The Single Undead Moms Club (Half Moon Hollow series Book 4) (33 page)

“I see you’ve been talking to Chelsea Harbaker,” I muttered.

“No, a Mrs. McGee.”

“Figures,” I huffed.

“Do you have any evidence that Libby had anything to do with Les Stratton’s death, other than ‘I can’t think of anyone else’?”

“Not at the moment, but I’m sure we’ll find something,” Lane said.

“Well, until you do, you will leave Mrs. Stratton alone. You will not contact her or question her without myself or Mr. Cheney present. And you will not approach Danny Stratton, ever. If I find out that you have been harassing either of the Strattons, I will be on your supervisor’s front step faster than you can say ‘mall security.’ ”

“Fine,” Sergeant Lane said, shutting his little notebook with a snap. “Don’t leave town, Mrs. Stratton. I will be coming to see you soon.”

“Good evening, Sergeant Lane.”

As the patrol car pulled out of my driveway, all of my bravado melted, and I practically sagged against the front door. My hands were shaking, and I thought I was going to throw up what little I had in my stomach. I felt Jane’s hand on my back and heard some distant murmuring in the kitchen.

Dick was holding a mug full of synthetic blood in front of my face. I let him put it to my lips and drained the entire thing in one gulp. How was I going to explain this? How was I going to prove my innocence to the people who could keep me out of jail? Sure, Dick and Jane were supporting me in the face of law enforcement now, but what if there was some circumstantial piece of evidence that linked me to Les’s death? What would happen when supporting me was no longer in the best interest of the vampire community?

“Jane,” I said, wheezing, “I know this is going to sound cliché, but I didn’t do it.”

“I believe you,” Jane said, nodding.

I straightened, my shoulders slowly relaxing. “Really?”

“I’ve been accused of murder . . . how many times now?” Jane asked.

“Two or three times,” Dick estimated, flopping down on the couch.

“Right. And every time, I didn’t do it.”

“There was that one time,” Dick said.

“That was in self-defense, and technically, all I did was Taser her.”

Dick snorted. “While she was soaked in lamp oil.”

“My point is that it would be stupid of you to spend all of this time in mediation, battling your father-in-law, only to murder him. It would bring the police right to you. And you are not a stupid person. You would not risk your custody of Danny. So now you have to lie low and say nothing. We have to do some damage control and try to find out who, besides you, wanted to see your father-in-law dead.”

I shrugged. “Me, most of the U of L fans in town, the people who had heard his ‘caught a ten-pound bass on a kid’s Snoopy reel’ story more than once . . .”

“That’s a long list,” Jane said.

“Well, we’ll look into it. You just sit tight, and don’t do anything else to draw attention to yourself. No arrests for public intoxication. No shoplifting undies from Walmart,” Dick told me. “No swimmin’ naked with Wade in the memorial fountain.”

“Have
you
been talking to Mrs. McGee?”

“Now, before we start our
Scooby-Doo
routine, is there anything we should know about?” Jane asked. “For instance, why did you send me a maddeningly vague text right before bedtime about an ‘incident’ at the Pumpkin Patch Party and the paperwork it would require?”

“Oh.” I sighed, burying my face in my hands. “I forgot all about that. I was sort of attacked by a masked figure while I was cleaning up the Pumpkin Patch debris last night. I’m pretty sure it was the same guy lurking in the school parking lot a few weeks back. He tried to stake me, but I fought him off. With a rake. He ran away into the woods.”

Jane’s lips disappeared as she pinched her mouth shut and exhaled loudly from her nose. She nodded, jaw clenching and unclenching. “And you didn’t think that
maybe
you should have reported this right away instead of sending me a cowardly text right before sunrise?”

I winced and offered, “I was traumatized?”

“Dick,” Jane said wearily, “get my spray bottle.”

“Jane, no!”

Hours later, I sat outside
Les and Marge’s house in my minivan with Kerrianne’s funeral potato casserole riding shotgun. While I’d loved the carb-based grief fuel when I was human, tonight I had to ride with the windows down just so I could tolerate the smell. This was what Southern people did in the face of death, no matter what their social class. They heard about someone passing. They threw together a casserole to sustain the mourners during their time of need, and they called on them to deliver the covered dish and their well wishes. And if they happened to pick up a tidbit of gossip about the bereaved or the strange circumstances of the death, all the better.

Just because I was a vampire now, that didn’t mean I was going to give up on tradition.

I hadn’t told Danny about his papa yet. I didn’t know how. He was so young, and he’d lost so much already. It seemed cruel to take something else from him. In addition to that stress, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing contacting Marge. But I wanted to continue the tentative relationship I’d rebuilt with her. I didn’t want Les’s death or my being a suspect in that death to derail the progress we’d made.

My life was complicated.

I leaned forward and tapped my forehead against the steering wheel. “Please, Lord, please don’t let this be one of those decisions I end up regretting a lot.”

Balancing the warm Pyrex in one hand, I knocked on the front door, a formality I’d insisted on even when Rob was alive. I didn’t want Les and Marge to feel comfortable just walking into my home unannounced, or vice versa. Of course, they did it anyway, but I tried to communicate how I felt about the issue with this little quirk.

An older woman, a friend of Marge’s I vaguely recognized from my in-laws’ annual holiday party, opened the door. Her blandly pleasant smile evaporated as she realized who was on the front stoop. “Oh. It’s you.”

Without further response, she walked away, disappearing into the crowd of people milling around in the living room. Nice.

The house looked and smelled exactly the same, like Lemon Pledge and gun oil. How could so much about my life have changed but this place remain the same? The crowd parted as I walked through the living room, like Moses walking through a particularly gossipy sea. I could hear murmurs, snatches of conversation, “no blood missing,” “so torn up Marge wasn’t allowed to identify him.”

I also heard hissing whispers of “Who does she think she is?” and “How could she?” from the other mourners. My memory flashed back to the days before Rob’s funeral, in this very room, being comforted by some of the same people. I’d sat on Marge’s couch, hands clenched together so tightly my knuckles felt bruised, desperately trying not to have some reaction, some moment of weakness that could be criticized later. Now these people were staring at me like I was something they wanted to scrape off the bottom of their shoes. And I could not give less of a damn. There was a real freedom in simply not caring.

I smiled at the lot of them, as sweet as pie, but without showing fang, because there were limits to what I could get away with in a group this trigger-happy. From what I understood, bullets couldn’t kill me, but they stung like hell.

Marge was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee clutched between her hands. She looked older, tired, and shrunken, as if she’d lost twenty “flu pounds” since the last time I saw her. She was wearing an old denim gardening shirt and no makeup, and her hair was slicked back into a bun instead of in its usual feathery helmet. Several of her friends from church sat with her, patting her arms and murmuring comforting platitudes, but she didn’t seem to hear them. She was staring straight ahead.

I put the funeral potatoes on the counter with all of the other dishes and approached her slowly. Her best friend, Joyce Mayhew, shot to her feet, vibrating with righteous indignation. “How dare you show your face in here, Libby Stratton? Rob would be so ashamed of you—”

“Don’t,” Marge said softly. “Give us a minute.”

“Marge, honey, you’re not strong enough to make good decisions right now,” Joyce told her, patting Marge’s hair.

Marge clearly didn’t like being told she wasn’t “strong enough” for anything, despite the fact that she’d told me the same thing almost every day while I was on chemo. “It’s fine, Joyce,” Marge insisted. “There are things we need to talk about.”

“I will be right over there,” Joyce said, glaring at me. “I’m watching you.”

I slid into the chair abandoned by Joyce. Marge stared down at her full coffee mug, rubbing her thumb along the handle.

“I’m so sorry, Marge.”

“I don’t even know how to respond to that anymore. I’ve heard it so many times today,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me, eyes shimmering with tears. “Is this how it felt for you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But at least Rob’s death was an accident. Knowing that someone hurt Les, that’s got to be so much worse.”

“I just don’t understand how this happened. I keep asking, who would want to hurt Les? And the police were here, and they asked so many questions. I didn’t know how to answer so many of them. He was behaving so strangely, ranting about you, making phone calls that he didn’t want me to hear. I just don’t know what happened to him in the last few months. I feel like the man I married died a long time ago.”

Tentatively, I reached out and patted her cool, dry hand. She didn’t take mine, but she didn’t flinch, either. I considered that progress. “I don’t know what the police told you, but I didn’t have anything to do with this, Marge. I am sorry about what happened to Les,” I told her. “I was angry with him, toward the end, but I would never wish that on him.”

“I know that,” she assured me. “I know I said some things right after you were turned—things I regret. But deep down, I know that you couldn’t hurt Danny or Les or me. We just needed time to adjust. If we’d just had more time, maybe Les would have . . .” Marge’s voice trailed off as twin tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s going to have to be a closed-casket funeral. Did the police tell you that? There was so much damage. Even so, I don’t think it would be a good idea for Danny to be there. That’s just too much to ask of a little boy. Have you talked to him yet?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know how to explain to him.”

“I could help you with that,” she offered. “Maybe it would help, coming from both of us.”

“I think so, too,” I said. “We can tell him tomorrow night. You could come over, maybe help him with bathtime and bedtime stories. That might help both of you.”

Marge’s thin, unpainted lips trembled into something that resembled a smile. “I would really appreciate that.”

Confrontations with other parents are going to happen—at your child’s school, at the ball field, at the mall. The important thing to remember is that thanks to the prevalence of security cameras and smartphones, you’re probably being recorded. So footage of your retribution will be held against you in a court of law.

—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting

J
ane told me to lie low, to let the Council investigators look into Les’s murder.

And I intended to follow her instructions, at least in spirit. She was already a smidge displeased with me for doing a mourner’s run over to my mother-in-law’s without talking to her. But since she hadn’t specifically told me not to condole with Marge, she couldn’t exactly get mad at me. Well, she could, but she chose not to.

Finn called, offering—hell, pleading—to help me manage this new crisis, but I sent his calls straight to voice mail. I had decided, for once, that I would listen to Jane’s advice about Finn and keep my distance. Finn’s charming little fibs had grown to a tsunami of lies I just couldn’t ignore. And while I wanted to believe that he felt something for me, everything he’d ever said or done seemed too carefully calculated, an orchestra of manipulation that left my head reeling and my heart sore.

Telling Danny that evening that his papa was gone had not been easy, even with the added consolation of his mamaw coming over to make his favorite dinner—spaghetti and cut-up hot dogs. Danny had been too young to understand when Rob died, and my resurrection hadn’t exactly helped him comprehend a grave one couldn’t escape. He didn’t quite grasp where his papa had gone and why he wouldn’t be back.

“But who’s going to take me camping and fishing?” he’d asked. “Papa said he had to make a man of me.”

“Mamaw will take you fishing,” Marge promised. “And camping.”

“But it won’t be the same,” Danny insisted.

“No, honey, it won’t be the same. But our lives weren’t the same after Mom became a vampire, right?” I asked. He shook his head, wiping at his nose with his sleeve. “It was different. But it was good. We’ve made the best of it. And we still have fun together, right?”

Danny nodded again.

“Your mamaw and your mom love you so much, Danny,” Marge said, pulling him into her lap. Despite recent protests that he was not a baby and too big for our laps, he snuggled into Marge’s neck and let her hug him. “We can’t bring your papa back. We can’t make things the way they were, but we can make the best of it.”