touched him, just a quick, almost furtive brush of her hand on his arm, much as she had touched Josh earlier. Through his cotton shirt, he could feel the warmth of her skin and he was astonished at the urge to wrap his arms around her and pull her close and just lean on her for a moment.
“I’m so sorry, Ross.”
He cleared his throat and told himself he was nothing but relieved when she pulled her hand away.
“Thanks again for everything you did tonight,” he said. “I would have been in a real fix without you.”
“I’m glad I could help in some small way.”
She smiled gently and he was astonished at how that simple warm expression could ease the tightness in his chest enough that he could breathe just a little easier.
“It’s late,” she finally said. “Or early, I guess. I’d better go.”
“Oh right. I’m sorry again you had to be here so long.”
“I’d like to say goodbye to Josh before I leave, if it’s all right with you,” she said.
“Of course,” he answered and followed her into the kitchen.
In his fantasy childhood, the kitchen was always the warmest room in the house, a place scattered with children’s backpacks and clumsy art work on the refrigerator and homemade cookies cooling on a rack on the countertop.
He hadn’t known anything like that, except at the occasional friend’s house. To his regret, Frannie’s kitchen wasn’t anything like that image, either. It was as cool and formal as the rest of the house—white cabinets, white tile, stainlesssteel appliances. It was like some kind of hospital lab rather than the center of a house.
Josh sat on a white bar stool, his cell phone up to his ear.
“I told you, Lyns,” he was saying, “I don’t have any more information than I did when we talked an hour ago. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything, okay? Meantime, you have to get some rest. You know what—”
Ross wasn’t sure what alerted the boy to their presence but before he could complete the sentence, he suddenly swiveled around to face them. Ross was almost certain he saw secrets flash in his nephew’s eyes before his expression turned guarded again.
“Um, I’ve got to go, Lyns,” he mumbled into the phone. “My uncle Ross just got here. Yeah. I’ll call you later.”
He ended the call, folded his phone and slid it into his pocket before he uncoiled his lanky frame from the chair.
“How’s my mom? Is she with you?”
Ross sighed. “No. I’m sorry.”
“How long can they hold her?”
“For now, as long as they want. She’s being charged.”
His features suffused with color. “Charged? With murder?”
Ross nodded, wishing he had other news to offer his nephew.
“This completely sucks.”
That was one word for it, he supposed. A pretty accurate one. “Yeah, it does. But there’s nothing we can do about it tonight. Meanwhile, Ms. Osterman needs to get on back to her house. She came in to tell you goodbye.”
He was proud of the boy for reining in most of his outrage in order to be polite to Julie.
“Thank you for giving me a ride and staying here and everything,” Josh said to her. “And even though I told you I didn’t need you to stay so late, it was…nice not to be here by myself and all.”
“You’re very welcome.” She smiled with that gentle warmth she just seemed to exude, paused for just a moment, then stepped forward and hugged the boy, who was a good six inches taller than she was.
“Call me if you need to talk, okay?” she said softly.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, though Ross was pretty sure Josh looked touched by her concern.
They both walked her to the door and watched her climb into her car. When she drove away, Ross shut the door to Frannie’s wedding-cake house and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do next.
He would just have to figure it out, he supposed.
He didn’t have any other choice.
This was just about the last place on earth he wanted to be right now.
In fact, given a choice between attending his despised brother-in-law’s funeral and wading chest-deep in a manure pit out on the Double Crown, Ross figured he would much rather be standing in cow honey swatting flies away from his face than sitting here in this discreetly decorated funeral home, surrounded by the cloying smell of lilies and carnations and listening to all the weeping and wailing going on over a man most people in town had disliked.
It would be over soon. Already, the eulogies seemed to be dwindling. He could only feel relief. This all seemed the height of hypocrisy. He knew of at least a dozen people here who had openly told him at separate times over the last few days how much they had hated Lloyd. Yet here they were with their funeral game faces, all solemn and sad-eyed.
He glanced over at his nephew, who seemed to be watching the entire proceedings with an odd detachment, as if it was all some kind of mildly interesting play that had no direct bearing in his life.
Josh seemed to be holding up well under the strain of the last five days. Maybe too well. The boy’s only intense emotion over anything seemed to be rage at the prosecuting attorney for moving ahead with charges against his mother.
It had been a hellish five days, culminating in this farce. First had come the medical examiner’s report read at Frannie’s arraignment that Lloyd had been killed with a blunt instrument whose general size and heft matched the large piece of pottery his sister had purchased shortly before the murder. Then reports had begun to trickle out that the heavy vase had several sets of unidentified fingerprints on it—and one very obvious identified set that belonged to his sister.
Added to Crystal’s testimony that Lloyd had a heated phone call with Frannie shortly before the murder, things weren’t looking good for his sister.
A good attorney with the typical cooperative client might have been able to successfully argue that Frannie’s fingerprints would naturally be on the vase since she had purchased it just a short time earlier, and that a hearsay one-sided telephone exchange—no matter how heated—was not proof of murder.
But Frannie was not the typical cooperative client. Despite the high stakes, she refused to confirm or deny her involvement in Lloyd’s murder and had chosen instead to remain mum about the entire evening, even to her attorney.
Ross didn’t know what the hell she was doing. He had visited twice more since the night of the murder in an effort to convince her to just tell him and the Red Rock police what had happened, but she had shut him out, too. Each time, he had ended up leaving more frustrated than ever.
As a result of her baffling, completely unexpected obstinacy, she had been charged with
