Tea-Totally Dead Read Free

Harmony shrilled. Then she laughed.
    A shiver tugged at my shoulders. Harmony’s laugh was always a little out of sync. It sounded stretched and distorted in spots, like a tape that had been left out in the sun.
    Harmony looked like she had been left in the sun too. Maybe for her entire forty or fifty years. Her skin was a leathery tan, her hair a blond bush of frizz and her eyes a pale, bleached blue. She fingered the crosses and crystals hanging around her neck, her expression going blank when no one shared her laughter.
    “Mom,” began Wayne, setting the space gun carefully on the floor. “Why do you do these—”
    “Oh, Waynie, my heart condition,” Vesta cut in, the smile leaving her face. She clutched a hand to her chest and stared wide-eyed at Wayne.
    Did she really think Wayne was going to fall for that old trick again? After all the times he had hauled her down to the doctor just to be told that her only heart condition was good to excellent? I smiled smugly. Then I noticed Wayne wasn’t talking. I glanced up at his face. It was stricken. He had fallen for it. I felt the heat of anger flush my cheeks.
    I grabbed Wayne’s shoulder and shook it hard. After a couple of seconds he came out of it.
    “Mom, I’m serious—” he began again.
    “Hooboy, Wayne,” interrupted a deep voice from behind Vesta. “Some trick or treat, huh? More like a trigger treat, if you ask me.”
    Vesta giggled at the pun and stepped away from the doorway, revealing a heavily muscled, balding man who was at least as tall as Wayne, maybe even taller. And Wayne was well over six feet. The man’s face looked like Wayne’s too, with its large nose and heavy low brows. His eyes were navy blue, though, like Vesta’s.
    “Uncle Ace?” I guessed.
    The man grinned, his homely face suddenly rendered comical. He stuck his hands into the air.
    “I surrender,” he growled. “You got me dead to rights, ma’am.”
    Then he stepped forward, bowed and grabbed my hand, pulling it up to meet his lips before I could resist. “Surrendering to you could only be a pleasure,” he added and kissed my hand a second time.
    I found it a strangely erotic gesture, especially coming from a man who looked like Wayne, only fifteen years or so older. I snatched my hand back, uncomfortable with the thoughts Ace’s kiss had aroused.
    “Uncle Ace, this is Kate Jasper,” Wayne introduced belatedly.
    “Yow! The Kate Jasper?” Ace said, stepping back in mock astonishment.
    This time I smiled, thinking he’d probably keep on clowning until I did. “That’s me,” I replied.
    “Well, come on in,” he invited. He turned to the side and bowed again, sweeping his arm in a grand gesture toward Vesta’s living room.
    I took a quick glance up at Wayne’s face. He was watching Ace with a shy, tentative smile that caught at my heart with its vulnerability. I grabbed his hand and pulled him past Harmony, who still stood in the doorway. I barely had time to glance at the roomful of tall strangers who filled Vesta’s living room when Vesta herself reappeared. At least her space gun and mask were gone.
    “So, now you’ve met Wayne’s live-in girlfriend,” she said to Ace, with a sneering emphasis on “live-in.” “What do you think?”
    I reminded myself to stay cool. Pretend to like Vesta, I thought. At least she hadn’t called me “the adulteress,” her usual term of affection for me. Or maybe it was disaffection.
    Ace put his arm around Vesta’s bony shoulders.
    “She’s a beauty,” he said with a nod in my direction. Vesta’s brows dropped into a frown. “But there’s no one as beautiful as my Vessie,” he added quickly. So, I thought, Ace was smart as well as funny.
    Vesta laughed. “Ace, you’d say good morning to the devil if—”
    “Aunt Vesta, you know what?” interrupted a tall, chubby young man walking toward us. His voice was high and insistent. “You don’t say ‘trick or treat’ if you’re the one opening the door.”
    I