Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

Her stepmother sighed dramatically, but otherwise kept quiet.

“Thank you,” Leese said. “After Mia made her statement, she was arrested. Somewhere in there she was read her rights and I showed up to represent her, at least for the time being.”

She stopped and this time the ticking of the refrigerator was the noisiest sound in the room.

“Right.” Leese looked at Mia. “Today, you were released from jail because it didn’t take the detective very long to determine that you were at an IT conference in Florida last week and that dozens of people could give you an alibi. Time-wise, it was impossible for you to fly home, kill Dad, and fly back to Florida.”

“I know,” Mia whispered.

“Then why did you confess?” her mother shouted, crashing her mug down on the table. I cringed, but no one else so much as blinked. “Why on earth did you do that?” Carmen demanded. “How could you be so—”

“Let her answer,” Leese cut in firmly.

Brad stood, went around to the back of Mia’s chair, and started kneading her shoulders. “Talk to us, Mee. It’ll be okay, okay? Just tell us why.”

Though Leese’s napkin had stanched the earlier tears, it was not going to be able to handle the flood I could feel coming.

“It was my fault,” Mia said so softly the words barely got past her teeth. “It was me, it was my fault.”

“We heard you the first hundred times,” her mother said. “It’s bad enough that your father is dead without this little problem. You said you’d explain when we got to Leese’s house. Well, we’re here, so tell us.”

Mia looked at Leese, who nodded. The younger woman bent her head. “Dad and I,” she told the table, “had this big fight when he drove me to the airport. A huge fight.”

This fact didn’t seem to faze the other three at the table. I couldn’t recall the last time my mild-mannered engineer father and I had argued about anything other than the importance of fiction in the universe. In spite of his ridiculous opinion that reading fiction was a waste of time if there was nonfiction at hand, I couldn’t imagine having a knock-down drag-out with him. Clearly, this wasn’t the case with the deceased Dale Lacombe and his offspring.

“What was it this time?” Brad was still working on her shoulders. “Your hair or your tattoos?”

His younger sister reached up and pulled at a loose strand of jet-black hair. “He kept saying over and over again that I was wasting my life, that if I ever wanted to meet a man who might actually want to marry me, I had to quit working a man’s job.”

I sucked in a quick breath, not quite believing what I’d heard. But once again, no one else at the table seemed surprised.

“Nothing new there.” Brad very gently bumped the top of his sister’s head with one of his fists.

“But this time I said he was wrong.” Mia’s shoulders rounded. “This time I told him that I was a grown woman, that I thanked him for his concern but my career decisions were mine and mine alone.”

Brad and Leese exchanged surprised glances and Carmen stared at her daughter. None of them said a word.

Mia either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “He said he was my father and that he’d always have a say in what I did.” She looked up and now the tears were flowing fast. “I told him he didn’t have a say. I told him I’d been living on my own since college, that if I wanted his advice, I’d ask for it, but that I didn’t see it happening. Ever again.”

Though it sounded as if it had been past time for Mia to stick up for herself, the timing was unfortunate.

“Don’t you see,” she said wildly. “It’s my fault he’s dead. He must have been so mad at me, so upset, that he wasn’t being careful on some building site and he . . . he fell. It’s my fault.”

That didn’t make a lot of sense, since he clearly hadn’t fallen straight into Leese’s pickup, but I kept quiet. And how, exactly, had she known he’d fallen to his death? But even as the question popped into my brain, I answered it. Detective Inwood must have said something about it when he’d been interviewing her.

Leese hitched her chair around so she could sit next to Mia. “Sweetie, it’s not your fault. There’s no way it’s your fault. Someone put him into the truck, so that same someone probably pushed him. We don’t know what happened, but the one thing we do know is you didn’t have anything to do with it.” She wrapped her arm around Mia’s slender shoulders and sent Carmen and Brad a look full of meaning.

“That’s right,” Brad said. “He died days after you left for Florida. How could there be any connection?”

Leese then looked pointedly at Carmen, who rolled her eyes and said, “Mia, stop being so dramatic. It wasn’t your fault. I don’t know why you have to—”

“Mia, have you talked to Corinne?” Leese cut in.

When Mia shook her head, her brother said, “Talking to Corinne is a great idea. If you want, I can call and make an appointment for you. Around lunchtime?”

“I don’t want to,” Mia said quietly.

“Of course you don’t,” Carmen almost snapped, “but it’s what you need.”

It suddenly dawned on me that they were talking about Corinne Napier, a psychologist with an outstanding reputation who practiced in Chilson.

Mia shrugged, but didn’t say a word.

“Then it’s settled,” her mother said. “Brad, you call Corinne first thing tomorrow and let us know what time the appointment is. Mia, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”

“Yes, Momma,” she said almost mechanically. “I have to be there ten minutes ahead of time and I have to ask Corinne to sign a note that I sat through the whole hour.”

Seriously? I glanced around, but as before, no one else seemed to think this was unusual.

“Good,” Carmen said and I watched the tension drain out of her face. She smiled and patted her daughter’s hand. “Now, how about another bowl of ice cream?”

“Coming right up,” Leese said, jumping to her feet.

“I’ll help,” Brad said, collecting the bowls from the table.

I got up and wielded the can of whipped cream and the talk turned to guessing what was going to be the peak fall color weekend, but though I played along with the conversation, I kept wondering about all the things this family hadn’t said.

Mia had been a patient of Corinne’s. Was it for her anorexia, or something else?

Their father apparently had a history of fighting with his adult children. Why?

But most of all, I wondered why they were finding it so easy to believe that Dale had been murdered.

Chapter 8

The next morning, my desk phone rang as I worked through the amazing number of e-mails that had accumulated since the last time I’d sat at my computer. Some were pure spam, some were solicitations, some were from other librarians, others were from patrons who thought an e-mail to me was the best way to get the library to purchase a new book.

And it probably was the best way, since the mention of any book I hadn’t heard of sent me straight to the nearest search engine for more information. One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to put all those requests into a separate folder and go over them when I had time, but here it was October and the habit had yet to get started.

“No time like the present,” I told myself, and clicked on my e-mail program’s “New Folder” function. After typing “Book Requests” as the folder’s name, I started moving e-mails around. Three went into the new folder, six got deleted, and then there was . . .

I studied the subject line. “Software Pricing Request,” it said, from a salesperson I’d met a few times.

Odd. I hadn’t requested any software pricing. And I never would have requested anything from this particular company. Their stuff was fantastically expensive and was designed for large library systems with multiple branches.