Too Big to Die

by Sue Ann Jaffarian

  The same small smile I’d seen on Holly’s face before made an appearance. “I’ll drive.” She pulled car keys from her jeans pocket and started for the door.

  “Hold your horses,” I said, amused at her eagerness. “It’s too late today. The office is either closed or will be by the time we get there.”

  If Greg and I had a daughter, she’d be like this—smart and creative like him, nosy and impulsive like me.

  Instead of tracking down Donna, I instructed Holly to pop the casserole dish into the oven. She’d just done that when Wainwright got to his feet and headed for the back door, his tail wagging with excitement. “Greg’s home,” I said.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Holly said, looking out the back slider.

  “Give it a second,” I said with a smile. Sure enough, seconds later we heard the garage door open and Greg’s van come up the alley. We couldn’t see it because of the wall that separated our property from the car port and alley, but we could hear it as it slowed and made the turn into the garage.

  twenty-three

  “So you’re Holly West,” Greg said, holding out his right hand to our guest. His face was a blank, except for curiosity. She nodded and took his hand. As soon as he had come into the house, Greg planted a big kiss on me and greeted the animals. Holly had hung back, watching our nightly ritual. Finally, I’d urged her forward and introduced them.

  “Sweetheart,” Greg said, turning to me, still holding on to Holly’s hand, “never in a million years would I have guessed that this was our mystery dinner guest.” He gave her hand a little squeeze, then let it go, his face still noncommittal. On his lap was a six-pack of his favorite beer. “I was so sure it was Dev, I even bought more beer on the way home.” He rolled over to the fridge and put the beer in. Before he closed the door, he asked Holly, “I’m going to have a beer; would you like one?”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything. He turned to me, but I declined. A pain pill was in my future, and I didn’t need alcohol on top of it. Greg pulled two out and handed one to Holly. “I think we have a lot of talking to do tonight,” he said.

  “Honey,” I said to Greg, “dinner won’t be for about another thirty or forty minutes. Why don’t you clean up first?”

  He put one of the beers back. “You’re right, Odelia. I’m just so anxious to talk to our guest.”

  Less than ten minutes later Greg was back in the dining area, washed up and wearing a clean T-shirt. Holly and I were both seated at the table. “So, girls,” he said as he retrieved his beer from the fridge. “Fill me in.”

  By the time the casserole was heated through, we’d filled Greg in on everything we’d talked about at the beach and on the way home, and the fact that Holly had seen Donna with Burt and Burt with Marla.

  “So there might be a link between Burt’s murder and the Kingstons,” Greg said. I knew he was eager to pin something on Kelton Kingston since we couldn’t go public with the settlement with Jordon West. “We need to talk to Donna—see what she knows.”

  “I was thinking of doing that tomorrow,” I told him.

  Greg wasn’t sure of that plan. “Are you sure you’re up for that, Odelia?” he asked. “It seems just the walk to the beach did you in today.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, getting up to check on the casserole.

  “Let me get that,” Holly said. She got up from the table. Grabbing a couple of potholders from the counter, she pulled the dish out of the oven. I exchanged a glance with Greg while her head was down. He raised his brows at me, as impressed by her as I was. Holly also threw together a small salad to go with dinner and set the table, which made me want to adopt her.

  “This is great,” Holly said after a couple bites of Zee’s dish. We had decided to eat at the picnic table on our patio since it had turned out to be such a nice evening, and we didn’t want to disturb the sticky notes. Holly and I took seats opposite each other while Greg positioned his wheelchair at the end between us.

  “It’s Zee’s signature dish,” Greg said. “She’s a wonderful cook.”

  “I have a couple of food vlogs as clients,” Holly told us. “But I’m not much of a cook. I’m not a bad cook, just not fancy.”

  “That’s kind of like me,” I said. “Greg and I mostly grill, but I can throw together a mean pot roast or beef stew.”

  “Odelia’s mother is the baker in the family,” Greg said. “Her banana bread is magical. Not dense like most of them.”

  “Speaking of my mom,” I said, “she’s a big fan of yours, Holly.”

  Holly looked skeptical. “Your mother watches my vlog?”

  I nodded and swallowed the bite I’d just taken. “She subscribes to it. She’s the one who told us about the dog rescue being online and the one who caught that you had posted something about Burt’s murder.”

  Greg chuckled. “Grace is a real piece of work. She’s in her seventies but keeps up on all the trendy techie stuff. She even has her own blog, but she hasn’t gone to videos yet.” He took a swig of beer. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s next.”

  Holly put down her fork and looked at us, her brows knitted. “Are you talking about Grace Littlejohn? The blogger on An Old Broad’s Perspective?”

  I nearly groaned. It never failed to surprise me how wide Mom’s blog readership was. Next to me Greg was laughing. “That’s our Grace,” he said. He flashed me a wide grin.

  “I know her!” Holly said with excitement. “Not personally, but we’ve exchanged emails. She wrote me about my blog and told me about hers. I looked it up and found it fascinating. She talks about everything on her blog, even though a lot of it seems too fantastic to be real.”

  Another look flashed between Greg and me, but this time he wasn’t amused. Holly caught that one.

  “Is it all fiction,” Holly asked, “or just the nutty parts, like the time she wrote about being shoved out a bathroom window while a gunman was after her?”

  “The thing about my mother’s blog,” I said after taking a deep breath, “is that the nutty stuff is true. Maybe a bit embellished, but true.”

  “And Grace was pushed out of bathroom windows twice while running for her life, not once,” Greg added.

  “No, honey, you’re wrong,” I said. “The first time I pulled her through the window. The second time I pushed her.”

  For the first time since I’d met her, Holly was laughing. “I’d love to meet her.”

  “Right now she’s on a trip with a bunch of senior friends,” I said. “But she’ll be home this weekend. I’m sure she’ll be excited to meet you too.”

  Finished with dinner, we relaxed on the patio. I had a bowl of washed strawberries in the fridge and brought them out for a light dessert. Wainwright was curled up on the grass. Muffin was in Holly’s lap.

  “Thanks for dinner,” she said.

  “It comes with a price,” Greg told her, leaning forward. “We’ve talked about everything but the elephant in the room. You said your mother was sure I wasn’t your father. Did she ever tell you who is?”

  Holly lowered her head until it almost touched Muffin’s. When she raised it, she said, “Yes, at the end she told me everything. It was her deathbed confession.”

  “And?” Greg pressed.

  I put a hand on his shoulder, warning him not to be too aggressive. I was pretty sure what Holly was reluctant to say.

  She still didn’t raise her head, and the silence grew awkward. I gave her a little push, keeping my voice low, as if my normal one might be too harsh. “Your father is Kelton Kingston, isn’t he?”

  “What?” asked Greg, turning to me in surprise.

  Still with her head down, Holly nodded. Slowly she raised her eyes to mine. “How did you know? Was it something you discovered in your research on me?”

  “No, just piecing together a few things,” I told her. I pointed toward the b
ack door to our house with my one working arm. “Not everything I know is stuck to that table in there.” I lowered my arm and used it to pick up a glass of iced tea. I took a quick drink. “I can’t see any reason for you to be following Marla Kingston unless it was something personal, and you started it about the same time you started following Greg—about the time your mother took sick. She told you then about Greg and how he wasn’t your father. So I’m taking a guess that she told you Kingston was.”

  Greg was clearly lost. “But Jane wasn’t seeing anyone during that time except for me on occasion. She was working that intern job. She didn’t have time for a steady boyfriend.”

  “You don’t know that for sure, Greg,” I said to him. “She could have been seeing someone she worked with. Didn’t you say she dropped the intern job unexpectedly and took the job in the assisted living place where Jordon West lives?”

  “Yes,” he said. Greg leaned back in his wheelchair and I could see the gears grinding, connecting the same dots I had. “But why that place?” he finally asked. “The only explanation was that she must have known about Kingston’s connection to West—about what he did.”

  “I don’t know anything about Jordon West,” Holly said, her attention totally on us, “or about any job in an assisted living place. She just said West was some nice guy whose name she put on my birth certificate to keep my real father away from me. She told me that she got pregnant by a married man she worked with and he wasn’t a very nice person. Kingston certainly fits that bill.” She paused.

  I glanced at Greg. “See? It was someone she met at work.”

  Holly was fighting tears. “After she got sick, she finally told me my father was Kelton Kingston, but she said I must never contact him because he didn’t know I existed.” A tear ran down one of her cheeks. Greg handed her a napkin. “Mom said he paid her off. He gave her a huge amount of money to have an abortion and disappear.” Her voice warbled from emotion. “She said while she worked at this company, she found out something very bad about him, something he’d done to another kid, so she knew he might try to hurt me, whether I was his or not.”

  “That’s why she left his company,” Greg put together, “and why she probably took that job where she could meet Jordon West. She wanted to see if it was true.”

  “I don’t understand,” Holly said, her tears under control, “what Jordon West has to do with this.”

  Greg and I exchanged glances. He nodded at me, letting me know the decision was mine on what to tell Holly. “Jordon West,” I began, “was the kid Kingston hurt. It was a car accident that Kingston caused, but he paid Jordon and his family off for Jordon shouldering the blame. Jordon West is a severe quadriplegic because of that accident. He can’t even speak. He and your mother became friends when she worked there. She even visited him for several years after you were born. Obviously, I don’t know why your mother decided to meet him in the first place, but I’m guessing that she wanted to see if whatever she’d learned about Kingston was true. Once she did, she put distance between herself and Kingston and you.”

  “Kind of a sweet twist,” Greg said, “that Jane named Jordon as Holly’s father, since Kingston took away all hope of Jordon ever having a family or normal life.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Now that everything is falling into place, it makes sense why his name is on Holly’s birth certificate. I’ll bet Kingston doesn’t even know about that.”

  Holly listened, her mouth hanging open as she tried to piece together what she knew with our theory.

  “But why were you following Marla Kingston?” I asked. “I understand your curiosity about Kingston, but why Marla? She and Kingston didn’t even know each other when you were born. He was married to someone else.”

  She shrugged. “Once I found out that Kingston was my father, I looked up everything I could about him. He really is nasty, and I could see why my mother wanted me to stay away from him. I followed him once in a while, but he’s difficult to video. He always has lots of people around him. So I started following Marla, more out of curiosity.” She stopped talking and looked sad again. “She’s pretty miserable and unhappy, in spite of all that money. Then she started seeing that Burt guy, but, like I told Odelia, I don’t think they were lovers, but something was going on.”

  “How did your mother support the two of you?” I asked as another thought came to me. “Did she have a job?”

  “She worked off and on, mostly for nonprofits,” Holly told us. “She also had a trust. It was the money left her by her adoptive parents when they died. She came into that money after she turned twenty-one. She was very good at investing, which was how she spent most of her time. We lived off the interest. Not extravagantly, but comfortably.” Her mouth turned down. “It’s all mine now, but I’d rather have her back.”

  Greg reached over and took her hand. “I remember her talking about the trust. But I also recall her saying it wouldn’t support her much beyond college. Are you sure, you lived off that trust?”

  “I can’t imagine how else we lived,” Holly said, her words coming out slow. “She was very good at investing.”

  It was a very sad and now-familiar story: a bad situation with money thrown at it to go away. “I know you’re hurting, Holly,” I said to her, “but I need to know something. Do you get monthly checks from that trust?”

  She shook her head. “No. Mom said that when I was born, she set up a new trust for us and funded it with the other trust’s money. As we needed it, she withdrew money out of a checking account attached to the main investment account. Both of our names were on it. When she passed, I contacted a law firm to handle the probate for me and make sure everything with the investment companies got changed over to my name only.”

  I covered part of my face with my right hand. “What’s the name of the law firm?” The question nearly came out as a groan.

  “Gower, Werk and Reynolds,” she answered. “Mom used them for years, so I went there. Was that okay?”

  I breathed easy, happy with her response. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do,” I told her, giving her an encouraging smile.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Holly said. She went back to stroking Muffin. “I was wondering if I should go back to the firm that drew up the original trust. It was a firm called Templin and something, but I knew Mom liked this other firm and had used them for years, so I went there.”

  Under the table, Greg gently pounded my knee with his fist. I would have kicked him hard in return, but it would have been useless.

  We started cleaning up dinner. Greg and Holly told me to relax and they would take care of everything. They shuttled our dirty dishes into the house, and Greg put them into the dishwasher. I followed them in and sat at the dining table, considering the sticky notes. If I hadn’t been hurting, I would have been eating up this lazy lifestyle.

  I could tell that Greg was itching to tell Holly everything but was restraining himself. Instead, he rolled over to the table and looked at the columns. “Well, now we know who Holly West is.” He grabbed a note, wrote Kingston on it, and stuck it under her column while she looked on. “I think the only mystery left on the table is who killed Burt Sandoval and why.”

  “But we’ll question that Donna person tomorrow, right?” Holly asked.

  “We?” Greg asked.

  “Well, I know you have to go to work, Greg,” she said, “but I can go with Odelia. She shouldn’t be driving in her condition.”

  “You’re right about that,” Greg said.

  “I’m right here,” I protested. “And I’m not disabled. I can drive.”

  Greg fixed me with a stare that said no way. “You can hardly move, Odelia. You can talk to Donna next week, when you feel better.”

  “But you know the sooner I do it, the more likely she’ll be to spill her guts,” I protested. “We need to strike while she’s grieving—or before she takes off, if she’s s
cared.”

  “See,” Holly argued, “you need me. If Grace were here, you’d let her tag along, wouldn’t you? And she’s old.”

  In spite of himself, Greg broke out into a big belly laugh. “Don’t let Grace hear you say that.”

  I wasn’t sold on this idea, and Holly’s logic wasn’t helping. “My mother tags along because she’s a pill. She’s like a sticky booger you can’t shake off your finger.” Both of them were laughing now.

  “The last time Odelia went to question someone,” Greg said, “she was pushed down some stairs. That was just yesterday. You ready for that kind of reception?” he asked Holly.

  Holly snapped her head in my direction. “You told me you fell.”

  “I did fall,” I told her, “after I was pushed.”

  “If you don’t take Holly with you,” Greg said to me, “then ask Zee.”

  “No,” Holly begged, “take me. I’m the one who told you about Donna in the first place.”

  I hung my head in defeat. I was hurting and overruled. “Okay. Okay,” I said, caving. “But we’re getting an early start.”

  Greg turned to Holly, his face lit like a bulb. “How about you stay here tonight?” he asked her. “We have a guest room, and I’m sure we can find you something to wear to bed and a toothbrush.” He looked at me. “Don’t we have a couple of new toothbrushes in the guest bathroom, sweetheart?”

  I nodded. I felt run over by them and by my body aches. I just wanted to go to bed.

  “No need,” Holly said, excited about the sleepover idea. She went into the living room and grabbed her messenger bag. “I have my go bag.”

  “Go bag,” I echoed. “What are you, some sort of spy? Do you have multiple passports in there too?”

  “No,” she insisted with a laugh. “It’s just that sometimes when I’m following a video story, I end up far from home and have to crash somewhere for the night. But if you need multiple passports, I know a guy.” She shot me a big grin that made me wonder if Jane was wrong about Greg not being Holly’s father.