Chapter Thirteen
“Idon’t know about any of this. It just feels wrong.
” Beauticians fluttered around me—touching up this, fluffing that, painting this, and pulling that.
“A woman was murdered here two weeks ago. The fountain is still roped off with crime scene tape. Having a party amidst a murder investigation is just ghoulish.”
Courtney reclined on my bed, perusing the menu with one eye, and sweeping Sue’s palace of narcissism with the other.
“I agree, babe, but what else could you do? This party is too expensive to cancel,” she said.
“At least the cops agreed that the killer most likely followed Mrs. Prado here, blended in with all the vans and workers, then killed her and slipped away.”
“But that makes even less sense,” I burst out. “Why would anyone stalk and kill Mrs. Prado? She was just a cook and house manager, not a mafia boss. Why would anyone want to hurt her, let alone be so desperate to do it that they’d risk being seen by dozens of people?”
“But they weren’t seen by dozens of people,” she said softly. “That’s what really freaks me out. How do you stab and murder someone, and then bury them under a pile of leaves amid a mass of chaos, and no one sees a thing?”
I shuddered, and was scolded for my trouble.
“Mrs. Kim, please, stay still.” Elin grasped my chin and snapped my head around. I was already cringing before her tweezers descended on my eyebrows.
There were still hours before the anniversary party started, but Christie assured me hours would barely be enough time.
That’s why I invited Courtney to join me in primping hell.
I snagged her an invitation the second I could.
I was also going to get one for her mom, but she offered to take Taylor on a grandmama-grandbaby vacation so that Courtney could get her first adult-only weekend in five years.
Her hair and makeup were already done, so that left her chilling in a fluffy bathrobe on my borrowed bed. “I saw the LPD outside,” she continued. “Why? Are they worried the killer will come back?”
“They can’t say if he will or he won’t since they have no idea why this happened,” I forced through my smooshed-up mouth. Freya got ahold of my jaw while Elin had me distracted with the burning fire above my eyes. “But no. They’re here to protect shiny rocks tonight, not the rest of us.”
“Are you worried?” She reached over and brushed the back of my hand. “What am I saying? Of course you’re worried.”
“I don’t know what to think,” I admitted.
“I haven’t been around for— I mean, I haven’t been in Mrs. Prado’s life for a while.
Maybe she did have enemies, and one caught up to her when her back was turned, but remember, Court?
It’s not just her. Tracy Williams from the post office was murdered too. ”
“I remember,” she replied, voice grim. “You’re thinking there could be a psychopath running around Lantana.”
“And if there is, he literally came to my doorstep.”
Courtney shuddered—suddenly feeling the same unease I was. “Do the police have any leads? Any evidence that the two deaths could be related?”
I would’ve shaken my head, but Elin and Freya had moved to my hair and were screeching at me for the slightest head tilt.
“Davis said no, and I did ask him exactly that. The investigations are ongoing, so he won’t give any details.
All he would say was that Mrs. Prado and Tracy Williams had less than nothing in common.
Different age groups, different friend groups, different neighbors, different income brackets, different causes of death.
“I guess the good news is he said the same for all the potential suspects we had running around the manor that day. Christie’s business is based in New York.
She and all of her staff drove in that morning from over three hours away.
Not a single one of them has been to Lantana before, and Mrs. Prado has never been to New York.
There’s just no connection there,” I said. “The only connection is—”
“—to you, Micah, Rhodes, Alex, and your omma,” she finished. She flashed me a look I only half saw out of the corner of my eye. “Did he grill you guys?”
“Only some of us,” I mumbled, face heating up.
“Obviously, he knew my mother didn’t crawl out of her deathbed just to murder her old cook.
Micah had already left for work. And Alex was with Christie and her staff during the time of the murder.
There were only two people—according to Davis—who had opportunity to commit the murder, and alibiing each other out is pointless, since a wife would easily lie for her husband, and vice versa. ”
“But you can alibi each other out,” she said, grinning away. “You two were too busy banging each other’s brains out in the dirt to be going around murdering cooks.”
“Yes, thank you,” I cried over Elin’s, Freya’s, Natalie’s, Rose’s, and Marcus’s snickering. “I know what we were doing—didn’t need the reminder.”
She laughed at me without a lick of shame.
“The point is that the murder had nothing to do with you, or your family. What happened to Mrs. Prado was horribly tragic for her and her family, but you’ve offered to pay for her funeral, and you petitioned the estate lawyer to convert the salary you were going to pay Mrs. Prado into a college fund for her grandkids.
What you’re doing is very generous, Sue,” she said, slipping into the wrong name easily.
“And it’s your best. The best you can do, so please, don’t sit here torturing yourself.
Let’s just enjoy celebrating you and your husbands tonight, especially since you guys have something to celebrate these days. ”
It was wrong to smirk and grin on the heels of discussing the brutal murder of someone who took part in raising me, so I bit hard on my lip—fighting back the rising smile that grew from thoughts of Micah and Rhodes.
After a rocky, and I mean mountainous, bad start, I finally figured out the key to true peace in this house—
Sex.
Micah and I were rolling around in the sheets nearly every minute of every day except for all the minutes of the day that Rhodes and I were banging away.
To say the spark ignited into passion that grew into a towering inferno of raging lust is putting it mildly.
The three of us were far from fighting these days.
Just the opposite. We’d fallen into a nice routine of eating breakfast together before work and school, laughing and being silly with Nari while cooking dinner, and burning up the sheets all the free minutes in between.
The only one who wasn’t in on the new terms of the truce... was Alex.
If anything, my relationship with him had gotten even worse.
Alex’s cold shoulder morphed into an Arctic chill.
He left every room I walked into. He attended meals with me for Lily’s sake, but afterward he’d hustle her away for the next activity in her routine, and left the three of us sitting in the awkward.
I did try once the week before to talk to him, but he just stopped me and said—surprisingly politely—that he’d prefer we maintain strict boundaries and only speak when it had something to do with caring for Lily.
I let him go without a word, swallowing my hurt, because what right did I have to push and harass him? We didn’t have a relationship to fight for. We didn’t even have a co-parenting relationship to fight for.
I wasn’t his wife. I wasn’t Lily’s mother. I was nothing to him at all.
At least I’m something to Micah and Rhodes, I reminded myself.
The next time I leave this house, I’ll be packing some good memories with me.
The memories of my first, third, twelfth, and thirty-third screaming orgasm.
Plus, the memory of waking up the next morning after those orgasms with their arms around me, and no nightmares retracting their claws from my mind.
And even though Rhodes and Micah claimed all they wanted out of the last days of their marriage was lots of hot sex, I could feel things changing between us.
Micah was joking, teasing, and laughing with me now—instead of jabbing, taunting, and laughing at me.
Some nights, we didn’t even have sex. We’d just curl up in bed laughing at old-school comedy reruns and bemoaning the current state of comedy television.
As for Rhodes, we never touched on what I blurted out in the woods about wanting to stay together and work on the marriage he didn’t know we didn’t have, but things seemed to change with him all the same.
Sex really seemed to mellow the guy out the way early morning runs never could.
Over the last couple weeks, he’d been opening up to me about the pressure he was under—having to run a business based in two states and support a family of five.
Even though the manor and Omma’s care were paid for by the estate, Latana was still an expensive town to live in—as ultra-rich communities tend to be.
Just one semester at Lantana Day School costs fifteen thousand dollars.
I wish I could’ve freaked out over those numbers, but Omma spent twice that a semester to send me to Titan Prep. Competition was fierce in a community that can afford to send their kids to any college they want. If you wanted your kid to have the edge, you had to pay for it.
Even though there wasn’t much my thirty dollars an hour and I could do to relieve his financial pressure, it seemed to help him just having me listen and hear him out without judgment.
So much so that over the last week, he’d been opening up to me about growing up under the weight of being Rhodes Newbury of the Chicago Newburys.