Then There Were Nun

by Dakota Cassidy

  She clamped her mouth into a tight line of neon-pink lipstick.

  “And by the way, how did Myron get your earring?” That earring troubled me to no end. She’d admitted it was hers in front of everyone. She might as well have handed Chief Burrows the key to her cell.

  Mom smiled like a Cheshire cat, before sucking in her cheeks. “Do you really want to know that, Lemon?”

  I blanched. I kind of didn’t want to know that. Mom was quite the looker back in the day, and even now she was no slacker in the date department, unabashedly sharing her adventures with me at every opportunity.

  May Layne had been a real field player until my dad came onto the scene.

  Which brings me to my Harley-loving biker father again. Somehow, the ultimate bachelor had managed to capture the fickle-pickle ultimate bachelorette’s heart and held on to it until the day he died of a heart attack five years ago at seventy-two. I was a late-in-life baby for them, Mom being on the cusp of her forties when she had me.

  So nope. I didn’t want to know the details of her escapades with Myron. But I was going full steam ahead with this line of questioning anyway.

  “I know regret will haunt me for days afterward, but yep. I do want to know, Mom.”

  “I spent the night at his house when you and Coco went to Seattle for that exotic fish show. Candlelight, the ocean in our ears, a nice prime rib.” She paused and sighed, dreamy and soft. Then she sobered. “I must have left it there. I hate when they get caught up in the sheets. I thought I took them both off. You know how that goes in the heat of passion—”

  I whipped up a hand. “I know all about it. ’Nuff said.”

  If her earring was at the crime scene, that meant either Myron had planned to return it at some point, or maybe he’d simply forgotten he had it. Or maybe it fell from the pocket of his jacket or his trousers when he’d been dumped in the bathroom?

  But was he even killed in the bathroom or somewhere else and dumped there afterward? And when had he been killed? In the early hours of the morning while we slept in our beds?

  “Don’t forget to tell them that when they question you. That you think you lost it at Myron’s house. But skip the gory details about what happened at the house. Please. I beg of you.”

  Her eyes penetrated mine, scanning my face, and suddenly she looked horrified. I imagine this was all sinking in now because her expression went from angry to astonished.

  “They really think I killed Myron?” she hissed from between her clenched dentures and slapped her thigh.

  I was trying so hard not to panic at this point, knowing this line of questioning made complete sense and was routine at best, but it didn’t make me feel any more comfortable.

  “I don’t know what they think. I think they’re just investigating every avenue right now, and it makes sense they’d investigate you because you dated Myron for six months. It’s normal procedure.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Lemon. You know better than that, and they should, too! Almost every single one of these cotton-pickin’ kids in here knows me. May Layne’s no killer!”

  That was it for me. I planted a hand over her mouth and leaned in close, her eyes following my face as I whispered, “I said, stop saying the word ‘kill’ out loud. That means any variation thereof, Mom. Murder, whacked, knocked off, take out, kill with an ‘ing’ tacked onto the end of it, past, present or future tense! Yes, these people know you, but they’re no longer looking at you like the cute little old May Layne with the foul mouth. They’re trained police officers, Mom, and they’re doing their job, which is to get you to give them information and/or confess to a crime. You’re not helping me here. Now can it!”

  Mom wrapped her fingers around my wrist and yanked my hand from her mouth, putting it back in my lap, and gave me a look of pure indignation. “I will not be accused of murder in front of all these people. They’re my neighbors, and some are even my friends. Except for that Ainsley Burrows. He’ll never see another free brisket sandwich from the likes o’ me.”

  I rasped a sigh—one that was a familiar sound escaping my throat where my mother was concerned. “That’s right, Mom. You put your foot down and put it down hard. A line has to be drawn, and brisket’s where it starts.”

  She harrumphed. “And I do not have a foul mouth.”

  “Wasn’t it you who referred to Myron’s gentlemanly parts as a gordita?”

  “That’s hardly foul. It’s an analogy to food, Lemon.”

  This time, I gripped her hand and made big Thumper eyes, the surest way to get what I wanted from her. “I’m begging you, Mom—behave. Please. Whatever you say can get you into trouble if you’re not careful. Do you remember the last time you were spouting off? You know, when we had that doctor’s appointment you didn’t want to go to?”

  Picture a seventy-year-old with blue hair, neon-colored lipstick in whatever shade happens to strike her fancy, black leggings, a denim vest and multicolored high-tops, clinging to the doorway of our store, yelling, “No, Lemon! No! No more wire hangers!”

  Mom’s hysterical. I totally admit I’m the first to laugh at her inappropriate jokes, but the humor drains right out of me when an unfamiliar-with-her-hijinks tourist getting gas shoots me all manner of dirty looks for senior abuse.

  Her eyes went guilty and apologetic. “I was just teasing you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But if that tourist with the stick up his butt and absolutely no sense of humor had taken it upon himself to really call social services, I could have been in a lot of hot water. There’s a time and a place for your joking and your unfiltered comments. We’ve talked about this. Now, I’m not sure how serious this inquiry is, but Coco’s got one of her lawyer friends coming in to help us out. So stop talking until she gets here. Pretty please.”

  She rolled her eyes at me and sighed. “Fine. But when I get out of here, you can bet not a one of these boy howdees is gonna get the time of day from May Layne ever again.”

  I held up my fist to her for a bump. “You show ’em how to hold a grudge.”

  Coco breezed in the double doors, and whether I’d realized it or not, I must have been tense, because seeing my BFF with a gentleman in a fancy-looking suit brought me enormous relief. So much so, I think my legs wobbled when I rose to meet the nice-looking older man with my friend.

  He was tall with an athletic build in that T-shape we women like so much. He had a nice mixture of dark and silver to his thick hair, but more importantly, his suit was crisp and clean, and his face had that trustworthy look to it, versus the smarmy, slick grin on the face of the kind of lawyers you see on TV.

  Coco squeezed my shoulder and looked at my mother with a reassuring smile. “Mama Layne, Lemon—this is Ansell Williams, attorney at law. He’ll be present when they question you.”

  Ansell held out his hand to Mom, and suddenly, she was no longer Caged Tiger Layne, she was Hidden Demure Dragon May. Her eyelashes swept her cheeks, and she propped her chin on her shoulder when she smiled up at him flirtatiously.

  He smiled back, pleasant and open. “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Layne. Has anyone questioned you yet?”

  Mom planted her hand in Ansell’s and shook her head. “The pleasure’s all mine, good-lookin’, and no one’s said boo to me.”

  Ansell’s handsome face relaxed, his dark brown eyes turning upward in a smile. “Good to know. So if you ladies don’t mind, I’m going to take my client somewhere private where we can talk.”

  Mom slung her bag over her shoulder and fairly skipped off after her lawyer, leaving Coco and me to shake our heads.

  “So did she say anything else? Or hear something this morning?” Coco asked, pulling me to sit next to her on the plastic chairs.

  I closed my eyes and told myself everything was going to be all right. “You mean aside from the hundred and one times she mentioned killing Myron? No. I made sure she clammed up and waited for the attorney. But I’m worried. You know Mom and her habit of saying whatever she thinks out loud.”

&nbs
p; Coco patted my hand in sympathy. “Ansell will make sure she’s protected. Now, how are you? You found a dead body today, Lemon. I’m worried about you.”

  I shrugged. “I’m fine.”

  That surely sounds like I viewed Myron’s death as cavalier—as though it was no big deal I’d found one of my fellow Fig Harborians sprawled out on the hard tile of a gas station bathroom.

  Not true at all. I’m just not particularly vocal about my feelings. It wasn’t even the dead body I was especially freaked out by. I’ve seen a couple in my thirty-three years.

  In fact, my mother often jokes with all the crime TV I watch, I’ve seen more lifeless corpses than dates. To which I often roll my eyes and mutter something indistinct.

  It was that the body was Myron’s—someone I’d rather liked, even if he had cheated on my mother.

  “I heard some of the officers talking about how he was…” Coco bit her bottom lip. “Killed. I’m sorry you had to see that. It’s awful. I don’t understand who’d do something so…so crazy.”

  “But I’ve moved on from seeing the actual body to wondering how it got there without either of us hearing it happen, Coco. I know Mom and I are pretty heavy sleepers, and she did take an Ambien, but if he was killed last night and dumped there, I need to consider a security system bigger than a lock. I also need to pin down the time of death.”

  The lock on the bathroom door wasn’t exactly fashioned after Fort Knox, but there had to have been some kind of struggle to get inside.

  No way someone could have dumped Myron in the time it took for me to leave the station, hop in my beloved Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1976, run and grab a coffee (because frankly speaking, ours at the station is an unholy blend of toxic waste and Satan’s spit) and return. Not without waking my mother or being seen.

  It took me fifteen minutes tops to hit Gabby’s Grind in her pastel-blue shop at the center of town, grab a plain black coffee—no frilly foam or double shots with tears of a Dutch Maiden, thank you—entirely avoid socializing with the shop’s patrons, and get back to the station in time to take my mother to her doctor’s appointment.

  And like I’d told Justice, I’d even managed to narrowly miss Waylan Caprice, a.k.a. Cappie, our town’s doomsday prepper. He was coming in the front door, and I was all but running out the back door of the kitchen to take the beach path right around to the front and to my car in order to take a pass on his latest story about his newest alien-proofing technique.

  Cappie was a hoot most times. I usually listened and hid my utterly inappropriate laughter when he shared his theory on keeping Big Brother out by wrapping his roof in tinfoil and reflective glass.

  So, however, Myron had been dumped, I was convinced it had to have happened during the wee hours of the morning.

  “What’s going on in that head of yours, Lemon?” Coco peered at me from beneath her soggy bangs. “No investigating—got that? You let the police handle this. I know what you’re like, but this isn’t a stolen purse in high school or a minor car accident where charts and graphs are needed to prove who’s telling the truth. It’s your mother. No sleuthing.”

  I’m inquisitive by nature, resulting in a sponge-like gathering of mostly useless information. Coco calls it just plain stickin’ my schnoz in where it doesn’t belong, but I kept my mouth firmly shut. I wasn’t ready to discuss any of it yet anyway. I needed time to think—to rehash everything I’d seen with my own eyes.

  Which reminded me, the receipt from Lester’s Pawnshop. I jammed my hand into the pocket of my hoodie and fingered the slip of handwritten paper.

  Coco nudged me, her sharp eyes narrowed. “Yoo-hoo? I know you like I know a good deal on Groupon. You’re spinning your wheels in that pretty head of yours. Talk to me so I can talk you out of whatever crazy idea you have,” she demanded.

  “I was just thinking I need a better lock on the men’s bathroom door at S&P. I’d prefer we didn’t become the hip place to drop off a recent kill. Speaking of bathrooms, I need to hit one. If Mom comes back, do me a favor, impress upon her the value of silence and its golden properties?”

  Coco laughed and nodded, waving me off in favor of scrolling her phone.

  I rose and made my way toward the lavatories to the left of the front desk and pushed the door to the ladies’ room open, slipping inside a stall.

  I didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. I just needed a minute to process this without Coco reminding me I’d gotten into trouble a time or two for snooping. Maybe say a prayer my mom and all her vim and vigor could be contained before she got herself into any more trouble. I also wanted to look at the receipt JF had grabbed.

  I winced at the thought that Jessica and I definitely contaminated that crime scene. And I’m not using that official term because I watch a lot of TV detectives either. I use it due to the fact that I’d once really contaminated a crime scene. As in, I’d crushed it with my big size nines. I have crazy big feet for someone so short.

  But I try not to dwell on that time in my life and keep plugging right along with the valuable knowledge I learned back then. Which is: Touch nothing, call 9-1-1, and keep your pokey nose out of it, Lemon Layne. I thought I was pretty good at the former, but not so much the latter, and now I realize, in a panic, I’m good at neither.

  I sat on the edge of the toilet and pulled the pink receipt out of my pocket, scanning it. It was handwritten, likely by Lester, dated yesterday at three-thirty, in the amount of four hundred dollars, but the item listed as either sold or bought was almost illegible.

  I needed to give this to the police, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t investigate all on my own. Which is typically where my trouble began—my brain told me I should let the police handle it, but my instincts told me to do something, anything, to ensure Mom didn’t end up a viable suspect.

  It’s just my nature, and the puzzle could be something as simple as trying to figure out who’d stolen Liz Hancock’s purse from the locker room in my junior year, to where Mrs. Fastbender’s little cocker spaniel Lolita had wandered off to.

  Or it could be as complex as who’d killed my late fiancé.

  That was really what Coco was worried about. How obsessively involved I became in his death. So obsessively, she’d physically brought me back to Fig to keep me from losing not just my sanity, but all my worldly possessions.

  I shook off the memory. It would do me no good to revisit that time in my life three years ago because it always ended up a dead end.

  My focus was Mom and Mom alone.

  Voices outside the door and the mention of Myron’s name had me climbing up on top of the toilet to hopefully keep from being noticed. If I was going to find out anything more about Myron’s murder, it wouldn’t be by simply asking around.

  The police, even if they were our friends and neighbors, weren’t going to willingly share anything from this point on if this was officially a murder investigation.

  “Did you hear what they did to him?”

  I cocked my head. The voice sounded like it belonged to Valerie Miller, a second-year cop and newer to Fig. I didn’t know her very well, but she seemed nice enough the few times she’d come in to get gas for her lawnmower.

  “Damn right, I did. Justice said the son of a gun cut a piece of his brain out.”

  That was Lorraine Becker. I’d know Lorraine’s nasally voice anywhere. She had horrible allergies. I saw her all the time at the group of medical buildings where I took Mom to see her physician for blood pressure checks.

  One of them turned the water on, making me lean closer to the stall door.

  “His wife says he was just at the doctor’s—something about his head. I don’t know. Her English is rough. I feel like some of it was lost in translation, you know? We have to get someone in who speaks Latvian to explain to her what’s happened. She’s somehow got it in her head that Fairbanks had a headache and that’s how he died. I mean, how do you explain to a woman her husband’s skull was cut open and some of his brain’s missing if she doe
sn’t speak English?” Valerie asked.

  “Were you the one to tell her?”

  “Don’t they give all the crappy jobs to us second-years?”

  Lorraine barked a husky laugh. “They do. Did you confirm the doctor’s appointment?”

  “Yep. He really did have a doctor’s appointment. Some slick neurologist in Seattle, from the looks of his website.”

  I pushed my ear against the stall door, as though that would help me hear them better. I needed the name of the doctor. My kingdom for a name.

  “So what was the appointment for?” Lorraine asked.

  Shoot. No name.

  “Aw, c’mon, Lorraine. You know how it works. We have to subpoena the doc to get Myron’s records, but it definitely had something to do with his head hurting. The missus made that really clear.”

  “I was just checking to see if you knew, Officer Miller,” she teased. “What a darn shame, huh? Seemed like a nice guy.”

  There was a sigh, and then Valerie said, “They’ve got May Layne in there right now. She lawyered up, but if you ask me, they’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s a nice lady.”

  I smiled to myself. One cop in Mom’s favor was good.

  “Lots of nice ladies kill people, Miller.”

  Now I frowned. This nice lady had not.

  “I know that, but seriously, she’s seventy years old. So he cheated on her? Big deal. You can’t see that woman hacking into a guy’s skull and taking out a piece of his brain, can you? That takes not only strength but mad conviction. Not to mention, if he wasn’t killed at the scene, which Justice says is still unclear because May’s daughter Lemon says the lock wasn’t broken, how’d she drag a guy the size of Myron in there? She’s maybe ninety pounds to his two-twenty. Let’s be real.”

  Yeah. Good point.

  “Stranger things have been known to happen,” Lorraine replied as another faucet gushed water.

  The conversation was suddenly interrupted by some sort of ruckus going on outside in the station.