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“Darlene.” Joe’s tone was ominous. “Enough.”
I had no idea what kinds of questions would be answered for Darlene if she knew that, and I didn’t want to know, either. Somehow, though, I was sure we hadn’t heard the end of it from her. As soon as Gray Evans hit the doorstep, Darlene would be on him, relentless with her need to know. Let her tell Gray she was a professional therapist and see what that got her. I was betting he’d brush her off like a speck of dust.
Joe didn’t want to see any more. He started wandering around the kitchen, inspecting the wiring, looking at the pipes that were poking out of the subflooring, waiting for their sink.
“What’s the plan here?” he asked, indicating the entire room and all the details.
I sighed and pulled myself away from the window, turning my back on Gray Evans and the dead girl.
My dream house was a shamble of renovations and un-checked deterioration. What had been advertised as “partially renovated” was actually the equivalent of saying “We’ve stopped the bleeding, now you can try and put the pieces back together.” The major systems, the heat and air, the electrical wiring, had been replaced, but the lathe in some rooms lay naked and exposed, while a few others had new Sheetrock, unprimed and unpainted, waiting like empty canvases.
I’d moved in anyway. I’d made the offer, closed quickly and hauled my belongings from Philly to New Bern before I could have regrets, before I could change my mind. Did it matter that the kitchen was basically a gutted shell? No. That’s why God made microwaves.
Did I care that my bedroom was the intended dining room, while the master bedroom was yet to be reclaimed from years of neglect and trash? Absolutely not—it beat living with Ma and Pa and knowing that no matter what I did, it wouldn’t be right by their standards. Parenting to Ma is like redoing an old house; you don’t ever declare it done because there is always room for improvement.
“The plan is to finish the walls first,” I told Joe. I was attempting to go along with his distraction, but the scene in the backyard tugged at me and I found myself looking over my shoulder. “I can’t afford plaster. Besides, the owners who started the work were using Sheetrock anyway, so that’ll come next, then the floors. I’m going to refinish what I can and try to match up the rest with new wood.”
Joe nodded. “Wood everywhere then?” he asked, but his eyes followed my gaze into the backyard.
“Yeah. I want to keep the house as close to original as possible. Maybe not the fixtures so much, maybe reproductions there, but you know, an old-timey feel.”
“Here he comes,” said Darlene, and no one had to ask who.
Joe walked to the back door and pulled it open. Darlene looked over at me and smirked, as if this was a social call and not a death scene investigation. I was once again frozen, standing rooted to the middle of my kitchen floor like a big dummy.
Gray was peeling off his gloves as he stepped onto the enclosed porch, stuffing them in his pockets and talking to Joe in a low voice. When they entered the kitchen, Joe looked at Darlene and said, “Come on.”
“But I want to—”
“Come on, Darlene.” Joe wasn’t giving her an option. As she approached the two men, he reached out, grabbed her arm and pulled her out the door. Darlene let out a high-pitched squawk and was gone without further ado. That left me alone with Detective Evans.
“Wish I had that lemonade now,” he said, his voice soft and easy.
“I’ve got bottled water,” I said, flying into a fluster of activity, opening cabinet doors, overlooking the cooler on the counter and finally realizing it was right in front of me.
Gray Evans moved across the room, took the cooler lid from my hand and set it down on the counter. Then he took the dripping water bottle that I handed him and put that down, too. He was inches away from me, so close I could feel the heat that radiated from his body, and smell the scent of musk.
“You know, it’s all right,” he said. The words brushed against me like a quiet breeze. “It’s all right to be scared and upset. Just try to relax a little bit, okay?”
I nodded and swallowed hard.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to me before,” I said.
That brought a smile. “Me, either.”
“You never found a dead body?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I get called in after the body’s been found. I know what to expect. It’s not a shock when I show up—not like it was for you.”
I looked away and turned my attention to fitting the lid onto the cooler.
“I…it was so…she was… When that blade hit her and I looked down and saw her arm, I thought, my God, she was sleeping here and I killed her.”
Gray was watching me, the water bottle unopened in his hand. “She was probably dead maybe six hours before you found her,” he said. He twisted the cap off the bottle and took a long drink.
“How did she die?”
Gray shook his head. “We won’t be certain until the medical examiner finishes, and it might take the autopsy to tell for sure. I’m pretty certain she’s got a head trauma, though.”
“Was it accidental or do you think she was murdered?”
“Almost certainly foul play,” he answered.
Right outside my window, just behind my house, a woman had been killed and then dumped. I hadn’t heard a thing. I’d slept through someone’s violent death and never even imagined it. I’d stood in my kitchen, drinking my morning coffee and looking out at the backyard, without any awareness at all.
“Do you know who she is yet?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Probably a crack whore, at least from the way she’s dressed, but with that hair, I don’t know.”
“Hey, maybe she worked a particular kind of clientele,” I said. “You know, the whips and chains, ‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy’ set.”
That made him smile. “You’re Joe’s sister, all right.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s quick, always got a comeback or the last word on a situation. And you look like him.” He hesitated, and then added, “Not the hair part. It’s your eyes. You’ve got eyes like his.”
“So, if Joe had hair, we’d be twins? Because I think what you’re really trying to say is I’ve got a mouth.”
He was looking at me, at first laughing a little, and then studying me. “Not really, not the twins part. But yeah,” he said, his voice thickening, “that’s some mouth you got there.” The way he said it, he could’ve been kissing me and I wouldn’t have felt the connection any stronger.
I backed up and changed the subject. Gray Evans scared me. He didn’t seem to know about women needing men like fish needed bicycles. I had the feeling that if I’d told him, he wouldn’t have cared, either. The guy was a player and spreading chemistry like fertilizer. Oh, this was one to stay away from, all right. But that wouldn’t be my problem for long. Right now he still didn’t know about me, about Nick. Later, his attitude would change and it would be a whole new ball game. He wasn’t going to ever be my problem.
“Okay,” he said, as if reading me. “Here’s what will happen next. The forensics people will finish processing the scene, and we’ll get the body out of here. When it’s all done, the yard will be yours again and you won’t have to worry about having any restrictions on working back there.”
“What if there’s another body?”
“We checked. There’s not. What probably happened is that she was killed nearby and your yard was convenient because of the overgrowth and the low fence. It was easy, that’s all.”
“I’ll finish clearing it out tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of this happening again. I don’t like this at all.”
“Hey, the chances of it happening again are incredibly small. We don’t have that many homicides here, maybe four a year. This was a fluke. Relax.” He looked out the window into the backyard, inspecting it carefully. “Are you doing all that by yourself? Nobody’s helping you? What’s with that sorry brother of yours?”
I smiled despite my stomach flipping over and my heart racing, despite the warmth that seemed to be spreading throughout my body in a long-ago remembered way. Oh man, this guy was trouble.
“Joe helps when he can,” I said, “but he’s got a family and work….”
“And you don’t?” Gray asked. His eyes were fastened on my face as if everything hung on my answer.
“No. I’m a teacher,” I said, and ignored the other part of his question. “I don’t have a job yet and besides, it’s summer. Teachers have the summer off.” I looked around the kitchen, away from his face, letting him follow my gaze. “So, I’m doing what I can. I’ve got most of the major work contracted out, but I need to keep the costs down.”
I looked up and caught him watching me.
“I’m not afraid of hard work. That’s why I was out there cutting back the undergrowth….” But as I remembered how the morning ended, I felt myself slow to a stop. We all knew how the morning’s work had ended.
“So you wouldn’t mind a little free labor?” he said, slipped it right in on me without me seeing it coming.
“Free labor?”
“Yeah, I can cut down bushes with the best of them, and I have something else I bet you don’t have.”
Now he had me. “What?”
He smiled mysteriously, his eyes sparkled and one thick eyebrow arched. “A chainsaw.” He gestured toward the backyard and grinned. “You ain’t seen nothing until you see what short work a chainsaw will make of your jungle. Hide and watch.”
For the first time since we’d met, I heard the faint twang of a Southern accent. Gray Evans was a country boy at heart.
“You better with a chainsaw than you are at pouring lemonade?” I asked. “Or should I tell EMS to stand by?”
He laughed and was about to answer me, but of course, Darlene with her Extrasensory Perception picked this moment to escape Joe and reclaim the kitchen. She sailed in through the dining room, a froth of pink chiffon and ladylike smiles, and focused one hundred percent of her attention on Mr. Wonderful.
“So,” she said, apropos of nothing at all, “were they her real breasts or not?”
Chapter 3
T he next morning my car exploded. I use the term “morning” loosely. It was 4:23 a.m., according to the clock on my makeshift nightstand, but the room lit up like a Roman candle as my Honda went up in flames.
I reached for the phone, hit 9-1-1 as my feet touched the smooth wood floor of my makeshift bedroom, and ran toward the kitchen.
“It’s Sophie Mazaratti, 618 West Lyndon Street. My car just exploded and it’s on fire.”
“Hold on,” the female voice said. In the background, I heard her say, “Start trucks one and two to 618 West Lyndon. Unit 2314, go ahead. Unit 2316, why don’t you start as well.” Then she was back with me. “We’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said. “Stay away from the vehicle.”
That’s what I like about police communicators. You could tell them you’d murdered your sister, then hacked off her head so you could fit her in a trunk, and they’d stay just as cool as a cucumber.
I hung up, grabbed my slippers and a sweater, and ran out onto the front porch. The neighborhood was on full alert. All the lights were on in the surrounding cottages, as one by one the residents came out into the street and stood staring at the burning car in my driveway. The wail of sirens woke anyone who might’ve slept through the explosion.
Most of my neighbors had missed the prior morning’s excitement, returning home from work to hear about the discovery of a dead body in my backyard on the local news. Now they clustered in a group, talking and watching my car turn into a blackened shell.
“You okay, Sophie?” one of them called.
I nodded, but there was no safe way to approach them. The burning car blocked my path and the overgrown front yard made walking that way impossible. I stood on the porch instead, watching and shivering. It was a warm night, made warmer by the fire, but I felt cold and very alone. I could dismiss the dead woman in my backyard as a happenstance occurrence, but my car, now that was a different matter.
I looked back at the neighbors. Did someone not want me here? I knew this was a paranoid way to view the situation, but the car had to have been destroyed intentionally. Was it kids? Vandals? Who else would want to torch my car? I thought about Nick and dismissed him. He hated me enough to do this, but he was in prison. The worst he’d been able to do so far was send threatening letters. He wasn’t due out for months. As mad as he was about me turning him in, he wouldn’t know where I was now, and if he did, I doubted he’d spring for a torch job. In the first place, New Bern wasn’t Philly. He’d have to import talent and pay for their trip down here. Nick was way too cheap for that.
I looked up and down the street, saw the fire trucks rolling toward my house, and wondered who else could’ve bombed my car. Someone connected with the body in the backyard? Someone who thought maybe I knew something or needed a warning?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told myself. “This is not Hollywood. You’re imagining things. Maybe it was just a freak accident. Things like that happen, don’t they? Gas vapors could ignite on a hot summer night, couldn’t they? It could happen, right?”
The firemen were pulling out hoses, rushing around to keep the fire from spreading, but my car was gone. A policeman edged around the smoldering hunk of metal and made his way up the driveway. He was using his flashlight, looking at the ground, searching for clues, I supposed. When he reached me, he glanced up and said, “Ms. Mazaratti? You all right?”
“Relatively speaking,” I answered.
“Wasn’t there a call here earlier today?”
“Yeah, there was a dead body in my backyard.”
It was another young cop. He kept staring down at his clipboard, like it was going to tell him what to do, and then looking back up at me. “Okay,” he said at last, “tell me what happened.”
“At 4:23 a.m., my car blew up. I was asleep, and when it exploded I woke up. End of story. You think it was an accident?”
“Well, ma’am, I don’t know. The arson investigator’s looking it over. He’s with the fire department, so he’ll tell us when he’s through. You didn’t see or hear anything of a suspicious nature before the car blew?”
I shook my head. “Like I said, I was sleeping.”
A familiar form was making its way up my driveway. Gray Evans, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, had arrived, a worried look on his face.
“You all right?” he asked me. I nodded and he turned to the young officer. “What you got?” The boy handed him the clipboard, Gray scanned it and then nodded. “All right. Go rope it off. We’ll get forensics over here.”
When we were alone, Gray looked back at me, his lips twitching with a suppressed smile. It took only a moment to figure out why he’d see this as funny. Long enough for me to realize that I was wearing bright green-and-pink pajamas covered in dazzling red cherries and fuzzy pink bunny slippers that Joe’s daughter, Emily, had given me.
“I was sleeping,” I said.
“And the slippers?”
“My niece gave them to me. She would be hurt if she found out I didn’t wear them.”
He looked over his shoulder as if searching for her in the crowd.
“Well, they’re comfortable. You wanna try them?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Your niece might not like that,” he said. “Besides, I’ll bet they’re way too small for me.”
I looked at his feet, remembered the things people said about the correlation between foot size and, well, you know, and started turning red. Gray noticed immediately and smiled even more.
“Y-you probably have your own,” I stammered.
“Bunny slippers? No.” He had no intention of making it easier on me. The young cop helped me out by calling Gray away.
I looked down at my feet and wiggled my toes. The pink bunnies tossed their ears and danced. They were cute. I looked back at Gray and saw that he was now talking on his cell phone, his back to me. My car was a sodden mass of ashes and debris. Men poked at the wreckage, examining it, taking samples of charred material and bagging them in small paper bags. The neighbors were disbanding, returning to their homes in ones and twos. Soon the sun would begin brightening the horizon.
I watched for another minute and then decided to make coffee. I figured that was useful. We could all use coffee. It gave me something to do. It made me feel like I had control over something, if only my coffeepot.
When Gray returned, he found me sitting on the front porch steps holding a thick mug in my hands. I’d pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, replaced the bunny slippers with sneakers and tried to tame my hair.
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said, but he seemed distracted and distant. The smile was gone.
