Family Case of Murder (13 page)

“You’re like a human dust mop,” Jason noted as he reached out and tried to help her shake free. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you had rolled around down there, trying to get as dirty as possible. Is there something about red hair that attracts dust motes?”

“No, it’s just me,” Lacy sighed. She should warn him what he might be getting into with her. She was some sort of walking statistical anomaly. If a chair had held thousands of people before, it would no doubt rupture when Lacy sat on it. And if a thousand people walked through a field with no problems, Lacy would find the hole and trip over it. And in the hole would likely be a hornet’s nest, and they would sting her. Trouble and bad luck had a way of finding her wherever she went.
 

She glanced up at him as he brushed the dust off her sock monkey hat, her heart in her eyes as she tried to warn him to run away.
It’s always going to be like this,
she wanted to say.
I’ll always be covered in dust or chocolate or some other substance that somehow bypasses everyone else and lands on me. I’m the one who walks through plate glass windows like an errant bird. I’m the woman who misses the first step and rolls down the remaining thirty. Run away, Jason, run as far and as fast as you can.

His hands settled on her shoulders and gave her a little shake. “It’s dust, Red, not plutonium. We’ll find a vacuum, and I’ll give you a once-over. You know how I like to clean.” He smiled, took her hand, led her from the room and, just like that, her gloomy interlude was over.

“That was an interesting conversation,” Jason said.

He was obviously referring to Bob and Rita’s conversation in the bedroom. “Uh, yeah. Mind-blowing. Wow.”

“You didn’t hear a word they said, did you?” he asked.

“Some.” Approximately five words or so.

“I knew you were in a zone. Where was your mind?”

“Quantum physics. I’ve been working on a new theorem in my spare time,” Lacy said.

“Mmm, hmm. In here.” He tugged her toward Riley’s room.

“Why are we searching in here? I thought we disqualified Riley as a suspect,” Lacy said.

“No one is disqualified until we find the culprit. Plus I don’t like your sister, and I feel like rifling through her things just for the fun of it.” He opened the door and stepped inside. “Whoa, scratch that last part. I’m not sure she would notice if we set the place on fire.” Clothes were strewn everywhere. For a neat freak like Jason, the room was probably causing him to retreat to his happy place in mental self-defense. He was more likely to tidy it than to search it at this point, so Lacy took the lead and began looking around.

“How do people live like this?” he muttered.

“Uh, yeah, she’s a slob,” Lacy said, not admitting that her room often looked the same. Despite her type-A tendencies as an oldest child, being neat didn’t come naturally to her. She had to work hard to keep things in perfect order. Whenever she was under stress or crunched for time, neatness was the first thing to go. “Think you could ever be with someone this messy?” she asked, darting him a half-searching, half-teasing glance as she rifled her sister’s possessions.

Jason was standing in the middle of the room, rendered ineffectual by the chaos. He tipped his head to study her. “I suppose it would depend on what else she brought to the table.”

“What if you couldn’t find the table because it was buried under mounds of paperwork?” She wasn’t exactly speaking hypothetically. The dresser in her bedroom was currently concealed under a heavy layer of legal documents from the Stakely building.

Jason shuddered, turning away. “You’re freaking me out.”

Lacy laughed and resumed her search. The differences between them were nothing new. What was one more to add to the pile? The list of what they actually had in common was so meager it was piteous.

Searching Riley’s things felt familiar, but not because they were Riley’s things; instead, it was akin to sorting her biological grandmother’s possessions. Barbara Blake and Riley had similar tastes is makeup, jewelry, perfume, and lingerie. Unlike Lacy who—despite becoming a millionaire—still bought her makeup and hair products from the drugstore like she always had. She suppressed a sigh, feeling as if this discrepancy somehow meant she was lacking in some way. Did she not take enough care with her appearance? If she spent fifty dollars on shampoo, would it add more spring and bounce to her rusty waves? She opened a bottle of shampoo and sniffed. It even smelled expensive.

“What are you doing?” She hadn’t realized Jason was watching her until he spoke.

“Smelling her shampoo. It smells good.” She held it out for him, and he took a whiff.

“Smells like shampoo. Aren’t they pretty much all the same?”

“This one has passion fruit in it,” Lacy explained.

“I guess if you’re not getting enough passion in your life, then you have to add it to your shampoo,” he speculated. Lacy laughed, feeling a little more buoyant. She wondered if that had been his intent because he draped his arm on her shoulders and surveyed the room. “Did you find anything interesting or important?”

“Besides the fact that Riley lives way beyond her means? No. Everything in this room is exactly what I expected it to be.” As she surveyed the expensive clothes, shoes, toiletries and jewelry, she felt a little sad for Riley. Maybe she was more insecure than Lacy realized. Maybe she felt like she needed all these outward trappings to feel worthwhile. While she, Lacy, was secure enough in her identity to pay less than three dollars for mascara.

She gave herself a mental shake at her own wishful thinking. Who was she kidding? Only in fairy tales were people so clearly defined. Just because she was frugal and Riley was extravagant didn’t mean they were respectively pious or flawed. They were just different. Riley liked expensive things and she always had. Lacy had always been the one to squirrel her money away and save up for big purchases. Riley had always spent whatever money she got as soon as she received it and then begged or cried for more until her parents, grandparents, or Lacy gave in. Lacy had a secret suspicion that her parents were still fueling Riley’s over-the-top lifestyle. Their mother had never been able to refuse her baby anything, and there was no other explanation for how Riley was able to afford such pricey clothes, shoes, and accoutrement.

“What were Bob and Rita talking about?” she asked.

Jason dropped his arm from her shoulders and began to rearrange Riley’s toiletries, putting them in order of size and shape. “About how difficult it is to keep up the charade of being a happy couple.”

“Seriously? They think they’re happy?”

“They think they appear that way,” Jason said. He finished with the toiletries and moved on to the jewelry, untangling necklaces and winding them around his finger before stacking them in Riley’s jewelry case.

“Why would they pretend to be a happy couple, if that’s really what they’re doing?”

“Good question, one I think we should find an answer to soon. Obviously they’re hiding something. Maybe Aunt Enid’s purse strings are tied to their marital bliss,” Jason suggested. He leaned forward on his toes, sorting a scattered pile of earrings into pairs.

“Jason, you need help,” Lacy said.

“You’re right. Grab those shirts and start folding.”

“That wasn’t the kind of help I was referring to. Has anyone ever told you that you have OCD?”

“Yes, but I prefer to call it CDO because the letters are in proper order that way,” he said, sounding totally unconcerned by her assessment. In fact he sounded happy. He began to hum as he cleaned.

“Every time I appear at your house, it’s already clean. I’ve never seen this side of you before, the one that takes so much joy in tidying.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. “It’s sexy, isn’t it?”

“It’s something,” she agreed. He turned back around and she wound her finger around her ear in the
You’re crazy
motion.

“I saw that,” he said.

“Did you see it, or did the voices in your head tell you I was doing it?” she asked.

He chuckled. “Good one.” He finished sorting the jewelry and picked up the box, using his sleeve to dust the top of the bureau. “The maid is dead a couple of days and things are already falling to disarray.” He clucked his tongue and turned around, ready to start on the rest of the room.

“If you had to choose between cleaning and me, which would you pick?” Lacy asked.

“What would you be wearing?” Jason asked.

“Jason,” Lacy said, stamping her foot in dismay.

“If you had to choose between me and chocolate pie, which would you pick?” he asked.

Lacy stopped short, her dismay changing to chagrin. “Touché. Let’s get out of here.”

“I haven’t finished cleaning,” he said, and he was serious.

Lacy clasped his hand and dragged him from the room.
 

“I’m not finished,” Jason protested again.

“You’re upsetting the balance of our relationship by letting your crazy leak out. That’s my role,” Lacy said.

“When you put it like that, let’s move on,” Jason agreed, closing Riley’s door behind them so he didn’t have to see the mess. “Let’s tackle GQ’s room next.”

They stopped in front of Robert’s room. Lacy had never realized before how apt the description was, but Robert worked harder than anyone she had ever seen to put himself together. He cared as much about high fashion and grooming as Riley; in that way, they were well-matched. Now that Lacy was away from him and spent her time with a cop who owned five copies of the same shirt and a pastor who routinely wore his cassock to supper, she felt a little shallow for believing the lie that fashion made the man.

Jason gritted his teeth as they opened the door. Lacy wasn’t sure if it was because another messy room might push him over the edge of endurance or because he simply didn’t like Robert. She thought maybe it was the former because as soon as they stepped inside the room and saw that it was mostly tidy, he breathed a sigh of relief and began to look around.

She started to look around on the other side of the room until Jason called her attention.

“Here’s something,” he said.

She meandered over and stood on her toes as he lifted something from a drawer. “It’s a watch,” she said.

“It’s a pocket watch,” he said. His tone was one he might have reserved for saying,
It’s a mutilated baby bunny!

“What’s wrong with a pocket watch?” Lacy asked.

“If you have to ask the question, then you wouldn’t understand the answer.”

“My grandpa carried a pocket watch,” Lacy said.

“Exactly. At the turn of the century everyone carried pocket watches, but then we invented this great technology that allowed us to get rid of the weird little pocket in the front of our vests.” He held up his wristwatch for her inspection. “Never date a man who carries a pocket watch, Red. I thought that went without saying. Apparently not.”

“I read pocket watches are coming back,” Lacy said, still not understanding why he was disturbed.

He set the watch aside with a sigh and turned to her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Lacy, there are two kinds of men in the world: Those who keep up with trends and those who don’t. You know what I’m saying?”

“No, not even a little,” Lacy said.

“I’m saying that you can live and die by what other people think of you, or you can be your own man. The fact that you wasted years of your life on this man worries me. I mean, I don’t like the pastor, but I’ll give him his props: at least he’s his own person. This guy, though,” he scanned the room with a grimace as if Robert was with them and could feel his censure. “He was never good enough for you. How did you not see that?”

He was confusing her. Lacy had always thought of Robert as being a little above her. He had been popular, the object of every female wish, and he had chosen
her.
But, according to Jason, she had lowered her standards by going out with him. The craziest thing was that she was beginning to believe him. Why had she allowed Robert to walk all over her? Why had she been heartbroken when he dumped her for Riley? She should have thrown a party. “Robert was the first man I ever dated. Doesn’t everyone get a learning curve?”

One of his hands slipped from her shoulder to her face. He cupped it, his thumb smoothing over his jaw. “Yes. And the fact that you’ve dated one man compels me to cut you some slack.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, though it was hard to sound outraged by his statement when she was whispering. The thumb smoothing over her cheek felt a little too good.

“You know,” he said.

She did know, and she didn’t want to talk about it. Jason had been unerringly patient the last few months as Lacy tried to find her feet again. He wasn’t the sort of man to wait for what he wanted or tolerate competition, but he had. For her, because she had been a mess. But she wasn’t a mess anymore, was she? So, what now?

“What did you learn from your first girlfriend?” she asked, desperate for a subject change.

He dropped his hand and turned away, tucking the watch back into the drawer with a thump. “That they sometimes come back and open bead stores.”

Lacy narrowed her eyes on his back. Cindy Davenport had been his first girlfriend? She didn’t like that; she didn’t like that at all, and she still hadn’t gotten an answer from him about what exactly their relationship entailed.

When he turned to face her again, his face was wiped clean of all expression. “Let’s move on to Donkey Kong’s room, shall we?” Jason said. He stepped back, indicating she should precede him from the room.

“You’re pretty good at changing the subject,” Lacy noted.

“I learned from the master, Red,” He said, quirking an eyebrow in her direction.

“Well, this is a surprise.”

Gregor’s room was immaculate. They hadn’t said as much to each other, but they had expected the room to match the man and be slovenly. Yet it was clean, and not just clean but
Jason
clean. Every item was in place and perfectly aligned, the vacuum lines in the carpet were in straight, even rows. The bed linens were so crisp that they would no doubt pass the quarter test.