Galloway himself.”
Dwight frowned. “But you yourself had no contact with her the week before she died?”
“Didn’t say that, Bryant. I said I hadn’t seen her. We talked almost every day. There was a public hearing on the planning board’s recommendations Tuesday night and she was opposed to them. Wanted to game it with me.”
“Huh?” No one ever said that Creedmore made his fortune through dumb luck alone. “You telling me she was killed? She didn’t do it herself?”
“We’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat for a few hours,” Bo said. “But yeah. Someone strangled her.”
“Well, damn!” said Danny Creedmore. They could see the wheels turning behind those shrewd blue eyes. “You talk to her good-for-nothing daughter yet?”
“What do you mean I can’t move back in here?” Dee asked indignantly.
She had appeared at the door of Candace Bradshaw’s new house with her duffle bag, and Special Agent Sabrina Ginsburg and Deputy Mayleen Richards had immediately blocked her entrance.
“This is my mother’s house. I live here and I’m her only child so I probably own it now.” She glared at the two law officers and all but stamped her foot in indignation.
“Unless she left a will, I rather doubt that,” said the blond Ginsburg “twin.” “It’s our understanding that she and your dad were still legally married, so he would be one of her heirs if she died intestate.”
“Whatever. So call him. I’m sure he’d rather I stay here than keep sleeping on his couch, and besides, I need fresh clothes.”
“You really can’t move back in,” Richards told her, thinking that Deanna Bradshaw was acting more like twelve than twenty-two. “You can pick up some of your clothes, but you can’t stay till we finish our investigation.”
While Sabrina Ginsburg went back to checking the files on Candace Bradshaw’s laptop, Mayleen Richards followed the daughter into her messy bedroom next door to the office.
The girl stopped at the doorway and gave a look of distaste at the state of her room. “Oh crap! I guess you’re not letting Sancha in to clean either.”
“That’s right,” Richards said. “While you’re here, though, I need to ask you some questions. You may have been the last one to see your mother alive. Did she give any indication that—”
“—that she was going to put a bag over her head and end it all? No! Okay, we had a fight. She was still pissed that I let a guy stay over last week and we got into it again.”
“What guy?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve dumped him. He can’t hold his liquor. Puked all over her new couch.”
“I need his name.”
Rolling her eyes, Dee muttered the boyfriend’s full name and that of his dorm over at Chapel Hill.
“Thanks,” Richards said, writing it on the yellow legal pad she carried. “Was your mother depressed? In some kind of trouble?”
“My dad told me what she wrote.” Dee upended her duffle bag on the bed and began to pull clean lingerie from an open drawer. “But he didn’t believe it and I don’t either. Mom liked her life. She was kicking ass and having fun.”
“Whose ass, Dee?”
“Anybody’s who needed it, I guess. How should I know? I was at school till Easter most of the time.”
“That when she moved in here?”
“No, it was Christmas. She was real big on giving herself presents. New Toyota for her birthday last spring, this house for Christmas. First new house she’d ever lived in. You’d’ve thought it was Buckingham Palace,” she said with all the scorn of someone born to the privilege and status her father’s family had possessed.
“Our old house had been in the Bradshaw family for a hundred years,” Dee said, “and she just walked away from everything there. Sold it all or sent it to the landfill. Even my stuff. The only thing she kept was her dollhouse and her clothes.”
“
“You don’t think she ever let me play with it, do you? Mom didn’t like to share. When she was little, I guess her people didn’t have much. She used to talk about the dollhouse she’d seen in a shop window and how she used to wish on the new moon for one, so Dad gave it to her for their tenth wedding anniversary. She was always fiddling with it and buying new stuff for it.”
There was a sudden catch in her voice and Richards realized she was not quite as indifferent to her mother’s death as she would have everyone believe.
“So when did you see her last?” Richards asked gently.
“I don’t know. Tuesday? Around two, maybe? We fought. She said I could go back to school or I could go live with Dad. She made me give her my key as I was leaving, but she was already starting to cool off.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, she was eating a late lunch and watching a history program at the kitchen counter—some guy jumped out of an airplane twenty-five years ago with a bag of diamonds or something.”
“Eating what?” Richards asked.
