by Karen Singer
As the two of them were leaving the room, Jenni noticed her Uncle Greg at the far side of the row of rooms. She also noticed the nasty gesture he made toward them.
“Greg!” Sally complained. “What the hell has gotten into you? Jenni didn’t kill him! Be nice.”
“Like hell!” Greg called back. “I’ve got no reason to be nice to either of you.”
“You were nice to me when we first arrived.”
“That was before I found out about…that thing!” he said as he pointed angrily at Jenni.
“I didn’t do it!” Jenni complained again.
“Not that…although that’s certainly got a lot to do with it too. I’m mad…no…we’re all mad as hell about the operations.”
“What operations?” both Jenni and Sally asked at the same time.
“The ones to turn…Kyle there, into a woman.”
“I haven’t had any operations!” Jenni replied.
“Sure you haven’t. And the proof is right there in front of me. Mom paid for your dumb perverted operations, but she wouldn’t lend any of the rest of us a dime. Go to hell! Both of you!”
Both Jenni and Sally were dumbfounded. “What money for operations?” Sally asked.
“Hell if I know,” Jenni replied, but her thoughts turned back to Detective Pierce asking almost the same question.
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Jenni sat trying to write up a report that listed everything she personally could remember about each member of her family. It was difficult because she’d had almost no contact at all with any of them since she had left home two years ago.
As far as she could remember, her Uncle Greg and Aunt Lili had been hurting for money, mostly because they tried to help Chris and Emily out. Her uncle did construction work and her aunt worked as a librarian at one of the universities in Jacksonville. Their oldest son, Chris, and his wife Emily, had two kids, but the youngest one, four-year-old Kaitlyn, had a heart problem. Jenni had thought that was fixed when she was a baby. Did Kaitlyn still have medical problems? Jenni didn’t know.
Her Uncle Greg’s second son, Ryan, and his wife Jillian, had an adorable little girl named Hailey who had to be two-years-old now. From the impression Jenni had always gotten about them, Ryan and Emily seemed to be happy and were doing just fine together.
The only other kid that her Uncle Greg and Aunt Lili had was Ashley, who Jenni figured must have just finished High School. If Ashley had finished High School, Jenni wondered what she was going to be doing in the future? She didn’t put it in her notes, but she was betting on at least a local college if not something better.
Jenni mostly bypassed her Aunt Sally, only because Jenni knew there was no way her Aunt could have done it. All she put in her notes was that her Aunt Sally was her grandmother and grandfather’s second child.
Jimmy, Grandma’s third kid, worked for the Jacksonville City Utility department. Jenni thought she remembered something about him mostly working on the water system, but she wasn’t sure. His wife, Madison, worked for a company that repaired ships at the Jacksonville port.
Logan was Jimmy and Madison’s oldest son. Jenni knew that he taught intermediate school math in Jacksonville, which was where he met his wife Kaylee. The two of them also had an adorable two-year-old daughter named Arianna. Jenni was betting that Arianna and Hailey were often put together since they were the same age.
And then Jenni got to her mother and father. Her father, Andy, was her grandmother’s fourth and youngest child. If there was anyone in the family that Jenni wanted to be guilty of the murder, it was her father…or her mother.
Her mother and father, and of course her brother Brian, all lived in Bradenton, Florida, on the other side of the state from Jacksonville. She lived with her Aunt Sally now, close to the middle of the state. Not nearly far enough away from her family. At least none of the others lived in Gainesville too.
She knew her father worked as a plumber. Most of her memories of what he did for a living though revolved around him going from one plumbing company to another. It was never said out loud, but she knew he got fired a few times for being drunk on the job. Her mother worked as a hotel desk clerk. Jenni remembered she seemed to go from job to job too, or rather, from hotel to hotel, because she always did the same kind of work. She also knew that money in their family had always been very tight. And things got far worse the year before she left home when a hurricane blew the roof off their house and the insurance company would only cover a small part of it. Jenni remembered the yelling and complaining both her mother and father had done when Grandma had refused to help with the cost of that.
As to her brother, Brian, the last she had heard, he was in school at the University of South Florida down in Sarasota. She didn’t know anything else about him. The two had never been even remotely close growing up.
Jenni looked over the notes she had made so far about the members of her family. Her notes were awfully sparse. She felt bad that she didn’t know hardly anything at all about most of her own family. Then again, from the way they all treated her, she’d just as soon know nothing at all about any of them.
Looking through her family notes, she realized that none of them could have done it. But at the same time, all of them could have. So which ones had the biggest motive? Was it just her own biased desire or was there more to it than that, but her top choice was her own father. Her mother was number two. After that, maybe Uncle Greg or possibly even her cousin Chris, only because they wanted Grandma to help with the doctor bills for Kaitlyn.
She thought about all that and scratched all those names off her mental list. None of them made sense! Instead, her thoughts turned directly toward her grandfather. When she had been searching for social media sites earlier, she had found none for him at all. Grandma had one on Facebook, but that’s all she had found for either of them. But that had been no surprise since from previous experience she knew that most older men didn’t bother with social media. The women were usually a different matter. Women seemed to love it.
So why had Grandpa been murdered? That seemed to be the most important question, because if she could figure out why, then maybe she could figure out who did it.
The last time she had seen her grandfather alive, had been when they had argued in the restaurant. That was bad! And now look at the hot water she was in. Before that, the one biggest time she remembered seeing him was when he had kissed that girl who had worked for the hotel that night. That had been something of a shock for her to see. So…was it possible that his murder had more to do with that than anything else?
Aunt Sally had called him a letch. Her aunt had also talked about her grandmother wanting to divorce him. Suddenly, Jenni felt like she was more on the right path. Had her grandfather continued to play around with other women? Maybe even after Grandma had won the lottery and he stopped working and travelling around? It sounded like a very important question to Jenni. She just had to figure out now how to get the answer.
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Detective Pierce was at the bar on the beach, interviewing the few remaining Finch family members he hadn’t yet spoken to, when his phone dinged signaling a message had come in for him. He opened the message and read through the results from the guys in the crime lab, what little there was. The only thing they had was the knife Larry Finch had been stabbed with, and nothing else. The biggest thing in the lab results was that they had found no prints at all on the knife. None! This was Florida. And southern Florida at that. How did you take a knife like that and shove it into someone’s back without leaving any fingerprints? It wasn’t like Michigan where people probably wore gloves all year round.
Pierce had been depending on the lab guys finding fingerprints on that knife. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t pushed everyone that hard in his preliminary interviews. Even having fingerprints with no matches in the system would have been a huge help. So why didn’t the knife have any prints? That fact alone spelled premeditated, as if he
hadn’t already suspected that.
There was an attachment in the message as well. Pierce opened it and found a close-up picture of the knife. All he had seen of it before was the handle when he had briefly examined the body. The rest of it had been buried into Larry Finch’s back. He noted the wooden handle and the wide heavy look to the sharp blade. He was going to have to check with the hotel restaurant to see if it matched any of their knives. If not, then someone had brought the thing from home.
There were no autopsy results yet, but Pierce knew they were hardly necessary. Larry Finch had been murdered by someone stabbing him in the back with a knife. And if he didn’t figure out pretty quick who did it, then this case was going to get a whole lot harder, because on Saturday, he was going to have to let everyone in the family get off of the island and let them go home. They would be scattered all over Florida, and none of them would be even remotely close to Miami. It would take him nearly a full day to reach any of them.
He put his phone away and went back to his interview with Ryan Finch. He had only been going through the motions with his interviews before. But now with no fingerprints, he could no longer do that. But even from the start, he didn’t get the feeling that Ryan was to blame. “Let’s end this for now,” he said to Ryan. “I’ll have more questions for you later. I need to check on something else.” He watched as Ryan gratefully left and went back to his family on the beach. He would have to dig harder into him too, but right now, his attention was focused entirely on the knife.
He left the bar and headed for the hotel lobby. It took him ten minutes to find the hotel’s manager. “I need your help with the restaurant staff,” Pierce said to him.
“The restaurant staff? Why?”
“Just help me out with them. I have questions I need answered.”
The manager got the impression that Pierce was angry about something. “Right this way,” he said as he led the detective toward the restaurant. His staff! Surely the detective didn’t think any of his employees had killed Mr. Finch!
With the manager standing next to him. Pierce first questioned one of the waitresses. He pulled up a picture of the knife on his phone. “Does this look like anything you have here in the restaurant?” he asked.
The waitress looked at the picture. “Sure. It looks like one of our dinner knives.”
“Dinner knives?”
“Yeah. That’s the knives we put out for all our meals.”
“All of your meals? Not just for steak or something like that?”
The waitress shook her head. “No. There’s no use having a different knife for that when most people would rather have the better knives.”
“Can I see one?” Pierce asked.
The waitress led the way to the back where there was a container filled with them. Pierce pulled one out and examined it. Hefty. Heavy and sharp. It appeared to match his picture perfectly. The sharp blade and the heavy weight of it would make it much easier to bury the entire thing into someone’s back, just as had been done to Larry Finch. But it would have still taken some effort to shove the entire blade in that far. So, was he looking for a man, or a woman? A man would more likely have the strength to do it…unless it had been an angry woman instead. Anger could count for a lot. But his guess was that he was looking for a man.
Chapter 8
Should she wear a dress, or just stay in the same clothes she had worn all day? That was Jenni’s big question of the moment. Her Aunt Sally was expecting her to turn up at dinner, despite the fact that neither of them wanted to be anywhere near the rest of the family anymore. Jenni had argued that perhaps ordering room service for the two of them together might be the better option. Her Aunt Sally had almost gone along with the idea, but instead she decided that she was tired of sitting in her room with nothing to do. She needed to get out. Even if it was around the rest of the family. So now Jenni had to figure out what to wear for dinner. Perhaps a suit of armor? Something to repel the slings and arrows that the rest of the family continually sent her way.
In the end, Jenni picked up the hotel phone and dialed her Aunt’s room. “What are you wearing?” she asked as soon as her Aunt had answered.
“You mean for dinner, or right now?” Sally asked.
“For dinner, of course.”
“I hadn’t thought about it yet. It’s only…” Sally checked the time “…six o’clock.”
“Well I’ve got to know in case I need to change,” Jenni told her.
“I don’t know yet,” Sally replied. “I wasn’t planning on getting all dressed up. I’m not wearing the dress I brought for Grandma’s birthday dinner on Friday.”
“No. I mean, are you going to wear something decent, or just stay in the clothes you had on earlier.”
“What I have on isn’t decent?”
“Sorry Aunt Sally. I just don’t know if I should change or not.”
Sally laughed. “I know Jenni. If it helps, I’m probably going to change, but it will still be something casual. Okay? Does that tell you enough?”
“Yeah. Thanks Aunt Sally. I’ll change then.”
“You’ve still got an hour dear.”
“You know it takes me longer to get ready than you do.”
Sally knew that. She didn’t know exactly why, other than the fact that Jenni always wore more makeup than she did. Actually, a lot more makeup. As to the rest, Sally could only surmise that it had to do with whatever Jenni did to make herself look so…feminine.
Jenni hung up the phone and turned to her closet. What should she wear? She didn’t want to leave her room at all. She didn’t want to go to dinner with the rest of the family at all. The last time she had been there for dinner, she had argued with her grandfather, and now look where that had gotten her. Grandpa was dead, and she knew everyone else in the family blamed her for it. Well, maybe not everyone else. She was sure her Aunt Sally didn’t blame her. Or did she? Jenni hoped not. Of course, there would be one other person in the family that didn’t blame her too – the person who had actually killed him. But more than likely, like everyone else, that person was trying to place the blame right on her as well.
So now she had to face dinner with the family again. She’d rather barf. What should she wear? Casual…but nice. She finally chose an old split skirt she had brought with her and a nice top she usually wore with it. Then she started undressing.
She removed the long loose shorts she had worn for much of the trip so far, and she pulled off the bright colorful t-shirt she had worn on top today. The special spandex panties with the hip and butt pads she left on. She also left on her bra that held her breast forms in place. Those breast forms could be glued to her chest if she wanted, but she hadn’t bothered to do that in months now. The bra holding them up was plenty good. The only other thing she was wearing she left on too, the tight waist cincher that held her already skinny waist in even more. Like the spandex panty that held her hip and butt pads, it was specially made to give her body a much more feminine shape. She had two of the waist cinchers, and two of the panties with the hip and butt pads. Like her bra with the breast forms, she never got dressed without them.
Undressed that far, she went to the sink and started washing off all her makeup. She wore a lot of makeup. She had been blessed with a face that with a little makeup, she could easily make it look more feminine, but with practice, and more makeup than she used to use, she had perfected the art of making herself look even better. And she had different makeup routines now for day and night, and for different occasions. Now it was time to redo it all for a nice evening out to dinner…although there was nothing that she was considering to be nice about this upcoming dinner…yet.
With her makeup gone and her face scrubbed clean, including using a skin defoliant to clean and open up her pores, she pulled out her razor and shaved her face. She desperately wanted to get her beard removed. Just like she desperately wanted to start working with a gender doctor. Just like she desperately wanted to start on hormones. Just like she desp
erately wanted her final confirmation surgery when it was all over with. But so far, the only thing she had accomplished on that long tedious list was…nothing. Ugh!
With her face shaved, she sat around waiting for another fifteen minutes for her skin to recover before she began the process of applying her makeup. Lots of makeup, including several different base colors. As long and arduous as the process was, it was also an art that Jenni enjoyed. There were so many different products available and so many different things she could do with each one to add or change her face subtly, or drastically. It had been six o’clock when she had started. By the time she finished getting dressed and quickly brushed her hair, it was nearly seven. It was a good thing she didn’t have to redo her nails.
Instead of meeting Aunt Sally in front of the restaurant, Jenni found her waiting for her at the convergence of all the paths.
Sally shook her head at the sight of her niece. “How the hell Jenni, do you manage to look so darn cute?”
Jenni laughed. “Work, Aunt Sally,” she answered as she hugged her aunt. “I work at it.”
“Maybe you should give some lessons to me,” Sally replied. “Ready for dinner?”
“No. I still think room service would be a better idea.”
“I know you’re right,” Sally replied, “but I refuse to be forced to sit alone in my room all the time. It was so bad today that I never even went to the beach.”
“I’m sorry Aunt Sally. I really shouldn’t have come.”
“And neither should I, but there was no way anyone could have foreseen what would happen to Grandpa.”
“Somebody did,” Jenni replied. “Somebody planned on killing him all along.”
Sally looked at Jenni skeptically. “Let’s go eat.”
They weren’t the last ones to arrive in the restaurant. In fact, they noticed several other family members on the path behind them as they headed towards dinner. But once inside, the looks they both got from the people already there were bad enough so that neither of them even bothered to try and sit with anyone else. They continued through the restaurant until they reached an unoccupied table. The waitress brought them menus and took their drink orders right away.