LITMIR.BIZ

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handle the incident internally.”

      Val’s dusky face had all the expression of a stone idol—an idol with intense, topaz eyes. “Someone puts a knife to your throat, he deserves jail time, not a demotion.”

      Arden’s friend and partner never had excelled at girl talk. Val had once, briefly, been a cop. She’d surely been a tomboy. “Daddy has it under control. He’s a good man.”

      “Unlike his daughter, the slut.” Val’s eyes sparkled with sudden teasing, despite her mask of solemnity. “So you kissed this knight in shining timeliness?”

      “Smith kissed me,” Arden clarified with assumed dignity. Then she admitted, “But I didn’t exactly bite his tongue.” No, instead she’d opened herself to him. His warm touch. His scent of heat and earth. When she should have been skewering his foot with one of her dress heels, she’d instead closed her eyes and pretended—just for a minute—that they’d never broken up. All her foolish, inappropriate longing had gone into that one stolen kiss.

      Smith…

      Like some desperate fool, she’d started to lift her arms around him, to draw him to her for the first time in too long….

      Just as well she’d forgotten the big stick in her hand.

      “There was tongue?” Val glanced over her shoulder as they walked.

      “Smith always did have a peculiar kind of charm.” That roguish grin. That cocky indifference. Even during those years when they’d known and disliked each other—or thought they had—she’d sometimes wanted to kiss him just to shut him up.

      “Charming as pie, ’til he dumped you.”

      “Exactly.” They turned down a cracked, uneven sidewalk onto a street boasting large trees and more Victorian homes. Several had been renovated to their original elegance, but most sat in graffitied disrepair, with abandoned cars in the front yards and rusting burglar bars on the windows. Historic Oak Cliff, once a jewel among Dallas society neighborhoods, had fallen victim to postwar white flight and urban decay generations before.

      Arden liked to think the recreation center for girls she and Val had started nearby could reverse some of that.

      “Dumped you over the phone.” Again, Val glanced behind them. Satisfied, she turned her stern stare back to Arden. “With no warning.”

      “Yes, he did.”

      “Drunk off his butt.”

      “I was there, Val. I’m the one who told you.”

      “Boy deserved biting.” Val slid her topaz gaze disapprovingly toward Arden. “And not in any good way.”

      “Well…I did hit him with a branch.”

      “Good.” But Val knew her too well. “Accident, was it?”

      “And I doubt I’ll see him again.” Which was a good thing, of course.

      “Make sure of it, girlfriend.”

      “Why, look,” said Arden brightly, to change the subject. “We’re at Miz Greta’s.”

      Miss Greta Kaiser taught piano at the rec center. Her tall stone home, like the neighborhood, had forgotten its elegance beneath decades of neglect. It boasted a mansard roof with uneven iron cresting, dormer windows along the top story, and a high bay window of Second Empire style. Roman arches over its windows and doorway added an Italianate touch. But several of the cracked panes in its higher windows had been patched with cardboard or taped plastic, despite Arden’s repeated offers to help with repairs. Lost roof tiles gave the appearance of missing teeth. What must once have been a glorious garden had withered to a brown, dirt-spotted lawn, deprived of sunlight by a single, glorious oak tree and of water by the Texas heat.

      It broke Arden’s heart to see it. And yet, had the home joined the ranks of the restored historic houses brightening the area here and there, Miz Greta couldn’t possibly have managed its upkeep. The divorcee had macular degeneration, a central blindness that limited her ability to manage certain tasks…which was why she’d asked for Arden’s help looking into a suspected secret society. Greta could play piano with her eyes closed. But she could no longer read without a huge magnifying glass.

      Today, Arden had brought a new audio book, wrapped in crinkly tissue, for their visit. “It’s a hostess gift,” she explained to a curious Val after knocking on Miz Greta’s recessed door. The expected barking erupted from the other side. Both women took off their sunglasses, and Arden her wide sun hat.

      “And I don’t get a bodyguard gift because…?”

      “Sweetie, you’re not my—” But the opening door cut off the rest of her answer. Both women stood a little straighter for their elder. Despite their significantly different backgrounds, both Arden and Val had been raised with Southern manners.

      “Please do come in,” insisted the small, white-haired woman, braids wrapped around the crown of her head, giving her barely enough height to reach five feet. She peered down at the barking dog through Coke-bottle lenses. “Hush, Dido!” Then—presumably to the women and not Dido—“I’ve made strudel.”

      On mere hours’ notice? The delicious smell filled the warm house, a testament to Greta’s cooking abilities despite her failing eyesight.

      “You shouldn’t have,” demurred Arden as they made their way through the crowded vestibule and into the parlor, because that’s what one said. Once she’d presented the gift, she crouched to let the cocker spaniel lick her hand and remember her. Dido wiggled harder at the sheer joy of having company.

      “Sure she should,” insisted Val, of the strudel.

      “I love cooking for guests,” agreed the older woman.

      In minutes, her visitors had china plates of strudel and tall glasses of sweetened iced tea. Because Greta’s old house had no central air—only cheap window units and an assortment of fans that had been running since June—the iced tea was especially welcome, despite Arden’s awkwardness at being waited on by someone she’d rather be serving.

      Arden felt even worse recounting her adventure of the previous night—but it had to be said, no matter how much it troubled her old friend.

      “My God.” Miz Greta shook her head, paling at even Arden’s most gentle version. “I never dreamed that you…You could have been killed!”

      “I’m sure I was in no danger.” Arden gently squeezed Greta’s thin hand. “The Lowell boy was just posturing.”

      “And apparently Arden’s loser ex-boyfriend has miraculous timing,” added Val darkly. When the dog barked in the kitchen, she stood.

      “Heavens, child! You’ll have me jumping at shadows. Dido?” The dog trotted back in and sat, nose pointed at the strudel. “She barks at squirrels.”

      Val sank back into her chair, but now Arden felt alert, as well. Being recently held at knifepoint had that effect, but it was no excuse for frightening old ladies.

      “Dido certainly enjoys company,” she noted, a deliberate feint.

      “She’s very affectionate.” The older woman relaxed as she petted her dog. “Hence the name. I’ve always been partial to Virgil’s Aeneid. In Roman literature, Dido is the heroine who falls completely in love, then kills herself after her lover deserts her to pursue his destiny.”

      “Imagine that,” murmured Val, no big fan of classic literature—but in the meantime, Miz Greta’s cheeks had regained some color from the distraction.

      “I wouldn’t have mentioned last night,” noted Arden carefully, “except that Lowell validated your suspicions. Why would anybody care about our research otherwise? I believe there really may be some kind of secret society out there!”

      “A dangerous society.” Greta shook her head. “Of course you must do as he said and leave

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