Chapter 12
Byrdie
Iget dressed in record time.
Vonn and Makhi are in the kitchen with Nance, who paces as she mumbles inaudibly under her breath and looks more panicked than I’ve seen her before.
Vonn has his head down, busy tapping a message on his cell phone.
Makhi is hungover, pale-faced and sick as he sits at the dining table with one hand on his forehead. There’s an untouched glass of water in front of him that he looks at and shudders.
Lydia is sitting at the table, her cell phone beside her. The only thing missing is a big tub of popcorn to go along with that wide-eyed stare, because she is loving all this excitement that's brightening what would probably have been a boring day of cleaning.
“What happened again?” Lydia asks.
It’s a mistake.
Nance’s eyes land on her. Her lips flatten and her back stiffens. “I don’t have time for your mischief today. You can go home and work tomorrow when things are back to normal.”
Lydia complains about having driven all this way.
Nance’s stubborn expression says it’s a waste of time.
After heaving a dramatic sigh, Lydia drags herself up from the table, picks up her phone, and slinks out of the kitchen, nodding at me on her way out.
I take her seat at the dining table and open my mouth to ask about Nash, but close it when Nance shoots a warning glance at the door and shakes her head.
I wait.
Five minutes later, the distant hum of an engine filters inside. Lydia has left.
“There are some things I trust Lydia to do,” Nance says, taking a seat at the table. “Keeping her mouth shut isn’t one of those things.”
“If you’ve been trusting her to clean, I hate to tell you this, but that girl couldn’t clean her way out of a cardboard box,” Makhi says, head in his hands.
I look at the table to hide my smile when Nance aims a glare at him.
“Drink your water,” she orders him.
He glances at the water and swallows hard. “If you want me to throw up all over this table, that’s exactly what will happen.”
She tuts. “I don’t see how a little whiskey can make a grown man so sick.”
“A little?” He lifts his head to look at Nance from where he’s rested it on the dining table after nudging aside the unwanted glass of water.
Before they can continue their strange argument, I ask Vonn, “Why did the sheriff arrest Nash for murder?”
I never thought Nash could kill anyone. He’s always been quiet, serious, and kind.
What if he goes to jail forever? What if they kill him?
I try to remember whether Arizona has the death penalty, and I can’t remember.
Part of me doesn’t try all that hard to remember.
Nash being arrested is one thing. That he could wind up facing a death sentence is something else.
“I’m dying,” Makhi groans. “Never let me drink again, Vonn. Swear on your first-born child.”
Vonn puts down his cell phone, looking more annoyed with Makhi’s complaints than willing to swear on anything, least of all on his first-born child.
With a gusty sigh, Nance gets up from the table and walks over to the refrigerator after making a brief stop to pull something out of a cupboard. She returns to the dining table with both hands full. “Here. Ginger will calm your stomach, and the painkiller will stop the pounding headache.”
Makhi looks briefly surprised by the ginger ale and painkillers she places in front of him, and I wonder at the relationship they have with each other. A long time ago, I thought Nance was just the housekeeper. But she’s more than that. She seems to care about them all.
“Sorry I called you an old bird that one time,” Makhi says, pulling the tab on the can of ginger ale with a boyish smile.
“And the other times?” Nance asks dryly.
Makhi groans. “Have mercy on a man who drank too much whiskey and killed off more brain cells than he can afford to lose, Nance.”
Vonn’s cell phone vibrates loudly across the wooden table, and he grabs it. After scanning the screen, he sets the phone down on the table, his shoulders more relaxed than when I first walked into the kitchen.
“Nash’s attorney is leaving his house now,” Vonn explains as Nance wanders over to the refrigerator and pulls out eggs and bacon.
“But what if the sheriff interviews him now? Could he push Nash into saying something that incriminates himself?” I ask.
I have no clue about who he’s supposed to have killed, and I’m hesitant to ask in case it involves a certain missing gardener who tried to sexually assault me.
“Nash knows not to say anything without his attorney, so we should be good until Otto gets him out,” Vonn explains with a reassuring smile.
“His attorney lives a couple of towns over, so it’ll take him an hour to get to the sheriff’s department.
It’s probably not a good idea for us to go down there, but I’d still like to see Nash. Make sure he got there in one piece.”
So would I.
I try not to be too hopeful. “You say that as if getting Nash out of jail for murder is an easy thing.”
“Nash didn’t kill anyone,” Makhi says, taking a small, hesitant sip from his ginger ale.
He eyes the can warily as he waits for a second, then his expression relaxes and he follows up the sip with a bigger one. I take it as a sign that the ginger is settling his stomach, and he’s not about to throw up over the dining table.
When Nance also relaxes from where she’s watching him closely from the stove, she must be more relieved than I am not to be cleaning puke from a gorgeous wooden table. I’d have helped her, but I would not have appreciated the task—or Makhi—afterward.
“How can you be sure he didn’t kill anyone?” I ask Makhi.
“Because I did,” he announces.
I freeze.
Vonn releases a frustrated sigh. “Don’t listen to him, Byrdie. He didn’t kill anyone.”
“But there was talk in town of a murderer under this roof,” I say. “The grocery store owner warned me not to come here.”
“There was a death in the house,” Nance says, removing cooked bacon from the skillet and pouring beaten eggs into the same pan. “Naturally, that leads suspicious minds to gossip.”
“Who died?” I ask.
“Nash’s dad,” Vonn explains.
“How did he die?” I glance between Makhi and Vonn, thinking one of them must have done it.
“He fell off the roof,” Vonn says, and when Makhi avoids my gaze, I know he must be thinking of how he found me standing on the edge last night.
My eyes fly to Nance. “You warned me not to go up there.” When I first started working as a maid, Nance made it clear she didn’t trust me. I was pleased to prove her wrong by not being lazy and for sticking around. The other maids they’d hired never lasted long.
“Because it’s dangerous,” Nance says. “There’s no railing along the edge. I imagine it gets slippery in the inclement weather. It would be easy for anyone to fall, especially while drunk, and he was very drunk that rainy, thundery day.”
My eyes widen. “You were here.”
“Of course I was here,” she says, meeting my eyes. “I’ve been a housekeeper here since Nash was a baby. The scream as he fell was really quite terrible. Most of the staff left afterward because of it.”
“I think they left because they believed someone had given the old guy a nudge over the side,” Makhi says dryly.
“One of you?” I ask, my eyes shifting between Vonn and Makhi.
Vonn nods. “We were friends with Nash and staying at the house. It wasn’t long before rumors spread that it had to be one of us. Since the locals could never decide which of us it was, they treated us all like lepers when we went into town.”
"But if it was just an accidental fall that happened years ago, then why do people still think it's murder, and why did the sheriff arrest Nash this morning?"
Too late, I wish I could snatch my question back and stuff it down my throat.
The gardener.
Vonn killed him for me when he grabbed me and pinned me against a kitchen wall.
What if that’s what this is about?
I eye Vonn closely, not wanting to bring up the gardener's disappearance while Nance is in the room. If she heard about what happened, she’d go to the cops about the murder.
“His uncle has never stopped bleating that his brother’s death was suspicious, before, during and after the investigation that ruled the death accidental. He repeated loudly and often that Nash killed him and faked a will, stealing what was his,” Nance says as she plates up breakfast for us.
I’m not interested in eating breakfast with all this talk about murder.
From Makhi’s green face as he nudges his plate aside, he’s not willing to risk finding out if his stomach can handle food yet.
Only Vonn immediately digs into his bacon and eggs while Nance returns to the table with glasses of OJ for Vonn and me.
“What was supposed to be his?” I dare to ask.
“Nothing,” Nance snaps, then sighs tiredly.
“Nash is the heir. As the son of the rightful owner of this house, he was always expected to inherit the house and the money. That’s the way it has always been for generations.
But his uncle started putting it about that his brother wanted him to have everything.
When Nash’s dad died, the whispers started. ”
“They got louder after the will reading when everything was left to Nash,” Vonn says.
I pick at my eggs. “But surely there has to be proof for the cops to arrest Nash for a murder that was ruled accidental years ago, right?”
“You’d think so,” Makhi says, sitting back in his seat with his eyes closed.
“This is a fishing expedition. It’s why Nash knows not to say anything until his attorney gets down there,” Vonn explains.
“Why doesn’t he have an attorney here instead of from two towns over?” I ask, confused.
“Because,” Makhi says, opening his eyes to look at me. “His uncle is the mayor of this lovely town with the sheriff tucked up tight in his back pocket, and he’s close friends with the attorney in this town.”
“Oh.” I consider a mayor turning an entire town against them. “I can see how that would complicate things for Nash.”