The ride from our gas station to the precinct takes all of five minutes from start to finish. Though it seems as though we’re pretty isolated, that’s only due to the dense trees between our property and the harbor.
As Mom and I entered town, passing the horseshoe of ice-cream colored shops nestled around the rim of ocean and docks, each decorated with strings of fun, colorful lantern lights, I clenched the steering wheel.
Not even Rainier, with its glacial white tips and sprawling peaks, was soothing me the way it normally did.
I didn’t experience the usual peace overtaking me when I saw the enormous, almost black rocks out at the point amidst the beige sand and purple-tipped waves. They often reminded me of Avalon, especially when the mist rolls in and the tide is low enough to walk out to them.
I looked wistfully out to the pier, where the water was currently dancing up in frothy sloshes between the rows of boats and thought again about my koi pond.
I needed some quiet time to think. I needed to consider what my dad would do if he were here and he knew his beloved May was a possible suspect in a murder.
Begin at the beginning, Lemonade, he’d say with a chuckle and a ruffle of my hair, using one of his many nicknames for me. Use those sharp ears and eyes, stay in the background, observe, observe, observe.
I shivered, determined to keep it together, not just for my mother, but my dad. He’d do whatever it took to protect my mother from being wrongfully accused.
As we made a left into the parking lot, I fought the vision of Myron, his lifeless body in the stall of the bathroom. And then I also remembered the prawn next to his body—odd for sure. So odd it made me shake my head.
That part of this whole mess made no sense. How did a nearly pristine crime scene with little to no visible evidence house a prawn, and if this was murder, who would leave something like that behind? But I had to set all of it on the back burner for now.
When we arrived at the station, pulling up to its weather-beaten red and white brick front, sandwiched between the courthouse and, strangely enough, a place to rent jet skis and book boat tours, Mom was in fine May form.
After literally peeling JF from the chief’s face—where thankfully, she’d done little damage to anything but his ego—I’d caged her and offered to drive Mom to the station peacefully.
Chief Burrows was too busy regaining his composure to protest, so Justice gave us the go-ahead. Plus, seriously, Mom’s a handful, but she’s not exactly a flight risk.
My cut wasn’t nearly as bad as all that blood led one to believe, so I butterflied it with a Band-Aid, ran a brush through my wet hair, put it in its customary braid to tame my mass of curls, and took a couple of aspirin to thwart the onslaught of a headache.
I was all the better for those aspirin, too, because Mom was currently frothing at the mouth and on the hunt for her prey.
Inside the police station, Mom stomped past the wall, featuring pictures drawn by the local elementary students, and up to the front counter, her colorful sneakers squeaking on the white floor.
Mom pounded the flat of her hand on the long front desk, taking Officer Thurman Wheeler by surprise. He pushed back from the desk, knocked over his steaming cup of coffee, and yelped.
When he saw it was my mom, he cleared his throat and smiled at her. His watery blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he mopped up the mess of coffee with a plaid napkin his wife Lainie had likely packed with his lunch.
“Mornin’, Mrs. Layne. How can I help? Another shoplifting incident?”
Mom shook her head and stuck her wrists out, palms up. “Nope. I’m here to be booked, Dano.”
Thurman blustered, looking around his brightly lit desk. “Who’s Dano? I’m Thurman, Mrs. Layne. You remember me, right? The guy who used to deliver your newspaper when I was in high school,” he said gently, as though Mom had finally gotten to the age where she’d up and caught a whopping case of dementia. “Do you need to sit down, maybe?” Then he looked to me with a sympathetic gaze.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Forget it. Just put the cuffs on me, and if you’re gonna do a cavity check, I’m puttin’ you on notice. I haven’t showered yet this morning.”
Fighting a snicker, I looped my arm through hers, directing her to one of the black plastic seats lining the front entry. “We’re just waiting on the chief, Thurman.”
“And I don’t have on any underwear either!” Mom chirped as she sat down.
Patience, be my guide.
“You know that’s not how it works, Mom. They haven’t arrested you for anything. They just want to ask you questions.”
She snorted, tucking her patchwork purse under her breasts and crossing her feet at the ankles, the multicolored laces of her high-top sneakers flopping to the floor.
“This is a waste of time, and they know it. If I was gonna kill the two-timer, I’d have done it when he told me about Febreze!”
Understand, our police department is pretty small. There are maybe a hundred employees total, working the various shifts. So when everyone turned from their desks located in the pit of the station and stared at Mom as the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights beat down on us, more than seventy-five percent of the officers there knew May Layne and her unfiltered responses. And at least half of them had been to our house at one point or another when we were kids.
But suddenly, all these people had become the enemy. Everyone had their law enforcement ears on. And I had to make Mom understand no one was looking at her like May Layne, the gregarious if not outlandish mother of Lemon Layne and the widow of an ex-biker beloved by the town he’d loved right back.
They were looking at her as if she were a suspect in Myron’s murder.
I sat up in my seat and looked Mom directly in the eye. Keeping my voice low, I gave her a dose of reality. “Mom? For the love of pulled pork, if you don’t stop flapping your gums, I’m going to have to take extreme measures here and use the Gorilla Glue on your lips. Stop talking about, mentioning, voicing, whatever, anything about killing Myron, okay? He. Is. Dead. It looks bad for you as his ex-DVD-shooting girlfriend. Get it?”
She clamped her mouth into a tight line of neon-pink lipstick.
“And by the way, how did Myron get your earring?” That earring troubled me to no end. She’d admitted it was hers in front of everyone. She might as well have handed Chief Burrows the key to her cell.
Mom smiled like a Cheshire cat, before sucking in her cheeks. “Do you really want to know that, Lemon?”
I blanched. I kind of didn’t want to know that. Mom was quite the looker back in the day, and even now she was no slacker in the date department, unabashedly sharing her adventures with me at every opportunity.
May Layne had been a real field player until my dad came onto the scene.
Which brings me to my Harley-loving biker father again. Somehow, the ultimate bachelor had managed to capture the fickle-pickle ultimate bachelorette’s heart and held on to it until the day he died of a heart attack five years ago at seventy-two. I was a late-in-life baby for them, Mom being on the cusp of her forties when she had me.
So nope. I didn’t want to know the details of her escapades with Myron. But I was going full steam ahead with this line of questioning anyway.
“I know regret will haunt me for days afterward, but yep. I do want to know, Mom.”
“I spent the night at his house when you and Coco went to Seattle for that exotic fish show. Candlelight, the ocean in our ears, a nice prime rib.” She paused and sighed, dreamy and soft. Then she sobered. “I must have left it there. I hate when they get caught up in the sheets. I thought I took them both off. You know how that goes in the heat of passion—”
I whipped up a hand. “I know all about it. ’Nuff said.”
If her earring was at the crime scene, that meant either Myron had planned to return it at some point, or maybe he’d simply forgotten he had it. Or maybe it fell from the pocket of his jacket or his trousers when he’d been dumped in the bathroom?
But was he even killed in the bathroom or somewhere else and dumped there afterward? And when had he been killed? In the early hours of the morning while we slept in our beds?
“Don’t forget to tell them that when they question you. That you think you lost it at Myron’s house. But skip the gory details about what happened at the house. Please. I beg of you.”
Her eyes penetrated mine, scanning my face, and suddenly she looked horrified. I imagine this was all sinking in now because her expression went from angry to astonished.
“They really think I killed Myron?” she hissed from between her clenched dentures and slapped her thigh.
I was trying so hard not to panic at this point, knowing this line of questioning made complete sense and was routine at best, but it didn’t make me feel any more comfortable.
“I don’t know what they think. I think they’re just investigating every avenue right now, and it makes sense they’d investigate you because you dated Myron for six months. It’s normal procedure.”
“That’s ridiculous, Lemon. You know better than that, and they should, too! Almost every single one of these cotton-pickin’ kids in here knows me. May Layne’s no killer!”
That was it for me. I planted a hand over her mouth and leaned in close, her eyes following my face as I whispered, “I said, stop saying the word ‘kill’ out loud. That means any variation thereof, Mom. Murder, whacked, knocked off, take out, kill with an ‘ing’ tacked onto the end of it, past, present or future tense! Yes, these people know you, but they’re no longer looking at you like the cute little old May Layne with the foul mouth. They’re trained police officers, Mom, and they’re doing their job, which is to get you to give them information and/or confess to a crime. You’re not helping me here. Now can it!”
Mom wrapped her fingers around my wrist and yanked my hand from her mouth, putting it back in my lap, and gave me a look of pure indignation. “I will not be accused of murder in front of all these people. They’re my neighbors, and some are even my friends. Except for that Ainsley Burrows. He’ll never see another free brisket sandwich from the likes o’ me.”
I rasped a sigh—one that was a familiar sound escaping my throat where my mother was concerned. “That’s right, Mom. You put your foot down and put it down hard. A line has to be drawn, and brisket’s where it starts.”
She harrumphed. “And I do not have a foul mouth.”
“Wasn’t it you who referred to Myron’s gentlemanly parts as a gordita?”
“That’s hardly foul. It’s an analogy to food, Lemon.”
This time, I gripped her hand and made big Thumper eyes, the surest way to get what I wanted from her. “I’m begging you, Mom—behave. Please. Whatever you say can get you into trouble if you’re not careful. Do you remember the last time you were spouting off? You know, when we had that doctor’s appointment you didn’t want to go to?”
Picture a seventy-year-old with blue hair, neon-colored lipstick in whatever shade happens to strike her fancy, black leggings, a denim vest and multicolored high-tops, clinging to the doorway of our store, yelling, “No, Lemon! No! No more wire hangers!”
Mom’s hysterical. I totally admit I’m the first to laugh at her inappropriate jokes, but the humor drains right out of me when an unfamiliar-with-her-hijinks tourist getting gas shoots me all manner of dirty looks for senior abuse.
Her eyes went guilty and apologetic. “I was just teasing you.”
“Yeah, yeah. But if that tourist with the stick up his butt and absolutely no sense of humor had taken it upon himself to really call social services, I could have been in a lot of hot water. There’s a time and a place for your joking and your unfiltered comments. We’ve talked about this. Now, I’m not sure how serious this inquiry is, but Coco’s got one of her lawyer friends coming in to help us out. So stop talking until she gets here. Pretty please.”
She rolled her eyes at me and sighed. “Fine. But when I get out of here, you can bet not a one of these boy howdees is gonna get the time of day from May Layne ever again.”
I held up my fist to her for a bump. “You show ’em how to hold a grudge.”
Coco breezed in the double doors, and whether I’d realized it or not, I must have been tense, because seeing my BFF with a gentleman in a fancy-looking suit brought me enormous relief. So much so, I think my legs wobbled when I rose to meet the nice-looking older man with my friend.
He was tall with an athletic build in that T-shape we women like so much. He had a nice mixture of dark and silver to his thick hair, but more importantly, his suit was crisp and clean, and his face had that trustworthy look to it, versus the smarmy, slick grin on the face of the kind of lawyers you see on TV.
Coco squeezed my shoulder and looked at my mother with a reassuring smile. “Mama Layne, Lemon—this is Ansell Williams, attorney at law. He’ll be present when they question you.”
Ansell held out his hand to Mom, and suddenly, she was no longer Caged Tiger Layne, she was Hidden Demure Dragon May. Her eyelashes swept her cheeks, and she propped her chin on her shoulder when she smiled up at him flirtatiously.
He smiled back, pleasant and open. “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Layne. Has anyone questioned you yet?”
Mom planted her hand in Ansell’s and shook her head. “The pleasure’s all mine, good-lookin’, and no one’s said boo to me.”
Ansell’s handsome face relaxed, his dark brown eyes turning upward in a smile. “Good to know. So if you ladies don’t mind, I’m going to take my client somewhere private where we can talk.”
Mom slung her bag over her shoulder and fairly skipped off after her lawyer, leaving Coco and me to shake our heads.
“So did she say anything else? Or hear something this morning?” Coco asked, pulling me to sit next to her on the plastic chairs.
I closed my eyes and told myself everything was going to be all right. “You mean aside from the hundred and one times she mentioned killing Myron? No. I made sure she clammed up and waited for the attorney. But I’m worried. You know Mom and her habit of saying whatever she thinks out loud.”
Coco patted my hand in sympathy. “Ansell will make sure she’s protected. Now, how are you? You found a dead body today, Lemon. I’m worried about you.”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
That surely sounds like I viewed Myron’s death as cavalier—as though it was no big deal I’d found one of my fellow Fig Harborians sprawled out on the hard tile of a gas station bathroom.
Not true at all. I’m just not particularly vocal about my feelings. It wasn’t even the dead body I was especially freaked out by. I’ve seen a couple in my thirty-three years.
In fact, my mother often jokes with all the crime TV I watch, I’ve seen more lifeless corpses than dates. To which I often roll my eyes and mutter something indistinct.
It was that the body was Myron’s—someone I’d rather liked, even if he had cheated on my mother.
“I heard some of the officers talking about how he was…” Coco bit her bottom lip. “Killed. I’m sorry you had to see that. It’s awful. I don’t understand who’d do something so…so crazy.”
“But I’ve moved on from seeing the actual body to wondering how it got there without either of us hearing it happen, Coco. I know Mom and I are pretty heavy sleepers, and she did take an Ambien, but if he was killed last night and dumped there, I need to consider a security system bigger than a lock. I also need to pin down the time of death.”
The lock on the bathroom door wasn’t exactly fashioned after Fort Knox, but there had to have been some kind of struggle to get inside.
No way someone could have dumped Myron in the time it took for me to leave the station, hop in my beloved Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1976, run and grab a coffee (because frankly speaking, ours at the station is an unholy blend of toxic waste and Satan’s spit) and return. Not without waking my mother or being seen.
It took me fifteen minutes tops to hit Gabby’s Grind in her pastel-blue shop at the center of town, grab a plain black coffee—no frilly foam or double shots with tears of a Dutch Maiden, thank you—entirely avoid socializing with the shop’s patrons, and get back to the station in time to take my mother to her doctor’s appointment.
And like I’d told Justice, I’d even managed to narrowly miss Waylan Caprice, a.k.a. Cappie, our town’s doomsday prepper. He was coming in the front door, and I was all but running out the back door of the kitchen to take the beach path right around to the front and to my car in order to take a pass on his latest story about his newest alien-proofing technique.
Cappie was a hoot most times. I usually listened and hid my utterly inappropriate laughter when he shared his theory on keeping Big Brother out by wrapping his roof in tinfoil and reflective glass.
So, however, Myron had been dumped, I was convinced it had to have happened during the wee hours of the morning.
“What’s going on in that head of yours, Lemon?” Coco peered at me from beneath her soggy bangs. “No investigating—got that? You let the police handle this. I know what you’re like, but this isn’t a stolen purse in high school or a minor car accident where charts and graphs are needed to prove who’s telling the truth. It’s your mother. No sleuthing.”
I’m inquisitive by nature, resulting in a sponge-like gathering of mostly useless information. Coco calls it just plain stickin’ my schnoz in where it doesn’t belong, but I kept my mouth firmly shut. I wasn’t ready to discuss any of it yet anyway. I needed time to think—to rehash everything I’d seen with my own eyes.
Which reminded me, the receipt from Lester’s Pawnshop. I jammed my hand into the pocket of my hoodie and fingered the slip of handwritten paper.
Coco nudged me, her sharp eyes narrowed. “Yoo-hoo? I know you like I know a good deal on Groupon. You’re spinning your wheels in that pretty head of yours. Talk to me so I can talk you out of whatever crazy idea you have,” she demanded.
“I was just thinking I need a better lock on the men’s bathroom door at S&P. I’d prefer we didn’t become the hip place to drop off a recent kill. Speaking of bathrooms, I need to hit one. If Mom comes back, do me a favor, impress upon her the value of silence and its golden properties?”
Coco laughed and nodded, waving me off in favor of scrolling her phone.
I rose and made my way toward the lavatories to the left of the front desk and pushed the door to the ladies’ room open, slipping inside a stall.
I didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. I just needed a minute to process this without Coco reminding me I’d gotten into trouble a time or two for snooping. Maybe say a prayer my mom and all her vim and vigor could be contained before she got herself into any more trouble. I also wanted to look at the receipt JF had grabbed.
I winced at the thought that Jessica and I definitely contaminated that crime scene. And I’m not using that official term because I watch a lot of TV detectives either. I use it due to the fact that I’d once really contaminated a crime scene. As in, I’d crushed it with my big size nines. I have crazy big feet for someone so short.
But I try not to dwell on that time in my life and keep plugging right along with the valuable knowledge I learned back then. Which is: Touch nothing, call 9-1-1, and keep your pokey nose out of it, Lemon Layne. I thought I was pretty good at the former, but not so much the latter, and now I realize, in a panic, I’m good at neither.
I sat on the edge of the toilet and pulled the pink receipt out of my pocket, scanning it. It was handwritten, likely by Lester, dated yesterday at three-thirty, in the amount of four hundred dollars, but the item listed as either sold or bought was almost illegible.
I needed to give this to the police, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t investigate all on my own. Which is typically where my trouble began—my brain told me I should let the police handle it, but my instincts told me to do something, anything, to ensure Mom didn’t end up a viable suspect.
It’s just my nature, and the puzzle could be something as simple as trying to figure out who’d stolen Liz Hancock’s purse from the locker room in my junior year, to where Mrs. Fastbender’s little cocker spaniel Lolita had wandered off to.
Or it could be as complex as who’d killed my late fiancé.
That was really what Coco was worried about. How obsessively involved I became in his death. So obsessively, she’d physically brought me back to Fig to keep me from losing not just my sanity, but all my worldly possessions.
I shook off the memory. It would do me no good to revisit that time in my life three years ago because it always ended up a dead end.
My focus was Mom and Mom alone.
Voices outside the door and the mention of Myron’s name had me climbing up on top of the toilet to hopefully keep from being noticed. If I was going to find out anything more about Myron’s murder, it wouldn’t be by simply asking around.
The police, even if they were our friends and neighbors, weren’t going to willingly share anything from this point on if this was officially a murder investigation.
“Did you hear what they did to him?”
I cocked my head. The voice sounded like it belonged to Valerie Miller, a second-year cop and newer to Fig. I didn’t know her very well, but she seemed nice enough the few times she’d come in to get gas for her lawnmower.
“Damn right, I did. Justice said the son of a gun cut a piece of his brain out.”
That was Lorraine Becker. I’d know Lorraine’s nasally voice anywhere. She had horrible allergies. I saw her all the time at the group of medical buildings where I took Mom to see her physician for blood pressure checks.
One of them turned the water on, making me lean closer to the stall door.
“His wife says he was just at the doctor’s—something about his head. I don’t know. Her English is rough. I feel like some of it was lost in translation, you know? We have to get someone in who speaks Latvian to explain to her what’s happened. She’s somehow got it in her head that Fairbanks had a headache and that’s how he died. I mean, how do you explain to a woman her husband’s skull was cut open and some of his brain’s missing if she doesn’t speak English?” Valerie asked.
“Were you the one to tell her?”
“Don’t they give all the crappy jobs to us second-years?”
Lorraine barked a husky laugh. “They do. Did you confirm the doctor’s appointment?”
“Yep. He really did have a doctor’s appointment. Some slick neurologist in Seattle, from the looks of his website.”
I pushed my ear against the stall door, as though that would help me hear them better. I needed the name of the doctor. My kingdom for a name.
“So what was the appointment for?” Lorraine asked.
Shoot. No name.
“Aw, c’mon, Lorraine. You know how it works. We have to subpoena the doc to get Myron’s records, but it definitely had something to do with his head hurting. The missus made that really clear.”
“I was just checking to see if you knew, Officer Miller,” she teased. “What a darn shame, huh? Seemed like a nice guy.”
There was a sigh, and then Valerie said, “They’ve got May Layne in there right now. She lawyered up, but if you ask me, they’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s a nice lady.”
I smiled to myself. One cop in Mom’s favor was good.
“Lots of nice ladies kill people, Miller.”
Now I frowned. This nice lady had not.
“I know that, but seriously, she’s seventy years old. So he cheated on her? Big deal. You can’t see that woman hacking into a guy’s skull and taking out a piece of his brain, can you? That takes not only strength but mad conviction. Not to mention, if he wasn’t killed at the scene, which Justice says is still unclear because May’s daughter Lemon says the lock wasn’t broken, how’d she drag a guy the size of Myron in there? She’s maybe ninety pounds to his two-twenty. Let’s be real.”
Yeah. Good point.
“Stranger things have been known to happen,” Lorraine replied as another faucet gushed water.
The conversation was suddenly interrupted by some sort of ruckus going on outside in the station.
“What the heck is happening now?” Valerie asked.
“Darned if I know, but we’d better get out there,” Lorraine replied.
Muffled voices coming from the direction of the bathroom door grew louder as the door opened then shut, muting them again.
Cautiously, I peered over the top of the stall to be sure both Valerie and Lorraine were gone. Coast clear, I slipped from the stall and stuffed the receipt back into my hoodie pocket, fully intending to hand it over to one of the investigating officers.
I shouldered the bathroom door and fell into a crowd gathered around the front desk as even more people piled into the station.
Coco was in the middle of it all, being pushed around, her purse swinging from the bend in her elbow as she tried to keep from teetering on her heels.
What in gravy’s name was going on?
“I’m tellin’ ya, sure as the day is long, the time has come!”
I tried to push my way through the throng of people who’d gathered at the station, but I didn’t need to look far to know who’d stirred up trouble.
Cappie.
He stood on top of Thurman’s desk, his hair—which I’m convinced hadn’t been cut since the seventies—in a thin, greasy topknot on his head, bouncing wildly as he hopped from bare foot to bare foot.
Cappie didn’t believe in shoes per se—he wore wooden clogs and for some strange reason, likely one of his many government-proof rituals, always kicked them off outside before entering a building.
He claimed the rubber on the soles was made from toxic something or other, and it would eat through his feet—or something like that. I’d zoned out on that particular rant against, as Cappie called them, the damn mutant robots running congress.
“May Layne ain’t responsible for old Myron’s murder! Listen up, Figgers, the po-po’s tryin’ to frame our girl and hide the truth from us!”
Oh, shoot. I didn’t know where Cappie was going with this, but I was in no mood to humor one of his conspiracy theories today. This was my mother he was dragging into another one of his nutty ideas.
Furthermore, how did he know thing one about Myron’s murder and my mom’s involvement? I loved Fig with the very depths of my soul—I didn’t love how quickly word spread, no matter how big or small the news. In a town this size, you couldn’t get a bunion without everyone knowing about it.
“Cappie!” Justice yelled. “Get down from there, or I’m gonna throw you in a cell!”
I wasn’t the only one who humored my pal Cappie—the entire town did. And what Justice means is, he’ll call Cappie’s daughter Noreen, and she’ll make him spend his nights at her cute bungalow where she can keep a close eye on him. The bungalow he declares is filled with listening devices ala the government. He’d moved out of her house and into a camper on a patch of her land because of it.
Cappie also hates Noreen’s house due to her very vocal pet cockatoos, which he’s convinced are also government informants. I don’t know how Noreen keeps her patience with Cappie, but so far, she hasn’t committed him or killed him, and in my mind, she deserves a medal for all the time she spends bailing him out of trouble.
“The devil I will, Copper!” he sang as he danced around the long granite countertop, his long, painfully thin legs, encased in thermal underwear, poking out of his frayed denim shorts with a sort of layered effect.
Justice pushed his way through the crowd and looked up. “Cappie, I’m gonna give you one last warning.”
“I’m not comin’ down until you let May go and tell the truth! We deserve to know the truth!”
What truth?
Thurman snuck up from behind Cappie and made an unsuccessful swipe for him, knocking into his chair, sending the contents of his desk and his person to the floor.
As pens and pencils scattered on the ground, someone from the crowd shouted, “What the heck are you goin’ on about, Cappie? You got us all worked up over poor May. Speak your piece!”
Cappie cackled and stuck his tongue out at Justice. “Listen up, Figgers! May Layne didn’t kill nobody. She’s an innocent woman bein’ framed by the corrupt system!”
Several people gasped, and then Davis Turner, a tried and true Walleye Fisherman’s Club Member, shouted, “So who killed him, Cap?”
“Zombies!” Cappie bellowed, waving a knobby, weathered finger. “We got us a case of the living dead right here, folks! He’s stealin’ brains and eatin’ ’em for dinner!” And then he began to chant and clap. “Free May Layne! Free May Layne!”
Everyone around me erupted, joining Cappie, stomping their feet, and demanding my mother’s release.
I covered my face with my hands and groaned.
Where was Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead when you needed him?