Coached to Death by Victoria Laurie

Author:Victoria Laurie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2019-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

“More soup, sugar?” Gilley asked.

I was curled up on the couch in Chez Kitty, staring numbly into space, my mind still processing the sight from earlier in the day.

“No,” I said, shaking myself out of the disturbing memory.

Gilley came to stand next to me. “How about if I just warm up what you’ve still got left in the bowl?”

I looked down. The bowl of homemade minestrone was full and cold. I’d taken only a few sips of the broth. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m hungry,” I said, offering it back to him.

He took the bowl and walked it over to the microwave. I heard the door open, the clink of the china on the glass turntable, and then a sequence of beeps as Gilley programed the soup to heat up again.

I sighed. My houseguest was a stubborn one.

When he brought back the steaming bowl to me, I refused to take it from him. “Cat,” he said sternly.

“Gilley.”

“You have to eat.”

“I will, just not now. Later.”

Gilley sat down next to me. “I think you’re in shock, sugar.”

I nodded. That felt about right.

“And you know how they treat people in mild cases of shock?”

“No, how?” I asked almost absently.

Gilley shoved the bowl at me. “They get them to eat.”

Sighing, I took the bowl again and lifted the spoon he’d brought to me earlier. Dipping it into the soup, I took another sip. I was surprised at how flavorful it tasted this time. “It’s good,” I said, dipping my spoon again.

“Damn skippy it’s good,” he muttered.

As I finished the soup, and felt better for it, Gilley chatted me up. It wasn’t a conversation that required any deep concentration; he was merely discussing the storyline from a Netflix series he liked, and I quickly understood that this was his way of giving me a little therapy. It was a way to keep me out of my head for a few minutes, and I found myself deeply grateful to him.

Handing the empty bowl back to him when I’d finished, I said, “Thank you. That honestly helped.”

Gilley took the bowl to the sink and brought me a fresh cup of hot tea. “Okay,” he said, sitting back down on the other end of the couch. “Tell me, from the beginning, what happened.”

When I arrived at Chez Kitty, I’d given Gilley a grossly disjointed story, starting at the end with the dead priest in the confessional and backtracking to the interview with Shepherd. I’d left out so much in my effort to explain why I was so rattled, and I wasn’t surprised that he was asking me about it again.

So I started at the very beginning and was working my way through the encounter with the woman at the church who’d come out after Kuznetsov when there was a knock on the door. Gilley got up to answer it, and I said, “I think that might be Shepherd.”

“What?” Gil asked, spinning around midway to the door. Pointing to the hallway, he lowered his voice

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