Buttoned Up (Button Box Mystery) Read online

  “That there’s something mysterious going on?” Nev brushed crumbs off his hands and, because I knew he wouldn’t notice or if he did, he wouldn’t care, I took care of the crumbs that had landed on the orange tie he’d worn with gray pants and a navy sport coat. “No mysteries! Whoever this Parmenter character was yelling at, the fight’s over, right?” For a minute, we both stood in silence and strained to hear Forbis’s voice again and when we didn’t, Nev nodded. “So it’s official. The fight’s over, no harm done. We are having a night out. And I’m not letting you get entangled in any more murders.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear.” Just to hedge my bets, I glanced up at the nearest stained-glass window when I said this. “No more murders.” I repeated the words I’d been saying to Nev in the months since one of my customers was killed outside my shop and I helped find out whodunit. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find out what’s going on and who Forbis is fighting with. It could be serious.”

  “There’s a security guard here.”

  Wise words, but Nev knew he couldn’t get away with them. Not when we’d both seen the security guard when we walked in, and we both knew that the man was eighty if he was a day, and so frail-looking, one good puff of wind off Lake Michigan would blow him clear to Iowa.

  “I’m not saying we should stick our noses where they don’t belong,” I assured Nev.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “But . . .”

  “But if something’s wrong and you don’t help–”

  “If something’s wrong and somebody needs my help, I’ll be only too happy to oblige. I’ll even take a quick walk around and make sure nobody’s in trouble if that will make you happy. After that, all I want is a chance to enjoy an evening out with you without murder and mayhem getting in the way.”

  “And all I want . . .” I didn’t need to think about it for more than two seconds, I knew it was true. I’d helped the cops with that customer’s murder a few months earlier, and I’d assisted in a couple other investigations, too. That didn’t change a thing. “All I want is to live the button life.”

  “And let’s just add another one of those sandwiches! Ham salad. It was really good.” Nev spotted a waiter over near the exhibit and grabbed my hand, and together we headed that way. While he took care of two of the little sandwiches, I checked out the nearest art piece. This was a set of tribal drums and like everything else, the hourglass-shaped drums were covered with buttons.

  “You don’t suppose he uses actual historic artifacts for his work, do you?” I asked Nev but true to his word, he’d walked away to do a quick turn around the church and I found that I was talking to myself. I flipped open the exhibit brochure to see if it answered my question, and mumbled, “These things are replicas, right? Forbis wouldn’t use artifacts that are hundreds of years old.”

  “Absolutely. Yes, he absolutely does.”

  The answer came from a woman standing at my side and studying the drums like I was, and I turned that way. She was taller than me, which is no big accomplishment, and as willowy as a reed. When Forbis contacted me six weeks earlier and arranged to buy the button that was in my purse—the button that I would present to him when he arrived and he would use to complete one of the artworks in the show—I’d treated myself to a sleeveless black sheath dress and a black shrug. The outfit screamed art gallery, and apparently, I wasn’t the only one who heard it. This woman, too, was all in black, though her dress was shorter than mine and cut low enough in front to accent the smooth swell of her breasts. Me, I’d decided to stand out in the crowd by adding Grandma Roba’s string of pearls to my ensemble. This woman didn’t need to accessorize. Her eyes were green and nearly almond-shaped, her hair was long, sleek, and dark, and scooped over one shoulder, and she was leggy enough to turn heads.

  When Nev walked back up to join me, she turned his all right, and when she caught sight of him, her mouth fell open.

  “Nev!”

  “Evangeline!”

  Their voices mingled and after one second of utter surprise, Nev and Evangeline fell into each other’s arms. A quick hug, a quicker peck on the cheek, and they stepped back, beaming and still holding onto each other’s hands.

  “What a wonderful surprise,” Evangeline crooned, and apparently it was, because Nev turned red all the way to the tips of his ears.

  “Evangeline . . .” He untangled himself from her and put a hand on my shoulder. “This is Josie Giancola. Josie, this is Evangeline Simon, an old friend of mine.”

  Evangeline’s laugh was as chipper as bird song. “Not so old,” she protested, “though it has been too long since I’ve seen you, Nev. I know you’re still on the job.” She looked my way and lowered her voice as if Nev wasn’t there and we were sharing a secret. “He’s got cop in his blood, that’s for sure. I can’t imagine he’d ever do anything else.”

  I was about to mention that not only was Nev a cop, but the best one in Chicagoland, but Nev and Evangeline didn’t give me a chance. Questions poured out of her, and Nev, usually as talkative as a stone statue, answered and threw in a couple dozen of his own.

  When they both finally stopped to take a breath, I saw my chance and jumped at it. “You’re an art fan?” I asked Evangeline.

  Nev answered for her. “She’s an expert,” he said, and in response Evangeline blushed ever-so-prettily. “Not in art, though I bet she knows plenty about that, too. In this vudon thing.” He smiled at her. “Right?”

  Evangeline stepped closer to the drums we’d both been looking at before Nev walked up. “I’m an anthropologist,” she explained. “My area of expertise is the cultures of the enslaved peoples of the Barrier Islands along the Atlantic coast.”

  “Where Forbis is from,” I said.

  Evangeline nodded. “When I heard about an art show that included vudon, I had to come see what all the excitement is about.”

  “She’s being modest.” I hadn’t even realized Nev had ducked away for a moment until he came back with two glasses of champagne. He handed one to me and the other to Evangeline. “When it comes to the Barrier Islands and the people who lived there, she’s the world’s leading expert,” he said. “Like you are about buttons, Josie.”

  “You know buttons?” Evangeline’s question was straightforward enough but I didn’t fail to notice the way one corner of her perfectly bowed lips pulled to the side.

  “I know antique buttons,” I informed her. “In fact, I’ve got one button for the display with me.”

  “Josie’s part of the opening ceremony,” Nev told Evangeline.

  It was my turn to be modest. “Just a small part. The way I understand it, Forbis is quite the showman. He needed one more button to complete one of these pieces . . .” I let my gaze rove over the drums and beyond them to what looked like some sort of altar. I hadn’t been told which piece my button would be added to, and on first glance, it was impossible to see where there could possibly be a blank space. So many buttons, so many colors, I bet I could look around for hours and never find the place where this one last button belonged.

  “Forbis wanted just the right button so he contacted me,” I told Evangeline. “Once he shows up, I’ll present him the button and he’ll put it in place. Then, officially, the exhibit will be open.”

  “And this button . . .” Evangeline took a sip of champagne. “It has some connection with vudon?”

  I laughed. “Nothing that mysterious! It’s just a plastic button, manufactured some time in the last thirty years. It cost Forbis exactly one dollar and fifty cents.”

  Evangeline’s eyes went wide. “Then why—”

  “Who are we to question an artist?” I asked. “I e-mailed Forbis pictures. Literally, thousands of pictures. He was looking for a button of just the right size and just the right shade of red. Fortunately, I had it in my inventory.”

  “Josie’s got lots of buttons in her inventory,” Nev told her.

  “Fascinating.”

  As far as I could tell Evangeline
meant what she said, but I couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere down the line, I’d be the subject of some academic study: The Effects of Button Accumulation on the Subnormal Acculturation of Gatherers.

  “You can be a big help to me, Josie,” Evangeline said. “As we walk around the exhibit, you can tell me about the buttons.”

  “Only if you explain vudon customs to me,” I countered.

  She laughed, and side by side, we began our tour of the installation.

  “The religion is quite intriguing,” Evangeline said as we stepped away from the drums and in front of a large box covered top to bottom with buttons. “There is an interrelation between vudon and the voodoo practiced in places like New Orleans and the vudou of Haiti. They share the same pantheon of gods and spirits, but vudon has idiosyncratic elements that set it apart. The enslaved people who were brought to the islands combined their ancestral African religious practices, tenets of Catholicism, and the spiritual beliefs of the Native Americans who were the first inhabitants of the Barrier Islands.”

  I love history. I guess that’s no big surprise since I love old buttons so much. I’d always been curious about other cultures, too. This was really interesting stuff. But what I didn’t get . . .

  Another quick look around the gallery only heightened my confusion.

  “I appreciate it all from a historical perspective,” I told Evangeline. “And I get Forbis’s thing with buttons. Well, sort of, anyway. He’s an outsider artist, one of those dreamers whose work doesn’t quite fit in the box of regular art. I’ve seen pictures of his work before and he usually covers stuff like cars and clothing and furniture with buttons. But this emphasis on vudon—”

  “That’s what I’m here to try and figure out, too,” Evangeline said. “My original supposition was that he was offering a commentary on the paradox between cultural practices and man’s push-pull relationship with history and modernity. We say we’re all about technology, but there’s something about the ancient religions that speak to us, something that speaks to us on a gut level, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.”

  “And here I thought the guy was just a nutcase!” Nev beamed a smile.

  “What I was going to say,” Evangeline said and her smile was as wide as Nev’s—that is, until she looked around again and it wavered a little around the edges. “I was going to say that now that I’ve seen the exhibit, I’m not so sure of any of that. The whole thing makes me uneasy.” A shiver skipped over her shoulders. I guess that’s why she slipped her arm through Nev’s. “I get the feeling the artist is not as concerned about tapping into the cultural and ethnic significance of vudon as he is simply poking fun at it. Although this big box here . . .” She studied the exhibit in front of us, a cube that stood about ten feet high. “I can’t imagine what Parmenter is trying to convey with this piece. The colors are certainly significant.” When she bent forward to point out a series of red and green stripes, she naturally took Nev with her. “In vudon, colors are allegorical. Green, of course, represents life. And red symbolizes death. But in my considerable experience, large cubes have no significance in the religion and big boxes played no role in religious ceremonies.”

  “Maybe this will help explain.” I pointed to a sign (completely made out of buttons, of course) to the right of the exhibit.

  “Press the Button,” it said.

  Which didn’t help a lot considering how many buttons surrounded us.

  Never one to be put off—especially when I had the chance to study buttons, buttons, and more buttons—I let my gaze roam over the sign, and it actually didn’t take me very long to catch on to what I’d bet any money Forbis thought was one heck of a whopping joke. The sign, see, was made entirely out of glass buttons—almost. There was one shell button all by itself over to the side.

  I pressed it.

  A whirring noise from inside the big box startled not only me, Nev, and Evangeline, but the rest of the crowd as well. My gaze was fixed on the box, but I could feel the space behind me suddenly fill with people who, like us, were anxious to see what was going to happen. We held our collective breaths and when the top of the box popped open, we all flinched as if we’d choreographed the move.

  The whirring continued and like a jack-in-the-box in slow motion, a figure rose into the spotlight.

  Good thing Nev was standing between me and Evangeline; I grabbed onto his free arm. But then, I don’t think anyone could blame me. The button-covered statue that ascended from the box was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever seen.

  It was eight feet tall and its arms were out as if it was reaching for each person in the audience. It’s eyes were black and sunken, its face was that of a skeleton and since it was covered with what I recognized as mother of pearl buttons, it glimmered in the overhead lights like bone. Its hair, row after row of black buttons strung onto wire, bobbed as the statue rose up. Like it was twitching. Like it was alive.

  “It’s Congo Savanne.” On the other side of Nev, Evangeline’s voice choked out of her, as unwavering as the look she gave the statue. “He’s a powerful petro loa; that is, a fiery and aggressive spirit. He’s fierce and strong and angry and he grinds people up with his teeth and eats them.”

  “Yeesh.” I would have known this was a malevolent spirit even if Evangeline hadn’t told me, and I backed up a step and would have kept on going if there wasn’t a lady right behind me staring up into the terrifying, button-covered face of Congo Savanne. I glanced passed Nev toward Evangeline. “You still think Forbis is trying to be funny?”

  “I think . . .” She finished off her champagne and when she was done, she was back to being her old self, straightforward and friendly. With a laugh, she handed her glass to Nev. “I think I’ll hit the ladies’ room before the festivities get started. I’ll be right back.”

  It wasn’t until we heard another series of whirring gears and the statue of the loa sunk back inside the box that I felt as if I could shake off its fierce spell. “Creepy, huh?” I said to Nev.

  Who, unfortunately, had picked that exact moment to glance toward where Evangeline had disappeared.

  “I didn’t mean her,” I blurted out, embarrassed. “I meant the statue. Evangeline is nice.” I gave him a playful poke. “You didn’t tell me you hung out with anthropologists.”

  My glass was empty, too, and Nev took it out of my hand and deposited it on the tray of a passing waiter along with Evangeline’s glass. “We don’t exactly hang out,” he said. “I haven’t seen Evangeline in a couple of years.”

  “She’s very smart,” I said, because it was true and because I was dying of curiosity and knew the best way to find out what I wanted to know was to keep Nev talking. “And she’s very pretty.”

  “She is.”

  “And you don’t exactly strike me as the type who sits around talking about cultures and old religions.” I knew this for a fact; Nev and I had been dating for just about a year and I knew he wasn’t into brainiac stuff. Sometimes, even talk of button history and collecting made his eyes glaze over. “How do you two know each other?”

  “Oh, just from around.” Nev shrugged away the significance of the comment. “Evangeline is—”

  “What?” She was back and with a fresh coat of lipstick accentuating her smile. As if she’d never left, she slipped her arm right where it had been, through Nev’s. “What’s he saying about me?” she asked, turning to me. “Because my guess is whatever it is, it’s not true.”

  “Nev’s nothing if not one hundred percent honest.” It was one of the things I appreciated most about him. After all, I’d once been married to a guy who specialized in lies. Knowing Nev always had been and always would be aboveboard—about everything—was one of the reasons I liked him so much.

  “And one hundred percent trustworthy.” Evangeline added to my assessment of Nev’s character at the same time she turned Nev around and piloted him over to the next item in the exhibit, an altar decorated with buttons. “That’s why you didn’t look su
rprised when he introduced us, right? Nev’s already told you all about me.”

  When I didn’t answer, she looked up at Nev. “I’m sorry,” she said and I didn’t doubt her for an instant. Evangeline’s face was pale. “You and Josie look so comfortable together, I just assumed you’d been dating a long time. I figured she knew all about us.”

  “And I’m feeling a little like everybody knows where this is going except me.” Three cheers for a bravado I suddenly wasn’t feeling; I kept my voice light and airy even though my insides felt as if I’d guzzled a Slurpee in record time. “Somebody want to clue me in?”

  Nev, apparently, didn’t.

  But that didn’t stop Evangeline.

  She adjusted her arm to hang onto Nev a little tighter. “I just assumed you knew,” she said. “Nev and I, we used to be engaged.”

  Chapter Two

  Slack-jawed is not a good look for me.

  I froze—yes, slack-jawed—and stared at Evangeline just long enough to see those gorgeous green eyes of hers go wide with horror. I didn’t know the secret, and she’d let it slip from her lips. The poor woman was mortified!

  Not nearly as much as I was.

  I couldn’t have been paralyzed for more than a second or two, but it felt like a lifetime. Every muscle tensed except for my stomach, which was twitching like a son of a gun, I finally forced myself to pivot toward Nev, and in that one moment before the emotion took over and swamped me like a tsunami, I was more curious than anything else. What would I see registered in his blue eyes? Embarrassment? Anger? Indifference? What excuse would he offer for keeping this huge piece of his past from me all this time?

  I never had a chance to find out.

  Before either Nev or Evangeline could open their mouths again—and before I could close mine—a hand grasped my upper arm and a voice I recognized from phone calls (not to mention that argument that had echoed through the church just a little while earlier) drowned out the thrumming of my blood inside my head.

  “There you are, sweetheart! Why, you are as cute as a spotted puppy under a red wagon, just like I knew you’d be. I been lookin’ all over the place for you.”