by B. T. Alive
“Where’s Lee?” I gasped. “Where’s Tina?”
“Calm down,” Glynis snapped, her posh accent harsh around the edges. Her nose was flushing pink, and I wondered if she’d been imbibing other beverages besides the tea. “They’re right in the back—”
I ran off, Glynis chiding after me. The parlor opened into a long dreary dining room, where an old white door opened into a kitchen. There, a single bare bulb cast a paltry light over the dismal tiled floor and walls and glinted off the wide windows and a glass back door. The door hung half open, yawning outward onto the rickety deck, which was poised over the river and the dark angry night. The rush of the river wailed at the door like a feral predator.
Beside the open door, leaning on a linoleum counter, stood Tina.
Between her and me stood a woman. A tall woman. A woman edging her toward the door.
“Tina!” I shrieked.
Tina jumped and cried out, and the woman turned, bewildered.
It was… Frannie?
“Summer?” Frannie said, with that same bemused incredulity that had driven me so nuts when she was my boss. She always seemed to find even my tiniest decisions an endless source of wonder, like some long-suffering scientist who kept exclaiming with surprise that her rats could be that stupid.
On the other hand, to be fair to her, I had just sloshed into this random kitchen soaking wet and hollered someone’s name. She probably didn’t know her cousin was a murderer.
“Hi,” I said. “Where’s Lee?”
“Who’s that?” called Lee’s voice, and she walked into the kitchen from some back room, carrying a dusty bottle of wine. As she came through the door, she held up the bottle toward Frannie and said, with a little smile, “I knew we had it,” and her whole tone and bearing were so absolutely, unquestioningly that of a Normal Mature Hostess that by the time she turned to me and her eyes went wide, I felt like a juvenile wretch. This sad, grieving older lady was trying to recuperate with some other ladies, here in the home that she would have shared with her husband, and I was blundering in here to smash it all.
There had to be a mistake. Somewhere.
“Were you… looking for me?” she finally said.
“Tina, actually,” I heard myself saying. “I tried to text, but the reception in this storm… you know…”
Lee frowned. “Is everything all right?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “It really wasn’t that important. I just have to… tell her something.”
Lee waited.
“Just the two of us,” I said. “Cousin stuff.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re cousins!” Lee said, with sudden warmth and a smile at Frannie. “I keep forgetting. Of course. And then come join us and get dried off. It is a mess outside.”
She shooed Frannie along with her, and they went off chatting to the kitchen door.
“What is it?” Tina whispered, but first I reached behind her and shut that door to the outside chaos.
“Hey!” she said. She opened it back up, with a blast of cold, wet air. “It’s super hot in here. This place is so old it has radiators.”
“Would you just—” I said, reaching to close it again, but she playfully crinkled her nose and held it open. “Tina! Listen!” I hissed, almost in a whisper. “We found the killer!”
“Really? Who?” she said, keeping her voice low. Then she glanced over my shoulder and winced with empathic pain.
“What? What are you getting?” I looked, but the only person standing in the doorway, on the far side of the kitchen, at least twenty feet away, was Frannie. “Frannie?”
“It’s nothing,” Tina said.
But then I remembered. “No, wait, you got a Frannie wince before, too,” I said, fast and low. “In her shop. Just before you got the text about Rhonda’s fake confession.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Tina said, “she’s just still really angry at Dante. This whole night is driving her crazy, everyone reminiscing about him nonstop—”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh crud.”
“I can see it from her point of view,” Tina said. “Lee is her cousin—”
“How did I not see this? Frannie co-signed the mortgage.”
“Really?” Tina said.
“Yes! Remember, she even said it to us, she couldn’t bear Dante having a house ‘paid for by women’. She knew about the dump truck. She’d have walked the property, she could have found the tunnel. She could have done it all.”
“Even cut the vines?” Tina said. “If she was co-signed on the property, why would she do that?”
“Because she was desperate,” she said. “She knew she’d messed up, big time. She’d spent her whole life being the Queen of Frugal, but she’d gotten roped in to trying to support Lee as family. But the more she saw of Dante, the more she knew he’d be a financial train wreck. First to Lee, and then, when he’d drained her dry, Frannie would be stuck paying their mortgage.”
“So she tried to break them up by stealing all the grapes and ruining the wedding,” Tina said. “And then, when Lee still took him back at the funeral…”
I nodded.
Frannie was the killer.
And even as I thought this, Frannie, still standing in the doorway twenty feet away, turned and caught my eye, with a look so stark with suspicion that it chilled me to the bone.
We’d practically been whispering. She couldn’t have heard us.
Could she?
Chapter 37
With an elaborate show of re-entering the kitchen, Frannie leaned in and called, “Anything wrong?”
“Nope! We’re great! Peachy!” I called, as if I had to shout to be heard across this epic kitchen space. “Coming right out!”
Frannie nodded, and she swept out.
“Oh my gosh, I think she heard us,” Tina whispered, with fierce panic.
“You mean you just think?” I whispered back. “Or did you actually feel—”
“I know when to say feel,” she snapped.
“Okay, okay. Then I think we’re fine,” I whispered. “We were talking low, and there’s plenty of noise out there from the living room. If they really just meant this as a tea party, I think we can get out of here alive.”
“Alive?” Tina’s eyes were round as quarters.
“That would be better, yes,” I said. “The bridge is out, so we’re trapped in this storm, but—”
“Trapped? I don’t understand. Why would Frannie want to hurt us?”
“Look, they can’t really hurt us as long as we stay alert. Just two middle-aged killers—”
“Two? Who else?”
Frannie popped her head back in through the doorway, her face crisp with displeasure. “Summer?”
“Right! Coming now!” I nudged Tina, and we started across the room. “We’ll be fine,” I whispered. “How would they actually kill us?”
As we came over, Frannie leaned out of sight, then turned back toward us… holding out to each of us a saucer with a cup of tea.
Tina and I exchanged a look of shared dread.
“Is there a problem?” Frannie said. “It’s decaf.”
“Oh!” I said. “Thank goodness!” I took the cup and saucer, freaking out when it clattered in my hand and the tea splashed over the rim. What if it was acid?
“Of course,” Frannie said. “Caffeine will kill you.”
Tina jumped, very nearly tipping her dark tea all over the pristine carpet.
We managed to follow Frannie into the living room without breaking or spilling anything. We settled into a sofa that was so soft and yielding that I thought it would be comfortable, but within seconds I realized it was sucking me in and hurting my backbone, unwilling to ever let me escape.
In fact, that was pretty much the vibe of this whole event.
In a central overstuffed chair, Lee was holding court, with Frannie perched primly in an upright chair close by. In further swallowing furniture that made a circle around the ample room, the other women seemed equally stranded
and sinking. Glynis was daintily sipping an enormous glass of wine, her lips pursed small but her eyes bleary and greedy. Rhonda was fiddling with the doily on an armrest, centering it, then moving it a titch, then moving it back… apparently big groups tilted her anxiety coping mechanisms from “talk nonstop” to “try to be invisible”.
Honestly, Elaine was the only one who seemed to be having a good time, and she was openly reading something on her phone.
With a sudden stab of panic, I remembered Fiona. Why was it taking her so long? What had I been thinking leaving her out there all alone? Okay, she was a spectacular shifter, but she’d been freaking bleeding—
Just then, I heard a step behind me. I turned with relief to welcome her…
“Cade?” I blurted.
Cade, standing at the entrance from a side hallway, gaped right back. He was still wearing his normal clothes from the day’s work in the orchard, brown corduroys and a loose white peasant-style shirt with embroidery. Seeing him all of a sudden like that, all normal and fine and himself again, made my heart literally ache.
“How did you get here?” I said.
“The… bathroom?” he said, honestly confused. “It’s down the hall.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh, that was me,” Elaine cut in, looking up from her phone with a smile. “I was running late, and Lee texted me that Fiona still hadn’t shown up, and Frannie thought I might swing by the orchard, just to check, and when Fiona wasn’t there—”
“You brought… Cade?” I said. I looked at him in disbelief.
He shrugged with embarrassment.
“I’d hate to say I insisted,” she said, simpering at Cade with a girlish hint at a giggle that was truly disturbing. “But I did think a nice man might be a consolation, at a time like this. For Lee.”
Pretty much everyone else squirmed. Cade awkwardly crossed around to the last empty chair, which was on the far side of the room from me, and I reflected that this “party” probably could not get any weirder or more awkward.
“Summer?” Frannie said. “Would you get down that album on the shelf behind you? The big black one.”
An album? Really? She wanted us all to look at family photos? Okay, I was wrong; this party could get more get awkward. But at least a slog through random photos would beat getting murdered. Probably.
On the other hand, I thought, as I hefted the enormous book onto my lap with one hand while still clutching my possibly lethal tea, maybe this album was a murder weapon. The thing was massive. And also weirdly familiar.
“What’s that?” Elaine said, perking up and casting her phone aside for good.
Lee groaned and tipped up her own large wineglass.
“Now, Lee,” Frannie intoned. “I just think the evening here could use a bit of balance.”
“My God, Frannie! He was murdered,” Lee snapped, her voice jagged.
Oh dear. This clearly wasn’t her first glass of the evening, then, was it?
On the other hand, to be fair to Lee, if this album was what I thought it was…
Frannie ignored her cousin and turned toward Elaine. “I forgot, you weren’t at the, ahem, ‘funeral’. This is the album that his mother-in-law brought. His album. His ‘little’ black book that he shared with his wife.”
“What?” I said. “I thought it had pictures of his wife and kids!” I flipped open the front cover, and there it was, the same family portrait that Noreen had flaunted, with Younger Dante and Noreen Jr. and all his abandoned children.
Beside me on the couch, Tina grimaced.
“Those are the pictures at the front,” Frannie said. “But it’s a binder. He could add new pages as he went along. Newest girls first, older ones to the back.”
“You mean…” I flipped through the first few pages, and after not all that many photos of Noreen Jr. and his kids, I got a full-page glamour shot of Maybe Slightly Younger Dante with his arm snaked around some blonde barista with too much mascara. Another couple flips, and here was Totally Not Even Younger Dante with a gushy-looking redhead in an actual college cheerleading outfit. He would have been, what, thirty-five?
“He kept this at his house?” I said. “With his wife?”
Elaine leaned in over Tina, staring at the photos with her eyes agleam. “Fascinating…” she murmured.
“Keep going,” Frannie said. “How did Noreen put it? He had quite a collection.”
Personally, I’d seen enough evidence of Dante’s game to last me through the next several incarnations. In case that’s a thing. But Tina was locked into the photo of the cheerleader, staring with an intensity that burned me just to see it. She flipped the page, staring at his next victim with equally painful focus. Then she flipped to the next page again. And again. And again. She was finally cauterizing the wound.
Across the room, Frannie nodded with approval. Then she turned to Lee, who was mid-gulp. “I just think you ought to at least look.”
She sounded so caring. I mean, yes, caring and absurdly insensitive, with poor Glynis and Rhonda and the rest of us cringing and bewildered that she was doing this now, but still. It was so hard to keep reminding myself that she hadn’t just disapproved of Dante, she’d smothered him under a ton or so of plant matter.
“Imagine if he’d shown you,” Frannie persisted. “You’d have had to invite them all too.”
“You invited the exes?” I blurted at Lee.
Lee polished off the last of the glass, which had held at least sixteen ounces. She blinked at me, and her eyes were red and bloodshot. She seemed to size me up, running some internal calculus that was clearly getting torqued by the alcohol.
Finally, she said, a little too slow, “I wanted to be sure.”
Glynis snorted. “Fat lot of good that did,” she said, cradling her drink. “Went and popped the question to his real favorite right behind your back.”
Lee’s wineglass trembled in her hand.
“Yes,” she said.
There was an excruciating silence.
Beside me, Tina tensed. She looked up from the album, which she’d plowed through more than halfway, and faced Lee with determination.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
“I have to say this,” Tina said, loud and clear.
“You really don’t,” I said, with an elbow to her side.
But it was already done. Lee peered at her, age line crinkling around her lips as she clamped them flat.
“You,” Lee rasped.
Chapter 38
“Come on, Tina!” I burst out. “Seriously?”
“Oh, wait,” Tina said. She eyed Lee’s hardening mask of rage with a thoughtful air. “You meant her? She’s the other one?”
“The other what?” Lee said, low and ominous.
“You are clearly up way past your bedtime,” I grumbled at Tina.
“You didn’t say anything—”
“I’m going to send you home,” I said.
“I’m going to send you both home,” Frannie snapped. “What are you even talking about? And when are you going to drink your tea?”
“It’s fine,” I snapped.
“It’s cold,” she said. “I brought that tea, and it’s not cheap, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste my hard-earned—”
“Maybe I’m not thirsty!” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re both freaking murderers!” I yelled.
Everyone stared. Especially Cade. Well, maybe I just noticed him more.
“I know this is all part of an awesome plan,” Tina whispered. Then she winced. And then she whispered, “What? Tell me that wasn’t you.”
“What… did you say?” Lee rasped.
“Come on, Lee,” I said. “You snuck out from your precious whist game to strangle Adora in her sleep because you thought she had to be the one. Why, I don’t know—probably she was the most openly besotted at the funeral. But then you weren’t sure… and you wanted to be sure, didn’t you, Lee? And so here we all are.�
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“No,” Lee said, simply.
But Tina looked so horrified that I knew I’d struck home.
Lee saw her expression too, and the rage in her own face boiled over again. “What you said is outrageous,” she said to me, and then, unable to tear her gaze away from Tina, she addressed her openly. “But if you did meet my fiance, in secret and alone, on the night before our wedding, well…” She choked on her wrath and went silent.
Tina flinched, but I said, “Don’t even, Lee. Murder is way worse than chatting up an old flame. And this isn’t even your first time. We know all about… Enkerson.”
Lee frowned, confused. “Who?”
“I mean, Keinherson,” I said, gravely.
Lee blinked.
“Hinnerskin?” I said. “Cankerson? Cankersore?”
“None of those are ringing any bells,” Lee said.
“Yeah, who are you talking about?” Tina said.
“Henriksson,” said a deep, powerful woman’s voice, booming from behind me at the front door as it swung open wide. “Mathilda Henriksson. The woman you tried to strangle for cheating with your first husband.”
Lee screamed.
“What are you dripping all over my foyer?” she screeched. “Is that blood?”
“Fiona!” Cade cried. “What happened?”
I twisted around in my chair so I could see. “You’re not dead!” I said. “Yay!”
Indeed she was not. She stood (dripping) in the wide doorway, the night storm howling outside behind her, strong and tall and fully human, and glowering with vengeance.
True, her jeans and shirt and flannel were a bloody, muddy disaster. But that just helped the effect.
“You killed Adora for nothing, you pathetic scum,” Fiona said. “And, for the record… he proposed to me too.”
“Really?” Tina said. She lit up, sitting up tall like a backpack full of bricks had melted off her shoulders. The album slid away from her, back onto my lap.