Читать книгу Close Neighbors - Dawn Stewardson - Страница 7

“THERE. ALL DONE.” Julie set a third glass of water on the table and smiled, then felt awful when Aunt Rachel didn’t smile back.

She hadn’t smiled all day. In fact, she’d been crying earlier. She’d come out of her room with her eyes red and her face puffy. So even though both she and Daddy kept saying there was no reason to be worried, Julie knew there was.

They’d kind of fooled her this morning, when they’d sat her down and explained what had happened. They’d made it sound okay.

Well, okay wasn’t exactly right. If you knew somebody and he got killed, it was probably never okay. But they’d said it was just one of those unfortunate things, so she hadn’t really been afraid. Not until the police detectives arrived.

That had been scary. And the stuff on TV was even worse.

At first, Daddy wasn’t going to let her watch it. Then he’d decided she’d see it at a friend’s house or something, anyway, and it would be better if she watched with them—so they could explain what was true and what wasn’t.

It was the stuff that wasn’t true that had been really bad. ’Cuz even though the newspeople never said Rachel’s name, they kept talking about an ex-girlfriend being the last person to see Graham alive—except for the killer. Only, somehow, they made it sound as if the police thought Rachel was the killer.

Daddy’d said they just did things like that so people would watch their news instead of somebody else’s. But when they made it sound like your aunt was a murderer, you felt awful.

“Hon?” Rachel glanced at her, then dropped a handful of spaghetti into the boiling water. “Would you go tell your dad that dinner’s in ten minutes?”

“Sure.”

She headed out of the kitchen and started up the backstairs. Her friends thought it was funny that their house had an extra set of stairs. But after her mom left, Daddy built a big addition across the back—so they’d have a family room downstairs and his office upstairs—and he’d put in the second staircase.

That was way before she’d started school, and he’d wanted the office so he could work at home more. Then, after her aunt moved in, one of them was almost always home. Rachel only worked when she had an assignment taking pictures to go with a magazine article or something.

Just as Julie reached the upstairs hall, the office phone began ringing. That meant she’d have to make one of those throat-cutting signs to her dad, ’cuz Rachel hated when the spaghetti got cooked too long, and—

“You’re insane!”

Daddy’s words froze her before she reached the doorway. He sounded angry, but kind of afraid, too, and he was never afraid.

Listening in on someone else’s conversation was against the rules, but she stayed right where she was, barely breathing.

“Of course I know they haven’t found it.”

Her heart had begun thumping, and she half wanted to run back down the stairs, half wanted to stay and hear more.

“You’re out of your mind! She didn’t kill him, so her fingerprints can’t be on it.”

The words kill and fingerprints started a hot, prickly feeling in her chest. She wished she’d decided to run back downstairs, because she was getting so scared that she felt like hiding in her closet, the way she used to when she was real little.

“You bastard! We’ll see what the cops think about that!”

Her eyes began to sting with tears. Daddy never swore. Maybe hell or dammit, sometimes, but never anything worse.

“Oh? And if I do call them? Are you going to walk into police headquarters with that gun? Don’t you think they’d have the brains to—”

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, she silently counted. How many seconds would it take for Daddy to hear what would happen if he called the cops?

She kept counting and counting but never found out.

The next thing she heard was the little beep his cordless made when you clicked it off.