Drowning in Amber (A Marie Jenner Mystery Book 2) (5 page)

Bea sighed as though I’d asked her an impossible question and turned away from the door, her hand still firmly on the door knob. “Naomi!” she called. “There’s a girl here. She won’t leave.”

“Marie Jenner,” I said. “But really, I can come back—”

“A Mary Jenner,” Bea called. “She said she needs to talk to you.”

There was a commotion from somewhere inside the house and Bea frowned just before she was rather unceremoniously pushed away from the door by a slight woman with a hairdo that seemed far too tightly pulled back and a ferocious expression on her face.

“Where is she?” she cried, as she pushed past the older woman. Trying to get to me.

“Good luck,” Dead Eddie whispered. “You’re about to meet my mom. She seems pissed.” He grinned. “Does she seem pissed to you?”

Yes, she did. I took a tiny step back, teetering on the very edge of the topmost step.

“You!” Eddie’s mom cried. “Are you one of those drug fiends? Like that Luke Stewart! Are you?”

Her voice wound up to a scream, and she fought Bea, who was trying to pull her back into the house.

“My name is Marie Jenner,” I said, grubbing in my purse for a business card. I could not believe I was now face to face with Eddie’s mom. I just wanted to get as far away from this place as I could. No way I was going to be able to be alone with Eddie after this.

“I suppose you’re here for money or something,” Eddie’s mom snarled. “That’s all you drug fiends want, isn’t it? Showing up at my house. Demanding money . . .”

She sobbed, then pulled her hand back and swung at me. If I hadn’t moved my head, she’d have slapped me across the face.

“I am not a drug fiend,” I said, waving the business card in the air like a pathetic flag of surrender. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to your son.”

“My son is dead!” she screeched, tears and mascara flooding her cheeks. “Why can’t you fiends leave me alone?”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Tell her that those bitches did it,” Eddie said, quite conversationally for someone watching his mother have a full core meltdown. “Queen Bea and her mob. Tell her that. She deserves to know.”

I ignored him because he was definitely not being helpful.

“Don’t you want to know what happened to your son?” I asked.

“Of course I do!” Eddie’s mother screamed. She took another small step forward and then sank to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Bea caught her before she collapsed completely.

“Let’s get you inside,” she said, soothingly. She turned her head and bellowed, “I need some help here!” A thundering herd of middle-aged women appeared in the foyer and scooped up Eddie’s sobbing mom, pulling her away from my line of sight and back into the house.

“I told you she wasn’t ready for visitors,” Bea said, smugly.

“I didn’t want to upset her,” I said. “I was just looking for—”

“She has every reason to be upset.” Bea rode roughshod over my words. “Even though I think that it’s better, in the long run, that her boy is dead.”

“What?” I gasped, barely able to believe what I had just heard.

“What?!” Eddie was having even more trouble with what the big woman said. He turned to me. “Do you have a gun?” he asked. “Shoot her right now. No one would ever blame you.”

I shook my head, then turned back to the woman at the door.

“You can’t mean that,” I said.

“I absolutely do,” the woman replied. “In fact, I thank the good Lord he’s finally dead. What his mother has gone through.”

I tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t manage anything past blinking, repeatedly.

“I’m just speaking the truth,” she said. “That boy was a millstone around poor Naomi’s neck since the day he was born. This is a blessing.”

“A blessing?” I whispered.

“It wasn’t a blessing, you cow,” Eddie muttered. “Shut your mouth.”

“And it was inevitable,” the woman continued. “Someone was going to put that dog down, eventually.”

“Dog,” Eddie whispered. “She’s calling me a dog.”

I glanced over at him and was horrified to see that his light had all but extinguished. This woman’s words were destroying him, right in front of me.

“Mom,” Eddie gasped. “Make her stop.”

A swirl of ice cold hit me as he staggered up to the door and into me. He started screaming again, and for a few horrifying seconds, I was caught inside him and could feel all his fear, and self-loathing, and sickness. And something else. Something that instantly ate away my stomach, but made me ache with hunger at the same time.

I couldn’t take it anymore, and flailed my way out of him, then stood, gasping for air.

“Is there something wrong with you, girl?” Bea asked, as Eddie disappeared back inside the house.

“No,” I said shortly, as I waited for my eyesight to clear.

I couldn’t exactly call out to Eddie to get him to come back and talk to me, ghost to living, but I had to give him a way to find me.

“Give this to Mrs. Hansen,” I said, holding the business card out to Bea. “And ask her to call me.”

She didn’t answer me. Just took the card between two fingers, as though it was covered with dirt or something. Then she sneered and slammed the door.

“Well,” I muttered. “That could have gone better.”

Truer words, and all that. I crept back to the Volvo, and with one last look at the front of that house, I drove away.

No wonder Eddie did drugs. With people like that around, how could he have done anything but?

I was pretty sure he was wrong about that bunch of women having anything to do with his death, but I knew that if I didn’t prove to him that they weren’t involved, he’d never get off that tack. And he needed to, if he was going to be able to help me find out who really killed him.

I needed to talk to him again, but not in that house. I hoped that he’d see the business card and the address on the front.

“Please, Eddie,” I muttered, as I white-knuckled it back to James’s office. “Please come to me, so we can talk. For real, this time.”

HERE’S THE ONLY
cool thing that happened in a day otherwise filled to the brim with warm shit. Queen Bea gave my mother the business card from that crazy girl. Marie. Marie Jenner, from the Jimmy Lavall Detective Agency.

I stared at the card, attempting to commit the address to a memory that was notoriously bad. Hoped I’d hang onto it as Mom scooped up the card and stared at it, hard.

“What do you think I should do about this?” she asked the cackling old crows. They all thought about it for a minute, then told her to let it go.

“You have enough on your plate right now, dear,” Bea said. “You don’t need to deal with anything more. Don’t you think so, girls?”

The “girls” all agreed, so enthusiastically I thought I’d puke.

And then that old bitch plucked the business card from my mom’s hand and dropped it in her huge purse. “Why don’t you let me deal with little Mary Jenner?”

“All right,” Mom whispered, and my heart wrenched. She sounded so hurt. So lost. And it was my fault. I couldn’t stay there and see that look on her face. Not for one more moment.

As I left my mother’s house, I heard Mom thank them for all their help and for being such good and loyal friends.

Yeah, Mom. You got some great friends there
, I thought.

Then everything went grey, and I guess I lost it again because when I came to, I was back at the tree where I’d been crucified.

This must be what hell is like.

I DROVE BACK
to the office with no problem at all, even though I was in a particularly foul mood.

I’d found Brown Eddie, but hadn’t been able to convince him to give me any useful information about the people who killed him. All he’d done was blame his mother’s book club.

I mean, really. A book club?

I realized I’d probably have to go back to that horrible tree if I wanted to talk to him again, because it looked like he was ping-ponging back and forth between those two places. I shuddered, hating the thought of seeing that tree again.

However, our potential client, Honoria Lowe, had given me a really decent clue. She’d led me right to Dead Eddie’s mom’s place with that sketch she’d made. Maybe I’d be able to figure out who killed Eddie without having to deal with him again at all. Maybe she’d just draw it all for me.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Solving a murder without dealing with the dead guy? Just dealing with someone who dreamed about the dead.

I sighed deeply as I parked the car and trudged up the stairs to James’s office. I couldn’t seem to get away from the dead, no matter how hard I tried.

I GLANCED AT
my watch and was surprised to see only an hour and a half had gone by.
Having a vehicle certainly cuts down on the away time
, I thought as I let myself into the office proper.
I could get used to that
.

James looked up from one of his books and smiled.

“My car all right?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied. “Hardly hit anything.”

His face whitened at my pathetic excuse for a joke, and I mentally kicked myself. He’d been through enough, lately.

“It’s all good, James,” I said, hastily. “Didn’t have one problem. Thanks for letting me use it.”

As I handed him the keys and he pocketed them, I was relieved to see the colour come back to his face.

“Glad it helped,” he said. “So, how went the wild goose chase?”

“Very well,” I replied, trying to keep my smile from disappearing, even though his words instantly ticked me off. “I ended up at the dead guy’s house. Well, not his house, exactly. His mom’s house.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Huh.”

He looked suspicious. Like maybe he thought I was lying to him. Which, of course, ticked me off even more.

“I’m telling you the truth,” I bristled, like a stupid cat ready to do battle. “That address on the sketch took me right to her house. I even talked to her.” Sort of.

“I didn’t think you were lying,” he said, but something in his tone still sounded off. “But maybe Honoria knows Eddie’s mom. Maybe she knows Eddie.”

“She said she didn’t.” I frowned. “If she knows them, why wouldn’t she tell us? The cops will figure that out quickly enough. Won’t they?”

“They should,” James said. “That murder was messy enough, and public enough, that they’ll want to catch the people responsible. For the media, if nothing else.”

“Well, then, why would Honoria lie to us about knowing Eddie?”

“People say a lot of things to protect themselves,” he replied. “Maybe she figures that going back to the nuthouse would be better than going to jail for murder. If she has us following her ‘vision’ leads, this might convince the cops that she’s gone crazy again.”

This took me aback. I never once thought that Honoria was lying about being a clairvoyant. But what if she was? What if she was playing us—me?

“Did you ask Mrs. Hansen if she knew Honoria?” James asked.

“I didn’t even think of it,” I admitted. “She’d just found out about Eddie being dead.” I shrugged. “Probably not the best time for me to drop by for a chat. She was sure I was one of Eddie’s ‘drug fiend’ friends. She mentioned someone named Luke. Luke Stewart. She called him another drug fiend. Maybe he’s someone we can check out?”

“Maybe,” James said. He glanced at the bare desk top, and sighed. “If we had our computers, this would be so easy,” he said. The police had taken them both, as evidence from our last—and only—case, and it looked like we weren’t going to get them back for a while. If ever. “We need to get a replacement. You know, something cheap, just for searches and stuff, until we get ours back.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, and then burst out with, “Can you afford that?” without thinking.

“Yes,” he said, with that superior smile all those people with a bank account that doesn’t hover around zero use that drives the rest of us crazy. “Let’s go tomorrow.”

We. This meant vicarious shopping, which took the sting out of the superior smile I’d probably imagined. “I love that idea,” I said.

After that, we settled into a tiny, comfortable bit of silence. I would have thankfully stayed there for a long time—like a cat in a sunbeam or something—but James snapped the moment.

“Have you called your mother lately?”

I blinked.

“No,” I finally said, looking out the far window, even though there was nothing much to see.

“You should,” he said. “She’s probably worried.”

“Probably,” I mumbled. I walked over to the window and stared out, willing James to shut his mouth about Mom.