UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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“Can I make you something to eat?” Grace stepped up to the kitchen counter and started pulling out plates and napkins. “You guys must be exhausted.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said. She leaned against the kitchen table, eyes glazed.
“Are we allowed to talk to John-Michael? I mean, can he contact us?” Grace asked. She arranged ham and turkey slices on four pieces of Wonder Bread, then squirted each with mustard and mayo and pressed them into sandwiches.
Lucy reached for hers. “That’s enough for me, thanks, Grace. I’m not hungry, I just don’t want to go to bed on an empty stomach.” Within a couple of minutes she’d finished the snack. Paolo ate his in four ravenous bites.
“I don’t know what John-Michael can and can’t do,” Lucy said in a weary voice. “I just know he’s in a whole lot of bad trouble.”
They couldn’t persuade Lucy to tell them more. She looked emotionally drained and went directly to her room. After five hours of driving, Paolo was also exhausted. The moment Lucy headed for the stairs he prepared to follow her, pausing only to drink a glass of water.
Grace listened to their footsteps from the bottom of the stairs. It sounded to her as though Paolo had accompanied Lucy to the double room at the top of the house. Maybe this was the night he finally made a move. A cunning, maybe even callous strategy, no doubt, but then Grace wasn’t surprised. Lucy was rarely as subdued and vulnerable as she was now. And Paolo, she suspected with aching realization, was not the type to give up. The fact that one of their friends was facing a mind-warpingly serious criminal investigation would probably only heighten the mood.
She forced her mind away from the idea of them together. Instead, she thought of John-Michael alone in his jail cell. This, too, was troubling.
Maya’s cell phone rang, startling all three girls. She answered in Spanish, “Bueno.” She nodded a couple of times and then put the cell back into her jeans pocket.
“My . . . aunt . . . Marilu is here. She wants me to go spend the night at her place.”
“She’s here?” Grace asked. “At the house?”
“Outside.”
Grace frowned. “Kinda late, isn’t it?”
“I . . . eh . . . forgot. She did mention that she might stop by. I called earlier and told her about John-Michael. I was pretty upset at the time.”
The girls watched her go upstairs to grab some overnight things. Candace turned to Grace. “Huh! Lying much?”
“You think?”
“Gracie, it’s almost midnight.”
“She’s Mexican,” Grace replied. “They’re a very family-oriented people.”
Candace raised a skeptical eyebrow. She ambled over to the kitchen and peered out through the front window. “Look at her aunt’s car. Tell me that isn’t a fifty-thousand-dollar car.”
Grace joined her at the front window. “The Cadillac? I suppose. Never really thought about it.”
“If Auntie Marilu is so rich, why does Maya have to live with us?”
Grace was on the point of replying, and then stopped because Maya was back downstairs now, looking for her keys on the hooks near the front door.
“Okay, later.”
“So your aunt has a pretty fancy ride,” Candace said lightly.
“Oh, that’s not hers,” Maya replied, distracted. “Did anyone see my keys?”
“You left them on the kitchen table,” Grace said, pointing. “Whose car is it?”
“It comes with the job,” Maya said. “She’s a driver.” She plucked the keys off the table.
They watched her leave.
Grace turned to Candace. “Did you know her aunt is a driver?”
“She’s never mentioned that. A driver,” mused Grace. “How do you like that? I wonder who she works for.”
Candace shrugged. “We don’t really know too much about Maya, do we?”
“We know as much about Maya as we know about anyone in this house,” Grace said with care.
Candace not only agreed, but proceeded to relate the theories she and Lucy had exchanged the night after John-Michael’s impromptu dinner party. “In the end,” she concluded, “Lucy wondered if John-Michael had ever actually been worried about HIV. That’s how messed up things are around here. Anything could be going on, underneath it all. Literally, anything.”
Eventually she grimaced and said, “I don’t know how any of us will sleep tonight. Poor John-Michael.”
Grace had the impression that the wider implications of Maya having extra knowledge about the housemates hadn’t impinged remotely on her stepsister’s brain. It struck her as odd, but she guessed that Candace must already be overloaded with concern for John-Michael.
“No way I’m going to bed feeling like this,” groaned Candace. “Seriously. I need to watch TV, or I’m gonna snap like a twig. And it won’t be pretty.”