With Friends Like These by Gillian Roberts

Author:Gillian Roberts [Roberts, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

THE KILLER GRANNY WOULD NOT be talked out of visiting her accuser. I didn’t see the point of notifying her of the cloud of suspicion over her head, so my excuses were fairly lame, and definitely not persuasive.

“But she’s out of the hospital. She’s okay,” I said. Hattie Zacharias had suffered grief and agitation, not a heart attack.

“Mandy! The woman lost her son. It’s nothing more than decent to offer condolences.”

I was being petty and selfish because Hattie lived in Society Hill, which was all the way on the waterfront. I couldn’t shuttle my mother there and back to the Main Line then retrace my tracks and arrive at Richard Quinn’s waterfront restaurant in time.

“Poor old woman,” my mother shouted. We were in the family room, where my father sat, almost regally, with the encased foot on a low stool and an afghan over his lap. My niece, Karen, was the floor show, dancing to recorded ditties in a convulsive but enthusiastic style. The background music was the same squeaky white-bread version of rapped Mother Goose that had caused my father’s precipitous slide across the living room twenty-four hours earlier, but he did not appear to make the connection and/or care, proof of how heavily he was sedated.

“It’s the least I can do,” my mother bellowed, trying to be heard above the din.

“…went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone…”

It was the worst excuse for music I’d ever heard, and I wondered how the woman who’d cut the record had fallen to the nadir of show-biz.

Still, as sorry as I felt for what had become of her, I felt even worse about what was happening to my auditory nerves. I put my hands to my ears and charaded aural agony, and way, way after she should have, my bright niece caught on and lowered the volume microscopically.

“Poor Hattie never had anything, anybody in the whole world except Lyle,” my mother said. “Now, what does she have at all?”

“The Queen of Hearts she made some tarts…”

Even at a slightly lowered decibel level, the voice was grating. Besides, I didn’t want to hear about any tarts, even the Queen’s, at the moment. My father didn’t wince or flinch. He grinned beatifically. The drugs he was taking were obviously the secret hope for peace on earth. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sharing them. “Karen!” I shouted. “Please!”

She looked shocked and examined me with a face that clearly was redefining me as seriously old and out of it. Nonetheless, she lowered the volume to an acceptable level. She was going to be an interesting challenge as a teenager.

“Okay, Mom,” I conceded. “We’ll go. But we have to leave now, and I might have to send you back in a cab, because before I knew about…this, I made a…”

My mother’s eyes widened, her mouth opened slightly. I could imagine her expression on someone lost in the wilderness who finally spots a sign of life. “Yes?” she asked softly, hopefully.

“A…” I gagged over the word, but my mother looked so expectant, so innocent, that I tried to give her this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.