Death by Marriage by Blair Bancroft Page B

came to DreamWear, I thought her “gifts” a nice little gimmick. Good for business. But her intuition, empathy—whatever you want to call it—had been right enough times for me to become less of a skeptic. I was ninety percent convinced she really did see auras. “Okay,” I said, “let’s look at the problem this way. What are the possibilities? What could intrude enough on Miss Letty’s life to screw up her aura?”
    “Cancer?” Letty offered. “Something bad like that.”
    I winced. Cancer had taken my father. But Crystal’s suggestion was valid. I put health at the top of the hopefully subtle questions we needed to ask. “Does she have close friends or relatives?” I asked. “Someone she might have quarreled with? Or maybe it’s one of them who’s sick.”
    “There’s a nephew up north somewhere. She told me he’s all that’s left of her family.”
    “Her heir?”
    “I guess.”
    “How about friends?”
    “She’s a fiend for bridge, but won’t touch Bingo with a ten-foot pole. She’s on the board of all the high-falutin’ organizations like the Hospital Auxiliary, the Library, and the Art Center. I think she said they just put her on the “Keep Main Street Beautiful” committee. The old gal’s got impeccable taste.”
    “Friends,” I repeated. “Someone she might have confided in?”
    Crystal’s anxious amber eyes winked shut as she scrunched her rounded features together, thinking hard. “She eats out with the bridge club once a week. That’s about it.”
    “Leaving you and me.” Mentally, I added problems with the nephew and local acquaintances to my list.
    “Money?” Crystal offered. “I mean, the economy’s tanked, right? Maybe Miss Letty’s money went down the drain with everyone else’s.”
    “Makes sense,” I murmured, “except I always got the impression her money was so ‘old,’ so securely invested that this latest downturn should be nothing more than a ripple in the flow of her finances.”
    “Maybe . . .” Crystal paused, turned and paced toward her Cave, fluffing her dress with every step.
    “Crystal?”
    “Maybe it’s not that kind of money problem.”
    “There’s another kind besides not having enough?” I prodded when Crystal didn’t follow up her highly ambiguous remark.
    “Seniors like Miss Letty , ” she said at last, “maybe you don’t know — Golden Beach being such an out of the way corner of the world and all — but con artists love ’em. Seniors draw scammers like bees to honey. Miss Letty’s generation came along when the world was still bright and shiny. They were taught good manners, trust with a capital T. They just can’t believe anyone would scam them. And they can’t believe they would ever be stupid enough to be taken in by a con. Which makes them perfect marks.”
    Crystal was standing half-way between me and her Cave, head down, flapping her hot pink caftan. Slowly, I closed my mouth over the obvious question—how did Crystal know so much about scams? Was this the past she was escaping the day she wandered into DreamWear? If so, it was well behind her, and if Miss Letty was being stung by con artists, then Crystal’s knowledge could come in handy. But it didn’t take a lot of intuition to see that Crystal’s words had not come easy. No sense in twisting the knife.
    Scams soared to the top of my list. But no . . . I shoved them back to last. We’d have to work up to scams, just as Crystal and I had done while brainstorming Miss Letty’s problem. I sagged down onto my wicker stool, plopped my head into my hands. Was I really up to this? Or was I plunging in, amateur night in Dixie, as I had with Jeb Brannigan and Vanessa Kellerman before Boone Talbot slammed the lid on my curiosity? Were Crystal and I charging off to Miss Letty’s like bulls in a china shop?
    Not quite. We’d just worked that one out. We were Letty’s friends. We cared.
    I cared about Martin Kellerman too, and look where that had gotten me. Shut