Suspicious Mimes by Virginia Brown

Author:Virginia Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Published: 2012-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Something kept tickling her nose. She couldn’t breathe. A steady weight pressed down on her chest, and Harley came straight up in the bed gasping for air and ready to fight her assailant.

Sam, dislodged and disgruntled, held on to the quilt with claws firmly attached. He yowled a complaint that registered in Harley’s sleep-fogged brain and she peered at him blearily. “Don’t you ever sleep late?”

Apparently not. Sam leaped to the floor and stalked toward the closed door, then looked at her over his shoulder and gave another loud yowl. Food and doody time. Yawning, Harley gave in and staggered into Nana’s small kitchenette that consisted of a refrigerator, microwave, and one of those heavy-duty coffee pots that looked like it came from the fifties. After letting Sam out onto the screened porch and feeding him, she started toward the coffee pot, determined to figure out how to work it.

To her surprise—and relief—it was plugged in and the coffee brewed. Nice. That meant Nana was already up. So where was she? There was no sign of her in any of the rooms. It wasn’t that big of a place, just two bedrooms, a large bath, the living room and kitchenette. Maybe she was already out visiting or having an early breakfast. Or doing a hit for the Mob. Yesterday hadn’t been that much fun. Especially when Bobby showed up. Apparently he’d heard about it on his police radio and decided to add to the joy. At least they hadn’t been charged with anything, though Nana was pretty upset that they’d taken her gun. There was an ordinance against firing weapons in the city limits it seemed, though that didn’t seem to slow the gang-bangers much. Nana said it was age discrimination and she was going to sue.

Harley had gone to bed with a headache and the intention of sleeping until noon.

But it was nice outside this early, she had to admit when she took a cup of coffee out onto the porch to sit in one of the lounge chairs and watch Sam watch birds. The tip of his tail twitched in perfect harmony with the odd little noises he made.

A lovely, fresh breeze came in through the screens, smelling of recently mowed grass. Leaning back, she just enjoyed the fragrant coffee and tranquility for a moment, letting her mind drift. As it seemed to do lately, it eventually drifted toward death and murder. She’d become a ghoul. How interesting. She wondered exactly when this change in her personality had shifted from just being a little out of synch to being completely bizarre. It must have been sudden. Maybe finding Mrs. Trumble dead in her own dining room had put her over the edge. Whatever it was, she had no idea how to get rid of it. Might as well do the best she could until it went away.

So she began to try to piece together the fragments of information into some kind of pattern. It was like constructing the quilt on Nana’s guestroom bed.

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