The Real Mrs. Price

by J. D. Mason

She didn’t say it, but he had a feeling that her belief might’ve had something to do with those possum bones. He couldn’t wait to hear her response.

  Marlowe met his confrontational gaze head-on and impressively held her own. She knew that she was being baited and refused to fall for it.

  With the rain outside and the solemn mood inside this house, and with no desire whatsoever to leave the side of this beautiful and downtrodden woman anytime soon, Plato decided to lighten the mood, her mood, if at all possible.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, getting up and going upstairs. A few minutes later, he returned with the best mood-lightening technology ever created—next to sex, of course, and food. “Check out what I found hidden in the closet of your spare room,” he said with as much cool as he could muster, considering that he was an absolute fool for karaoke.

  Marlowe actually smiled. “Oh my goodness. I forgot I had that thing.”

  “Well, all things considered—rain, trespassers, missing husbands, and murders—I figure we might as well put a little funk into our day and…” He held up the machine and cocked an optimistic brow. “Can you handle it?”

  Marlowe stared at him, stunned. “Are you serious?”

  “Hell yeah, I’m serious,” he said, searching the room for an open outlet. “Let’s do this.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out looking for Eddie?”

  “In the rain?” He found one. “Nah. I don’t work well wet.”

  That disheartened look she gave him almost did him in, but Plato drew on his party reserves.

  “I’m really not in the mood for karaoke, Plato, and besides, I don’t know if that thing even works.”

  He plugged it in, and the damn thing lit up like R2-D2. He looked at her and grinned. “What do you know? All fired up and ready to go.”

  Plato pulled out his phone and plugged it into the unit and brought up one of his all-time favorite love songs, which he felt would convey his deepest, most passionate feelings about this budding “thing” developing between them. Love was a figment of his imagination, but every now and then, he indulged in fleeting moments, just to remind himself that he was still human. As the music started, he tapped the microphone a few times to make sure that it was on.

  Marlowe shook her head in amusement at the fool he was about to make of himself, but hell, he’d done it before and prided himself on the very real fact that he would again. He turned up the volume to Anthony Hamilton’s song “Cool,” stepped into character, and started to sing his heart out to this woman.

  A groove like this said it all. It was a resonating testament of a man’s commitment to his woman. That shit was raw and real and from the heart. It didn’t get more romantic than that.

  Her expressions morphed from disbelief to embarrassment (for him) to amusement, and then finally, he knew he had her, she started nodding her head, and a shy smile crept across her face.

  Plato gyrated over to her and held out his hand for her. And then he waited. And then she took it. He pulled her to her feet, and they danced together in the middle of her living room. She knew the words to this song, too, and when David Banner started his rap, Marlowe took the mic. When the girl part came up, she shoved the mic under his chin, and right on cue, he recited it perfectly.

  They were Beyoncé and Jay Z, Sonny and Cher, Missy Elliott and Timbaland. They were a dynamic duo, perfectly synced in the harmony of music and bodies and movement. Marlowe shook off the dismal mood she’d been in since he’d met her. In this moment, she cast all her cares away, swayed those luscious hips of hers, snapped her fingers, and danced with him like they’d been doing this together their whole lives.

  The kiss really did come out of nowhere. He hadn’t planned it, but he sure believed that it was meant to happen. He’d danced her over until her back was up against a wall. Marlowe’s pretty face and lips and hips and breasts and … when he’d lowered his lips to hers, he’d expected to be pushed or slapped, kicked, pepper sprayed. None of those things happened.

  He’d braced his arms against the wall on either side of her. Marlowe pressed her hands to his chest, but not to push him away. To steady herself. To steady him. Tongues somersaulted over each other. Lips smacked, sucked. Kissed. Licked. Shit! She tasted delectable. Marlowe seemed to almost melt, like she was relieved by this event and that it had finally happened. Maybe she was satisfied with a kiss, but being a man, of course, this was just first base. He lowered one hand to the strap of her dress and started to slide it off her shoulder. It would’ve done his heart good to get an eyeful of one of those glorious breasts of hers. But Marlowe grabbed him by the wrist, broke the seal of that sensual kiss, and came back to her good senses.

  “You need to go,” she said, breathless.

  He made note of his dick swelling and throbbing. “I’m not ready to go.”

  She glared up at him as if he’d just committed the biggest crime known to humankind. “I’m ready for you to go.”

  To say that he was disappointed was an understatement. Things between the two of them were just starting to get interesting, and to deny him the possibility of her didn’t sit well with him. The ugly side of Plato, dominating and predatory, started to stir awake. He glared at her, practically daring her to try to make him leave. She couldn’t “make” him do anything and she knew it.

  “Please, Plato,” she said, snapping him back into the moment. “I can’t do this.”

  This time, he’d go. But the next time, if there was a next time …

  You Go Hard

  LUCY SHOWED UP AT MARLOWE’S without calling first to at least have a fair shot at seeing the woman again. If she thought that Marlowe was defensive the first time the two of them had met, she was defensive times ten this time around, and with good reason. Lucy had acted like a first-rate asshole when they’d met, so Marlowe had every right to be the asshole this time. When Marlowe came to the door, Lucy stood at the door waiting to be invited inside. Marlowe made no such offer.

  “I just wanted to apologize,” Lucy said quickly before the other woman slammed the door in her face. She’d left Roman at the hotel and decided to come here alone because, really, anything that the two of them had to say needed only to be said to each other. “Ed did a number on both of us,” she continued to a stoic Marlowe glaring at her through the screen door. “He was a liar and a fraud and a cheater and a manipulator.” Again, she waited for Marlowe to relax her stance a bit in a show of solidarity. “He pretended to be someone he wasn’t, and fooled both of us.”

  This woman wasn’t her enemy, and eventually, Lucy hoped that Marlowe would draw the same conclusion about her. Not that they’d ever be friends, but maybe they could be a little more cordial toward each other.

  “Shame on us,” Marlowe whispered introspectively.

  Lucy knew better than to accept the statement as an olive branch, but Marlowe seemed to at least be letting her guard down a bit. “Do you think I could come in?”

  Marlowe hesitated but eventually pushed open the screen door.

  She really was pretty. Her features were softer than Lucy’s, and her ass really wasn’t that much bigger than Lucy’s either. Ed was definitely a booty man, though. Marlowe had enviable breasts, the kind that Lucy might get a quote on when she got home.

  She followed Marlowe into the cozy living room and sat down on the sofa. Marlowe took one of the armchairs opposite her.

  “The crazies on social media are out in full force,” Lucy offered, trying to ease the tension. “Ed’s got to be the only bigamist martyr ever recorded in history.” She smiled at her own attempt at humor. Marlowe didn’t.

  It wasn’t hard to see that all this was taking a terrible toll on this woman. Lucy had no idea what she was like before all this, but Marlowe’s demeanor was so heavy and dark that it was scary, and understandably so. But that was how Ed left people he claimed to care about. She’d called it “the Ed Effect.”

  “So Ed never mentioned my name?” It was a dumb question, but for some reason, it wa
s one that she was unnaturally curious about.

  “Yes. He’d told me that he’d been married once but that his wife died of breast cancer,” Marlowe unemotionally explained.

  “I was at work when another faculty member came to my office and showed me the breaking news story online,” Lucy told her. “The police had told me the day before, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that my husband had a second wife, and people couldn’t wait to shove that crap in my face.”

  “Did Eddie just disappear?” Marlowe asked. “Did he go out for milk and not come home one night?”

  Lucy shook her head. “We had a fight,” she admitted. “I’d found out some things about him—”

  “What things?” Marlowe interrupted.

  If anyone deserved to know this other side of Ed, Marlowe did. Lucy had come here waving a white flag. If she wanted Marlowe to open up to her, then she’d need to lay her cards faceup.

  “I think he killed someone,” Lucy apprehensively admitted. “And I think that he was going to kill me, too, if we hadn’t been interrupted.”

  Marlowe’s eyes widened, but she didn’t seem shocked. More like she was surprised that Lucy had confided in her.

  “A friend of Ed’s was found dead at his cabin in the mountains. He and Ed worked together, and I think that he found out that Ed was doing something illegal.”

  “What makes you think Eddie killed him?”

  Eddie. She called him Eddie. How come Lucy hadn’t noticed that before?

  “The man who was killed called me before he died and told me that he suspected that Ed was breaking the law.”

  “How?”

  Lucy was saying too much. Despite this intimate relationship she felt that the two of them had on one level, she didn’t know Marlowe well enough to reveal everything she knew. Lucy had to be careful. She had to get a feel for who Marlowe Price really was before telling her everything.

  “Something to do with stocks,” she vaguely explained. Lucy decided not to go into detail. “But he only suspected it. He didn’t know for sure.”

  “Why would he tell you that?” Marlowe quizzed her. “And what makes you so sure that Eddie did anything?”

  “I really don’t know, Marlowe,” she lied.

  “But you believe that he would’ve killed you over something that this other man was suspicious of?” Marlowe wasn’t stupid.

  Lucy sensed that her own story didn’t make sense to Marlowe.

  “He told me he’d kill me if I told anyone that I thought he’d killed Chuck,” Lucy tearfully admitted. “And I believed him, Marlowe. He scared the shit out of me, and I know that I would be dead, too, if my neighbor hadn’t stopped by when he did.”

  Marlowe sat in silence for a few moments before finally opening up to Lucy. “Then that makes two people he’s killed.”

  The air hung heavily at that revelation.

  “Two?” Lucy asked in disbelief. “Who else?”

  Marlowe swallowed. “I don’t know who he was, but I saw Eddie shoot him. It was the last time I saw my husb—Eddie. He didn’t see me, though.”

  “Do the police know?”

  “I told them,” Marlowe admitted. “They just don’t believe me. I think that the man they found in that car is the man Eddie killed.”

  How many more people had he killed before Lucy had met him? Who was Ed Price, really?

  “Who was this monster we married, Marlowe?” Lucy asked, still in shock by what she’d just heard. “And how can he get away with this?”

  “He is a monster,” Marlowe said solemnly. “Everybody believes that I am, though.” She shook her head.

  “I hired Roman Medlock to try and help find him. If he’s alive, then I need to know. I can’t get on with my life knowing that he might be out there somewhere.”

  Marlowe leaned her head to one side. “You don’t believe he’s dead either.”

  “I need peace of mind. If he’s dead, then I can finally go to the police and tell them what I know.”

  “What’s the point? He can’t hurt you if he’s dead.”

  “I just need to know for sure.”

  Marlowe studied her, stared at her for too long. Underestimating this woman was a mistake.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Lucy responded. “I need to know if he’s really dead so that I can get on with my life.”

  Marlowe’s blank stare bored into Lucy. “Did you expect for me to sit here and tell you that I killed him?” she asked stoically. “You’re hoping that I did.”

  “Something like that,” she said sheepishly.

  The peek into that promising rapport that Lucy had felt was slowly building quickly began to dissipate.

  “You should leave.”

  Lucy had blown it for a second time. “Marlowe, I—”

  “You what? Think I’m stupid enough to fall for this … this whatever this is between us and confess to killing a man? Really?” she asked, appalled.

  “I know what he was like,” Lucy added desperately. “Ed was every bad thing that a man can be, and not just to me, but I suspect to you, too. Look at what he’s done to your life, Marlowe. He’s turned your world upside down and left you with a death sentence hanging over your head.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said tersely.

  Of course she’d say that. Even if it was true, Lucy didn’t want to hear it. Roman was right. This trip was a dead end.

  “That’s not the answer you wanted,” Marlowe challenged.

  Lucy’s disappointment shone like a beacon. “It’s what I thought you’d say.”

  “I said it because it’s the truth,” she said defensively. “Eddie was alive the last time I saw him. What happened to him after he left here is as much a mystery to me as anybody, but I did not kill him.”

  Lucy gathered her purse and stood up to leave. She had other questions, more answers that she needed, but she doubted seriously that Marlowe would willingly offer any more than she already had.

  Lucy stopped at the door, then turned to Marlowe one last time. “I hope all this works out for you, Marlowe,” she said truthfully. “I hope you’re exonerated. I really do. And I hope he is dead and that if you did kill him, that you get away with it.”

  * * *

  Roman looked as stunned as Lucy was when Marlowe told her about Ed killing a man. “You believed her?” he asked, sitting across from her at the coffee shop.

  “Mostly,” she said reflectively. “If you’d seen the look in her eyes when she said it, you might’ve believed her, too. Ed’s a killer, Roman. He’s a con man. And somehow, he’s managed to get away with hurting so many people.”

  Roman had been off doing his own investigation of that big black guy they’d seen on the news with Marlowe and then again at the restaurant the other night. His theory was that if Marlowe had killed Ed—or whoever that man was who had been found dead in Ed’s car—she’d had help, and this guy had been the one to help her.

  “Did you find anything on that man?” she asked.

  “You dig deep enough, you can find anything on anybody.”

  “Okay.”

  “Osiris P. Wells,” he said proudly. “Acme LLC is the upper crust of a bunch of layers that eventually lead to him.”

  “And who is he?”

  He shrugged. “He’s a professor. A traveling one, apparently. I managed to find basic information on him at various colleges and universities around the country, but he’s never spent more than a semester at any of them.”

  Whatever this guy had to do with Marlowe or Ed didn’t matter because he was just another dead end.

  “Are you going back to Denver?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

  Lucy didn’t say anything.

  “Unless there’s something else you’re looking for, Lucy.”

  “What else would I be looking for, Roman?”

  “I read people pretty good, and something tells me that you didn’t just come h
ere looking for a possibly dead husband. I’ll make you a deal. Tell me what’s really going on, and maybe I can help.”

  There was a humanity to Roman that she hadn’t expected. She’d seen it in him from the beginning, a vulnerability that came from someplace inside him that he worked hard to keep hidden. This wasn’t just a case for him; it seemed to be something more, and she didn’t quite understand what or why. She could trust him. At least, she hoped she could. The thing is, keeping this secret was becoming harder and harder, and she was starting to realize that she was going to have to tell someone—Roman—if she ever expected to get to the bottom of the issue.

  “Before he died, Chuck Harris sent me some information.”

  He quietly waited for her to continue.

  “He sent me numbers to the accounts that Ed was using to launder drug money.”

  He raised his brow. “Account numbers?”

  She nodded. “Fake accounts with real money.”

  “The forty-seven million?” He stared at her in disbelief. “Why would he send you that kind of information, and what are you supposed to do with those account numbers, Lucy?”

  She took a deep breath before explaining. “The reason that Chuck Harris didn’t turn Ed over to the authorities is because he was hoping to get the money, or some of it, for himself,” she finally confessed. Her eyes darted back and forth between Roman and the floor.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He gave me the account numbers in the hopes that I could somehow manage to get the PINs and banking information from Ed.”

  “He wanted you to help him steal money from these laundered accounts?” He was stunned.

  Lucy nodded. “He figured that maybe Ed kept the numbers on his computer or, I don’t know, maybe in his wallet or on his phone.”

  “And you looked for this information?” He probably didn’t mean to look disgusted, but he did.

  Reluctantly, she nodded again. “I never found anything, though.”

  “So you were going through with this?”

  She paused. Lucy wasn’t a criminal, and she’d never planned on doing anything illegal. Her intent had always been to turn over everything she knew about Ed to the authorities as soon as she felt safe enough to do so. That money was criminal money used for illegal activities. Ed had been siphoning it off for months. “I can’t do anything with it because I don’t have the PINs or banking locations.”