A Veiled Deception Read Online Free PDF

father narrowed his eyes. “Must be bad, if you think I’d drink one of her twitchy brews.”
    Aunt Fiona bit her lip against one of her signature cutting remarks, and I appreciated it.
    Twitchy? Hmm. Did he mean witchy?
    I believed that our childhood suspicions about Aunt Fiona being a witch had been founded in truth. Did Dad believe it, too?
    Good grief, did he know that my mother had actually moon danced with her best friend . . . and taken me along for the ride?
    “Fiona,” he said, brows furrowed, his defenses weakening before my eyes, as he took his comfortable chair. “I’d appreciate a cup of tea. Thank you.” He gave me one of those parental looks. “‘Ignorance is the parent of fear.’”
    A literary quote for every occasion, I thought. “Who’s the author of that one, Dad?”
    “Herman Melville and I never knew how right he was.” Dad then tried to drill the information out of me with his “Dad does the guilts” look, the one he’d given me the morning after that fateful Winter Ball when Nick and I had lost our virginity to each other.
    I didn’t break then, either. Nick had successfully escaped at dawn via the tree outside Brandy’s window with no one the wiser.
    “Give it to me straight,” my father snapped. “‘I am never afraid of what I know,’
    Shakespeare. And, Madeira, I’m smarter than you think.”
    Uh-oh. What did that mean? “Where’s Sherry?” I asked, too worried about my sister to consider my unending list of past transgressions. My father picked up his pipe out of nervous habit and put it down again. “I haven’t seen Sherry since she and the Jezebel disappeared so as not to spoil ‘the surprise.’” Dad gave a strained half smile. “When Deborah left, she was fit to be tied that it hadn’t come off.”
    Whatever it was. “Mary Quant, mother of the miniskirt, where the Hermès could Sherry be?” I looked out every one of the taproom windows. I even lifted the board covering the coach-stop drive-through window. Normally dim, because of the raw boards and corner logs it was made of, the room darkened and grew chill as if with our spirits.
    My father huffed. “Madeira, you will explain the ambulance this minute.”
    Aunt Fiona brought his tea before I could answer. Not that I was putting off telling him, but I’d rather eat dirt.
    Alex owed me big time for this one.
    Dad acknowledged his tea with a grudging thanks, raising his mug in approval. She’d not been so foolish as to give him a teacup. “Fiona,” he griped. “Mad still hasn’t told me.”
    I sat, hemmed and hawed, sighed and swallowed, and finally revealed what I knew, and until I’d come down, I pretty much knew more than anybody. As a child I thought my father never left his stately academic demeanor behind, but for the second time in my memory, life shocked him speechless. By the time Aunt Fiona and Dad recovered, and I’d fielded a thousand or so questions, most of which only Jasmine could know, Nick and Alex ushered in Detective Sergeant Lytton Werner—or Little Wiener, as I’d dubbed him in third grade. Of all the detectives in all the world . . .
    I’d only called him Little Wiener once. Okay, so we were in the cafeteria at the time . . . and the nickname stuck like burrs in his underpants. That’s all I needed today, a detective in a $200 rack suit who owed me for upgrading his geek score. Not that I judged people by their clothes . . . well, yeah, I guess I did. That was my job. But seriously, a bad suit didn’t mean he was a bad detective, I hoped.
    By high school, everybody had dropped the word “little,” because Wiener the Quarterback had turned into six feet of toned muscle. The nickname had still popped up once in a while on the football field, but by then, he could beat the scrap out of anybody who said it.
    Still, I’d stayed the Hermès out of his way for the better part of my life. Werner eyed me. “Still a glamazon, I see,” he noted with scrutiny, resurrecting the