Why was this happening to me?
Proof?
What proof?
Was my mother nuts? Completely insane? Off her Valium? (Not that she took it regularly—she preferred to reserve it for special occasions—but I was beginning to think it might be a good idea.)
My brain went fuzzy, rather like the TV screen once did right after they played the National Anthem in the wee hours of the morning.
“Andy? You there? Hello? Did I lose you? I’m heading over to Cissy’s now to do a little Q and A. Maybe you could join us,” I heard Janet saying in my ear, sounding so far away.
I threw back my head, letting out a strangled, “Aaaarrrgh.”
Which Brian heard and threw the coupe in Park, hopping out and racing to the passenger side of the Acura.
“Babe, I think it’s time to go,” he said, and put a hand on my head and another on my shoulder to guide me into the seat—like the police did with suspects—then he took the phone from my hands, telling Janet good-bye before hanging up, dropping the cell in my lap, and shutting me in.
I made no noise of protest, not even a whimper.
I was as close to open-mouthed shock as I could get.
Before I could answer, my cell rang again. It was doubtless Janet, calling me back, determined to get the scoop.
Brian gave me a look that said, “Don’t do it,” but I retrieved the phone from between my thighs and answered anyway, while he put the car in gear and started to drive.
But it wasn’t Lois Lane with her nose for news.
It was Cissy.
I felt my blood pressure rise even before I heard the cultured twang of her familiar drawl.
“My word, Andrea!” the Mother of all Mothers started in. “Where in the world have you been? I’ve left you innumerable messages, yet you neverreturned a single one.”
Which explained the high count on my voice mail.
She and Janet probably accounted for all twenty-one.
“I was incommunicado,” I said, and my eye twitched. “Which is more than I can say for you, Ms. Press Conference Buttinski. Janet Graham’s already called to fill me in on your latest stunt—”
“My latest stunt?” Cissy sputtered. “You mean the press conference at the police station, don’t you?”
Duh.
I got out a strangled, “Uh-huh.”
“I’m not sure what information Janet chose to impart to you, but I was merely acting on behalf of a friend,” Cissy defended. “Debbie Santos needed someone she trusted to stand up for Miranda, and I agreed. How was I to know that Anna Dean would be speaking to the media just as I showed up at the station with Debbie’s attorney? It was pure coincidence—”
“But you’re making everything worse,” I interrupted. “You’re bringing in a forensic pathologist to do an independent autopsy, and you’ve threatened to hire a P.I. to do his own investigation, then you out and out lied about my having some sort of proof that Miranda didn’t kill herself. My God, Mother! What’re you trying to do?” My voice rose to a pitch I’m not sure I’d ever reached before, even when I was eleven and sang soprano in the church choir. “You want to get me arrested for withholding evidence? Can’t you just leave things alone, just for once in your life? Why don’t you let the police do their thing and just watch from the sidelines, like normal people do?”
As if the conversation wasn’t stressful enough, Brian hit the brakes hard, stopping the car abruptly as an intersection with a red light loomed ahead. He threw his arm across my chest, like that would’ve kept me from going through the windshield if that’s where I’d been headed.
“Hey!” I yelped. I wagered he’d been paying more attention to my end of the conversation than to the road.
He mumbled, “Sorry.”
I brushed his arm away, leaning my brow against the window and closing my eyes, wanting to restore my equilibrium.
I’d hoped that while I was at the cinema watching Harry Potter magically turn the bad guys into snakes, any potential hype or sordid sensationalism surrounding Miranda’s untimely death would evaporate, and the poor woman could have a little peace and quiet in the Afterlife.
Was that selfish of me? Was my mother doing what was right by throwing herself in the middle of things, while I just wanted to be left alone?
“Andrea? Andrea, are you there?”
I pushed the cell up to my ear. “Yes”—unfortunately—“I’m still here.”
She launched right into her saint routine: “If I’m making things worse by keeping a promise to a lifelong friend, well, then forgive me. And I didn’t exactly lie about what you knew. You told me this morning that Miranda didn’t have her gun with her when you brought her home last night. So how could she have used it to shoot herself? If that’s not evidence, I don’t know what is.”
“Maybe she had another gun,” I suggested, bumping my head against the window as the Acura took a curve a little too fast.
“No, she didn’t,” Mother insisted. “Debbie Santos said that Miranda bought the .22 last spring when she got some unsettling e-mails from a fan, even though her stepfather urged her to get something larger. But Miranda wanted a gun she could carry in her purse. One gun, Andy, that’s all she bought.”
“Did you tell that to Deputy Dean?”
“Of course I did.” She sniffed. “I was informed the gun Miranda used to do herself in was indeed registered to her. Which proves my point,” she finished, as if that meant everything made sense.
“I think you’ve seen too many reruns of Mat-lock,” I mumbled, because Cissy was acting as if Debbie Santos giving her a legal voice in Miranda’s postmortem matters suddenly made her Inspector Morse; or, more fittingly, Inspector Clouseau.
“Now you’ve gotten me off-track,” my mother complained. “Did you listen to any of the messages I left?”
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t.” I shifted, leaning back against the leather seat, squinting against the daylight as my pulse throbbed at my temples.
Brian eased the car to a stop at another intersection, this one at Belt Line and Preston. He looked over, raised his eyebrows.
The call waiting on my cell beeped.
I sighed, figuring it was the police, wanting to know about this “proof” I was harboring.
“Andrea? Are you listening to me?” my mother cawed in my ear, and I quickly said, “I’ve got another call. Hold on, okay?”
I flipped over with a perfunctory, “Hello?”
“Andy? It’s Delaney Armstrong. I left a message on your voice mail earlier but you never called back.”
So there was at least one call of twenty-one that wasn’t Janet Graham or my completely off-her-rocker mother.
“Wow, do you believe the news about Miranda? Though I’m not surprised, considering her recent behavior,” she started in, before I could get a word in edgewise. “I found out this morning when I sent my driver to drop off Miranda’s Jag, only he said the police were all over the street so he pulled over a couple blocks away and called me to ask what to do. I was debating whether to phone the police or you, when I caught your mother on TV. I figured one of you would know how to handle things, so I had him take the car to Cissy’s. Just wanted to get it out of my hair. That was all right, Andy, wasn’t it? I called first to make sure it was okay, and Cissy said it was fine.”
Of course she did, I thought, grinding my teeth.
“Anyway, I’ve gotta go. So tragic about Miranda, though. I guess all that fast living caught up with her at last. And to think I used to envy her.” She sighed. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, isn’t it?”
With that, Delaney hung up, and I took a deep breath before I flipped back over to Mother, not giving her a chance to chastise me for making her wait (she thought call waiting was the work of the devil and rude as elbows on the dinner table).
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I told her, my voice grating like gravel. I was so pissed I could pop. I snapped the cell closed, glanced up and real
ized we were pulling into my condo’s parking lot. “Could you turn this baby around and take me to Mother’s?” I asked. “I’ve got a strong hankering to wring her scrawny neck.”
“You know, if you offered up tickets for that, you could probably make a few bucks,” Brian said, nudging the bridge of his glasses before he made a ring around the parking lot and headed back the way we’d come.
I was too irked to laugh.
If I came with a warning label, at that moment, it would’ve read: Danger! Combustible Materials Enclosed!
And Cissy had better be wearing a hard hat.
Chapter 9
Usually, approaching Mother’s house meant a quiet drive down Beverly, a lovely old street lined with tall trees and stately, well-landscaped facades. The skitter of leaves beneath tires was about as much commotion as you’d encounter on an early day in fall, beyond birds twittering and blowers whooshing as gardeners tidied up.
It was that way this morning, when I drove over to share the bad news about Miranda DuBois with Cissy.
Somewhere between then and now, Mother had turned quiet into insanity with her unscheduled, over-the-top performance at Deputy Chief Anna Dean’s press conference regarding Miranda’s death.
Well, I didn’t know firsthand that it was over-the-top, but I could only imagine, from the carrots of info Janet had dangled before me.
I didn’t so much care that Cissy had gotten involved in Miranda’s passing, it’s just that her role in this tragedy had morphed into something far greater than I’d ever fathomed. Becoming the late Miranda Dubois’s guardian or trustee (or whatever the legal term was) until Debbie Santos returned to the States?
Not exactly a move I’d anticipated, but what could I do? I would have loved to lock her in her suite of rooms until she learned to stop meddling, but I’m not sure I’d live that long.
I was surprised but not stunned by her announcement that she’d hired an independent forensic pathologist and taunted the police with talk of bringing in a private eye. Mother never did anything half-assed, so why wouldn’t she cover all the bases?
What amazed me most was the fact that she’d dragged my name into the mess, when the last thing on earth I wanted was to get caught up in another gut-wrenching drama. I’d been a willful participant in more than my share in recent months, and I needed some privacy, some time alone with my boyfriend and my paints.
I had no desire to become entangled in Miranda’s death, not for all the coffee beans in Starbucks.
I needed my mother to make some kind of public retraction, so I could extricate myself from this evolving scandal and go back to living my own life. Because I was all for leaving the detecting to the Highland Park police.
Somehow, I had to convince Cissy to take a step back and stop antagonizing the cops. Debbie Santos could take on the boys and girls in blue when she got home, if that’s what she wanted.
This wasn’t my mother’s battle to fight.
At least, I didn’t think so.
As Malone steered the car nearer Mother’s address, I noticed the increasing crowd of vehicles parked against the curb on either side. I wondered if, maybe, one of the society dames was having a garden club luncheon, or if someone’s horde of relatives had arrived weeks early for Thanksgiving.
Until I realized the parked car crunch led right to Cissy’s place, with SUVs and vans from local TV stations standing at the mouth of the drive with microphones in hand. Even a patrol car with a pair of HP cops had joined the mix: one of the uniforms monitored access to Mother’s driveway, and the other tried to keep the street from becoming a parking lot.
Call me psychic, but I felt sure the throng hadn’t gathered for a book club discussion at Cissy’s nor to celebrate the glory that was my mother’s yard. Her roses might be the envy of the neighborhood when they bloomed in the spring, but the bushes weren’t exactly lush with flowers at the moment and were hardly worthy of satellite trucks and camera crews.
I feared for an instant that Brian’s car might be swarmed, but I needn’t have worried. Though a few of the loitering reporters surely got whiplash turning their heads to see who was arriving in the little red coupe, not a single reporter rushed toward us.
The officer blocking the drive did make Malone stop and roll down the window, and he even made me show ID when I told him I was the only child of Cissy Blevins Kendricks and this was the house I’d grown up in.
I guess having the “Blevins Kendricks” part on my driver’s license allowed me to pass the test, as he let us through without further hassle.
While I wasn’t surprised to see Stephen Howard’s shiny pickup truck out front when we pulled up, nor Janet Graham’s VW, which was parked right beside it, I raised my eyebrows when I spotted another familiar vehicle: a marked car with plates that clearly tagged it as belonging to the deputy chief of the Highland Park P.D.
But that wasn’t the only surprise to greet me. There was also a midnight blue Ford Taurus that had seen better days—I had no idea to whom it belonged—and, most conspicuously, Miranda DuBois’s shiny gray Jaguar, which was being lifted onto the back of a tow truck. Delaney’s driver must’ve already been by and dropped it off, and Deputy Dean had certainly wasted no time in having the car hauled away.
Speak of the devil.
There stood Anna Dean, across the driveway, her hands on her gun-belted hips, supervising the operation.
At least that meant the cops were investigating, right? Maybe they’d even uncover something telling in Miranda’s car, a voice recorder or a notebook or a piece of crucial evidence like they were always finding on CSI just before the “Oh, shit” moment (as Brian liked to call it).
“Looks like the circus is in town,” Brian said, parking his coupe around the side, near Mother’s garage, rather than pulling up behind the tow truck.
“And Mother’s the ringleader,” I remarked rather dryly.
I seriously contemplated slipping in the back through the kitchen door instead of having to walk past Anna Dean in front, but I knew I had to face her sometime, regardless. So it might as well be now.
Oddly enough, I felt my Excedrin-sized headache blossoming.
Brian must’ve heard my groan after he cut the engine, as he asked, “Are you okay?”
I felt a little like a lamb headed to the slaughter for some reason, but told him instead, “I could be worse.”
Which was true.
I could have had Dengue fever or the West Nile virus or something equally nasty.
Though I was a little queasy, I wasn’t sick. I was just caught in the cross hairs of a very awkward situation.
And I owed it all to Mummy Dearest.
Yippee Skippy.
“You want to go through the back?” Brian asked, reading my mind, but I shook my head. Call me a masochist, but I intended to face the consequences of Mother’s actions regardless of how much it hurt.
I clung to his hand as we walked around the front, pausing as the tow truck let out a loud screech and clink of chains as it secured the Jag onto its flat bed.
Deputy Dean caught sight of us as we emerged from the flagstone path that wound through the hedges. She wasted no time in confronting us, thumbs tucked in her utility belt, a tight frown on her lips.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Kendricks,” she said, sounding stuffy and formal, though I’d been “Andy” that morning.
Oh, how quickly the wind could shift.
“Hey, Deputy Dean,” I said before introducing her to Brian. “So you’re going to check out Miranda’s car?” I asked, stating the obvious, and she nodded an affirmative. “Do you have to tow it? Didn’t Delaney’s driver leave the keys in the ignition?”
“Yes, we’ve got the keys, but we’re lifting it on the tow to preserve evidence. We’re still regarding this as an open case until the M.E.’s ruling, despite what you may have heard.” Anna Dean paused to squint at me, and I felt a little like a germ under a microscope. “You don’t have something you’d like to add to what you told me th
is morning, do you, Andy?”
So I was “Andy” again, just like that?
I felt my eyelid twitch.
“Not a thing,” I told her, “even if my mother implied otherwise. Which is why I’m here,” I added, raising my voice over the lurch of the motor on the tow truck as it started up and began the slow curve around Mother’s driveway. “I want Cissy to go on the record stating she’d been mistaken when she suggested I was holding back information relating to Miranda’s death, because I’m not keeping things from the police. I told you everything.”
“Is that so?” She still didn’t look like she trusted me entirely.
“Yes, it is.”
She glanced at Brian and then back at me. I was surprised she didn’t come around behind me to see if I was crossing my fingers.
Which I wasn’t.
“All right.” She gave a clipped jerk of her chin. “If you do think of something that may help us, I’d appreciate it if you’d come straight to me instead of running off to Cissy. I’d hate to have to charge you with interfering in an investigation.”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from reminding her that she was the one who encouraged me to seek solace at my mother’s house that morning, after I learned that Miranda was dead. But I didn’t want to piss off a high-ranking member of the Highland Park police, particularly after Cissy had done such a brilliant job of it already.
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you,” I said, in my best Little Miss Manners mode.
“Your mother’s making this more difficult than it has to be, what with beating us to the punch calling Mrs. Santos in Brazil and flying in a pathologist from L.A. to independently examine Ms. DuBois’s remains. I somehow doubt he’s going to find anything to refute the county M.E.’s report, which we should have by tomorrow, by the way.”
I knew the forensics lab had cases backed up and was months behind. Malone was forever complaining about the slow rate of return, especially on DNA, for his firm’s criminal cases. But I guessed that Miranda’s high profile had pushed her case to the front of the line. I wasn’t surprised.
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