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

Dodson’s death. Even if I didn’t like her much, she was a person with a life she liked—and she’d been my neighbor, for better or worse.
    And then with a quick goodnight, he was out the door, leaving me to lock it with shaking hands.
    “Mom? Everything okay?” Maggie’s voice called from her bedroom.
    Didn’t that child ever sleep? “I think so,” I called back. “I think everything’s just fine.” And I smiled to myself. I didn’t want to face at that moment what I was going to do about the girls if my relationship with Mike took a sharp turn—and yet I knew I wanted that sharp turn, apprehensive as I was.
    ****
    The phone woke me around one-thirty in the morning. It was Angus Mitchell, telling me there would be a bond hearing in the morning at ten. “Claire hopes you’ll be there,” he said, his words almost a command. I asked where it was, grateful that I wouldn’t have to go to the jail again. I’d been there to talk with Joe, one of the young men who vandalized my skeleton house and my own home. The fact that I was now fond of him, and he’d turned his life around and was married to Theresa, my carpenter’s daughter, did nothing to erase the horror of the jail in my mind.
    Grabbing the pencil and pad I kept by the bed, I scribbled down his directions and then managed to get my mind clear enough to ask, “Where will she go? I guess she can’t go back to their house. Or maybe she doesn’t want to.” He’d made it clear there should be no problem about Claire posting bail.
    “I can’t say about that,” he said and cleared his throat. “I’m in a bit of an awkward place here. I’ve always represented Jim, and when they married I represented both of them. But….” He let his unfinished sentence hang in the air.
    “Have you talked to him?” I wanted to add, “I thought you called him a sorry bastard,” but I guess business is business for lawyers like everyone else.
    “The nursing staff wouldn’t let me, but they said it’s a superficial wound—painful no doubt and must make sitting uncomfortable.” Did I detect just the slightest amusement? “I’ll go to the hospital after the bond hearing.”
    We said goodnight, each thanking the other, and I went back to bed where, of course, I did not sleep, my thoughts bouncing from Claire to Florence Dodson to Mike Shandy and landing on Florence Dodson. She didn’t fall down those stairs. She may have been old—in her eighties, I suspected—but she wasn’t frail. She did a lot of gardening, more than I could do, and complainer that she was, she always seemed in control of her senses. Someone pushed Florence Dodson down those stairs. I had nothing to prove it, just instinct. My hunches were usually right. Had Claire pushed her? That thought was too bizarre to tolerate.

Chapter Two

    I was in the office by eight-thirty the next morning, already at my desk plowing through papers when Keisha, my take-care-of-all-things assistant, came in.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked, giving me a raised-eyebrow look. Today her hair was pulled straight back from her face, accenting the fine bone structure, and she wore black stretch pants. Okay, Keisha is way too big for stretch pants—not fat, just big—but she likes them. Today she wore a flowing scarlet tunic over them, and she looked, well, dramatic. Life with Keisha is nothing if not colorful.
    “Nothing. Why?” I knew what she meant, but I couldn’t decide whether to be offended or laugh, though ultimately I did the latter.
    She looked at her watch. “You are never in the office before nine. Now I don’t even have time to do my nails ’fore I got to get to work.”
    Grinning, I said, “No, and would you make a pot of coffee? I have to go downtown in a little bit.”
    Raised eyebrows again. “Downtown? Your business don’t take you downtown.”
    Zing! She figured things out way too fast for me.
    I tried being lofty. “I’m going to court.”
    “Hmmm. Court. You gonna’ to tell me