairs. She’d shut the widow’s walk down at ten and advised everyone to go to bed and wait for ghosts. Then she’d said a silent apology to Tess and warned her to stay away from the master bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Billings were in the master bedroom, and they were enough to frighten the ectoplasm out of anyone, dead or alive. She went to her room and quickly changed into jeans, a black turtleneck, and a heavy black sweatshirt. Then she quietly went downstairs and out the back door.

She took a deep breath, letting the sharp night air fill her lungs while her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She waved acknowledgment when Ivan signaled from behind the concealing lower branches of a giant spruce. He’d chosen good cover, she thought, moving to join him. She wouldn’t have seen him if he hadn’t flashed the light at her. She drew closer, and the jaded cop part of her went momentarily speechless at the picniclike atmosphere Ivan had created. He’d spread a blanket on twenty years’ accumulation of pine needles and brought a second blanket, a searchlight, binoculars, and a thermos of coffee. “Looks as if you’re planning on spending the night,” she said.

“This is my first stakeout. I wanted to be prepared.” And he wanted to make her comfortable. He wanted to keep her warm and safe and entertained. He would have rented a Winnebago if he thought he could have gotten away with it. Or better yet, he would have hired a detective and let him sit out here, freezing his buns, while Stephanie was inside, soaking in a hot bubble bath. And after the bubble bath…

Stephanie shifted uncomfortably. She’d never had a stakeout partner look at her quite the way Ivan was looking at her. It wasn’t difficult to guess what was on his mind, and it was almost impossible not to respond. She knew if she gave him the slightest encouragement, they’d be in the house, under the covers, and the mystery would remain unsolved.

Maybe it would be worth it. It wasn’t much of a mystery, anyway. It wasn’t as if there were drugs involved. And in actuality, no one had gotten hurt. There was just a dead guy who turned up every now and then, and he’d been dead a long time. He could hang around a little longer while they took a night off to make love.