No Neighborhood for Old Women (A Kelly O'Connell Mystery) Read Free Page A

look a bit ashamed. “I know I should have listened to your instinct about Jo Ellen North. I could have stopped things before she almost killed you. But this time…I think your instinct is out of whack. She fell. Period. End. Of. Story. The police will treat it as a homicide until they do an autopsy—routine procedure. They have to do that with all unexplained deaths. But I’ll bet you it comes back ‘accidental death.’” He took a pull on his beer and then asked, “Do you know about any family?”
    “I think she had nephews. No children, but there were two men that used to visit her on occasions, like they’d come by the day before Christmas or Thanksgiving. Once or twice I saw one of them—the one that drove a Lexus—take her somewhere, maybe for Sunday dinner at noon. But they didn’t come often, and I think she was alone a lot except for her dog and her birds.” Mrs. Dodson’s house had cages, lots of them, full of parakeets and canaries. I guess they were her companions. I’d never been in the house but knew about the birds because she’d told my mom about them.
    Mike smiled. “Yeah, those birds. They’d drive me batty in no time at all. But the house was neat, just crowded with stuff. Furniture that looked old, statues and bric-a-brac and everything on every table all over the place. I was afraid to move for fear of breaking something, but I doubt any of it was valuable.”
    “Probably not. Was the house clean?” Oops, I sounded like my mom.
    “Pretty much. As clean as a house with all those birds can be and as an old lady could keep it.” He hesitated. “It smelled bit like urine. You know how old people are.”
    I wished he’d stop referring to her as old. “How old was she?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe seventy.”
    “Seventy is not that old,” I retorted. “It’s too young for a healthy woman to die.”
    I stopped, arms crossed in front of me, and thought about the way people stereotype the elderly. This was not the time to remind Mike that seventy is the new fifty or whatever. Besides, I thought Florence Dodson was quite a bit older than that. “Can you find the nephews?”
    “Sure. They’ll run it down. There was one strange thing. We found a sleeping bag, kind of battered and old and—well, smelly—in the carport. Looks to me like a homeless person took up residence there. Be hard to find out and trace though. You seen anyone in the neighborhood?”
    “No, but I’ve been gone from that street for eight months. How would Mrs. Dodson miss that? I think she goes in her carport frequently—and I know she still drives, uh, drove.”
    We talked a bit more, but we were both tired and there didn’t seem to be anything either of us could come up with about Mrs. Dodson or Claire. When Mike said he had to go, I rose to walk him to the door. Our goodnights were getting more and more awkward. Mike usually gave me an affectionate hug or a quick kiss, but we both knew something much more intense lurked on the other side. As I stood next to him this night, he put his arm around me for that hug and then, unexpectedly, kissed me—hard, his tongue exploring mine, his fingers digging into my back.
    And I responded. I’d been missing that attraction, that sense of passion, for a long time, but still my response surprised me. I quelled an instinct to look around and make sure the girls weren’t peeking again.
    When we moved apart, we were both a bit stunned. Mike didn’t say anything for a long time. He stared at me. Then he muttered, “Kelly, I don’t want you hurt. I care too much. Please, for my sake, keep your nose out of both Mrs. Dodson’s death and Claire’s problems.” He meant of course the crimes I’d gotten involved in when I found a skeleton in a house we were redoing. In the end my ex-husband was killed, and I came close.
    At that point, I would have promised him almost anything, but I knew I couldn’t abandon Claire and I wouldn’t let go of Florence