Alibis Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  Back upstairs, I boxed up last year’s files and labeled it with a thick black marker. I’d just stashed it in the storeroom when I heard voices at the front door. These were much more civil, and in a minute I heard light footsteps on the stairs.

  Victoria, Ron’s wife, met me at the top.

  “Hey there,” she said. “Looks like you guys had a little excitement this morning.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’m on my way to take fabric swatches to a client in Old Town,” she said, “but thought I’d stop by on the way and invite you and Drake to our place Saturday evening. We’re grilling steaks and ribs. I’m guessing Ron didn’t already mention this?”

  “He didn’t. He was a little busy.”

  She laughed. As she left, I watched her stop beside the door and give Ron a kiss. I hope the big dodo appreciates her. With what happened on their wedding day a few months ago, we’re lucky we have her.

  I spent another hour wrapping up my little organization project and then headed for home. Elsa was working on her front flowerbeds and she waved me over when I pulled into my driveway. I knew she was going to bring up the subject of the twins again—I swear, she’s become a dog with a bone on this subject.

  “I went over there awhile ago,” she said. “I saw Clover leave, but since the red car is still home I figured that means Zayne is there. Well, if she is, she’s ignoring me completely. I rang the bell and called out, even walked around to their backyard. Something’s not right over there, I tell you.”

  I opened my mouth to list a selection of logical reasons why a person might leave her car home while she’s somewhere else, but I saw the look in Elsa’s eyes.

  “It’s just … young girls and the troubles they can get themselves into,” she said. “I cared for those two little ones and now I’m worried. Could you check into it? I mean you and Ron and your company?”

  I gave a resigned nod, hoping my lack of enthusiasm didn’t show too greatly.

  She seemed relieved. “What is it about girls when they hit their teens? They change so much.”

  I thought back to my own teen years. My experience was clouded by loss and grief, but even before that I remembered the onset of puberty as possibly the worst time of my life. Pressures abounded everywhere—girls made snarky comments about your hair, your clothes, your looks. Although I’d never been one of the cool kids, popularity was paramount to so many of them. Boys—well, the sexual tension was always in the air. I’d dated Brad North nearly all my senior year and by the time we entered college we were talking marriage.

  Yeah, and look how that turned out.

  Chapter 10

  Thirteen years ago …

  January, two months after my twentieth birthday. I’d fully expected this morning’s meeting with the family lawyer to go the same way every other one went: No, Charlotte is too young to be living on her own; no, she can’t have free access to her inheritance yet; if she’s really going to marry this North fellow then there should be a pre-nuptial agreement.

  All the meetings with this impossibly ancient attorney went the same way. Elsa attended as my guardian, Ron as the senior-most family member, and me, slumped into a chair while they all talked about me as if I weren’t in the room. I’ll graduate with an accounting degree in one more year. I think I can handle my own money now.

  “… the house, furnishings and vehicle. For now,” the attorney was saying. “Upon her twenty-first birthday, she’ll receive access to half the trust fund. At age thirty, the remainder.”

  I patted the tabletop with my hand. “Could you all at least pretend I’m right here.” I tried for a respectful tone.

  “Sorry.” The lawyer actually looked a bit chastened. “Charlotte, the trust fund provision is not my decision. Your parents wrote it that way. Each of your brothers received his share at the appropriate age, as well.”

  I know I made a face when he used the word ‘appropriate.’ I couldn’t help myself. He turned his attention back to the long sheets of paper on the desk and I fiddled with the ring on my left hand. The diamond Brad had given me when he proposed at Christmas wasn’t a large one but it signified that we had a future together. In one year’s time I would have my degree and a husband and we would be living in a nice neighborhood, a far cry from our contemporaries in their student-housing apartments.

  Today’s meeting was momentous for me—my own home. No matter what the rest of them said, I felt like a grownup—finally. I signed the papers the lawyer pushed toward me and walked out of his office not quite believing my luck.

  Gram suggested a celebratory lunch. She’d put stew in a big pot on the stove before we left for the meeting. Ron begged off, saying he had to meet with a woman about renting space for his business. He’d received his private investigator’s license two years ago and the cases started to roll in, thanks to the guy who’d mentored him. But working from home with his shrewish wife Bernadette and three small kids underfoot was proving nearly impossible.

  So the celebration ended up being just Gram and me, which was fine. I gobbled down the stew and cornbread, mentally cataloguing the possessions I’d collected in five years in this house, while she talked about the practicalities of being a homeowner.

  “You’ll need to be sure to have the furnace serviced each fall. Ron did it last September so it’s working fine now. And he’ll help you this spring when it’s time to switch over to your air conditioning.”

  I nodded absently. She probably thought the smile on my face was gratitude for her advice, when in reality I was thinking how great it would be to have Stacy over to hang out tonight. I was pretty sure some of my dad’s liquor supply must still be in a cabinet somewhere over there. The moment Gram paused, I jumped up and put my dishes in the sink then dashed to my room to start packing.

  The shiny black extension phone I’d bought for myself sat on the bedside table. I was fairly certain the phone at my own house—my house!—wasn’t connected yet, so I picked up this one and punched Stacy’s number to deliver the great news.

  “Tonight? Yeah! Wow, that’s fantastic, Charlie. I’ll tell Jennifer and Karin and Lisa. They’ll round up the guys, and I’m pretty sure Dominic was getting a keg for the weekend. If he can get it now, he’ll bring it.”

  “I was thinking it’d be just—”

  “Oh, man, this’ll be great!”

  … you and me … But she’d hung up. Wow. I was about to host my first party. I started flinging things into a box.

  I spent the afternoon putting my clothes into the closet I’d used five years ago. At some point I would have to go through the old stuff I’d left behind. Clothes the fifteen-year-old me had loved were just plain icky now. Walking through the living room and kitchen sent me back to childhood with waves of memories, both sweet and painful. My mother’s china in the dining room hutch, linens she’d inherited from her mother, my dad’s pipe on an end table.

  I went into their bedroom, half expecting to see Mother’s robe hanging from the hook on the bathroom door, but Elsa and Ron and the other responsible adults of the day had cleared my parents’ personal things. When Brad and I were married we would move into this room. It would be weird.

  Another thing that had been cleared from the house was all trace of food. There was not so much as a stale cracker or ancient bag of popcorn. I would need to buy groceries. I checked my wallet where I had a whole ten dollars to last me the month. Welcome to the real world, Charlie. At least, thanks to Elsa’s diligence and my own sneakiness, the car out in the garage was gassed up and ready to go. I went out there and got behind the wheel.

  The neighborhood had a whole different feel to me, adult Charlie driving my own car from my own house to do my own grocery shopping. Up the block, I saw a woman at the Delaney house, holding the hand of a little blonde girl with each of hers. They must be in kindergarten or first grade by now, just coming home from school. The woman wasn’t their mother. A fragment of conversation passed through my memory, Gram saying something ab
out the parents now having a nanny for the girls. They were apparently making an obscene amount of money now (her words) and could afford such things. It meant nothing to me.

  At the supermarket I discovered this stuff was expensive. Bread was more than a dollar a loaf, and my ten bucks wouldn’t go far. I settled on items for the party, for now. Tomorrow, I would have to figure out something that didn’t involve Gram or see-I-told-you-so Ron.

  Friends started arriving a little after ten-thirty that night. Obviously, Stacy knew that was the magic hour when Gram finished watching the evening news and would be dead asleep, the time I had always sneaked out. By midnight I was beginning to wish they’d all go home. I kept turning down the music. Even though all the windows and doors were closed on a January night, surely the sound was rocking the neighborhood.

  The gang had decimated the food supply but the keg seemed bottomless. By two a.m. I was ready to hide under my bed, except Rick and Lisa seemed to have locked themselves in my room. I wanted to be a good sport but I had an exam on Internal Revenue Service rules in—oh, god—six hours.

  Where was Stacy? Maybe she could convince the rest of them to wind things down. I walked through the living room, past overturned cups and paper plates gooey with onion dip. A dribble of red salsa trailed across the white rug in front of the TV. I picked up as much of the trash as I could hold and headed for the kitchen. I should have put the big wastebasket in the living room. As if anyone would actually use it. I pushed through the swinging door.

  There stood Stacy and Brad. Kissing.

  The cups and plates dropped at my feet. Stacy heard the sound and backed away from him.

  “Nope,” she said with a laugh and a little slap at his shoulder. “Scott’s the better kisser.”

  She was laughing as she walked toward me. “Silly bet. I told Scott he was the world’s best kisser.”

  My best friend had always been a joker, much more playful than I, full of pranks. Was this just another of those? I didn’t know. I only knew I was tired and grumpy and had a huge mess to clean up and an exam to pass very soon.

  “Party’s over,” I said to her. “Go tell the rest of them it’s time to go home.”

  Chapter 11

  The memory of that first night in my own home hit me in a flash, as if it had happened yesterday. Whoo.

  Brad and I had continued as a couple another few months. With finals and graduation I had no time to dwell on my feelings about what might have been a simple misunderstanding, and certainly no time or energy to talk seriously with him about it. There were little signs all along, I saw in retrospect. I walked off the podium with my new diploma in hand, joined him at the back of the auditorium afterward and handed him the ring.

  He and Stacy eloped less than two months later and even had the audacity to send me an invitation to their reception. I didn’t go and didn’t speak to either of them for more than eight years.

  “Charlie? You seem a million miles away,” Elsa said from the seat beside me. She held a huge bowl of potato salad on her lap.

  I blinked back the old memories and turned onto Ron and Victoria’s street. Drake was doing a midday flight and would meet us. Ron had warned that the steaks were going on the grill at six o’clock sharp, and if I knew my hubby he would definitely be here on time. The thought of Drake made me realize that Brad and Stacy’s betrayal had been one of the luckiest events of my life.

  “It looks like we’ve been blessed with this weather,” Elsa said. “This is the warmest April I’ve seen in awhile.”

  She says it every year, but I didn’t remind her.

  “I brought my jacket anyway. You young kids never seem to notice the cold but I sure do.”

  She also says that every year.

  I parked on the street in front of the house and helped Elsa with her potato salad, taking her elbow as she insisted on carrying the large bowl up the flagstone pathway to the front door. With my minimal cooking skills, my contribution to the party was a jar of salsa from Pedro’s and two large bags of chips, all jammed into a canvas tote bag.

  Ron answered the door, trailed by his ten-year-old, Joey, the only one of the three boys who hadn’t suddenly become six feet tall.

  “Hey, c’mon in,” Ron said. He took the bowl from Elsa. “Vic’s in the kitchen.”

  The scent of barbequed ribs filled the house, almost making my knees weak. I followed my nose and found Victoria lifting a wide pan with two racks of ribs from the oven. She set it on the stovetop and turned around, her face bright pink from the warmth.

  Elsa had followed Ron out to the backyard where he promised there was beer in the cooler.

  “Those ribs smell so good,” I said, taking a seat on one of the barstools at the granite counter.

  “They’ll be better after we add more sauce,” Victoria said.

  I must have whimpered.

  “You can have one now as an appetizer,” she offered. She started to pull the foil from the pan but I held up a hand.

  “I doubt I could eat just one. I’ll save it for later.” I pulled the chips from my tote bag. “We could open this salsa. I picked it up from Pedro’s yesterday. And there are two bags of his chips.”

  “Which are always fantastic.” She tore open the first cellophane bag and, like woodland creatures at the sound of prey, two of the boys loped into the room and eyed the bowl as chips filled it. “Take this out back,” she told them, “and leave enough for your dad to have some.”

  The two were gone already, handfuls of chips headed toward mouths.

  Victoria was shaking her head as she opened the second bag and dumped chips into another bowl. “It is truly astounding what those three can put away. They eat constantly.”

  “So, married life is good? Everyone settling in together?”

  “It’s great. The boys are only here alternate weeks, so Ron and I actually do have some couple time. My design business has kept me so busy since the first of the year, I’ve barely taken a breath.”

  Elsa came in from the backyard, a tall glass of iced tea in hand. I’d gotten an especially hot bite of the salsa and decided the tea was a good idea. As I walked out the back door to get some, I heard Elsa say, “I suppose Charlie told you about the new mystery in our neighborhood.”

  Still on the subject of the Delaney twins?

  In the back yard, Ron was doing something at the grill and I discovered Drake had joined the party. He must have come through the side gate. He gave me a quick kiss and pointed out the tea pitcher on a long table that was set up to hold the food when everything was ready. I poured myself a glass while he reached into the cooler for a beer.

  The two younger boys, Joey and Jason, were tossing a ball between them, while Justin slouched in a chair tapping away at his phone. I wandered toward him and took the seat beside him.

  “ ’sup, Aunt Charlie?” He didn’t take his eyes from the lines of text on the screen.

  “Not much. How about you?”

  A shrug. The dismissive attitude and inattention to an adult would have earned me or my brothers a cuff on the head from my dad. At the very least, a mild reprimand from Mother. These days, it seemed the way of the teen world.

  I searched for a topic of interest. “You have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know … Kinda. There’s some girls I like.” No eye contact but it was the longest communication I’d gotten from him yet.

  Could I tease another whole sentence from him? “Girls, huh. So they’re all interested in Justin Parker?”

  It wouldn’t be a stretch to think so. He had his dad’s height and dark hair, his mother’s chocolate-brown eyes, and a sexy little smile I’d like to think was similar to mine.

  He finally looked up at me and flashed the smile. “Yeah—you know. Girls don’t much settle with one guy. A lot of them just want to hook up.”

  Teen code for sex without any emotion attached.

  “Justin, really? That’s what they’re saying to you?” I gave a nod toward his phone.

>   He clicked the phone off, darkening the screen. “I think I’ll go get a Coke.”

  He made it sound as if the girls were propositioning the boys. At fifteen? Oh, come on, Charlie. You remember high school. The boys were doing the asking.

  With his phone stashed away, Justin looked like nothing more dangerous than a great big kid. He pulled a canned cola from the cooler and watched the younger boys throw the ball while he popped the top on it. Ron said something to him and he walked over and shook hands with Drake. The kids were growing up so fast.

  I meandered back inside to see if I could give Victoria a hand. She was seasoning a platter full of steaks and Elsa sat at the counter with her tea.

  “This looks like enough food for an army,” I joked.

  “I suppose the big surprise of my married life is how much food three growing boys can pack away,” Victoria said with a grin. “There are five adults and the three boys—do you think a dozen ears of corn will be enough?”

  I’m sure my eyes went wide. I’m used to planning food for two.

  She kept stacking corn into a huge kettle. “Hey, Elsa was just saying the twin girls who live up the street from you seem to be on their own a lot these days. Do you suppose they would like to be included in some of our gatherings? Maybe meet the boys?”

  I thought of Justin’s comments about girls and hooking up.

  “Um, let me think about it,” I said. “The girls are a bit older and probably have their own set of friends. I don’t know them very well, but I can go over and talk to them.”

  From Gram’s little smile, I suddenly knew she’d planted the seed of the idea in Victoria’s head with little thought as to how it would actually work out. She may have even plotted it all out to get me over there to see what the twins were up to. I sighed.