Unfashionably Dead

Chapter Thirty-five

"He didn't go to Boston," Margaret says before she's completely inside her door.

Fifteen minutes late, as usual. Nice that she assumes I'm so eager to wait on her tardiness.

"Oh?" I perk up, out of the misery of trying to sort through reaper-ghost relations. I'd so much rather debate who is the world's most influential fashion designer. "What happened? I mean, besides your death?" If Benitez has done his job, Clive should have been ordered to remain in town. Big if.

She walks over to her couch and sits. As her body disappears into the leather, a look of befuddlement crosses her face. I take a seat on her chair, hovering just above it and focusing on staying put. It's probably the hardest acclimation to ghost life I have experienced.

Margaret rises, to where she is hovering just above her sofa's cushion. "He called his son and told him he needed to stick around here for the next few days."

"Did he say why?"

She sighs. "He told him that an issue came up with work, that he wouldn't be able to leave until the twenty-eighth."

"He needs to make sure Lanie stays in jail for his crime." I hate thinking like this, but it's the only explanation. Clive killed Margaret, which makes it all the more likely our murders were perpetrated by different people. I'd never seen Clive before he was crouched over my corpse. But who knows? Maybe he was removing evidence.

"Possibly. He was practically glued to the television while he rearranged his schedule." She stares at her nails, as though she's inspecting a new manicure. "He also booked a flight to the Cayman Islands."

"To the Caymans? Isn't that a tax haven?" I know they're in the Caribbean, but I seem to recall a movie star being in trouble for tax evasion. Or maybe it was a movie. Whoever it was kept his unreported money there.

"Totally," Margaret answers. "I've gone there probably twenty times."

I shoot her a dirty look.

"What?" She throws her hands into the air. "I like beaches. And I only invested a little bit there, maybe thirty grand." Shock stretches across her face. She leaps off the couch and rushes toward her desk. In and out of the wooden drawers she goes until she reaches the bottom, where she lingers for several minutes.

I start to lose my patience.

She exits the drawer with a sigh. "It's not in here. Oh. My. God." She punctuates it with expletives directed at Clive.

"What isn't there?"

Margaret gulps. "My safety deposit key, the paperwork. All of it's gone."

"Why are you getting worked up over thirty thousand dollars? It's not like you can use it now." I shake my head. "And if you had the money, why were you blackmailing Adam?"

"Well, it's a bit more than thirty grand." Her face scrunches up. She's definitely being intentionally evasive.

"How much more?"

She looks to the wall, as though she's trying to avoid eye contact with me. "Like ten times as much."

"You've had all that money, yet you sold my shoes and blackmailed Adam?" I gape at her. Her behavior and entitlement issues are preposterous.

"My dad cut me off after my last visit to the Caymans. I had to physically go there to have access to it. Obviously, with no money to get me to the islands, I was practically destitute."