Quietly Dead by Laura Belgrave

Author:Laura Belgrave
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Fiction Works
Published: 2014-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Almost midnight and Day Two without Robin. Day Two without worrying about a proper meal, dishes, skirmishes over chores, or what to watch on TV. Claudia didn’t miss any of it, but she ached for the company of her daughter and felt the silence of her house as if it were a tomb. Of course, there was the kitten, which though not yet named had begun to demonstrate actual moments of affection, but the distraction lacked staying power. Nothing—not the freedom, not the wine, not the oboe—nothing could fend off a long night weighted with loss. Her daughter was in Washington with her ex-husband, with whom she had slept for all the wrong reasons. The boyfriend with whom she had slept for all the right reasons, or so she’d thought, was packing for California. Claudia felt the creep of loneliness press in.

She settled onto the couch, put her bare feet up on the coffee table and flicked on HBO, not caring that a Mel Gibson movie she’d never seen was already half over. She refused to open the case files again—had intentionally left them on the dining room table—but banishing them from her thoughts was something else altogether. The Becker case didn’t bother her. Oh, it wouldn’t be open and shut, but the components were comfortably familiar: wealthy man killed, wife to inherit, brazen young woman in the background. It would take legwork, but not a lot of creativity. The Farr drowning, though . . . . Claudia shook her head. Suggs better do his part. He better have the network he claimed he did. Raynor better have the greed she thought he did.

The cordless telephone was on the table beside her. She picked it up and pressed the talk button. She’d spoken to Robin two hours earlier. Was it too late to call again? She started to dial, then set the phone down. Of course it was. What was she thinking? For as good a time as Robin was having—and she was; Claudia could hear it in her voice—she sounded tired, too. How could she not? A long drive, bonding with her daddy, the kitten she’d left behind . . . the poor kid’s world had shifted on its axis in less than seventy-two hours. She needed sleep, and Claudia hoped Brian had enough parental brain cells to make sure she got it.

She yawned, tired herself, but restless. Two murders. Two murders in tiny little Indian Run, both made to look like accidents. She wondered whether it had occurred to Suggs that other murders masquerading like tragic mishaps might well have slipped by him over the years. Easy enough to happen, once you began to make assumptions, to take things for granted. Claudia irritably pushed off the couch and aimed for the kitchen. She’d almost done it herself with Becker. There was a . . . a mindset here, a small-town mentality of invincibility. And really, hadn’t she moved to Indian Run partly for that very reason? For

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