by Jeff Shelby
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Jake asked. “We don’t want to leave you…”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll be fine,” she told him, and I wondered if it was as much for self-affirmation as it was to convince Jake. “Besides, you need to get those kids settled. I’m sure everything will be fine.”
But I wasn’t so sure. Because I didn’t trust Detective Grimmis to lay off the questioning, and I didn’t trust Gloria to keep her mouth shut.
Jake glanced at me. “Not a bad idea.” He nodded toward the kids. “Natives are getting restless.”
Will was laid out on his back, his eyes closed, earbuds in his ear. Emily was scowling at her phone, most likely because Andy wasn't responding to her texts or her battery was running low. Sophie and Grace were thumb wrestling and arguing about who had won the last battle.
I smiled at Gloria. “If you’re sure?”
“Yes,” she said. She waved her hand. “Go. Get settled.”
She gave me the address and I typed it into my phone. She gave us the walking directions, and we pulled our luggage from the bus and headed away from the chaos of Gloria's house. The sun was warm, the humidity getting thicker by the minute, and I was covered in a fine sheen of sweat.
“Is Aunt Gloria going to jail, Mom?” Grace asked, pulling her Barbie roller bag behind her.
I tugged on the straps of my backpack, trying to adjust them so they weren’t digging into my skin. “No, honey, I don't think so.”
“Why not?” Will said, one earbud in and one out. “They found a dead body in her house.”
“Yeah, and so did we,” I reminded him. “And we didn’t kill Olaf.”
“But she might've done it,” Will argued. “She said she didn’t like that woman. What was her name, the lady that was murdered? Agatha?”
“Agnes,” I said. “And we don’t know that she was murdered. Yet.” It was true. All they had was a dead body. Agnes could have died from natural causes. In Gloria’s kitchen.
“She didn't kill anyone,” I said firmly. I looked at Jake, who was loaded down with carry-on bags and our suitcase. I lowered my voice and asked, “Did she?”
“You're asking me?” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I haven't seen her in years. I have no idea. So, yeah, she could maybe be a murderer.”
Grace made a little noise and I glared at him. “Stop.”
“Oh my god, it's hot,” Emily said, her shoulders sagging beneath the weight of her own backpack and lugging a roller bag in each hand. Once the ban on luggage had been lifted, she’d packed multiple outfits for each day. And all of her cosmetics. And all of her hair supplies, including, no doubt, her curling iron, hair dryer, and flat iron. “I'm gonna die.”
“I wish,” Will muttered.
“Maybe you shouldn't have brought so much stuff?” Sophie offered, her purple backpack bulging on her back. “You have three bags.”
“I need a lot of stuff,” Emily told her. “Just wait. You’ll understand in a couple of years.”
“You brought seven pairs of shoes,” Will said, shaking his head. “We're here for, like, five days. And two hair dryers. You brought two dryers.”
I was unaware of this.
“That's because I care about how I look,” she shot back. “Unlike you, I don't want people to mistake me for a hobo.”
And their fascination with hobos lived on, I thought, thinking back to all of the conversations we’d had about hobos.
Will just rolled his eyes and shook his head. He’d learned pretty quickly that the best thing to do with Emily was to simply disengage. Because it drove her nuts.
“Everyone should just be happy we’re in the sun rather than shoveling eighteen feet of snow,” Jake said, his face tilted toward the giant yellow ball of fire in the sky. “Savor every moment of the light and ice-free pavement.”
We walked five blocks in the sunshine and I directed everyone to our left, on to the street that our house was supposedly on. I was admittedly nervous about seeing the rental. The last time Jake and I had gone on a vacation, the accommodations had turned out to be significantly different than advertised. On that trip, it had been just the two of us, so we'd made due. And also found a dead body.
But with the kids in tow this time, I was worried that if the rental house wasn't what we were expecting, it would be far more difficult to make it work.
My fears, though, were quickly abated as we reached the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was similar in design to Gloria's but a little longer, and on a bigger lot. It was a stucco exterior with a wide green lawn, the landscape dotted with mini palms and hibiscus plants. A brand new-looking silver minivan was parked in the driveway.
“Is that our car?” Grace asked.
“Think so,” I told her.
“Whoa,” she said. “That's cool.”
There was a small lockbox near the front door and I punched in the code Gloria had given me, finding the house key inside. I stuck the key in the lock and pushed open the front door.
The cool rush of air-conditioned air was a welcome change from the sticky humidity we'd been walking in. Everyone kicked off their shoes in the tiled entryway, dropped their bags, and took off to explore the house.
The interior was immaculate, light and bright and very Florida feeling, with beach prints papering the walls and plantation shutters on the windows. Jake and I found our room at the back of the house, past a living room with a big screen TV and a massive, open kitchen with a bar. There were packages of donuts and cookies on the counter and a quick glance in the fridge confirmed that Gloria had picked up a few other groceries, too: milk and orange juice, some fruit and butter. A loaf of bread was on the opposite counter next to the toaster, along with a package of gourmet coffee.
“She really went out of her way to make us feel welcome,” I murmured, overcome with gratitude.
I followed Jake into the bedroom. Our oversized master suite was probably four times the size of our own room at home, with a king-size bed, a walk-in shower and oversized tub.
“I might never leave,” Jake said, setting his bag on the bed.
“We aren't old enough to live here,” I reminded him.
He flopped down on the bed. “Not yet,” he said. He closed his eyes and sighed. “Sunshine. Space. All I need now is a beer.”
“We have a pool!” Sophie yelled from the living room. “In the backyard!”
We’d kept that a surprise, just in case it wasn’t in working order. We’d been burned by our resort trip to make any promises about accommodations until we actually saw them.
“Can we go swimming?” Grace screamed. “Right now?”
I pulled open the blinds on the window that looked out at the back of the house. A sparkling blue pool and lounge chairs beckoned.
“Yep, go ahead and change,” I yelled back.
They shrieked and their feet pounded on the tile toward somewhere else in the house.
“There's a game room,” Will said, sticking his head in our room. “Air hockey and ping pong. And did we get a WiFi password?”
“It's on the little rental sheet by the front door in the entryway,” I said.
“Cool,” he said and disappeared.
Emily took his place in the doorway. “My room has its own bathroom!” she said, finally happy about something.
“Awesome,” I said, smiling at her.
“I know, right? I get a bathroom all to myself instead of having to share it with five other people!”
Between the sun and the space and the number of bathrooms, I was pretty sure she and Jake were never going to want to leave. The girls would be hard-pressed to return home, too, considering the fact that they were getting ready to swim in their own personal pool.
Emily held up her phone. “And what's the WiFi password?”
“Will just went to get it.”
She made a face, probably assuming he'd hide it from her, but took off in search of him.
I lay down next to Jake. “I think the house
is a hit.”
“No dead bodies, so yeah.”
I poked him in the ribs. “Stop it.”
“It's sort of like you're that lady on Murder, She Wrote,” he said, opening one eye. “Everywhere you go, corpses just show up.”
“That's not funny.”
“It's kind of funny,” he said, chuckling. “I'm gonna start keeping a tally sheet.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You might need one for your divorces, too, if you don't stop.”
He laughed again. “Alright, alright. I'll stop. Grandma would never let me hear the end of it if I got divorced again.”
We both giggled at this.
“Is your aunt going to be okay?” I asked him, watching the ceiling fan spin slowly above us. “I mean, it’s not every day you find a dead body in your house.”
“Unless you’re us,” Jake said, and I poked him again. He grunted. “I don’t know. I hope so. But it's not like I really know her, you know? I don't know much about her. She's my aunt. Garrett's mom. I remember her from when I was a kid, but other than that?” He shrugged. “There isn’t much else there.”
Jake wasn't great at staying in touch with family members. I had to remind him to make phone calls or texts when birthdays or anniversaries popped up on the calendar. He didn't make an effort to reach out to most of his extended family. He said there wasn't a reason for it. He didn't hold any animosity toward anyone or anything like that, but he just chose to concentrate on the people who were close by and in his home. He enjoyed receiving Christmas cards and seeing what his extended family was doing in other parts of the country, but he felt no urgency to build or maintain those long-distance connections.
“Maybe your grandmother killed that woman,” I suggested, grinning. “She seems capable.”
Jake laughed again. “Grandma's a piece of work. I definitely wouldn’t put it past her. Not sure if she’s that mobile, though.”
I pictured her in her wheelchair, trying to maneuver it from the clubhouse to Gloria’s home with her thin, bony hands. “Hmm. Maybe she put out a hit. Gloria said no one liked Agnes, right?”
“Mom!” Will’s scream startled both of us into sitting positions. “Mom! Come quick! Mom!”
We both jumped off the bed and hustled through the house. We weren't used to hearing Will sound emotional about anything, and the way he yelled made me think he'd come face-to-face with a serial killer.
He was standing in the hallway that led to the bedrooms, a panic-stricken expression on his face.
“What's wrong?” I asked, touching his shoulder.
He pointed into the room. “In there. Look in there.”
I walked into the bedroom. Characters from Finding Nemo were painted on the walls. There was a single twin bed, a writing desk, and a small, flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. There was no blood splattered on the walls or bodies mangled on the beige carpeting.
“What's wrong?” I asked. “I don't see anything.”
“You don't see anything?” he said, his eyes growing large. “How can you not see it?”
I turned in a slow circle, looking for whatever had spooked him. Then I looked at Jake.
He shrugged, not seeing anything either.
“Look over by the bed,” Will said. “On the wall.”
I stepped closer to the bed.
“It's huge,” Will said. “I'm not sleeping in here.”
Just above the headboard, a spider roughly the size of a dime clung menacingly to the wall.
“What's going on?” Emily said from the hallway.
The two younger girls squeezed into the room, already in their bathing suits.
“Spider,” I said. “There's a tiny spider on the wall.”
“It's not tiny,” Will countered. “It's huge. I'm not sleeping in here.”
Will had a thing about spiders. Most of the time, he coasted through life caring about very little and disturbed by even less. But his kryptonite was spiders. It didn't matter the size and it didn't matter where they were found. They creeped him out. The girls regularly relished placing fake, plastic spiders in his vicinity, waiting for him to freak out and take off running. They lived for it.
So I knew there was no way he was going to sleep in this bedroom.
I looked at Emily. “There are two beds in your room, right?”
Her face reddened. “No. No. There's only one.”
“That's not true,” Grace said. “Sophie and I just looked. There are two. The bedspreads are blue and you put all of your shoes on one of them.”
Sophie nodded.
Emily glared at both of them, then looked at me. “I'm not sharing my room.”
“I'm not sleeping in here,” Will said.
“Tonight, he is sleeping in the other bed,” I told her. “We'll reassess tomorrow.”
“I'll spider-proof it,” Jake told Will.
“That isn't fair!” Emily cried.
“Why?” Grace said, frowning at her. “Sophie and I are sharing a room. We have bunkbeds.”
Sophie nodded again.
“Will is gross!” Emily said. “I don't want him touching my stuff.”
Will picked his backpack off the floor. “Like I'm gonna touch your stupid stuff. Except your hair dryers. I'm totally gonna touch those.”
“Mom!”
“Knock it off,” I told Will. “You aren't touching her stuff.” I looked at Emily. “And you will chill out and share your giant, oversized vacation room because we are a family.”
She groaned and stomped off. Will smiled and followed her.
“Can we jump in the pool?” Sophie asked. “Please?”
“Head outside,” Jake told her. “You can put your feet in. I'll be there in just a minute.”
She and Grace scurried off like mice.
I rummaged through the desk drawers. There were a couple of pens and a small pad of writing paper. I tore off the cardboard backing on the pad and headed toward the offending arachnid. I held it near the spider, then scooped him onto it. It also bothered Will that I never killed spiders, but collected them and took them outside, so they could go free.
This spider remained completely still, and for a second I thought it might be dead. Maybe all eight legs were paralyzed with fear after what he'd just witnessed, and he was probably wishing he'd picked another house to invade. He'd chosen poorly.
“You have your tally sheet handy?” I asked Jake as I walked past him toward the front door.
“My what?”
“Your dead body tally sheet,” I said over my shoulder. “Because I'm pretty sure Emily is gonna kill her brother.”
EIGHT
With four kids living in our house, time for just Jake and me was hard to come by. If we weren't all together, one of us was usually with at least part of the clan, whether it was at home, at school or at an activity. We tried to plan date nights, but they were frequently interrupted by last-minute plans that involved the kids. None of which we minded, of course, but when the opportunity to spend some time together offered itself, we usually jumped at it.
The two younger girls spent nearly the rest of the day and evening in the pool, splashing and swimming and inventing all kinds of games with the various pool toys that were kept inside a large deck box. Will and Jake played a few games of ping-pong before joining the girls in the water. Even Emily came outside for a little bit, positioning herself in one of the lounge chairs so she could worship the sun. We ordered a pizza for dinner, returned to the pool for a while, and then finally sent them all to bed.
Knowing that they were all going to be tired from the travel and the swimming and would therefore probably be sleeping in, Jake and I got up early the next morning and headed outside for a walk.
The sun was bright, the humidity low, and it was strange being outside in shorts and a T-shirt when if we'd been home, I would've been in boots and thermals.
“I could live here,” Jake said, squinting into the sunshine.
“You need to experience summer here fir
st before planning our retirement,” I told him.
His hand slipped into mine as we walked. “I can handle humidity. I lived in Texas, remember? But here? We're like an hour from the beach.”
“I don’t know if I want to retire here.”
“I wasn't talking about retirement. I was talking about next winter.”
I laughed. As much as I loved Minnesota and as much as Jake had come around on living there, he was still someone who thrived in warmer temperatures. His mood grew darker as winter approached each year and he insisted on wearing his flip-flops until the first snow, his own personal act of defiance. He maintained that we would be spending at least part of our latter years in a warmer climate, as he did not want to be an octogenarian shoveling a path to get the mail.
We retraced our steps from the day before, leaving the cul-de-sac and aiming ourselves toward Gloria's house. Jake had spoken with her briefly last night, right after we’d ordered pizza. He’d invited her over for dinner, but the police were still at her house. He offered to bring the pizza to her, but she’d insisted she wasn’t hungry and told him she would touch base with us in the morning.
From a distance, we could see her out in the front yard, a garden hose in her hand. I breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t been hauled in to the police station since her conversation with Jake, so at least that was a good sign. There was no yellow tape surrounding her property and no sign of police, either.
Gloria was wearing a yellow sundress and matching headband that kept her hair out of her face. She was staring intently at the flowers she was watering before she looked up and saw us.
“Well, good morning!” She set the hose down and hurried over to the faucet to turn it off. She looked down at her hands, then wiped them on the sides of her dress. “How are you two today? How is the house?”
“We're fine,” Jake told her. “And the house is great. Thank you.”
She nodded, still smiling. “Where are the kids?”
“Sleeping off all of the swimming they did,” I told her. “They love the pool. It might actually keep their minds off Disney World.”
She smiled. “Oh, lovely. I'm glad you all like it. It's a very nice home. The folks that own it are rarely in town. They cruise all around the world and we almost never see them. But, yes, it's a very nice home.” She sounded distracted.
