She looked up. “Silly, isn’t it? You’ve probably never had a night like that. I know you said you’re not brave, but you’re so nice I bet you said that just to make me feel better.”
As if. I smiled and started to deny everything, but Rachel kept going.
“This morning I decided that even if Sam was gone, our marriage vows aren’t. I owe it to us, to our family, to try.”
Her words were full of bravado, but the expression on her face spoke of fear and a shaky stomach.
I only wished I knew what she was talking about. There was, however, only one proper course of action. Mom action. “You can do anything,” I said. “You’re young and strong and smart and fearless in your determination to do what’s best for your children. There’s no wall tall enough to keep you from achieving your goals.” Whatever they might be.
Rachel puffed out her cheeks and blew a sigh of relief so big it fluffed her bangs back off her face. “You think so?” The soft question made her sound only slightly older than her daughter.
“Look at all you’ve done so far.” I waved my arms, indicating the homey kitchen, the living room, and the pile of financial printouts littering the small desk in the corner. “You’ve created a beautiful home, taught yourself a new career, and in your spare time raised two well-behaved children who, I’ve been told, can walk and talk and chew gum at the same time. If that doesn’t qualify you for king of the world, I don’t know what does.”
She didn’t laugh, but she did smile. “Thanks, Beth. You’ve been a big help. I couldn’t have made this decision without you.”
I hated it when people said things like that. It made me feel that I should do all I could to make the decision the right one. Which ended up with me making offers that ranged from babysitting infant triplets to helping a friend move in a January blizzard.
“Let me know,” I said, “if I can do anything to help.”
The referee dropped the puck and two hockey sticks darted out. “Go, Raiders!” I yelled, clapping my mittened hands together. Jenna’s hockey team was on home ice here in the Agnes Mephisto Memorial Ice Arena, and they had a good chance to win this afternoon’s game.
I sat down next to Marina. “Did you know Sam had a business partner?” I asked.
Marina huddled inside her capacious wool coat. “ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be; / For loan oft loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.’ ”
Well, well, well. “That’s a direct quote.”
Marina tossed up her chin. “Thou dost soundest surprised. Methinks you underestimate this . . . this sprite.”
Sprite? Marina was many things, but elflike was not one of them. Not unless elves came in tallish, widish, red-haired versions whose use of an indoor voice was limited to whispers about feminine hygiene products.
“Just going with precedent,” I said. “Never once have I heard you quote Shakespeare correctly.” Not that I was the best judge—English lit had been a long time ago—but even I could tell when iambic pentameter was being beaten with a stick.
Her chin dropped. “Not even once?”
“Well, you get the ‘To be or not to be’ part right, but after that . . .” I shrugged.
She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You’re not going to bring up the York thing again, are you?”
Only Marina could turn “Alas, poor Yorick” into “Alan’s poor York.” “Would I do a thing like that?”
“In a New Yorick minute,” she said.
“Pretty funny, aren’t you?”
“Why, yes, I am.” Her proud look made me laugh. “The DH and I are paying huge smacking sums for the second youngest child to learn five-hundred-year-old plays at the collegiate level, so I figured I might as well learn, too. Double instruction for the dollar.” She grinned. “I’m driving the kid nuts.”
“Good for you. So I take it you knew Sam had a partner?”
“Sam’s partner is—oh, dear, I thought this was a nohitting league—Brian Keller.”
“No checking,” I corrected. “Hitting is always illegal. Checking is different.” Much different, but no matter how many times I explained the rules of hockey to Marina, they never seemed to sink into the long-term-memory part of her brain. Lately, however, I had suspicions that she understood much more about hockey than she was letting on. One of these days I’d catch her, and it’d be all over.
“So you say. You also say they wear sweaters, and if those are sweaters”—she pointed at the ice—“I’m a raven-haired string bean.”
We could have entered into a debate regarding the merits of using outdated terms of reference—if she was going to make fun of the term “sweaters,” I would ask her about the last time she physically dialed a telephone number—but there were more important topics on the agenda. “Who’s Brian Keller?” I asked, then stood up and whistled loud enough to send an echo around the cavernous building. “Nice save, Jenna!”
“It was?” Marina’s forehead was creased with puzzlement. “But she fell down.”
My daughter had, in fact, thrown herself onto the ice, arms outstretched, in a last-ditch effort to keep the puck from sliding into the outside corner. “Quit that,” I said. “Who’s Brian Keller?”
“He was a friend of Sam’s in college,” Marina said. “Grew up in suburban Milwaukee, played baseball from infancy through high school, went to the University of Wisconsin to major in art history of all things.”
My spine stiffened in preparation for the defense of all liberal arts degrees. “There’s nothing wrong with majoring in art history.”
“There’s nothing wrong with declaring your major to be communications, but is it really going to help you get a job? I think not. Sam and Brian connected during a Western civ class—required, in case you wanted to know—and stayed in contact over the years. When they became disenchanted with their wage-slave jobs, they put their heads together and came up with the brilliant idea of selling cheese to the Chinese.
“Selling—”
Marina kept going. “Luckily for their net worth, their wives put the kibosh on that idea. Behind every successful man there is a woman who could say, ‘I told you so.’ Though if I remember correctly”—she tapped her cheek with an index finger covered in purple mitten—“Brian and his wife are divorcing. No children.”
I looked at her in admiration. “How do you know all that?”
She picked a piece of invisible lint off her sleeve and dropped it onto the cold cement floor. “Some call it gossip, I call it information gathering.”
“What else do you know?”
Her breezy manner fell away and her mouth twisted as she watched the players skate from left to right and back again. “That Sam was the nicest guy ever. That no one can dream up a real reason why he was killed. That without Sam, Rachel and the kids are going to have a tough time.”
All true and very sad, but none of it was useful for finding a killer, saving my bookstore, or restoring order to the city of Rynwood.
“Anything else?”
“Why, yes, indeed, my sweetie.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve figured out how to end static cling.”
She shook her head. “I’ve decided to let the next generation tackle that. It’ll be good for them.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I know who killed Sam.”
Even though I was used to Marina’s dubiously authoritative pronouncements, this one startled me. “Forty-five seconds ago you had no clue to the killer’s identity. Now you know?”
“You didn’t see the announcement flashing in big red lights on the scoreboard?”
It was my own fault; I knew better, but I glanced over at the scoreboard and saw only the score. Home 2, Visitors 1.
Marina cackled. “Caught you!”
I closed my eyes. Why did I do things like that?
“But in answer to your question, my razor-sharp intelligence homed in on the murderer’s identity just as your dainty daughter whacked the puck clear to the other end of the ice. Brian Keller is the killer.”
Sure he was. “And what’s the rationale for this theory, other than the fact that it’s fun to say.”
She was repeating the phrase in a singsong fashion, tipping her head from side to side with the beat. “Keller
