Drip Dead (5 page)

“No occasion,” I lied. “And you don’t have to bring anything. I’m thinking spaghetti and garlic bread. I can handle it.”

“Six?” Sue asked.

“Works for me,” I replied.

“Uh, Georgie? You don’t just randomly decide to cook because it’s Thursday. Is Wade coming? Should I call Fred?”

“No!” I shouted into the phone, then realized how strongly I’d reacted. “No, don’t call Fred. I can’t explain right now, but Wade won’t be there. Just us girls. Okay?” I tried not to wince at the word
girl
and carefully avoided mentioning that there would be another “girl” at dinner.

I hesitated. I hadn’t really expected to get away without telling her, and it really wasn’t fair not to give her some advance warning that she was having dinner with Mom. And why.

“Okay,” I said. “This is an emergency. And it’s complicated. Listen, I’m at the grocery store. I really can’t explain this on the phone. I’ll come by the spa on my way home. But I can’t stay long if I’m going to cook.”

I hung up before she could ask me anything else.

Twenty minutes later I pulled up in front of Doggie Day Spa, having set a personal power-shopping record for the grocery store. The front-end cargo space of the Beetle was packed with enough groceries to last me several weeks, or Mom and me a few days. Fast-food dining made groceries last a long time, but I knew that wasn’t going to be possible with Mom in the house.

I let the dogs out of the car, clipping on their leashes. Sue met us at the door of her pet grooming shop with treats for the dogs and a question for me.

“What’s going on, Georgie? When I tried to call Fred he wasn’t available, and the deputy who took my message was acting awfully strange. That couldn’t have anything to do with why you didn’t want me to invite him to dinner, could it?”

Her tone was curious, but there was an edge. She’d been dating the sheriff for a few months, and we occasionally double-dated: her and Fred, and me and Wade Montgomery, a Pine Ridge City Councilman and my sort-of boyfriend. But since I’d been involved in the investigation of a couple murders in Pine Ridge, Fred and I were sometimes at odds.

I motioned to a stool behind the counter, and Sue took the hint.

I still didn’t know where to start, but there wasn’t time to tiptoe around the truth. “Gregory Whitlock’s dead.”

Sue’s mouth dropped open but no sound came out.

“I found him,” I continued, “this morning.” Had it only been a few hours ago? It felt like an eternity since those few horrible minutes under the house.

“You found him? Where was he?” Sue’s voice strained with shock.

“He was under Mom’s house.” Even though it was the truth, I realized how absurd it sounded when I said it that way.

I tried to explain. “I went to check the plumbing and stuff in the crawl space under the house. He was down there.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how he got there or what he was doing. In fact, I don’t know much of anything about this. I just know he was dead.”

“But, how . . .?”

I shrugged again. “Ask Fred. He isn’t telling me—or Mom—anything. All I know is that he won’t let my mother back in her house, and she can’t stay at Gregory’s, either.”

Sue eyed me suspiciously. “And just where is she staying?”

“With me,” I admitted miserably. “Which is why you have to come to dinner tonight. I left her unpacking, but I’m stuck with her until your boyfriend lets her back in her house, or lets her stay at Gregory’s. I mean, she’d practically moved in there already, so she ought to be able to stay there, shouldn’t she?”

I tried not to think about how long it might be before I could get Mom back into her own house. I already knew it wouldn’t be soon enough.

“So you have to come to dinner,” I pleaded. “Just for a little while, to give me a break. Maybe, with you there, we can get through this evening with a little dignity intact.”

Speaking of dignity, another thought occurred to me. “And do you have a pair of pajamas I can borrow? Just until I can get into town to buy some new ones.” Pine Ridge wasn’t known for its shopping opportunities.

Sue’s brow furrowed. Usually she was the one on a conversational roller coaster. It took a second for the question to register, then she nodded. “Sandra won’t approve of the ratty T-shirt, will she? I have a brand-new pair at home. I’ll bring them with me.”

She glanced over at the dogs, settled contentedly in their favorite nap spots, and shook her head. “The pups could use a brushing. Why don’t you leave them here and go deal with Sandra? I owe you for the last round of computer work and I can bring them with me at six.”

She looked around the empty shop. “Pretty quiet here this afternoon, anyway.”

I couldn’t hide the relief I felt. I wished, for Sue’s sake, the shop was busier, but I was grateful for her willingness to take Daisy and Buddha off my hands for the afternoon.

She did owe me for some computer maintenance I’d done for her. Not many people in Pine Ridge knew I’d owned a computer security firm in San Francisco, but the ones who did—like Sue and my boss, Barry Hickey—were happy to take advantage of my expertise.

The reminder stayed with me through the drive home. When I’d returned to Pine Ridge I thought Samurai Security was behind me. But the unexpected appearance of Blake Weston, and his subsequent murder, had landed the whole mess on my doorstep again, and nearly drawn me back into the world of high tech.

There was still the matter of Samurai’s finances to sort out. A small army of lawyers and accountants were trying to untangle the mess. One of these days, they told me, there might be a financial settlement due me.

I wasn’t holding my breath.

By the time I hauled the last load of grocery bags into the kitchen, Mom was unpacking the first bags and putting them away. I got another of her raised-eyebrow looks when she opened the refrigerator to put away the salad. She didn’t have to say anything—we replayed the same conversation every time she looked in my fridge.

First she would bemoan the state of my nutrition, then she’d move on to how she’d taught me better eating habits, and finally she’d sigh deeply and tell me that soon I would regret not taking better care of myself.

“Just wait until you turn forty, Georgiana—and it’s not that far away, you know. You can’t eat like this forever.” I realized she had been talking for several minutes without me really hearing her.

“I’ve got a long way till forty,” I countered. “And I don’t ‘eat like this’ all the time. I just hadn’t been to the grocery store this week.”

Well, maybe I hadn’t been to the grocery store this month, but I’d been busy. I had my licensing exam coming up soon, and I’d been spending every spare minute studying.

The exam had me spooked. I’d done fine on all the classroom work in my nearly four years in the apprenticeship program, and I had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Caltech—one of the toughest schools in the country. But test anxiety was still an old nemesis. Intense preparation was my main defense, and I wanted to pass this thing the first time.

“And don’t tell me how hard you’ve been studying. That’s no excuse. In fact”—she closed the refrigerator and leveled her gaze at me—“you should be more careful of your diet when you’re under stress. It’s a fact that proper nutrition is essential to proper brain function.”

She had me there, though I wasn’t about to admit it. And how did she know what I was thinking? It was a mom talent that I thought should have gone away when I was no longer a teenager, but it hadn’t.

I pulled a jar of premade spaghetti sauce from a bag and set it by the stove. Next to it I put a package of spaghetti noodles, some pre-sliced mushrooms, and a small package of Italian sausage.

“Spaghetti sauce from a
jar
?” The disapproval was clear in her voice.

“If we want to eat tonight instead of tomorrow,” I explained as I dragged a saucepan from the cupboard, “I have to take some shortcuts.”

I dumped the sauce in the pan and put it on to heat, then got a frying pan and threw the sausage in.

Mom puttered around the kitchen, making unnecessary small talk about dinner and fiddling with one thing and another while I cooked and drained the sausage and added it to the bubbling sauce.

We were carefully avoiding the one subject that was foremost on both our minds: the death of Gregory Whitlock.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I really am sorry, Mom.”

She looked at me. Her expression said she didn’t understand what I meant, though I was sure she did. After several seconds she abandoned the attempt, her face crumpling momentarily with grief before she regained her usual iron control.

“You never liked him, Georgie,” she said, her voice soft with a vulnerability she never displayed in public. “You must be”—she hesitated as though searching for the right word—“
relieved
.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I admit, Gregory wasn’t one of my favorite people, but this isn’t the time or place for that discussion. What’s important right now is you. You loved him. I want to be here for whatever you need.”

“I’ve been through this before, Georgiana.” Her usual commanding tone was back, the moment of weakness buried once again. “It’s not easy, but you do what has to be done.”

I wanted to ask her how she did that, how she buried her feelings. But just then the doorbell rang.

“Watch this for me, would you please?” I said, hurrying to the front door.

“I walked them,” Sue said as she handed me a shopping bag and unclipped the dogs’ leashes. “And they had dinner. Don’t listen when they tell you they haven’t.”

I chuckled. Sue was a sucker for dogs of all kinds, and my two knew that well. “They gave you the sad starving-puppy eyes, didn’t they? You are such an easy touch.”

I glanced in the bag. Flannel pajamas with subdued stripes. Mom would approve. I gave Sue a brief nod of thanks.

“Hello, Sue,” Mom called from the kitchen. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Neverall.”

I rolled my eyes. Sue and I had been best friends since we were kids, and even though she could refer to Mom as Sandra when we talked about her, she couldn’t bring herself to call her anything but Mrs. Neverall to her face.

In the kitchen, Mom had somehow assumed control in the two minutes I’d been gone. The table was set with napkins carefully folded at each place, the garlic bread was in the oven, and pasta was boiling merrily on the stove.

How did she
do
that?

We made polite small talk for several minutes while Mom finished the bread and pasta and I tossed the bagged salad into a bowl and added a drizzle of Italian dressing.

By the time we sat down to eat, however, we had exhausted all the carefully neutral topics. We served ourselves and began to eat in an increasingly uncomfortable silence.

I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it before I said something—
anything
—to break the silence. My brilliant plan to have Sue help me through the first night of Mom’s stay wasn’t working.

This was worse than I had imagined, and it was only the beginning. I wouldn’t last a week.

I waited, hoping Mom would relax a little, would stop pretending there was nothing unusual about her having dinner at my house, or spending the night with me. Nothing unusual about finding her fiancé dead under her house.

Not likely. Sandra Neverall had established the rules and she would expect everyone around her to live by them.

Well, I didn’t have to play by her rules. This was my house, my dinner table, and I wasn’t going to be shoved back into the role of the dutiful daughter trying—and failing—to please her mother.

“Mom,” I said, in what I hoped was a casual tone, “do you know what those boxes are that Gregory had under the house?”

“Boxes?”

“Yeah. There were a bunch of wooden boxes. Shipping crates of some kind. I wondered if you knew what he was storing under there.”

Mom shook her head. “He wasn’t storing anything under the house.”

“So you didn’t know they were there?” I countered, twirling pasta around my fork with a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

“There wasn’t anything to know, Georgiana. Gregory wasn’t storing anything under my house.”

I chewed for a moment, considering whether to press the issue. Sue shot me a warning look, but my curiosity was aroused.

“Under the hallway, I think.” I thought for a minute, trying to picture what I’d seen. But all that would come back was the image of a misshapen lump and a pair of unmoving penny loafers. “I know they were there. I saw them.”

I shoved away the thought of the other things I had seen under the house. I didn’t want to think about that again. Ever.

Mom shook her head, her expression puzzled. “No, Georgie,” she said, slipping back into my childhood nickname. “Gregory has a nice big house of his own. There isn’t any reason for him to store anything under my house.”

It didn’t take a brain trust to see where this was going. Mom truly did not know about the crates under her house. Sandra Neverall could be the Queen of Denial when she wanted to be, but this time she was clearly sincere.

Which meant Gregory had stashed something under there without telling her. And that meant it was something he didn’t want her to know about.

But what could he have wanted to hide from her?

And why not keep the crates at his own house?

But saying that to my mother wasn’t a good idea.

We finished eating in silence.