A midsummer nights schem.., p.5
A Midsummer Night's Scheme, page 5
They hoisted him inside the ambulance, slammed the doors, and took off. That’s when Daria felt someone next to them.
“Are you two all right?”
It was Aiden and he was on his phone, seemingly waiting to talk to someone. Beside him were Officers Ned Carter, Shae Johnson, and a few others.
“We’re fine,” Quinn reassured him.
Before he could respond, Aiden was back to his call, and whoever was talking to him was not telling him what he wanted to hear. “No, they haven’t arrived … No, that’s not acceptable. We’ve got a—” Something caught his eye from down the street. “Never mind, I see them … right.”
He hung up, his gaze on Daria’s cousin. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. The dogs have a couple of cuts, but it’s nothing, considering all the glass. Go do what you have to do.”
Aiden nodded and met up with the animal control unit. He pointed over at the vehicle.
“Everyone needs to back up! We don’t know how many are in there!”
Two animal control employees, dressed head to toe in protective gear, slowly released the canvas tarp from the hole. They had brought a bunch of thick burlap bags and long poles with pincers at the end to grab the snakes. They took hold of the slithering reptiles one by one and finagled them into the sacks. Each time they’d call out the name of the snake.
“This one’s a copperhead!”
“Got ourselves a timber rattler over here! There’s also a bunch of rattlesnakes!”
“Whoa, whoever did this wasn’t messing around. I think this one’s a black mamba!”
The reptile opened its mouth, hissing at the handler. Inside, its mouth was the color of pitch.
“Yep, definitely a black mamba.” He shoved the snake in the bag.
Daria noticed the officers writing each one down. By the time they were done, they had captured seven snakes, each one more deadly than the last.
Aiden looked at the list, his expression like stone. “Ned, call over to the ER. They’re going to need to know exactly what kind of snakebites they’re dealing with.”
Officer Carter nodded before walking to the side to make the call, while his partner, Shae Johnson, jotted down more notes.
After the animal control officers secured the snakes inside their truck, one of them walked back over toward them. “Listen, Detective, you should know, whoever did this thing, they went far and wide to get them snakes.”
Aiden flipped a page in his notebook. “Be more specific.”
He adjusted the bill of his cap. “Well, some are local, but a couple of ’em aren’t even from this continent. I’m no herpetologist, but I do know for a fact it’s illegal to keep a black mamba. Some of the others, well, I’d have to look up. Let’s just pray that guy didn’t get bitten by that one.”
“Thanks, Mike.” Aiden shook the animal control guy’s hand. “Going to need a name of a good herpetologist, if you’ve got one.”
“Yeah, it’s in the truck. Follow me.”
As Aiden and Mike went off, Ned and Shae returned with yellow tape, sealing off the area.
“Can’t believe we’re seeing this kind of crime scene again this soon,” Quinn mumbled under her breath.
RBG and Rueger were dog-tired, both lying on the ground in front of them. If they had been tweaked earlier, they weren’t anymore.
“Something like this doesn’t just happen,” Daria told her. “This was planned. This is attempted murder.”
“I know it, but I still can’t wrap my mind around it.”
After finishing with animal control, Aiden had his team scour Chad’s vehicle for evidence. It didn’t take long. Right under the driver’s seat they found an opened burlap sack, similar to the kind animal control had but without the agency’s logo. With gloves on now, Shae rooted around inside the car. Her eyes rounded as she stopped and took out a handwritten note. She unfolded it and scanned the words.
Her partner, Ned, interrupted her reading. “Well, what does it say?”
Her tawny eyes met his gaze. “Someone here went old-school. Listen to this:
“O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical
Dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show
Just as you return, it is time for you to go.”
Ned rubbed his bald head and the back of his neck with a kerchief. “Now, what on God’s green earth does all that mean?”
Standing near where Chad’s body had been on the ground, Aiden grimaced. “It’s a passage from Romeo and Juliet. The perpetrator is calling Chad Frivole a snake, saying he should’ve never come back to town … and he deserves to die.”
Chapter Three
To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in this sleep of death what dreams may come …
—Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Quinn had always known that Aiden was sharp, but he had just demonstrated a whole other level of theater geekdom. “You have Romeo and Juliet memorized?”
His brows furrowed. “With everything happening, that’s what you’re asking?”
“Oh, I have a lot of questions, but that’s the only one I think you can answer at this point.”
“Fair enough. No, I don’t have Shakespeare memorized per se, but Grace played Juliet at her college’s production last season and I ran lines with her.”
Grace was one of his younger sisters, currently finishing up at James Madison University’s musical theater program.
Aiden rested his warm hand on the crook of her neck, his thumb stroking the underside of her cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay? What happened here was extreme.”
She rested her hand on top of his. “I mean, all things considered, yeah. But Chad? Not so much. He did not look good.”
“Yeah, I better head on over to the hospital, see what’s up.”
“Okay.”
He gave the curve of her neck a gentle squeeze.
She searched his eyes for a clue. “What?”
Aiden let out a vexed grumble. “Just promise me, Cagney and Lacey, you two won’t start poking around this case.”
Quinn tilted her head. “Cagney and Lacey?”
He looked skyward, muttering “Deliver me” under his breath.
“I’m kidding, Aid. I’ve seen their reruns on Nick at Nite. That show’s even older than you.”
“Babe, your charm is appreciated, but I need you to promise me your involvement in this case ends here.”
Daria shuddered. “If she won’t, I will—for the both of us. We were out the minute someone brought snakes into the picture.”
Quinn swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yeah, the only place I ever want to see snakeskins is on my belts and boots.”
Aiden’s shoulders dropped. “Good.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ve gotta run. I’m probably going to be late tonight.”
“No worries. Should I bring some dinner over later?”
Daria gagged but covered it up by pretending to cough, pounding a fist to her chest. “What? I have allergies.”
Aiden ignored her, turning his attention back to Quinn. “Nah, I’ll grab something. Call you later.”
As soon as he was out of earshot, Quinn elbowed her rude cousin.
“What?” Daria feigned innocence.
Quinn gave her the stink eye.
“Listen, I know you two becoming a couple is your girlhood wish come true,” Daria said. “But c’mon … we used to make fun of such PDA.”
Quinn crossed her arms. “Well, that’s a big bucket of bull crap.”
“Excuse me?”
Quinn didn’t hesitate. “It’d be one thing if we were smashing it up in front of you, but we were being totally appropriate. So what gives?”
“It’s just … I don’t know.” Daria blew some stray hair out of her eyes. “Aiden’s awesome. You know I think he’s the best. But remember … he’s a guy. He’s just a guy.”
Quinn was confused. “I don’t understand. Did he do something to tick you off?”
“No, of course not!” Daria said in a rush. “I’m just saying, he’s human.”
“I know that.”
Daria let out a grunt. “That means he’s not the superhero you’ve built him up to be. He’s going to make mistakes. He’s going to leave the toilet seat up or forget to put the cap back on the toothpaste.”
“I’m not that anal-retentive.”
Daria’s countenance softened. “I know you’re not. What I’m trying to say—badly—is that I don’t want you getting hurt, or setting him up to fail either. I want you to be realistic and not look at him like he’s your own personal savior.”
“Says the woman literally marrying Jesus.”
Daria stiffened. “That’s different and you know it.”
Quinn studied her cousin: shoulders tense, an impenetrable shield. The tough girl with the gaze of steel and a heart fragile as glass. It hurt to witness her pain.
And Quinn knew exactly who was responsible for breaking something in her cousin, something that had yet to heal.
“Not all guys are like Raj, you know. There are good ones out there.”
Daria’s head reared back, like she’d been slapped. “What does he have to do with anything?”
Oh, he had everything to do with Daria’s current reaction, at least in Quinn’s opinion. Raj had been her cousin’s boyfriend back in grad school—the first guy she’d ever brought home to meet the family.
“He’s the one,” Lizzy had whispered in Quinn’s ear over Sunday dinner. “Isn’t he something?”
And the commitment seemed mutual, with Raj inviting her cousin not once, but twice to India with his family over school breaks. By his last year of law school, they were practically living together, with him using her place as his quiet space to study for the bar exam.
Her apartment wasn’t the only thing he used, Quinn thought.
Two weeks after he passed his exam, Raj took Elizabeth out to celebrate.
She thought he was going to propose. She had bought herself something fancy, a dress meant to be noticed without begging for attention. She’d let her hairstylist magician, JoDene Dewey, work her sorcery on her straight-as-an-ironing-board locks, even splurging on one of those deep-conditioning treatments to give her hair a shimmering glow.
Raj picked her up at her parents’ house, dressed in a vintage Armani suit and bearing flowers for both his girl and her mom. Quinn had been over to help her cousin with makeup, so she was there to witness the whole exchange, including a moment between her aunt and uncle where they acknowledged the gravitas of the occasion.
They were happy for their daughter.
It had taken some time, but Aunt Johanna and Uncle Jerry had grown to care for Raj too. After three years, the family agreed: it was time for an engagement.
“We won’t be too late,” Raj let them know before leaving. “I’ll have her back right after dinner.” He stopped, his dark-brown eyes warming as they locked with Lizzy’s mom’s. “I want to thank you for everything, for always making me feel like part of your family.”
Okay, so those last words were a tad strange, but at the time both Quinn and her aunt Johanna thought he was trying to give them a signal of what he was about to ask. The minute they heard his car leave the driveway, Quinn’s auntie jogged over to the back fridge, grabbing a bottle of champagne along with the ice bucket she and Uncle Jerry had received on their wedding day.
Her uncle only griped a little. “Don’t get me wrong. That young man is all right. But would it have killed him to ask for her hand?”
Quinn filled the bucket with ice. “Uncle Jer, that’s so old-fashioned!”
“Humph. Well, so am I,” he said, before snapping his newspaper open and hiding himself behind it.
For all his bluster, when he was done with the international news section, Uncle Jerry hoisted himself out of his favorite La-Z-Boy chair to give the champagne glasses an extra wipe-down so they would gleam in the candlelight. Then the three of them sat and waited, pretending to read until Raj and Elizabeth came back home.
Raj was a man of his word and had Quinn’s cousin back in under two hours, right after dinner. When Quinn and her aunt and uncle heard sniffling on the other side of the front door, they assumed Lizzy was crying from happiness. Uncle Jerry even started twisting the champagne cork.
But when they heard car wheels ripping through the gravel road, the three of them were confused—until Elizabeth opened the door. There was so much black mascara running, it was as if Raj had left his tread marks all over her face instead of the street outside.
The cork accidentally popped from Uncle Jerry’s hands.
They couldn’t believe it. Raj had pulled a Legally Blonde maneuver, choosing a fancy restaurant so he could orchestrate the breakup in public.
“I don’t understand. What about the flowers? His vintage suit?” Quinn voiced what her aunt and uncle couldn’t.
Not even bothering with a tissue, Lizzy lifted the skirt of her dress to wipe her tears and runny nose. “He said he wanted to give our time together the respect it deserves, to give me and my family a proper good-bye. When I told him I thought he had been gearing up to propose, you know what he said?”
The three of them shook their heads in unison. Uncle Jerry handed her a tissue.
“He said he loved me, he wished he could marry me, but not enough to go against his family’s expectations. Family came first, and what they wanted was for him to marry a more appropriate match—a proper Bengali woman, someone who went to an Ivy League university and has a ‘real’ career.
“Oh, and the only reason why they took me on those trips was because he had insisted, and they figured it was better for him to be with a maagi they could keep an eye on than the alternative. The last thing he said to me was, ‘Well, at least you got to see the world outside your little town.’”
When Aunt Johanna asked what maagi was, her daughter told her it was better if she didn’t know. Quinn had looked it up later. She vowed to punch Raj in the face if she ever saw him again.
The break-up wrecked her. Shortly after that night, Elizabeth quit her job at the homeless shelter, gave up her apartment, and then didn’t leave her childhood bedroom for over a month.
The “incident”—as everyone in the Caine family called it from then on—had occurred years ago, and it still stung fresh just thinking about it.
“Forget what I said,” Quinn insisted. She knew Daria wasn’t ready for this particular conversation. “Are you hungry? Because I could chew my own arm off. I’ve only had that coffee today.”
The tension drained from her cousin’s face. “Yeah, I could eat. Let’s go.”
They walked around the crime scene toward their favorite lunch spot, Church Street Eats, run by Greg and Eun Hutton. The girls tied up the dogs to a nearby post, making sure they both had filled water bowls, which were always kept at the ready right outside the door of the restaurant. Most of the businesses on Church Street offered the same courtesy; Vienna was a true-blue dog town.
As soon as they walked in, tiny bells signaled their arrival, and Eun stopped in the middle of taking an order. “It’s about time you two got over here! I thought I was going to have to drag you in myself!”
Daria and Quinn exchanged a glance before sitting down in their usual spots at the counter. Eun shoved an order into the ticket carousel and automatically filled a glass with ginger ale for Daria and one with seltzer for Quinn.
“All right, so what happened? Was Chad drunk? You know, I was at the doctor’s office the other day, and I read in People magazine one of his castmates just checked into rehab. Of course, they didn’t actually say ‘rehab.’” Eun emphasized with air quotes. “They said it’s ‘exhaustion,’ which everyone knows is”—she glanced left and right before loud-whispering—“drugs.”
Quinn knew Mrs. Hutton was being serious, which is why she sucked in her lips to stop herself from letting out a laugh.
Daria answered for her. “It was nothing like that. We saw Chad at the dog bakery just before he got into his car. He was fine. Sober. Really.”
Eun narrowed her eyes. “So what made him swerve all over the road like that? I think his car destroyed that new vape store. Not that I’m complaining.”
Greg Hutton balked. “Good riddance, if you ask me. This town doesn’t need that kind of business here.”
Eun called out over her shoulder, “Preach it, my king! Vaping is no good!” Her gaze darted back and forth between the cousins. “It’s like putting microscopic glass shards into your baby-pink lungs. You girls never do that, right?”
“No way, Mrs. H,” Daria told her. “My most controversial coping mechanism of choice these days is biting sarcasm. I’m as dull as dirt.”
The tiny bells above their door rang again—and two familiar faces walked in.
“Should’ve known I’d find you two here—getting ready to stuff your faces while only a stone’s throw away from a crime scene. The Caine women’s idea of a good time has always been really twisted.”
It was Bash, hand in hand with his girlfriend, Rachel.
Daria chuckled. “Says the guy who runs towards and not away from burning buildings.”
“Yeah, but it’s my job to save lives—not like you two.”
Something in Quinn’s stomach dropped. The conversation was taking an acrid turn.
Daria’s face fell. “What the heck is that supposed to mean? Are you suggesting your sister and I are looking for danger?”
Rachel’s cerulean eyes rounded while Bash ran a hand through his sandy-brown hair in frustration. “No, of course not, but what are you doing at the scene of an accident where there’s venomous snakes?”
Eun dropped a handful of empty plates, the ceramic shattering into pieces. “Snakes? Chad’s car had snakes in it?”
A collective hush fell over the restaurant. Bash cursed under his breath.
“It’s all fine now, people,” Quinn told everyone. “Animal control got them all.”
