The Amanda Pepper Mysteries, Bundle #5 by Gillian Roberts

Author:Gillian Roberts [Roberts, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two

“IT MAKES ME ANGRY AND sad,” Sasha said over dinner. She had the silver martini shaker on the seat next to her, and she looked at it, as if Phoebe, alive, might still inhabit it.

“We are all angry and sad,” Mackenzie said. He’d joined us for the meal and looked almost as troubled as Sasha did. While we’d been bidding farewell to Phoebe, he’d spent Sunday on the phone with his parents, three cousins, and two uncles, who’d lost their homes to the devastating hurricane that had leveled too much of Louisiana, including his parents’ parish and the home he’d grown up in. No lives lost, which was the very good news, but three months after the catastrophe, everyone was still scattered, unsure about what to do—or what they could do—next.

Their pasts had been eradicated; their futures were murky, and each day was progressively more difficult to wade through.

His mother, the usually buoyant Gabby Mackenzie, compared their situation to having Vaseline on your glasses while trying to read the fine print. Jobs lost, contacts lost, supplies lost, friends made into distant refugees or missing altogether, promises unkept, seasons passing. All the supports society had built were gone.

They’d never had much in the way of material goods. In fact, C.K. had said he hadn’t realized till he was out in the world that they’d been “something close to poor.” And now, they had still less. His father, Boyd, called “Boy,” had been a construction worker when young, then a partner in a country hardware store. The fact that he couldn’t rebuild on his former site or supply the tools for others to rebuild was driving him up the wall. If, of course, there had been a still-standing wall to be driven up.

We’d offered the loft to them and to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, their dogs. Either we and our sure-to-be-miserably-unhappy cat would share the space with all of them, or we’d give it to them for as long as they needed, and we’d find friends willing to house us for the duration.

His parents had politely—they were southerners, after all—declined. Exile did not seem a solution to them, and they needed to be closer to where they hoped to rebuild their lives. One of Boy’s cousins had a spread of land with lots of room for the dogs up in West Monroe, and though that was too far away from home to be efficient, they could stay as long as they needed to. It was no solution, but the only available one. Mostly, they’d been on long forays close to home, staying wherever they could find shelter, working at rebuilding their store and life, and then retreating north to West Monroe.

We sat glumly in a tiny Ethiopian restaurant, each of us sad and/or angry for our own reasons. We favored third world cuisines—they were generally hearty and inexpensive, although it did feel out of kilter to be dining on the cuisine of a country with a starvation problem. Perhaps it should have put our problems in perspective.

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