Aretha Moon and the Dead Hairdresser: Aretha Moon Book 2 (Aretha Moon Mysteries) by Linda Ross (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

gas station with a stud in his tongue, and it was like he was speaking some weird foreign language.  I couldn’t figure out anything he said.  Talk about speaking in tongues.

“It started out nice enough,” Jordan said, going back to rubbing the bar with the cloth.  “She’d ask me for a ride home and I’d drop her off.  Then she started inviting me in for a beer, but there was another woman there sometimes.”  My ears perked up at that.  “So we started coming to my house since my grandmother went out a lot to church and stuff.”

“When did the cutting start?” I asked.

Jordan sighed.  “About the third time she came over, I guess.  I had asked if I could draw her, and she said yes, but there was a catch.  I had to let her make a little cut on me with her knife.  She said it was a ritual she had, that she liked to mark her boyfriends as her property.  The way she said it made it sound harmless.  Like getting a little tattoo or something.”  He shrugged.

“But it got worse, didn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah.”  His eyes dropped.  “I didn’t know how to stop it.  She was so insistent.  A little cut became a bigger cut and then she wanted to watch me bleed.  It scared the shit out of me.”

“I bet,” I said.

“My grandmother walked in on us one night and saw me sitting there bleeding, and she about had a cow.  When she gets mad, watch out.  She screamed at Kara and made her leave.  She told her never to see me again.”

“How did Kara react?” Thelma asked.

“She just laughed.  Said there were plenty of other guys around and then flipped the bird.   I thought Gram was going to hit her with her purse.”

“And you never saw her again?”

Jordan shook his head.  “She modeled a few times in the art class, but I was in a different class by then.”

I drained my whiskey sour and fished out the Maraschino cherry.  “Did you ever hear about any other guys Kara was seeing?”

Jordan shook his head.  “I never ran into her again, and I didn’t want to.”

“What about the woman at her house?”

“I think her name was Holly or something like that.”

“Maybe Hominy?” I asked.

“Yeah, that sounds right.  I don’t think she was there all the time.  Kara liked her privacy.”

Jordan got us each another drink and then moved down the bar to take care of a man who’d come in alone.  Thelma and I looked over our list and put a check mark by Jordan’s name.  “I don’t know,” I said in a low voice.  “He seems kind of sweet.  And harmless.”

“Sometimes they’re the worst,” Thelma said, and I supposed she would know, having been a school teacher.

“I’d like to talk to that woman who had some kind of dispute with Kara just before she was killed.  The one married to a lawyer.”

“Stephanie Riley,” Thelma said.

“Yeah, that’s the one.  Mr. Pierce said they lived just up the road from him.  Let’s run by there.”

“Don’t you want to weigh in at your diet group before we head up to Quincy tonight?”

“What do you think?” I asked, finishing the second whiskey sour and sucking on the cherry.

Thelma rolled her eyes and followed me to the car.

When we turned off Highway 79 and passed Kara’s rental house we saw a police car in the drive.  I slowed, and we craned our necks, but we couldn’t see anyone.

A lot of county roads are gravel, but this one was paved.  I figured it didn’t hurt to be a lawyer.  Lots of perks, like getting your road paved.  I drove slowly anyway.  The corn fields were cut low, the broken stalks looking like stubble.  There was a steep ravine on either side of the road, and the road was narrow enough that I paid attention to where I was driving.  From the corner of my eye I saw bits of trash rolling along the fence.  People always threw trash out of their cars in the country.  White plastic bags caught on corn stalks and waved in the wind like flags.  Something pink lay against one of the fence posts.  I rounded a curve and heard Thelma whistle softly.  And there was the Riley estate.  That’s the only word to describe it.

There was a wrought iron fence around the whole property, which I’m guessing was about five acres that included a pond.  There was a gate at the driveway.  It was closed but not locked.  Thelma got out and opened it, and I drove through.

“How much do lawyers make?” Thelma asked when she got back in the car.  “I may have to go to law school.”

“Clearly more than reporters.”

The house was two stories, stucco and stone.  There were big windows everywhere, and a sun room jutted off the side.  “What do you think?” I asked.  “Three or four thousand square feet?”

“Probably a finished basement making it five or six,” Thelma said.  “I had a Barbie house when I was little, and I thought that was a mansion.”

“You had a Barbie house?  You who became a nun?”

“The things we love when we’re kids aren’t always the things we love when we get older,” she said.  “What about you?  Did you have a dream house?”

I tried to remember.  “I was all about Wonder Woman.  I was into her invisible airplane.  I wanted one in the worst way.  I mean, it was the best of both worlds.  You know how a genie or a leprechaun or whatever gives you one wish?  What are you going to ask for, to be invisible or to be able to fly?  But ask for Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane and you’ve got both.”

“You know you’re weird, right?”

“I may have heard that before.”

The circle