Under the Dog Star by Sandra Parshall

Author:Sandra Parshall [Parshall, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 1590588789
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2011-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

Did Claude Ann think the Hawaii police wouldn’t communicate with the Honolulu police and find out about the missing gun? Jon was back at the door before Dinah had conjured up anything close to a rational reason for her lie. “Dad and Claude Ann have gone to the lodge for dinner. Will you come?”

“What about Lyssa?”

“After she talked to Raif’s mother, she took a sleeping pill. She’d rather be unconscious.”

“What about Phoebe and Marywave?”

“Phoebe volunteered to stay with Marywave. They’ve ordered in a pizza. I haven’t eaten all day and I’m starved. How about you?”

Dinah wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to be alone and she was in a swivet to speak to Claude Ann about the gun. She grabbed her purse and followed him to the car.

“What do you think Raif was doing out on that lava field, Jon?”

“He may have gone to meet someone on the sly.”

“A woman, you mean?”

“Lyssa would never believe it but, as you’ve guessed, Raif played around.”

“But he would’ve met a lover at the No-Tell Motel, not in the middle of a lava field.”

“Maybe she wasn’t a tourist. Hawaii, or at least this corner of it, is like a small town. Everybody knows everybody. Maybe they planned to make love in the back seat of the car.”

“The ‘Vette he rented didn’t have a back seat.”

“I don’t know, Dinah. It was probably connected to his gambling. Like Langford said, maybe somebody owed him and chose not to pay.”

Dinah wished. But how likely was it that another somebody in this corner of the island had a grandfather who willed him an Italian gun? “Who died in California back in eight-nine?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There was an article about a death at an earth sciences conference behind a picture of your mom and dad.”

“I’d forgotten I had it. It was Steve’s dad.”

“Louis Sykes?”

“That’s right. He got tanked and drowned in the hotel swimming pool.”

“Why would someone take it?”

“Why would you take the picture apart to snoop?” He let out a prodigious sigh. “Sorry, but I’ve got more pressing things to think about than a death that happened over twenty years ago.”

“Right.”

He drove to the front door of a rustic lodge lit up like Christmas. The parking lot overflowed with traffic and the raucous sound of Bavarian polka music spilled out into the night. Dinah flashed him a quizzical look. “This is where you come after a death in the family?”

“The Kilauea’s a busy place, but the back room’s reserved for us. Go on in and I’ll try to find a place to park.”

She had a yeasty feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling that several members of the wedding were lying their heads off. Claude Ann’s lie about the gun was the most bothersome. She had no conceivable motive to murder Raif, but the world was too full of nuts for cops to be finicky about motive. If Claude Ann’s Beretta was the murder weapon, if her fingerprints were found on it,

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