CHAPTER 6

I was looking into the gray-blue eyes of a distraught woman. How could I lie to her?

That’s just it. I couldn’t.

“Yes, I did see your dog,” I answered.

The woman’s weathered features brightened instantly. “You did? You saw my Skippy? Where? When?”

“Last night.” I thumbed over my shoulder. “On my back deck.”

“Show me.”

“I’m sure he’s not there now.” How was I going to tell this sweet old lady that her beloved pet had been eaten by some huge dog ... or cat ... or whatever? I couldn’t do that. Then again, how cruel would it be to let her keep thinking he might be alive?

“Show me now, dammit,” Mrs. Wahlen snapped, “or I’ll call the police.”

Maybe sweet wasn’t the right adjective.

“Okay.” I offered a hand to her as Mrs. Wahlen stepped up onto the porch. She waved it away. “I can do it myself.”

“Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t mean to offend.”

She grumbled as she stomped over the threshold. I followed. “Why didn’t you call?”

“I didn’t know who the dog belonged to,” I answered, pushing the door open wider to accommodate her walker. “It was last night.”

“But I put fliers on everyone’s door. On your door. You could have at least called to tell me you’d seen him.”

“I didn’t get a flier.”

The lady, whose mind was definitely still razor-sharp, made a point to look at the rolled-up flier, sitting on top of the mail.

Busted.

“I ... erm, that’s your flier? I didn’t read it yet.” I snapped the rubber band still circling it. “See? It’s still rolled up.” After dropping the rubber-banded tube back on the table, I directed Mrs. Wahlen through the house to the French doors. She sniffed as she glanced around. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” I opened a door for her. “But he was outside here last night.”

Mrs. Wahlen slid four fingers into her mouth and produced an eardrum-piercing whistle. “Skippyyyyyy!”

That dog wasn’t going to respond, no matter how loud she whistled.

“Where was my baby when you saw him?” Mrs. Wahlen asked, squinting against the sunlight.

“Right there, on the deck.” I pointed at the spot where I’d left him. I noticed the dark stain on the wood too late.

Leaving her walker behind, Mrs. Wahlen hobbled outside and bent down. She poked at the spot with an arthritic finger. “Is that ... blood?”

“I don’t know.” My heart started thumping loudly in my ears.

Mrs. Wahlen looked at the bat, which was lying next to the stain. “Did someone hurt my Skippy?”

“No.”

“Where is he?” she snapped.

“I didn’t hurt him.” At her glare, I amended my answer. “Well, maybe I hurt him a little. I didn’t know he was a dog.”

Her face turned the shade of a tomato. “How could you not know that? The ears? The tail?”

“It was dark outside. I didn’t see a collar or leash. I thought he was a wild animal.” I pulled up my pant leg. “He bit me.”

“Of course he bit you,” Mrs. Wahlen scoffed. “You were hurting him.”

“No, he bit me first. Then I ... sort of ... accidentally ... erm ...”

“My Skippy wouldn’t attack anyone unprovoked. Now, where is he? Did you take him to a vet?”

“Um, well. I don’t know where he is. When I came inside to find a box or something to put him in—so I could take him to a vet, of course—another animal, a bigger one, grabbed him ...”

The woman’s eyes widened. Her tomato-red face went instantly white. Afraid she was about to pass out, I grabbed her arm, but she yanked it away. “Don’t touch me, you murderer!” Mrs. Wahlen stomped—as hard as a hundred-year-old woman could—back inside, reclaimed her walker, and headed out the front door. Once she was safely down the porch steps, she turned and shook an arthritic finger at me. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

Nifty. I was being sued. For killing a dog that had attacked me. With any luck, the attorney would tell her to drop it and that would be the end of that. But still, even if there was no lawsuit, my conscience was going to nag me for years about this one. I donate money to the Humane Society every year. Animal cruelty is my thing. My cause.

“I’ll look for his call then,” I said, thinking I might offer to pay a settlement if I was contacted by a lawyer. I didn’t have a lot of money in the bank, and I didn’t have a full-time job, but I had sold my apartment for a tidy profit. I would sleep better at night if I donated some of that cash to Mrs. Wahlen’s pet replacement fund. “One question, though. Was Skippy up-to-date on all his shots?”

The woman leered at me then stormed away.

“I’ll take that as a no?”

 

Someone was screaming. Outside. The sound was shrill. Eardrum-splitting. I thought someone might be dying. I pictured severed limbs, spurting blood. So, of course, I went racing outside to see.

It wasn’t what I imagined.

There were no severed limbs. No spurting blood. Just two little people—imagine Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat, sans the red suits—racing up and down the front sidewalk, screeching at the top of their lungs like stuck pigs. Oh, and they were smiling. It would seem they were making that noise for the hell of it.

Immediately, I unchecked the Have Kids box on my mental Ultimate Things to Do list. With my luck, my kids would possess supersized lungs like these two lovely angels. And the energy of a pack of hyenas.

As I was about to go back inside, a serene-looking Samantha strolled onto her porch. Seeing me, she smiled and waved.

Before I could ask her whom the little monsters belonged to—thank God, that could’ve been a bad thing—they started trotting toward her, yelling, “Mama!”

Poor woman.

As I watched them bounce around her like jumping beans, knocking flowerpots over and trampling the petunias, I concluded she was either an angel or on Valium. There could be no other explanation for how she maintained her cool while chaos erupted all around her.

I returned her wave when she glanced my way, and in she went, following on the heels of Things One and Two. The blissful silence returned.

There wasn’t anything interesting to watch now, so back in I went. I headed down to my girl-cave and got to work. Roughly an hour later, I heard the doorbell. Being a girl who had lived in the city for years, I was starting to have some serious people-withdrawal. All this quiet, the solitude, the peace, it was getting to me.

I opened the door. Samantha. Smiling. As usual, she was wearing pristine vintage clothing—Chanel today—and her hair and makeup were flawless. If I was going to start spending a lot of time with this woman—which was still very much in question—I was going to have to do better than sloppy sweats and a ponytail. After all, I was a clothing designer. “Hello, are you busy?”

“Nope. Come in.” I ushered her inside, to the kitchen. “Something to drink?”

“No thanks.” She settled on a bar stool and watched as I poured myself a diet cola. She waved away a second offer at a glass.

I sat beside her. “Your children are very ... energetic. Very cute.” I wondered where they were now.

“Thank you. They’re napping.”

“Ah.” I sipped my cola, wondering if Samantha had come over for some adult time or if she wanted to talk about something specific.

“Have you had any luck with your little investigation?” she asked.

Aha, so there was an ulterior motive. “I have. I learned Jon has an airtight alibi. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I don’t even know what sort of evidence was found when the police arrived.”

“I do,” she said. “I came to return Michelle’s Cuisinart. She’d loaned it to me a few days before. I was the one who found her.”

Hadn’t Jon said he was the one who discovered her? Had he lied? Or forgotten?

“Okay, so tell me. What did you see? Blood? Signs of a struggle?”

“No, none of those.” Samantha spun the swiveling stool around, so her back was facing the counter. “She was right there, lying on the floor, a wire dog cable hanging around her neck.”

“And ... ?” When Samantha didn’t add any more details, I asked, looking up, at the ceiling, wondering how the former Mrs. Stewart had hung herself. “Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all.”

“Am I missing something? A broken window? Signs of a struggle?”

“No. There was none of that.”

“Then what makes you think it wasn’t suicide?”

“First, the cable wasn’t attached to anything. It was just looped around her neck. Did she strangle herself by holding it there? Can you do that? Second, can you think of anyone who has killed herself in the middle of her kitchen? It’s such an odd place to pick. Could you imagine her strolling around her house, that cable knotted around her neck, and her stopping right there saying, ‘I think I’ll die right here,’ and pulling the chain? And third, Michelle would never do anything so ... dirty ... in her kitchen. She was a germ-aphobe, especially when it came to Joshua. He’d been sick a lot that summer. She was bleaching and Lysoling everything. If she ever thought to kill herself, she’d do it someplace safe, somewhere easy to clean, like her bathroom. And I told the detective that.”

“Strangled?” I stared at the floor, almost able to picture Michelle Stewart lying there, her sightless eyes staring back at me. I shivered.

“Yes.” Samantha spun back around. “Wouldn’t you think that the instant she passed out, the cable would loosen and she’d start breathing again?”

“I would.” My throat was dry. I gulped half my glass of cola.

“But you said Jon has an alibi?”

“He does.” I emptied the glass. “Why do you suspect him?”

“Well, everyone knows that the spouse is usually the killer. Plus, I’d heard them arguing that week. More than once.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Married people fight,” I pointed out. “It doesn’t always lead to someone dying.”

“True.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “But I’ve watched enough episodes of CSI to know that a strangling is a more intimate way of killing someone. The killer has to get close to the victim, within reach.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Which is generally why they’re someone the victim knows.” Little did Samantha realize, that statement put her, and her friends, on my short list of suspects.

“It was in her house. The kitchen. There was no sign of a break-in,” Samantha continued. “Yet another reason to believe it was someone she knew well. Like Jon.”

“So tell me, who else would Michelle let into the house?”

“Besides her husband? And me, of course ...” Samantha’s eyes widened. “You don’t think ... Do the police suspect me?”

I shrugged, doing my best to hide the truth. “I wouldn’t know.”

“But you said you talked to the detective.”

“I didn’t tell you that. How did you know?”

She blanched. “Lindsay told me. Was she lying?”

“Hmmm. I see good news travels fast around here,” I said to nobody in particular. “I did talk to the detective. But he wouldn’t even tell me as much as you did.”

Samantha shifted in her seat, checked her watch. “Oh darn. I need to get back. Need to take the bread out of the oven.” She slid from the stool. “Do you believe what the detective said about Jon?”

“I do. It sounded like there was absolutely no question of his innocence.”

“Well, I guess that’s good news for you? I imagine you weren’t too thrilled to learn you’d just moved in with a suspected murderer.”

“I imagine nobody would be thrilled to learn that.”

“True.” Samantha strolled to the front door, seeming to be in no hurry to get to her baking bread. “I guess I must believe it, too, then.”

“I think you’ll believe whatever you want,” I said as she stepped outside. As soon as I closed the door, I went down to the girl-cave to take some notes. What Samantha said made a lot of sense. At least, the part about the untied cable and the notion that Michelle might have known her killer.

At this point, I was ninety-nine percent sure Michelle Stewart had been murdered. I made a list of suspects. It was short. Very short. And I had serious doubts about all of the people on it. There was Jon, whom I couldn’t remove yet because of that inconsistency in his story versus Samantha’s. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t him. Samantha was on there, too. And Lindsay. Erica was the last name on the list. Because Lindsay, Erica, and Samantha were pushing me so hard to investigate, I was having a difficult time believing any of them were the killer. Jon had an alibi.

That left ... who else?

I needed to find out who else might have been close enough to Michelle to be invited inside the house. I was missing something. Something big. The puzzle pieces just weren’t fitting. Who would kill Michelle Stewart? And why?

The more I learned, the more I needed to know.