by Aimee Hix
“Who’s my pretty girl? Who’s the prettiest girl in prettygirlville, huh? You are. Yes, you are.”
As I rubbed her head, I looked up at Aja, questioning look still on her face. “She’s being trained in Dutch. Genius there thought it was a good idea and I don’t have the energy to argue with him about everything.”
“Dutch?” Aja turned to Ben.
“If she responds to commands in Dutch, her focus can’t be broken by someone who only knows standard English dog commands.”
Aja looked thoughtful. She was probably considering whether getting hooked up with my weird family was in her best interests. “Smart. Have you thought of using multiple languages in case the person knows Dutch?”
Oh, shit.
Ben blinked. “That’s an interesting approach. We’d need languages that were linguistically similar to ensure the trainee wasn’t too confused by sentence structure since she’s unlikely to make heuristic language developments.”
“I’m sure the dog is smart enough—”
“He’s talking about me, Aja,” I said. “And for the record, he’s not correct. I’ve already trained Fargo to understand my own sentence structure. Watch.”
I pulled a treat out of my pocket and showed it to the dog. “Tell me a story, Fargo.”
She instantly laid down on the grass and rolled on to her back. It wasn’t what she was supposed to do, but I wasn’t about to let Ben know that.
“Good girl!” She sat back up and I gave her the treat. I’d figure out way later to make sure she knew what she was really supposed to do.
“What was that?” Ben demanded.
“I asked her to tell me a story and she acted out the Venice Beach League Playoffs 1987 scene.”
“You let the dog watch The Big Lebowski?” He sounded annoyed. “She’s just a puppy.”
I blinked at him and hauled my bag back up onto my shoulder. I turned to look at him as I walked past, heading toward the house. I’d given up hoping he was playing with me when he said stupid crap like that. He might have been a math and science genius, but sometimes he was a dumbass. I shook my head. He was worried about a dog being too young to see a movie.
I chuckled and went into the house.
“Mom? I’m home.”
“In here, sweetie.” I followed her voice into the kitchen. She sat at the table with a black hoodie in her hand re-threading the drawstring.
“If we keep this up, I’m going to have to get more of those nametags.” She smiled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.
“Willa Elaine. Don’t you dare apologize for helping someone. Besides, Aja is lovely.”
Lovely? Okay. She must have turned on the charm because I hadn’t seen anything approaching lovely. I’d gotten full of attitude, annoyed, rude, and scared. Of course, my mother engendered different feelings in people than I did. It’s probably why she had lollipops and I had a gun. Or maybe it’s because she had lollipops and I had a gun. It really was a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Or was that carrot and stick? Damned if I knew.
“I appreciate it either way. She needs to feel safe and I figured there’s no safer place. Plus, the cabinets at her place are full of junk.”
She raised an eyebrow but she kept her lips pressed tightly together, holding in a laugh. Yeah, I got the irony too.
I grabbed a bottle of water and considered how best to dump my annoyance at Seth. I didn’t want to come across as whiny. Not that it would have made a difference. She was my mom, not his. I could whine about him being an inconsiderate, rude, inconsistent, cowardly asshole and she’d tsk my language choices but she’d still be firmly Team Willa.
“Seth took off for … who knows where.” Discretion being the better part of valor, I unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow while avoiding her eyes.
“For work?”
I nodded. “I assume so. He left a recording with the message center. He didn’t even try to call me or text me.”
I wasn’t sure if it was okay to tell my parents about Seth and Michael being adopted. But the Colonel had made it my secret too and I needed advice.
“Seth found out that he and Michael were adopted sometime after Michael died and … .”
She just looked at me trying hard to keep her face neutral. Her attempt to act like she didn’t know told me she’d known.
“How long?” I asked. I wasn’t mad. I wanted to be, but it made sense that the Colonel and Barbara would have told their best friends.
“After Michael’s memorial service.” She looked chagrined. “They were so bereft and it seemed like keeping it a secret any longer was another burden.”
“Did you think about telling me? So I’d understand why … dammit, Mom, this morning I told you I knew something was up with him.”
She thought for a minute. Had it been Dad in front of me, I’d never have known what he was thinking about—box scores, what was on TV, whether he needed to mow the lawn—but my mother was as opaque as the herb tea she liked. It was obvious she hadn’t agreed with keeping it a secret. I decided to let her off the hook.
“It wasn’t your secret to tell.” Relief showed on her face. “Unlike those cookies on the top shelf of the pantry behind the giant box of bulgur wheat.”
Her eyes widened and she looked away. I had to laugh. No poker face at all.
“And the embarrassing part is that Seth had to show me. I’m such a great detective my health nut mother who doesn’t have an ounce of deceit in her body is hiding junk food from me and I missed it.”
She grabbed me in a surprisingly rough hug. Hugging her was usually like hugging a marshmallow, soft and comfortably dry, sweet all around, reminding you of gentler times.
“Mom?”
She sniffled.
“Mom, it’s okay. I’m just teasing you.”
She pulled back and looked in my face. In another surprise, her voice was deep and brusque when she spoke. “I am your mother. I always will be. Never forget that. Promise me, Willa? You’re my daughter just as if I’d known you since before you were born. You have to tell me you always know that.”
Fear pooled in my stomach like a swirl of acid. She was dying. She had cancer or a heart condition and she was going to die and leave me. Tears prickled, a not unusual sensation over the past year, and I didn’t fight them. Get used to discomfort, the therapist had said.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t cry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.” She seemed as stunned by my reaction as I’d been by her words.
“You’re dying.” The words crawled out of my mouth like molasses, thick and dark, chokingly cloying.
Her gentle smile was back. “Not any more than anyone else, Willa.”
Feeling silly, I leaned away from her and swiped my hoodie cuff under my eyes, mopping up the tears.
“Then what the heck, Mom?” If that was what getting used to discomfort was like, then screw that.
She fluttered her hands at the kitchen windows overlooking the front yard where Ben and Aja played with Fargo. “That little girl out there. She’s taking care of herself and … I just … .”
“And Aja reminds you of me when I came to live with you here.”
There it was. Mom hated to say anything bad about Leila. I’m sure she’d read in some step-parenting book that you didn’t criticize the child’s biological parent. But I wasn’t a child anymore. And I knew Leila’s faults.
She looked stricken. “Your mother did her best—”
“Neither of us believe that, Mom. Even Leila doesn’t. I can’t say it’s okay. I can’t even say I’m over it, but she knows. She even can admit that you’ve been a better mother than she ever could.”
“I’d never say that, Willa.”
And she wouldn’t. Not even under threat of torture.
“You don’t have to. I know the t
ruth.”
I gave her a kiss on the cheek and went to my room to change into clean clothes for dinner.
I texted Jan about the situation at Aja’s and the sledge I’d maintained as evidence.
My mother called out from the kitchen as I finished up. “Can you let the kids know it’s time to come in? And they need to wash their hands since they’ve been playing with the dog.”
I just smiled. Aja would get more attention than she knew what to do with. She was going to have an overflowing well of meddling and hovering mothering. She’d just have to adjust like I had.
I opened the front door and stopped for a minute, observing the teenagers. Ben tried to school his face into a stern model of authority and kept failing. Aja and Fargo were having too much fun. That made me happy. She had too big of a burden and not enough happy. I knew being angry at her parents was pointless but, hell, they could have at least gotten her a pet to keep her company if they were determined to be off jet-setting.
Chapter
9
Aja hadn’t even been gone a day and the place looked even lonelier than it had when she was living, existing, inside it. It didn’t help that it was barely dawn and another gray, overcast day had been predicted. I thought it would be a good idea to check Aja’s house to make sure the ex hadn’t come for one of his nighttime visits and left anymore presents.
The perimeter search yielded nothing out of order so I circled the house, eyeing the windows and doors, especially in the back. Nothing.
It began misting so I yanked the keys out and tried to unlock the front door. I met resistance, barely getting the key into the deadbolt. I pulled back and looked at the key ring. The locksmith had labeled them for me so I knew the key was right.
I pulled the key for the handset up and the same thing happened.
I pocketed the ring again and pulled up my flashlight app. Both locks had been jammed.
That sonuvabitch had been here and sabotaged the locks, probably hoping that Aja would be trapped outside. Checkmate, you little asshole. I flipped up the hood of my jacket and went back to check the slider. That was, at least, under a deck, which would keep off the worst of the moisture that seemed to hang in the air, not falling so much as just suspended like film on a window.
I slipped walking down the minor slope that was dug into the backyard property allowing the basement, fully underground in the front, to open onto backyard. Just like our house but worth at least a million dollars more.
I let out a yelp, louder than I would have liked since most of the neighbors were probably still snuggled up in their cozy beds, while I slid my dampening ass down the grass that was unnaturally green after a snowy winter and must have been super expensive fake grass. Rich people.
I was pushing off the ground when I saw a figure dressed much like I was—jeans, flat sneakers, dark hoodie. Unlike me, the figure attempting to slip around the far side of the house away from me was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Super inconspicuous in case anyone comes upon you sneaking around a house in the early morning hours. A mask. Sheesh. Someone watched too many movies.
“Hey!”
Stupidly warning him—and it was definitely a him, the lower body straining against the fabric, showing musculature definition even through denim—I watched as he took off at a sloppy run over the damp ground. I tried to push up off the grass harder and into a run, but I wasn’t having any more luck with my slippery-soled shoes. I made a mental note to get something that had traction and put on speed. He wasn’t even to the front of the house by the time I turned the corner and, like a good PI, calculated his height. Specifically, that he didn’t have much of it and his shorter, heavier legs made him a good deal slower than I was.
He jagged right into the trees, cutting through to the paved path that wound through the development—another nice perk for the upper, upper middle class that lived in the subdivision. His shortcut hadn’t saved him much time because I was still gaining on him and I wasn’t even running full speed, conscious of taking a spill and losing him entirely. Oh, and hurting myself.
On the asphalt, though, I poured on the speed. “Stop!”
I didn’t care about disturbing the inhabitants at that point. We were in a shallow wooded area, the nearest house five hundred yards or more in the distance. He was pumping his arms at a speed that would have been sufficient had his legs been able to keep up.
“Stop! Police!”
Cop instinct, not a year out of uniform, kicked in. I hoped he didn’t ask to see a badge like the windshield repair guy.
I pushed off extra hard with my back foot and launched myself, grabbing him around the waist, and twisted us off the pavement into the mulch. I didn’t want anyone breaking anything when I had falsely, if accidentally, identified myself as police.
Instead of deflating like expected, like any scared, stupid kid would, he kicked back hard and caught me on the jaw. He nailed me in just the right spot and I saw proverbial stars.
I heard him scrambling up and running off while I shook my head like a cartoon and tried to count all my teeth, especially the back ones. When I was finally back in the land of the fully cognizant with a wet ass, ripped jeans, and scuffed Chucks, I listened for the sound of a vehicle. The only thing I heard was a very optimistic mourning dove cooing and the chirp of a text alert. The figure was gone, so I pulled out my phone.
I need you at a scene.
Either Jan’s cold case has just gotten super-hot or she had a second case for me. That made three I was juggling, in case anyone was counting.
The rain began coming down in earnest as I limped back to my truck, my knee competing with my pride to see which smarted more.
The rain was an icy drip-drip-drip on my neck, sliding off the umbrella. Despite the chill, the air was warm enough to melt the snow. The soft mounds covering the bushes were disintegrating quickly and chilled air hung foggy low on the ground in between the trees that ringed a little pond. There were dozens of these neighborhood ponds scattered through the subdivisions all over the county. The crime scene turned out to be in the neighboring subdivision, so I’d arrived in under five minutes.
Anything built during or after the nineties had community spaces like this that the older neighborhoods like mine lacked. There was also less space between the houses in these newer ones too, so I didn’t bemoan missing the fifty gallons of water that collected leaves and a bench pitched at such a steep angle as if it wanted to slip you into the water while you weren’t paying attention. It was just a place for toddlers and dogs to get muddy while their moms chatted.
“I do not miss this,” I said, remembering the last time I’d been at a crime scene in the rain. Just like the uniforms standing watch now, I’d only had my police uniform hat to protect me from the elements. At least that time it had been summer and the rain running down my back hadn’t been cold. Man, that guy had bitched about his ticket from the nice dry car he’d maimed while talking on his cell phone. Another thing I did not miss—entitled middle-aged assholes in their midlife-crisis-mobiles.
I was still having a better day than the uniforms. Or Jan. Or the dead guy they’d found face down in the small pond. I’d been at the scene of another body in a pond no more than a year before. That time I’d been the uniform who’d arrived in response to the 911 call. This time the body had already been whisked from view and was in the unmarked coroner’s van. That time the body hadn’t shown any outward signs of what had happened other than the water. This time Jan had told me that it was obvious the guy had been in a fight, at least. At least was her out in case the cause of death wasn’t beaten to death.
Unlike TV, where autopsies were instantaneous because the coroner had nothing better to do than wait for a well-timed murder, Jan would not be dropping in to get the autopsy results later today.
“Not that I’m not enjoying this frigid walk down Being A Cop Sucks memory lane, Jan, but wh
y am I here?” I asked. The closest uniform, a guy I didn’t know, smirked and then his face settled back down to the barely concealed misery I knew he felt.
Silently, she handed me her phone. A young man stared back at me from a DMV file. Damian Murphy. He was as nondescript as they came—an average teen you would have seen a hundred of wandering around the halls of the high school. Unless you knew him, loved him. Like Aja might have once. It couldn’t be a coincidence that a kid named Damian about the right age was found dead near her house.
“Never seen him before. Not that I remember anyway.” I wasn’t lying. I hadn’t seen him before.
I shrugged and tried to hand the phone back, but Jan shook her head. I flipped to the next photo.
The picture displaying on the screen was of my business card.
“My business card was at the scene? Okay, that’s unusual but—”
“Flip to the next shot.”
I scrolled to the next picture on her camera and saw my handwritten cell phone number and the words any time, day or night.
“Willa?”
Fine. I was here to answer questions so I’d answer questions. “I gave this card to a young woman I met at one of the self-defense classes I attend.”
“I’m assuming you generally don’t give out your cell number,” she said. “The card was in the vic’s back pocket. Do you have any idea how my victim had the specific business card you gave this young woman?”
I curled my toes inside my boots. I counted to ten.
“Her ex-boyfriend has been bothering her. There’s been some vandalism. Someone’s been getting into her house.”
I’d let Jan draw her own conclusions, but even an idiot could add two plus two. Either way, Aja’s stalker was likely in a body bag.
“The boyfriend’s name?”