Chapter 40

“Bernie, are you all right?” Libby asked, retying the belt on her robe.

“I’m fine,” her sister told her. “I’ll talk to you later.” And she hung up.

Libby stood there with the receiver in her hand for a moment, then turned towards Googie.

“Did my sister seem weird to you?” she asked him.

He looked up from the grape leaves he was filling.

“She’s always weird.”

“Did she seem upset?”

“She was definitely uptight.” Googie wiped his hands on his apron. “I’m going to wear a white T-shirt if that’s okay with you, because my brother borrowed my white shirt last night and puked all over it.”

Libby nodded absentmindedly.

“Did you hear what I said?” Googie asked.

Libby made an uh-huh noise.

Bernie’s call bothered her, but she couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t the randomness of the question about the recipe that bothered her. Bernie was always asking random questions. Libby ran her fingers through her hair. Maybe it was the tone in her sister’s voice. Bernie had seemed excited. But then she was always excited.

Libby paced back and forth for a few seconds and then picked up the phone and called Bernie again. Bernie answered on the first ring. She sounded normal enough, Libby told herself when she hung up. She looked at her watch. She had half an hour to take a shower, get dressed, and get over there and help Bernie finish setting up.

“I’m going back upstairs,” she told Googie.

He nodded distractedly. But when Libby had climbed the steps, instead of taking a right and going into the bathroom, she took a left and went into Bernie’s room. Libby looked at Bernie’s old teddy bears and the movie posters of The Breakfast Club and The Lost Boys she still had on her wall.

For some reason Libby’s throat started to constrict. She could feel the tears starting to come. This is ridiculous, she told herself. Maybe it was, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very, very wrong as she went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The feeling wouldn’t go away. She tapped her fingers on the shower curtain. There had to be something behind it. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

Nothing. And then Susan Andrews’ face popped into her head. She heard her talking in the store the morning after Lionel’s death about Lionel asking her to put a stake through his heart. She’d thought then that it was an odd thing to say. But Susan said lots of odd things. Now she wondered if it were wishful thinking.

Another picture flashed through her brain. Lionel’s picture hanging on the wall in Susan’s library. The black candles under it. And now that she thought about it, Susan seemed to be deriving a lot of enjoyment from having the memorial service for Lionel in her house. Normally she hated having large groups of people over and had since her husband died.

So she had a change of heart. So what?

None of this added up to anything, certainly nothing she could call the police about.

And yet . . . Libby took a deep breath.

“Screw it,” she said.

She turned off the shower and put on the shorts and T-shirt she’d just taken off. Then she slid her feet into her sandals and ran for the hall closet where her father kept the gun she wasn’t supposed to know about.

So she’d lose another customer, maybe even several, and she’d look like a fool.

Big deal.

Better that than a dead . . .

No, she told herself as she ran down the steps. Don’t even think the words. Just concentrate on getting to Susan Andrews’s house.