Too Pretty to Die (20 page)

Well, hell.

If I hadn’t before, now I felt like a total schmuck.

I squirmed, kicking my feet against the silk rug.

I didn’t even hear her approach me, merely felt her light touch on my chin as she tucked her fingers beneath it and raised my gaze to hers.

“Perhaps this is one of those times when emotions can’t be explained, my dear,” she told me, her drawl slow and soft, her eyes not accusing in the least. “Do you ever do things because you feel you have to? Even if they make no sense to others?”

Of course I did, and she knew it.

I bit my lip and nodded.

“Well, it’s one of those cases. You don’t have to get involved any more than you already are, Andrea. You just have to let me be, and I’ll do what needs to be done.”

That sounded like a line I may have used on her a time or two.
Don’t question me, just support me.

Mother wasn’t done yet. “Somehow, sweet pea, I have a feeling you want to see justice done in this case, too. If someone did hurt Miranda, he can’t get away with it. We can’t let him.”

“I know,” I said, kicking the toe of my sneaker against the floor. It wasn’t like I didn’t feel a stake in Miranda’s passing, too.

“Darling, remember, this isn’t about you or me,” she said, and brushed her hand over my cheek. “It’s about a little girl who doesn’t have a voice anymore. She needs someone to see this through, to make sure she isn’t remembered by a lie.”

With that, she strode from the bedroom, leaving me alone with the Coach purse and my own insecurities.

Wow.

I shivered and rubbed my arms up and down until the goose bumps disappeared.

I’d seen my mother intense before, and I know how wrapped up she got when she lost anyone she loved, or even liked the least little bit.

But this time her intensity was so quiet, it left me shaken.

It was hard to fathom that Miranda had been alive last night and dead this morning. It had all happened so fast, the way this thing had caught us all in its net: me, Mother, and Janet, even Stephen, who had helped Mother find a private investigator.

It was freaky, too, how none of us could let things lie.

Was it because we were so dad-gummed inspired to find the truth, or was there something more attached to all our motives?

I knew Janet’s was the need to write a story that would save her career, and mine was pure guilt.

Mother’s reasons were something else entirely, and I tapped my fingers, trying to sort them all out: a combination of loyalty to an old pal, for sure; the need to set things right for a young woman who seemed to have had it all and suddenly had nothing.

But there was something else.

Mother had definitely made up her mind that Miranda hadn’t died by her own hand, without even hearing the county medical examiner’s preliminary report or waiting on the findings of the police investigation, which had barely gotten off the ground that morning. It was like
I
had died, the police were calling it suicide, and she refused to believe it for an instant.

It’s not that I didn’t agree with her about Miranda, because I did, considering the mystery surrounding Miranda’s gun and the missing laptop, and particularly after my conversation with Janet Graham.

But Debbie Santos’s request that my mother become Miranda’s “mommy
ad litem
” had turned Cissy into a lioness, fur ruffled and claws bared, ready to do whatever was absolutely necessary to protect her cub.

Only Miranda wasn’t hers.

Call me selfish and insensitive, but this all had me pondering a single question that had nothing to do with Miranda: had Cissy ever fought so hard for me?

Had she ever pushed like mad to make sure I came out on top?

And I don’t mean putting all the pieces in place for my debut.

Oh, sure, she was 110 percent behind that, but it had all been her doing, her dreams, not mine. When I informed her that I wasn’t going to SMU—or any other Texas college—but had instead enrolled at an art school, Columbia College in Chicago, my mother hadn’t exactly been waving her pom-poms, cheering me on. She’d been sorely disappointed, like I’d struck her with a double whammy after ditching my cotillion, even though it’s what I wanted.

Every guy I’d dated until Brian Malone had been on her hit list; and even though she’d been the one who pushed Malone and me together initially, he hadn’t exactly endeared himself to her when she realized we’d been “keeping company” without so much as a promise ring on my third left finger.

Sure, I understood that she loved me, deep down, beneath everything.

Okay, yes, she’d actually ended up helping me out a few times when I needed help out of a jam (even if not a jam of my own making).

But I was her only child, so giving me an emotional boost now and then was to be expected, right?

As I’d grown up, I became accustomed to Mother throwing herself into her volunteer work, which I realized—as I grew out of the house—gave her less time to comment on my life and how I lived it, or to interfere.

Until the past year or so, when she’d gotten restless in a way that I’m sure many mavens of society did once their children left the nest, their husbands croaked or dumped them for shinier trophy wives, and charity work didn’t quite hold the sparkle it had once.

I’d begun to wonder if Cissy wasn’t at a point in her life where chairing galas and fund-raisers didn’t quite fill her up the way it used to.

I had a sense, too, that part of it stemmed from her getting tired of waiting for me to get engaged so she could plan my destination wedding. Instead of holding her breath till the day I would bear a (legitimate) grandchild for her to dote on, she’d decided to take on another kind of maternal “volunteer” gig entirely, though this one was quite a bit more serious than candy-striping at Presbyterian Hospital.

Or, perhaps, I was overanalyzing and overdramatizing things, as usual, because I was knocked off-kilter by the tragedy that had dropped into our laps. It wasn’t every day that someone I knew was found dead, and it made it worse that I was at the top of the local police department’s list of “last known person to see the victim alive.”

I didn’t want to be jealous of Miranda.

I mean, Miranda was dead.

So whatever baggage I carried regarding my mother, whatever resentment or jealousy I was feeling because of her recent actions . . . well, at least, I still had time to deal with it—and deal with her—while we were both alive and kicking.

And I would do that.

Really I would.

Just as soon as this ordeal was behind us and we could sit down and have a “heart-to-heart chat,” as my daddy used to say.

He also had another favorite saying, usually relating to making peace between me and my mother: “When pigs fly.”

I didn’t like that one near as much.

M
alone offered to take me out for a quiet dinner after we left Mother’s house, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to sit in a restaurant full of unquiet people and make idle chatter while we chewed our way through a couple of courses, no matter how good the food or the company.

Besides, I was too curious about the photos on Miranda’s camera and wanted to get home, upload them onto my computer, and check them out. They could all be shots from her summer vacations or a trip to the zoo, but I had to hope there was something more . . . something tying in to the e-mail sent to Janet about exposing the secret lives of the Caviar Club members . . . something that would shed more light on Miranda’s sudden death.

Part of it was helping Janet get her story—and keep her job—and part was definitely a curiosity about why exactly Miranda’s life had been snuffed out so prematurely.

The rest wasn’t so altruistic.

It had more to do with wanting a little peace in my life, which meant getting Janet Graham off my back and getting Mother back to doing her event chairing thing instead of taking over the microphone at police press conferences.

It could happen soon, too, particularly if the Dallas County medical examiner found cause to believe Miranda hadn’t killed herself. But Deputy Chief Dean’s remark to me about “this one looks and smells like suicide” had me wondering if that would happen.

And why wouldn’t I have doubts?

According to Anna Dean, there was no sign of forced entry, the gun used to end Miranda’s life belonged to Miranda, and she’d been upset enough to have a nervous breakdown in front of a dozen people at Delaney Armstrong’s house only hours before she died.

If it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then, by God, it was a duck, right?

You betcha.

Unless it wasn’t.

On the drive back to my place, I asked Malone if his firm had ever handled a case involving a suicide that wasn’t.

He said yes, that Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt had represented a few clients whose loved ones had purportedly killed themselves, resulting in nonpayment of death benefits, only for the deaths to be proven accidental after private investigators, exhumations, and independent autopsies were done.

Then again, they’d also had a few cases where challenges were lost.

Since he knew the legal ramifications of Mother becoming the late Miranda DuBois’s legal guardian until Debbie returned to the States, he suggested—okay, advised—that I be careful where I stepped. “Stay out of it,” was his point, and I assured him I had no desire to spend Thanksgiving behind bars.

He’d overheard Anna Dean’s remarks about not interfering in the police investigation, and I promised him, as I’d promised the deputy chief, that I would not cause trouble.

No lie.

I had no intentions of shaking things up with the authorities. I’d leave that to Cissy. But I couldn’t see getting out of helping Janet with her mission to expose the Caviar Club. I couldn’t imagine how that would entail anything illegal.

Surely it wasn’t against the law to aid and abet a society columnist afraid of losing her job?

When we arrived at the condo, my next door neighbor, a true Texas good ol’ boy named Charlie Tompkins, was out walking his old pooch. He hollered a greeting, along the lines of, “Well, howdy there, pretty lady. Hey, there, counselor. Was that your mama on the news this afternoon, Andy?”

Oh, geez.

I gave Charlie a halfhearted wave then turned my back on him, allowing Malone to do the talking for me, as I was in no mood for chatter.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said, while I stabbed my key in the lock. “I wouldn’t pursue that line of questioning unless you want to see a live human spontaneously combust.”

“Then we’ll just zip our lips, eh, pup? No good comes of poking a stick at a cranky woman.” The older man laughed and tugged the leash, drawing his dog in the other direction.

“
Men
,” I said under my breath as I pushed open the door and Malone and I headed inside. My shoulders didn’t sag until I’d turned the dead bolt and locked the big, bad world outside.

“You mind taking care of dinner?” I asked my sweetie as I held on tight to him for a long minute. “I’ve got something I need to do.”

“You want onion and green peppers on a thin crust, right?” he asked, hitting it dead-on.

“Yummy. No wonder I love you.” I kissed him full on the mouth, giving him a pat on the tush before I hightailed it into my office, Miranda’s tiny camera burning a hole in my purse.

While Brian assumed the weighty task of calling Domino’s to place our order, I settled down in front of my computer and set the Pentax on my desk.

I woke Mr. Dell with a tap of my mouse and plopped into my nonergonomic chair—a pretty French style almost-antique with a pillow flush behind my back—and then I got to work, sorting through the rubber bands, binder clips, iPod Nano cords, and flash drives in my junk drawer until I recovered the memory card reader I was seeking.

My heartbeat hastened its tempo as I removed the secure digital card from Miranda’s camera, stuck it into the reader, and then slid the reader into a free port.

“Come to mama, baby,” I cajoled as I drummed fingertips atop my desk and waited the few seconds it took for the files to load before the slide show began, flashing photos, one after the other, across my flat screen.

I kept one hand on the mouse, in case I needed to pause and study a photo, and I tapped my palm against the thigh of my jeans with the other. I had so much nervous energy, and I was so anxious to find something incriminating, something real, that I could barely breathe.

The first dozen photos seemed pretty innocuous: shots of Miranda at various functions, wearing pastel-hued suits and grinning as she posed with giant scissors about to cut the ribbon on a new PetsMart; standing alongside the mayor and chief of police at the Guns and Buns breakfast fund-raiser, and on and on, until I was afraid there would be nothing.

“Whatcha looking at?”

I jumped at the sound of Malone’s voice, and realized he was crouching beside me, squinting at the monitor.

Instinctively, I clicked the mouse and stopped the slide show of Miranda’s digital photographs. The image that stuck on the screen was of her at what appeared to be an office birthday party, everyone in silly pointed paper hats, the craggy-faced co-anchor of the evening news staring at Miranda from the sidelines as she blew out an army of candles on a snow white cake.

“It’s nothing,” I said, thinking fast, as Janet had sworn me to secrecy. I didn’t like keeping things from Malone, but I figured in this case it was only temporary. I’d fill him in on the whole shebang when this mess was all cleaned up.

“Isn’t that Miranda DuBois?” he asked, his hand planted on the arm of my chair as he leaned forward to gaze at the screen. “And that’s the dude she did the news with. Dick Uttley, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I quietly agreed, then chirped, “Was that the doorbell? I think the pizza man’s here.”

“No doorbell.” He shook his head. “You’re hearing things. So why’ve you got this on your computer? Looks like a party. Were you there?”

“No.” Well, I wasn’t going to lie to him about that. “It’s a photograph of Miranda’s.”

He went, “Hmmm,” before asking, “How’d you get it? From her Web site?”