Said the Fly (The Epiphany Jerome Forensic Mystery Series Book 1) by Laurie Taylor

Author:Laurie Taylor [Taylor, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Traveling Light Press
Published: 2013-07-16T05:00:00+00:00

15

I peeled off my clothes; they dropped in a heap at my feet. I wanted to make love desperately, to savor my luck to be living, to leave the taste of death behind. Mimmo was lying in bed, lit by the blue light of television. Mostly was curled asleep in an armchair in the corner of the room.

Mimmo wasn’t as drunk as I’d expected. He didn’t say anything though he was dying to know where I’d been all evening. It was a pact we had made with each other somewhere in the beginning of our relationship: no ropes around our necks. His eyes burned through me.

I had to wash off the lingering smell of the morgue first.

I went into the bathroom and turned on a very hot shower. I scrubbed myself all over with a gel that smelled like oranges. I washed my hair vigorously, twice, with shampoo and then combed through it with a coconut cream rinse.

As I was wrapping a towel around me, my husband came into the bathroom. It started there, moved through the hallway and ended on the floor of the bedroom. It was what Amy dramatically calls ‘blood on the wall’ sex. More to the point, it was like a California firestorm driven by the hot Santa Ana winds ... dying down in brief intervals, only to explode again in a different location with renewed intensity.

Afterward we lay awake for a long time. Neither of us spoke.

Eventually, I began to cry. I told him where I’d been and everything that had happened since I found Dora’s body in the boat. I explained that whoever Dora was, whatever she’d done in her life, I felt she deserved to be taken seriously and defended in death. I also explained that if I hadn’t alerted Ballero as I did, I feared he and the Guardia would have confused the coincidence of the two murders and gone looking for a single madman instead of pursuing each case separately, following the trail and logic of the evidence.

Mimmo listened patiently and then covered his face with his big hands muttering complaining words in Italian. I knew from past experience that the best way to calm him down was to get him in the kitchen, and in any case, I was starving. “I haven’t eaten since I was in Fellini’s, and as you know that was not very much. I can't go to sleep like this.”

Moving around a kitchen for my husband is like a meditation. Every move is graceful and precise. He’s fully present in the moment no matter how trivial the task, which is why it distracts him. Unlike me, through sleight of hand he cleans while he cooks. In the end you sit down to a meal that looks like as if it had been arranged by an Ikebana flower master, and the kitchen is at peace as well.

While he was working, I sat at the counter where I normally sort my beetles and stroked Mostly, who’d woken up and come in to join us.

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