LOVER COME HACK Read online

  Praise for the Madison Night Mystery Series

  “A sense of danger and menace pervades the entire novel, but it is lightened by Mad’s genuine likability and strength. Vallere has crafted an extremely unique mystery series with an intelligent heroine whose appeal will never go out of style.”

  – Kings River Life Magazine

  “Instead of clashing, humor and danger meld perfectly, and there’s a cliffhanger that will make your jaw drop.”

  — RT Book Reviews

  “A terrific mystery is always in fashion—and this one is sleek, chic and constantly surprising. Vallere’s smart styling and wry humor combine for a fresh and original page-turner—it’ll have you eagerly awaiting her next appealing adventure. I’m a fan!”

  — Hank Phillippi Ryan,

  Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark Award-Winning Author

  “Diane Vallere…has a wonderful touch, bringing in the design elements and influences of the ’50s and ’60s era many of us hold dear while keeping a strong focus on what it means in modern times to be a woman in business for herself, starting over.”

  — Fresh Fiction

  “All of us who fell in love with Madison Night in Pillow Stalk will be rooting for her when the past comes back to haunt her in That Touch of Ink. The suspense is intense, the plot is hot and the style is to die for. A thoroughly entertaining entry in this enjoyable series.”

  — Catriona McPherson,

  Agatha Award-Winning Author of the Dandy Gilver Mystery Series

  “A multifaceted story...plenty of surprises...And what an ending!”

  — New York Journal of Books

  “A humorous yet adventurous read of a mystery, very much worth considering.”

  — Midwest Book Review

  “Make room for Vallere’s tremendously fun homage. Imbuing her story with plenty of mid-century modern decorating and fashion tips…Her disarmingly honest lead and two hunky sidekicks will appeal to all fashionistas and antiques types and have romance crossover appeal.”

  — Library Journal

  “If you love Doris Day, you’ll love Madison Night, decorator extraordinaire. She specializes in restoring mid-century homes and designs, and her latest project involves abductions, murder and vengeance.”

  – Books for Avid Readers

  “The characters in this series are really great and you laugh and cry along with them when necessary. Madison and Tex are a terrific pair, and the story will definitely keep readers entertained….and after you’re done reading you will very much want to find a Doris Day movie to enjoy as much as this book.”

  – Suspense Magazine

  “A charming modern tribute to Doris Day movies and the retro era of the ’50s, including murders, escalating danger, romance...and a puppy!”

  — Linda O. Johnston,

  Author of the Pet Rescue Mysteries

  “A well-constructed tale with solid characters and page after page of interesting, intelligent dialogue. Diane Vallere delivers a cunning plot as well as humor and romance.”

  – ReadertoReader.com

  The Madison Night Mystery Series

  by Diane Vallere

  PILLOW STALK (#1)

  THAT TOUCH OF INK (#2)

  WITH VICS YOU GET EGGROLL (#3)

  THE DECORATOR WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (#4)

  THE PAJAMA FRAME (#5)

  LOVER COME HACK (#6)

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  Copyright

  LOVER COME HACK

  A Madison Night Mystery

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition

  Trade paperback edition | October 2018

  Henery Press

  www.henerypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2018 by Diane Vallere

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation with Doris Day or Warner Bros is claimed or implied.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-414-0

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-415-7

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-416-4

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-417-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Doris Day

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Madison Night’s lifestyle provides unique opportunities for research. In some cases, the people who help the books go from idea to page are strangers who may never know of their help, but that doesn’t minimize their contribution.

  Thank you to:

  The staff of Atomic Ranch magazine, for curating content that closely aligns to Madison’s world and delivering it to me in convenient magazine format four times a year. Your stories have been a constant source of inspiration for her imaginary clients.

  Shannon from House-Improvements.com, whose YouTube videos made removing a non-load bearing interior wall seem like something Madison could do herself.

  Doris Day, for continuing to be the perfect role model for Madison.

  Josh Hickman, who answered approximately 327 of my questions about ceiling finishes, painting, panda-pawing, mudding, sanding, mortaring, patching, and more while never alerting the landlord to maybe keep an eye on me.

  Retro-renovation.com, for massive archives of time capsule houses and restoration projects. Madison’s new yellow kitchen was designed with resources found on this blog and it’s no exaggeration to say I wish it were my kitchen instead.

  Lee Lofland, for writing Police Procedure and Investigation: A Guide for Writers, which was instrumental in helping me know what would happen if Madison were bleep bleep bleep or bleep bleep bleep, both of which happen in the upcoming pages.

  Henery Press and my fellow Hen House authors, for giving both me and Madison a home and a community.

  Amy Jolly, for saying yes to my big, fat, last-minute, post-deadline favor!

  Subscribers of the Weekly Diva: I have the best readers! Thank you for letting me spend time with you every Sunday, for embracing my different series, and for volunteering to be deceased characters who originally owned the stuff Madison Night acquires. I know that makes you sound a little weird, but I love you anyway.

  ONE

  I should have expected the letter. In my fifty years, I’d maintained polite and friendly relationships with bosses and employees. Friends and family. Bad dates and good lovers. When I looked at it like that, I guess I was due for a bombshell like this.

  Dear Madison, it started, It’s taken me a few days to collect my thoughts. I can no longer be a part of this relationship. When we met, I accepted that we wouldn’t always see eye to eye. I knew you had strong opinions and I was attracted to that at first, but after butting heads one too many times, I can’t take it anymore. You are not always right. You are not the most talented person in the room. And we are no longer partners on the application for the Very Important Projects competition.

  The letter conti
nued with a line by line breakdown of my character flaws followed by how fellow mid-mod designer and recent attached-at-the-hip friend, Jane Strong, had interpreted my behavior as a personal affront to her. I stopped reading the list of my faults about halfway through. There’s nothing like seeing the carefully thought out dissection of your natural personality in a neatly formatted document to make you consider adding booze to your first cup of coffee.

  And did I mention? Jane hadn’t just spent time collecting her thoughts. She’d color coded them and provided a handy key at the top of the email to help me understand which of my flaws were the worst.

  This is what happens when you collaborate with a friend.

  Jane Strong was the one who had first told me about the DIDI—Design in Dallas Initiative. DIDI was a group of established professionals that recognized excellence in design, decorating, and renovation projects in Dallas, Texas. Their mission statement was to identify buildings within the Dallas Tax Base that had been ignored. Dallas had undergone several transformations in its lifetime, yet for every new hip part of town that popped up on the radar, another one fell into disrepair and in some cases, abandonment. Jane had read about my recent renovation of an old pajama factory that I’d inherited and had told the DIDI about my work.

  That was the first job I’d completed on such a large scale, and the wave of positive attention from the design community had been unexpected. The DIDI endorsement had given me massive name recognition overnight, and Mad for Mod, my mid-century focused interior decorating and design company, had gone from booking the occasional atomic kitchen renovation to kitschy movie theaters, novelty restaurants, and even one theme-room bed and breakfast. I had the luxury of being selective about the jobs I took. For a small business, it was a good feeling.

  About a month ago, the DIDI sent out an email announcement of a pop-up competition to kick off the Very Important Properties competition, or VIP, as it was truncated to fit into a world increasingly dependent on initials. The lack of pre-competition buzz had been intentional to even out the chances of winning amongst both established and emerging talent in the city limits. Other components of the contest were equally determined: rigid design requirements, capped budgets, and a tight window for execution once applications were approved. Jane asked if, instead of competing against each other, I was interested in pooling resources and collaborating on a joint submission for VIP?

  A flurry of emails, an invitation to brainstorm concepts before giving an answer, and a gigantic delivery of fresh daisies to thank me and proclaim there was no way we wouldn’t win, and I said yes. It didn’t hurt that I was looking for ways to avoid the mess that was my personal life.

  Jane and I shared a common design philosophy, an attraction to the mid-century modern aesthetic, and a proximity to the same milestone birthday (fifty, though to be fair, the two years between our birthdays ensured I reached it first). Things like that can lull you into a false sense of compatibility, especially amongst potential friends where the messiness of romance wasn’t part of the equation. For an independent woman like me, the novelty of having a new friend who shared my passions was a high. We traded lipstick recommendations, watched TCM movie marathons on Friday nights, swapped out vintage clothing we’d accumulated, and alternated driving the truck we took to the local flea markets to shop for inventory.

  Still, after giving up nights, weekends, and paying jobs to collaborate with Jane on our VIP entry, today’s email hit a nerve. I’d jumped through hoops for her, and this was the way she thanked me. By attacking my character in an unemotional message she’d needed days to write after “collecting her thoughts.”

  I steeled myself with a deep breath and called her office.

  “Posh Pit, Vonda speaking,” her assistant answered.

  “Vonda, this is Madison Night. Is Jane available? I need to speak to her. It’s urgent.”

  “Madison. Tell me Jane didn’t send the email. Of course, she sent the email. Why else would you be calling me? I am so sorry. You have no idea. She’s crazy. The woman is totally off her nut.”

  “This really is between Jane and me.”

  “I can’t let you talk to her.”

  “This will only take a moment.”

  Vonda Quinn was Jane’s assistant, but from what I’d seen, her job involved little more than answering phones, data entry, and unsolicited attitude. Her sigh was clear despite the crackling of the forty-year-old mechanisms inside my 1970s yellow donut phone. “She’s not here. She went to the DIDI offices to turn in her submission for the competition before the cutoff for entries tonight.”

  I felt the heat rise over the back of my neck, not an entirely unwanted sensation considering the back door to my studio was propped open and the cold air from outside had entered. “Jane can’t submit that application. The designs are mine. The concept is mine. The building belongs to her, but there’s more to that submission than the property.”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Vonda said.

  I wedged the phone between my ear and my shoulder and grabbed an empty file folder. I was so distracted, I almost forgot it was my turn to talk. “I’m going to the DIDI offices right now. If you have any way to get in touch with her, you might want to give her a head’s up that I’m on my way. I’m not in a particularly good mood after her email, either.”

  “That’s between you and Jane.”

  I chose not to mention that I’d already made that point. I straightened my neck and the receiver dropped onto my desk. I didn’t waste time on a good-bye. Vonda might not have written or sent the email, but she’d known about it and that was bad enough. As I grabbed a stack of pages off the printer and wedged them into the folder, I wondered how many other people Jane had spoken to about her less than flattering views of me.

  I found Effie Jones, a recent college graduate and my first ever full-time employee, in the small storage unit I kept behind the studio. What Effie lacked in knowledge about design she made up for in organizational suggestions and millennial perspective. (It didn’t hurt that I’d gifted her with ten Doris Day movies to help her refine her eye. That’s how I first learned about mid-century design, and it seemed as convenient a training method as any.) Effie was working on a new inventory database to keep me organized beyond my current if-it-fits, I’ll-take-it-home system.

  “Effie, I have to go to downtown. Can you lock up the storage unit and cover the studio? There’s only one appointment this afternoon—the Bickners. They’re going to drop off a list of the items they’re selling to me. After we get the list, you can work on inputting them into the new database while you’re in the studio.”

  “Sure, Boss.” Effie looked slightly annoyed. “It would have been more productive if I’d gone out to their house and taken pictures first.”

  I held up both hands. “This whole system is new to me. When someone says they want to sell me the contents of their never-renovated 1961 ranch house so they can take their family on a cruise for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, I say yes. The details—we can always work them out after the fact.”

  “Okay, Boss, but I’m telling you, once you embrace this new system, you’re going to wonder why it took you so long.”

  I smiled. Aside from her post-college status, Effie was a former tenant of the apartment building I’d owned. Since getting the job at Mad for Mod, she’d taken to calling me “Boss.” I’d learned to accept it.

  “Maybe that’s true,” I said, “but now’s not the time to discuss it. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I’ll call you when I’m on my way back.”

  I fished my car keys out of my tote bag and unlocked the door to my vintage Alfa Romeo. It was my second one in five years, and not in as good of shape as the first. In a perfect world, I’d find the time to restore it. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be on the receiving end of unsolicited emails that attacked my character, either.

  The DIDI offices were
on the twenty-third floor of Republic Tower in downtown Dallas. Originally built to be the largest building in the city, it battled the Southland Center for that distinction for a few years, even adding a spire to the roof five years after it was first constructed. Like so many small battles, both buildings lost when the First National Tower dwarfed them in 1965.

  Republic Tower had started life as a bank, taken a few different turns, and now leased office and retail space. It was the perfect location for the DIDI offices because the building itself spoke of the history of Dallas design and represented what those of us who had an interest in looking to the past for inspiration were trying to protect.

  I parked in the underground lot, tightened my scarf around my neck, and walked to the elevators. It was late September, not usually a cold month in Dallas, but with unseasonable rains had come unseasonable drops in the daily temperatures. Fellow residents, as if by unspoken agreement, shifted their wardrobes from summer wear to fall attire along with the flip of the calendar, and I was no different. A welcome chill had arrived a few days ago, giving me a reason to dust off my vintage light pink London Fog coat. I’d accessorized with a white scarf and a pair of vintage Courrèges boots that rarely saw the light of day. White leather gloves with small bows at the wrist completed my outfit. I kept my gloves on all the way through the vestibule, on the short elevator ride, and into the lobby of the building.

  “Good morning, Miz Madison,” said a rotund black man from behind the security desk. “A little chilly out there, isn’t it?”