Death by Chocolate

my
job.”
    Dirk shook his head. “Savannah,
that’s dumb. Your client croaked.”
    “Yeah, but she paid me in
advance. I think she’d still want to know who it was.”
    Abruptly, he pulled the
Buick over to the side of the road and turned to face her. “Look,” he said, “the
gal’s dead. She ain’t ever gonna know nothin’, so—”
    “Granny Reid says the
moment we pass over we instantly have all knowledge. It’s like a veil being
lifted, and once we leave the physical world and join the spiritual one, we see
everything clearly.”
    “Then you don’t have to
find out anything for her. According to your grandma, she already knows
everything, right?”
    Savannah turned and gave
him a long, hard look. “Okay, smarty-pants. Maybe I want to know for myself.”
He threw the car into drive and pulled back into traffic. “Well, hell, girl,
why didn’t you just say so in the first place? Let’s go back to the mansion and
check out that medicine chest.”
    “And her dresser drawers,
and her desk and her closets and—”
    “Anybody ever tell you
you’re a nosy old broad?” ‘Yeah. It’s a gift. And I keep telling you, boy...
I’m middle-aged.”
     
     
    Dirk knocked at the front
door of the mansion, but when nobody answered, Savannah reached across him and
tried the knob. Just as she had suspected it would, it opened easily.
    “They didn’t bother to lock
it before,” she said. “Not much reason to bother now.”
    The tripping of tiny
toenails across the hardwood floors announced the arrival of the terrible
threesome.
    “Meet my buddies,” she told
Dirk as she knelt on one knee and began petting first one, then the other.
‘They’re named Satan, Killer, and the little runt one is Hider.”
    “Are you serious?” Dirk
offered his hand, but Satan snarled. “Stupid names for some barking rats.”
    “Are you guys hungry?” she
asked. Then she noticed the bits of dog food in Killer’s tiny beard. Satan’s
whiskers were wet, so they had water. And they weren’t rushing out the door to
go doggy-wee-wee, so she assumed Marie must still be on duty.
    “They look fine to me,”
Dirk said, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. It occurred to Savannah
that nothing short of a German shepherd or rottweiler was a “real” dog to Dirk.
But then, he hadn’t been bitten by one of these little ones, either. She still
had a bandage on her forefinger.
    “Anybody here?” he shouted,
his deep voice echoing through the house.
    The answering silence
seemed heavy and thick, as though the house itself knew that something had
changed.
    Looking around at the
antiques, the heavy drapes, the dark fabrics, Savannah said, “I don’t think I’d
want to be here after midnight... in the middle of a thunderstorm—”
    “With a psycho ax-murderer
on the loose from a local nuthouse.... yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve got some
imagination, Van. It’s just your average, run-of-the-mill mansion.”
    “With a carousel horse and
a suit of armor in the living room?”
    “Exactly. I’ve got the same
sorta stuff in my trailer.”
    “Oh, yeah.... with your
TV-tray coffee table and your orange-crate bookshelves.” Savannah started up
the stairs. “Come on, I’ve been dying to see the master suite.”
     
     
    When Savannah opened the
door to Eleanor’s bedroom and looked inside, her first thought was, Somebody
beat us to it. It’s already been searched.
    The canopied bed was
topsy-turvy, a tumble of blankets, sheets, and pillows, some of it spilling
onto the carpet. Half of the dresser’s drawers were open, clothes hanging out.
The closet door stood ajar, the heel of a rhinestone-studded pump stuck beneath
it.
    Every horizontal surface
was littered with food wrappers, empty booze bottles, jewelry and makeup and
assorted items of clothing, some clean but more dirty.
    The room had a stale odor
about it, as though it badly needed a breath of fresh air.
    “She really was depressed,”
Savannah said.
    “Why didn’t the maid
straighten up in here?” Dirk shook his head as he looked around, taking in the
mess. “Hell, this is worse than my trailer. At least I keep all of my dirty
clothes in one pile.”
    “Yeah, you’re quite the
Suzy Homemaker. I suspect that Eleanor wouldn’t let the maid—or anybody, for
that matter—in here. This was her cave, where she hid from the world.”
    Dirk walked over to the
closet, pushed the door open, and looked inside. “What do ya suppose she was
hiding?” ‘The fact that