Illicit Artifacts Read online

  The sudden heat of Jess’s body made her even more aware of her own cold limbs, and she began to shiver.

  “Geez, you’re freezing.” Jess pulled her in even tighter, wrapping a leg around Jil’s thigh and pressing her breasts tight against Jil’s.

  Jil gasped, her nipples hardening.

  Jess laughed under her breath. “Sorry.”

  “S’okay.” Jil tilted Jess’s chin up and kissed her gently on the lips. “I thought you’d gone home.”

  Jess pulled back, her eyes dark pools, lit only by the sliver of moonlight coming in the window. “Did you want me to?”

  Did she?

  “No. No. I’m glad you’re here.” Jil cupped the back of her head and kissed her again, fitting herself snugly against Jess’s warm, soft body, barely covered by a dark blue negligee.

  Jess snaked one arm under Jil’s T-shirt and gently squeezed her breast. “Let me make myself useful then.”

  Jil felt heat flare where Jess touched her, lighting a sparkling trail that blazed along every nerve in her body. She sighed, on the edge of a moan, as Jess pulled her shirt higher and put her hot mouth where her fingers had been, sucking Jil’s nipple into her mouth.

  Warmth filled the space between them, a space that seemed so wide. “I want you closer,” Jil whispered.

  Jess slid down in the bed, pulling Jil’s jeans down with her as Jil pulled her own shirt over her head. Naked and shivering, she reached for Jess and pulled her back up to kiss her.

  “Why are you still dressed? I want to feel your skin.”

  Jess grinned in the half-dark and shucked the silk.

  Her skin was almost as supple and smooth as the negligee, and Jil ran her hands over every inch she could reach—rich and sweet and…like home.

  She loved watching Jess’s body writhe as she touched her, played every inch of her like a delicate harp, drawing sighs and moans and cries from every cell in her body. She knew already when to draw back, to give Jess’s reluctant joints the chance to catch up with her eager nerves.

  The very definition of coupling. Knowing without being told.

  Jess rocked against Jil’s hands and mouth, climbing steadily, beautifully, to the peak.

  Then shattering.

  Jil almost shattered too, watching her, and Jess barely had to touch her before she felt the first pulls and waves clenching her lower belly. She thrust her hips up to meet Jess’s every touch…submerging, surrendering.

  God!

  After, Jil captured Jess’s mouth once more, running her hands over her back and pulling her in, closer, closer. Their bodies fit tightly, like puzzle pieces locking. Jess’s breasts filled the hollow just below her own, her chin rested against her breastbone, their legs and thighs intertwined.

  She couldn’t get close enough.

  *

  Padraig found her, of course.

  “No daughter of Aimee’s is going to be sleeping in a cardboard box,” he said.

  She was so relieved to see him, she almost threw her arms around his neck. Almost.

  “What the hell took you so long?”

  He chuckled. “Didn’t know you were so unhappy there. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You’re the private eye. Why didn’t you know?”

  He bundled her into the car, where the heat from the air vents blasting icy air still seemed warm to Jil. She pulled her knees up to her chest in the passenger’s seat, just trying to stop shaking so she could fasten her seat belt.

  She didn’t even ask where they were going.

  At the Second Cup, she ducked into the bathroom. Her back felt like the frost had bitten her skin from the hips to the ribs, and when she peed, it burned. She must have let the hot water run for five minutes or more. When she emerged, Padraig sat at the corner table, drinking a large coffee, and on the table next to him sat a tall cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream.

  “Thanks,” Jil muttered, sliding in across from him.

  “Ye’ve obviously lost my number,” Padraig said darkly and handed her a small stack of business cards, one of which he tucked into her bag. “Consider memorizing it.”

  Jil cracked a small smile.

  “Why did you run away?”

  She took a sip of her hot chocolate and declined to answer.

  “You’re sixteen now, Kidd. You know placements are going to get tougher to find.”

  “I could be on my own.”

  Padraig scowled. “You’re still a child. You’d never survive. You need looking after.”

  Jil looked through him. She’d never asked him and never would—why she couldn’t live with him.

  “I’m not going back there. Rob is a perv.”

  Padraig winced, then leaned forward, his face hard. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you? I’ll kill him.”

  Jil shook her head slightly. “No. Not yet.”

  Padraig cursed softly. “Right then. Somewhere else.”

  The fist in her stomach unclenched a little.

  “Come back to my office with me. You can sleep there tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll think of something.”

  Chapter Three

  As the first rays of wan sunlight pooled onto the dark hardwood, Jil left Jess sleeping. She pulled on her running gear in the bathroom, then grabbed her iPod and beckoned to Zeus.

  “Can you keep up with me, lazy bones, or will I have to tie you to a tree while I run the trails?”

  Zeus whined and leaped off his bed as Jil laced her runners.

  December and the streets were cold but free of snow. A miracle in Ontario in the weeks before Christmas. Wreaths hung on every door of her building, and someone had planted giant urns with birch branches and evergreen boughs that glittered unnaturally with enhancements purchased at Michael’s.

  Zeus shied away from a homeless person dressed as Santa Claus as Jil pulled him down the street and headed for the park overlooking the water.

  When had Elise told her about her illness? Had she even told her?

  Jil shook her head, trying to remember. It seemed so long ago but had only been a few months. It had been a shadow over her shoulder that had followed them both for years. She would dip in and out of illness, into remission and back again.

  And then, this past year, something shifted and they both knew she wouldn’t make it back.

  But had she actually said it out loud? Had she actually said, “I won’t be here for Christmas this year?”

  The river had frozen over partially, the deeper water still lapping around the fragile outer rim of ice that jutted out about ten feet from the shoreline. Icy air swept her hair back, and she pulled her running scarf up over her nose. A few minutes of breathing that air and she’d be gasping for breath, unable to run. Forget it.

  After stretching and walking a few meters, she took off slowly. Zeus pulled his attention away from the seagulls and loped beside her. A few minutes—that’s all she needed to clear her head and concentrate on the order of the day. Swimming through memories of her teenage years was not how she’d planned to spend the rest of this year.

  The wake was Monday. The funeral, the day after. Though why they bothered to call it a funeral, she couldn’t imagine. Elise wouldn’t be buried until March because of the frozen ground.

  Good. That would give her some more time.

  She gave herself a mental kick. Time for what? To demand another autopsy?

  Elise should be laid to rest, not warehoused in a mausoleum like a science experiment cooling on ice.

  But Karrie’s words still needled her. Why the delay with the autopsy? Elise had been sick. Dying. She’d died of cancer—hadn’t she? Why did she want to look deeper?

  Three kilometers in, and she felt every step in her joints and back.

  “What do you think, buddy? Should we pack it in?”

  Zeus bounced.

  Her cell buzzed and she stopped to grab it.

  Chet. Sorry to bug you, but the computers are down in the office.

  Jil swore. Take a weekend, why do
n’t you? She texted back. But she’d already turned toward home.

  Padraig was right. His family business did have shite timing.

  *

  Jess turned her office phone to Do Not Disturb and powered off her computer. The hand on the clock read 1:56. Four more minutes and the wake would start. Right now, people would be coming into the vestibule, taking off their boots and coats with self-conscious precision. Smoothing their hair. Stopping to sign the guest book.

  She’d imagined this ritual as many times as she’d imagined the phone call that would eventually come from the hospital, telling her Mitch had finally died.

  Jess took her rosary out of the top drawer and fingered it.

  There were years past where she would have prayed a decade for Elise’s soul, but now the prayers felt hollow and cold. Their magic had left her.

  When had this happened? When had she started to feel so excluded from her faith that she could no longer find comfort in its most basic rituals?

  Maybe when she realized those rituals were chaining her to a life she didn’t want anymore. The holy rites were beginning to feel like holy traps.

  She held the tiny cool pearls in her aching fingers and instead said a simple prayer for Jil.

  I’m so sorry I can’t be with you.

  Then she laid her rosary back in its case in her top drawer.

  A prayer should never end with an apology.

  *

  “All set?” Karrie straightened an errant flower from one of the standing arrangements and turned to face Jil.

  “You’re going to open that now?”

  Karrie nodded. “As long as you’re ready.”

  Jil breathed out slowly, then nodded. “Okay.” She watched as Karrie reached over and pulled the upper half of the casket open, like the lid on a suitcase.

  She remembered how, at her mother’s funeral, she thought Aimee had been cut in half, because her legs and feet had been hidden by the lower part of the casket.

  In movies, the casket lid always lifted in one piece, revealing the entire body. She hadn’t been prepared for the reality of half-measures.

  “Does the bottom open too?” Jil asked in a hushed voice.

  Karrie smiled. “Why? Does it creep you out too? The no legs thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  Padraig led her by the hand to the edge of the casket. “You kneel here. You can say a prayer if you like, or just talk to her.”

  She didn’t want to kneel. Then she couldn’t see her mother.

  Aimee’s dark, lush curls framed her face and fell to her shoulders—even as she lay sleeping. Jil reached a hand out to touch her mother’s fingers, which clasped a small bouquet of roses. They felt like cold, soft wax. She brushed her fingertips along Aimee’s knuckles gently.

  Padraig didn’t stop her.

  “I’ll leave you to have a moment alone,” Karrie said. Her full ruby lips made every vowel sound slightly over-pronounced.

  Jil forced herself away from her memories and into the present moment. She looked at Elise’s white hair, coiffed into perfect curls. Her face, in death, looked younger, as the wrinkles and stress lines she’d formed in more recent years had relaxed.

  Jil reached out and straightened a crease in her scarf, her hand brushing over Elise’s old Fauxbergé brooch. “Got to make it look good, eh, Elise?” she said softly.

  Karrie pretended to be busy with something in the corner—setting out a guest book or something. Another man in a dark blue suit appeared in the doorway to the visitation room and gestured almost imperceptibly. Jil caught his movement out of the corner of her eye, and Karrie nodded, glancing at the large clock on the wall.

  One fifty-nine.

  She caught Jil’s gaze. “No need to rush. It’s two now, so the guests will start to arrive soon.” She stepped two paces toward the casket, beside the door. “When you’re ready, you can come stand with me here. We’re the receiving line.”

  A receiving line of two. But she felt gladder than she could say of Karrie’s company. She didn’t think she could hold up a receiving line all by herself.

  “This is only until four, right?”

  “Yes. Then again from seven to nine. Mrs. Fitzgerald chose the shortest time slots possible because she didn’t want you to have to greet people for days. She said if they wanted to see her in her finery then they’d get up and make it out.”

  Jil fell into place beside Karrie, glancing down at her simple Oxfords that looked like something out of an English boarding school, the dark black tights with tiny pulls, as if worn three times too often. And her funky turquoise glasses—so out of place, but so fitting on her young face.

  “How does someone in her twenties decide to become a funeral director?” she asked.

  Karrie shrugged. “My dad, mostly. I used to go to work with him sometimes, you know, after school or in the evening if he couldn’t get a sitter for me. My mom died when I was young. I grew up with just my dad. Anyway, I always used to wonder what happened to the bodies after Dad finished doing the autopsies. When the guys with the long white cube vans came to pick up the bodies, where did they go? Who dressed them up and made them look good for their funerals?”

  “So how did you find out?”

  “In high school, they had this ‘bring your kid to work day’ thing. I always went to work with my dad, so I wasn’t that excited about it, but then I found out that he’d asked one of the prep guys at the funeral home if I could shadow him and his partner for the day. They said yes, and I got the inside scoop. Totally fascinating.”

  Jil smiled. Everyone had to have a passion, right?

  Out in the hall, she heard the noises of people removing their coats and boots, pausing outside to pick up a memorial card and get a cup of coffee from the room across the hall.

  “That’s where I started, you know, after getting my papers. I had a job downstairs, preparing the bodies, doing the makeup.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Shelly from My Girl was totally my hero.”

  Jil grinned. “Jamie what’s-her-name?”

  “Yeah.”

  The first wave appeared at the door.

  “Ready?” Karrie put on a professional smile—Jil recognized it, just like Jess—and subtly ushered the crowd toward the casket.

  She caught herself looking around, scanning the crowd for Jess. But of course, she wasn’t there.

  Around dinner hour, the crowd started filtering out.

  “You’re free until seven. You can go for dinner, or whatever you need to do, then be back for seven.”

  Jil snorted. “What the hell am I going to do for three hours? Go to a movie?”

  Karrie smiled wanly, but in the absence of her professional duties, seemed to struggle to meet her eye.

  “What?”

  She startled. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Bullshit. You know something. What is it?”

  Karrie sighed. “I’m a terrible secret keeper. But this really isn’t the right moment.”

  “There’s rarely a right moment, I’ve noticed.”

  “Yes, but there are definitely some wrong moments, and it’s hard enough to meet and greet lines of mourners without this kind of news.”

  Jil stood up straighter. “Give it to me.”

  With a sigh, Karrie drew Jil into the bay window. “I asked my dad about the autopsy—about why it took so long.”

  “And?”

  “And he said ‘nothing was traceable.’”

  “Those were his words?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask him what he meant?”

  Karrie blew the bangs off her face. “I did. He said there were some…irregularities. But nothing conclusive. So it could be nothing. Which is why he did conclude natural causes in the end.”

  “But he suspects something.”

  She bit her lower lip. “Just between us, he considered some sort of toxin, but without any evidence at the cr—” She paused. “At the scene where she d
ied, he didn’t have enough information to test further.”

  “Could it have been some meds she took for her illness?”

  “Well, certain medications you take at the end of life could cause those irregularities, and those would have to be excluded. But her medical records arrived with her body. Everything she’d been prescribed was listed…”

  “And I’ve looked in the medicine cabinet. Most of what she took was still there.”

  “Could she have been taking something not prescribed?” Karrie asked softly.

  “What, like a street drug?”

  “Or something homeopathic, maybe?”

  “It seems unlikely. Elise wasn’t really into shark tooth powder or anything like that. But I can’t say for certain I knew everything she took.”

  Karrie shrugged, her eyes full of sympathy. “Sometimes it’s better just to let things go, Jil. Especially if there’s no way to know and looking will just drive you crazy.”

  “But if someone poisoned her—and that’s what we’re saying, right? Someone could have poisoned her?”

  “I guess. But is it likely? Why would they?”

  Jil straightened up again as someone walked toward them. She plastered on a fake smile, but between her gritted teeth said, “That’s what I need to know.”

  *

  Jess checked her phone.

  Nothing.

  The wake should have ended by now.

  She sighed and got in her car, then pulled up to the loft in the dark. Streetlights glowed off the snowbanks, casting a watery sheen on the pavement. She parked on the street. Jil only had one parking spot. When they got their own place, it would be with two parking spaces.

  She gave her head a shake. A nice thought, but not exactly practical.

  How would they move in together, exactly?

  What did she plan to do with her house? How could she invite any of her family and friends over? Not to mention—how could she go about divorcing Mitch and keeping her job?

  Nope. Parking on the street looked to be in the cards for a while.

  When she got inside, Zeus greeted her at the door, and she grabbed his leash to take him out.

  This was as close to domestic bliss as they were going to get.

  Chapter Four