Fatal Error by J. A. Jance

Author:J. A. Jance [Jance, J. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2011-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

28

Salton City, California

Lola Cunningham had been a good cook, an excellent cook, actually, and she had been thrilled to pass those skills along to her adopted daughter. And in an effort to make Mina feel at home, Lola had tracked down a traditional Croatian recipe for punjene paprike, stuffed green peppers, and made it her own.

There was a lot about her adopted family and being in the Cunningham house that was repugnant for Mina, but she had loved being in the kitchen with Mama Lola, as her mother liked to be called. They would stand in the kitchen together, side by side, talking and laughing as they diced and sliced, chopped and cooked. Had Lola not died of an undiagnosed heart attack the year Mina turned sixteen, everything might have been different. Mina might have been different, but Lola’s unexpected death had changed everything.

Today though, once Mark finished burying the ashes from the Weber grill, he’d probably return to the couch. Morosely silent, he’d sit there, drinking and watching some inconsequential golf tournament while Mina bustled around the kitchen. She prepared the stuffed peppers the same way Mama Lola had done—well, almost the same way—making two separate batches, one for Mark and one for Mina.

Working in the kitchen always made Mina happy. She hummed a little tune as she ground up the necessary ingredients—the beef and the pork and the onions—that would go into the green peppers she had brought home with her from San Diego for this very purpose. Finding decent green peppers or decent anything else in the godforsaken little grocery store in Salton City was pretty much impossible. She estimated that the extra doses of seasonings she added to the mix should be enough to conceal a few other things.

As she hacked the tops off peppers, Mina found herself thinking fondly of Richard. He had surprised her and proved to be far more of a man than she ever would have expected. She was sorry not to have the money back, but even so, Richard had won a measure of respect from his killer that he probably would have appreciated if he had lived long enough to know about it.

As for Mark? He was useless, spineless, and boring. His money had been a major part of his appeal. Now that the money was gone, so was the attraction. She enjoyed the prospect of torturing him with the idea that she expected him to take care of Brenda single-handedly and that she wanted him to do it tonight. It would be immensely entertaining to see him sitting there stone-faced while he struggled to come to terms with the very idea. She didn’t doubt that he’d need to fill himself with some kind of liquid courage—gin most likely, gin on the rocks with a twist of lime.

Just to keep him off balance, she would pretend that everything was fine and that she believed that he’d do what she wanted. Wasn’t that why she was hustling around in this grim

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