A Manor of Murder Page 3

  Added to my being dyslexic, I needed to work harder than most people to achieve results and improve my self-esteem.

  I tried to tone down my song while I moved away from Edward’s body. Eve was calling 911 and giving information. Possibly the person who killed him was still here, I realized, reining in the sound leaving my throat.

  When she hung up, I placed my finger across my lips to signal for her to keep quiet. She lifted her eyebrows, and I pointed at the closet door and then outside the windows. Tall, thick bushes stood around the lawn. It looked like branches moving from where two of them met.

  Eve tugged on my arm. Our next movements again reminded me of childhood when she and I took dance lessons and practiced crossing the floor on our toes. This time, we made our moves quieter as we rushed through rooms to get out the front door.

  The cool air felt good on my skin once we’d run out without getting attacked. Edward’s car was still in his driveway with my truck behind it. My instinct was to jump in my pickup and rush us away. Then we would be safe.

  Screaming sirens that neared made the hair on my arms raise but assured me we didn’t need to leave.

  In no time, the driveway and lawn were filled with vehicles of every sort. Police cars and an ambulance carried people who scrambled out of them while Eve and I waited, giving information to those who asked questions. The first young deputy had a full forehead of pimples. Afterward, an unmarked sedan pulled in on the lawn. Its stocky driver walked to us. I had never seen a man roll his eyes. This day, though, Detective Wilet speared us with his dark-eyed gaze and then flipped it toward the sky. Yes, us again.

  “Be in my office this afternoon,” he ordered, and we nodded. With nothing more, he stomped into the house through the open doorway.

  We slipped into my truck. “He knows the deputies questioned us already,” Eve said while I backed up and maneuvered us onto the highway.

  “My God, what do you think happened?” I said, driving away. “Edward couldn’t have just fallen in, could he?”

  She stared at me. “No. I believe he was murdered.”

  My breath caught. She’d voiced my belief. “But who could have done that? And why?”

  She gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. “We don’t know much about his life other than hearing him argue with the man who’d been there.”

  “And Edward was an attorney and Mom’s wedding planner.” Renewed thought of her marrying made my stomach pull tight.

  “And Mom’s beau was his uncle,” Eve reminded.

  That made everything worse. I focused ahead and steered toward a place of safety for us, my home or my twin’s. With what just happened, or what we’d just discovered, we couldn’t chance going out in public yet. Our conversation would be about a dead man, which was not something we would not want anyone else to hear. Even if we tried, I was certain we couldn’t just talk about everyday events. Finding a dead body was anything but ordinary.

  I drove to my house. We remained silent until we were locked inside. “That’s terrible,” I said. “The man shouldn’t be dead.”

  “Of course not. It’s such a pity.” Eve took a chair at my kitchen table.

  “I really did like him, even if we just had problems with him.”

  “I liked him, too.”

  I fixed us mugs of dark-roast coffee with lots of cream and sugar since we could use comforting. Then I gathered legal pads and pens for each of us and sat. “We’d just as soon write everything we know about Edward before we go downtown to get ready for the detective’s questions.”

  We drank coffee and wrote. Sometimes we stopped and discussed things like asking each other when we recalled first meeting our client, which was different for each of us. Occasionally one of us would stare into space, thinking. We got up and walked, deep in thought. Still quiet, we returned to the table and wrote. Twice I grabbed snacks for us. I kept a stash of chips and chocolate chip cookies for times like this. Not really like this, like expecting a person we knew to get murdered. It was more that sometimes I just wanted to stuff a bit of unhealthy food into my mouth. My twin did not, so she stayed trim, while I spread out more in the waist and hips. Today she didn’t complain about junk food and shoved much of it into her mouth like I did.

  My phone’s ring made me jump. I wasn’t expecting a call and feared if I spoke to anyone, I wouldn’t be able to hide my concern about finding a dead person. I certainly couldn’t think creatively now and didn’t want to have to discuss ideas with a potential customer. Instead of answering, I considered letting it ring, and if someone wanted to, they could leave a message.

  I glanced at the caller’s name: Mom.

  Dreading how I would sound to her, I showed Eve her name and then clicked to answer, putting my phone on speaker.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said as though everything were normal and that she had not told us she had wedding plans and her intended’s nephew was planning it all. And then he and Eve and I had argued, and he’d insisted he would rush the ceremony. And then we found him dead.

  “Sunny,” Mom said. “I tried to call your sister’s phone, but she must have it off.”

  Eve nodded. She probably turned off the ringer right after her 911 call.

  “Did you need her for anything in particular?” I asked Mom. In one way, I was pleased to hear from her. In another, I feared giving away what happened.

  She hesitated. “It’s just that you’re a little more delicate than she is.”

  “I am not.” I bit my lower lip. Why would I want to argue with her now?

  Eve kept nodding, like she agreed with our mother.

  “Something’s happened,” Mom told me. “Somebody killed Mac’s nephew.”

  “Oh no.” My gaze shot toward Eve, and I realized I was reacting to Mom’s news as though I hadn’t heard it or experienced it firsthand. Hearing her say the words made the entire event feel fresh, deadly fresh.

  “Yes. Since my fiancé is his next of kin, the police showed up here to tell him.”

  “Oh, Mom, I am so sorry.”

  “I know. It’s awful.”

  I gripped the phone tighter, feeling her pain, so sad for our mother’s anguish. “Is there anything we can do?”

  She grew silent, making me fearful that she might say we had already done enough with having such harsh talks with the deceased. I dreaded having her discover we had found him. She surely didn’t know it yet. But she would.

  “Just say a prayer for his soul and for Mac. I’m sure the police will find out what happened, and justice will be served.” Forever rational, she would believe that. But nobody ever discovered who murdered my older sister. Mom loudly exhaled. “I can let you know when Edward’s funeral will be taking place. I hope you and your sister can be there.”

  “Of course.” I lifted my gaze toward Eve. Her face mirrored my sadness. “Let us know.”

  “I will. And, Sunny, I really do love you and your sister.”

  Her words pulled tears from my eyes. She hadn’t expressed those sentiments last time. “I love you, too, Mom.” I worked my throat to get more words to move out past the new lump. “And, Mom, everything will be all right.”

  “I know, honey. I need to go now.”

  Once we disconnected, I wordlessly stared at Eve and she at me. Surely she was processing the words and feelings expressed by our mother, who felt loving toward us again. What caused the change ran through my mind, but I didn’t want to consider it.

  “Maybe I should have told her we knew he died, and we found him,” I said.

  Eve’s lips pulled back in a grimace. “Will she still say that she loves us when she finds out?”

  “She will. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Eve turned her paper over and began to draw. She drew circles, small and increasingly larger circles that connected and then some that did not. She moved her pen tip over and created he
arts, these similar to what she often painted.

  I turned my sheet over. I drew a couple of simple flowers and then created crude stick people. One of them held a large stick knife. Another lay inside a large oval—Edward’s tub.

  “We need to go see Detective Wilet.” I lifted my pad, hiding that page. We grabbed our purses and pads and headed to the station, both aware that what was coming was not something we looked forward to.

  The sheriff’s office had been spruced up since the last time we’d been there. Thank goodness no murders had occurred that we’d been involved with in quite some time. Actually, we weren’t involved in murders. We’d only been around them, making Detective Wilet believe we were more connected than we were.

  His office, down the hall, had received a fresh coat of pale yellow paint, already scuffed with dark scratches. The notices and awards now clustered together as we had suggested instead of being strung along the wall like broken snap beans. The odor of fresh coffee came from the new pot on a small table in the hall, replacing the incessant stench of the burned bottom of the last one.

  Eve and I passed open doors, where people speaking quietly in rooms paid no attention to us, and reached the detective’s unmarked open door to the left. He sat behind his desk that was cluttered with papers. He worked on some of them until he finally looked up at us in his doorway. “Come in. Sit.” He nodded to the pair of gray metal chairs across from him. “I see you brought your homework.”

  We lifted our pads we had written on.

  “We knew you’d want information,” Eve said.

  “We wrote the things we could think of.”

  He leaned back in his thinly cushioned chair, wide hands clasped behind his head. His thick lips showed some potential of a smile. “I never had anyone do that before. Go ahead, let’s hear what you have.”

  “You first,” I told Eve, who, after all, was the oldest. By six minutes.

  “All right.” She held up her pad. I saw she had written her information in paragraph form. I glanced at my notes. I’d numbered mine and made a list. Eve’s ability to always read words in sentences and numbers in order was a talent our parents hadn’t passed on to me. She told him about some man named Carl we had seen there arguing with Edward and described him and his car. As she was reading her notes to Detective Wilet, his hands lowered, his potential smile wiped away.

  He leaned forward in his chair. “You were really involved with the victim.” His eyes took in me and my twin. Then he wrote notes, leaving his words in the air. What were we to interpret from them?

  “All right, now you.” He pointed his pen at me.

  “Could he have just fallen in his tub and knocked his head?” I asked. “The water was running. Maybe he tripped and fell backward?”

  He gripped his chin. Letting it go, he pointed at what I held. “Your list,” he said.

  Once I began, starting with how Edward contacted us, wanting to talk about ideas we might come up with on how to restore an older traditional house he had bought and make it more contemporary before he would move in, Wilet’s eyes narrowed. “Let me see that,” he said, and I held up my pad, ready to give it to him. He held up a hand to stop me. “I only wanted to see how you have that written.”

  Maybe he thought Eve’s style of writing was better, but I had learned to accept what I could do and what I could not. Things I mentioned about the few times we had been in the same house as Edward ever since we took the job made the detective’s eyes appear to gloss over, possibly since Eve already told him most of it. He sat straighter, alert detective mode, when I told of the dead man’s connection to our mother.

  “Your mother’s getting married?” he asked, penning notes.

  Eve wore a grim expression. “That’s what she said.”

  I was ready to blurt that we didn’t want her to, but second thoughts told me not to. Letting him know our feelings about that and the ensuring argument with the man who was now dead probably was not something we’d want to mention.

  The detective wrote more while Eve and I sat quietly. I became aware of the pulse on the right side of my neck. He stared at me. “You two had completed your work at Mr. Cancienne’s house and were retrieving your tools when you found him, is that right?”

  Eve had told him that, so much better worded than I could have thought of. “Correct.”

  “And all of the remodeling he wanted done there was complete?”

  No, we had planned to remodel the downstairs bathroom, too. “We finished everything he wanted us to do.” A bead of sweat ran between my breasts.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  I shook my head and saw Eve doing the same, both of us with tights lips pulled low at the outer edges and eyebrows lifted in our innocent expressions. “No, nothing,” I said, although the words came out higher pitched than normal.

  I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but then considered his job was to detect. Detect problems, inconsistencies. He kept a hard stare aimed at my face, and I wanted to squirm like a guilty student seated in front of a principal. I managed to swallow twice under his watchful eye. My exhale sounded too loud when he turned those hard eyes away toward my sister. I became aware that she was experiencing the same emotions I just had and needed to remind myself we were guilty of nothing.

  “You know this isn’t the first time you two have been around murders.” Detective Wilet leveled his gaze from one to the other of us.

  “But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Eve reminded.

  “We became victims.” I jutted out my chin. My body had finally healed after I’d been shot.

  “Yes. Thank you for coming in. I may be talking to you again.”

  Relief swept like a downpour through my body while we left his office. Why, I wasn’t certain, although I had a feeling he would tie us both to our customer’s murder, and I did not want to deal with that.

  No, we didn’t do it. But would we again need to prove that was true?

  Chapter 4

  I drove Eve home and tried, with little success, to keep from looking at houses near hers where things had occurred that caused much of our stress. What was happening now was most important, I told myself, parking behind her garage door that she opened with her remote. We walked through the garage she kept as immaculate as her Lexus and lovely home and into the kitchen while the garage door rolled down quietly behind us.

  Eve punched quick numbers into the alarm beside her door and spun toward me, hands flying up at her sides. “Sunny, what’s going to happen once he finds out we had an argument with Edward and then he fired us from the job?”

  I tightened my jaw. “I know. That’ll look suspicious on our parts.”

  Her torso swayed back. “We’re sunk.”

  That sentiment struck me, too, but only for an instant. “Oh, come on, sis. We didn’t really do anything.”

  She kept eye contact with me for long moments. “Right, but there’s the sin of omission.”

  Again, we weren’t guilty, I reminded myself. I didn’t need to tell her, but determined the painful experiences we would need to go through. A ring from her front doorbell drew our attention. On edge, I went with her to the door, where she looked through the peephole. Her entire demeanor changed. A smile brightened Eve’s face, bringing one to me, too. She unchained, unlocked, and opened the door.

  “You’re here,” Eve said and stepped forward, arms up and then around the neck of her caller.

  Dave Price looked at me over her shoulder while a jealous tinge ran through me. He shared the hug with her, but let her go before she moved her arms away from him. Then he moved forward and hugged me. I hugged back, enjoying the feel of his broad shoulders and the comfort of being close to him. We stepped apart.

  “I heard what happed and wanted to see if I could help.”

  “Come in,” I said, and we all moved from the foyer into the den
. As usual, my emotions started battling each other when considering him. Although we hadn’t told Eve that he and I were a couple, planning to be a more committed one, he learned of a murder we were involved in and showed up at my sister’s house, not mine.

  “Have a seat,” Eve said, and he settled himself in a cushioned chair. She and I took the marshmallow-soft sofa, she taking the side nearest him. “I’m not sure what you could do, or even anything we can do about what happened. Sunny and I haven’t discussed it much yet. But it sure is nice for you to come and offer.” She did something I hadn’t seen her do in a while—my sister batted her eyes at him. She was leaning toward him so far she could have fallen off the sofa, and I was sure she would want to land on his lap. And she’d want me to leave. I would not.

  “I knew you two would be together right now,” he said. “Sunny, I went by your house and when I didn’t see either of your vehicles, I figured you’d both be here.”

  I allowed a small smile on my lips. He had gone to my place first.

  Eve’s phone rang from her purse she had left in the kitchen. “Excuse me,” she said and went to get it.

  Dave spoke to me, voice lowered. “I hope you’ve gotten over your silly anger about what I said about your mother’s engagement.”

  I really hadn’t thought of it. Possibly I thought of couples being engaged after a future bride announced their exciting news and showing off her ring. I stared at Dave, realizing my mother had announced her news to us—or Edward had, and maybe that was a reason we’d been so shocked. And hurt? Did she have a ring? New brides didn’t always have one for engagements, but we didn’t even let our mother have time to show it if she had one on her finger.