“Name it.” I got out my notepad to write down the assignment. Was it research for another investigation? Following up with a source? Looking for the proverbial smoking gun?
“I’m going to need you to feed Aunt Beast.”
“What? You need me to feed your aunt? Is she ill?”
“No, she’s not ill,” Holman said, looking at me like I was crazy. “She doesn’t have any arms.”
This was the first I was hearing about a relative of Holman’s with no arms. But before I asked any more questions I paused, waiting for the rest. With Holman I’d learned that sometimes when you thought you were talking about one thing, you were actually talking about something else entirely.
“She gets one pinch in the morning and one in the evening. And if I’m gone for more than two weeks, you’ll need to change her.”
Before I could object to feeding, pinching, and changing anyone, he pulled out a large cylinder of Bettamin Tropical Fish Food and set it on the desk in front of me.
And there it was: a fish.
Holman pointed to the electric-blue betta fish swimming in a clear glass bowl atop his credenza. I realized that although I’d seen the fish nearly every day, I’d never asked if it had a name.
“You named your fish Aunt Beast?”
“Yes.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Aunt Beast. You know, from A Wrinkle in Time?”
It sounded familiar, but I was going to need a little more to go on.
“Aunt Beast is the beloved monster who helps Meg heal and teaches her not to judge people by their appearances.”
I looked at Holman and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was one of the sweetest and saddest things I’d ever heard. Before I could stop myself, I threw my arms around his neck and squeezed him as tight as I could. “Do you really have to go?”
Holman, for his part, stood quite still except for his long, spindly arms that he stiffly wrapped around me and crossed at the wrists, being very careful not to touch any part of my torso. He’d tried to hug me once before and I remember thinking the experience was akin to being embraced by a stick bug. This second attempt was not much better, but I appreciated the effort.
“Who will protect the coastal waters of mid-Eastern Virginia if not me, Riley?”
I released him and tried not to be offended by how relieved he looked. “Fine. Go save the environment. Leave me here all alone.”
Holman picked up his briefcase and turned off the light. “You won’t be alone. You’ll have Aunt Beast.”
After Holman left for places unknown, or at least unknown to me, I skulked back to my cubicle and was about to text my boyfriend Jay to tell him I was thinking about his cute face when my phone rang.
“Riley, thank God! It’s me.”
“Me” was Tabitha, my former library co-worker and current bridezilla. I’d been covering some shifts for her at the library as she prepared to marry her blue-chip doctor fiancé, Thad. She’d complained bitterly when I handed in my resignation. “How am I supposed to plan my wedding and do all of your work for you?” I agreed to help out here and there mostly because I loved our boss, Dr. Harbinger—and he loved Tabitha and me. We were both like daughters to him, which I suppose made us like siblings, rivalry and all.
“Can you come meet me? Like now?” she snipped.
Tabitha was an unrelenting taskmaster and no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to be able to do anything to her satisfaction. I wondered what cardinal sin of information management I had committed this time.
“I’m at work. Can I do it later?”
“That depends,” she said. “How long after finding a dead body can you wait before calling the police?”
CHAPTER 2
Are you okay?” I asked Tabitha as I stepped into the massive foyer of her fiancé’s family home.
“I’m fine,” she said. But she didn’t look fine; she looked pale. True, Tabitha’s skin was always pale, however it was usually an aristocratic pale—farm-fresh cream with a hint of peach—that paired perfectly with her raven hair and haughty attitude. But when she opened the door her cheeks had more of bad-shrimp pallor. In five years of working with Tabitha St. Simon, I’d never seen her look so fragile.
“It’s in there,” she nodded toward a long walnut-paneled hallway, at the end of which was a door that stood halfway open. The “it” she referred to was the lifeless body of Dr. Arthur Davenport, a prominent local cardiologist and her fiancé Thad’s father. I walked down the hallway and peered into the room. Seeing him lying on the rug made me feel a little like I’d eaten a bad shrimp myself, so we walked back to the foyer to wait for the sheriff, whom I’d convinced her to call as soon as we had hung up.
Tabitha told me on the phone that she’d come over to get some measurements that the wedding planner needed—some crisis about the antler arch possibly being too wide for the terrace doors. And since Thad was out of town at a conference and Arthur was supposed to be at work, Thad told her to just run over and get what she needed. She heard the family dog howling from Arthur’s office when she got there, which was weird, so she went to go see what was the matter. And the matter was Dr. Davenport lying dead on the floor.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe a stroke? Heart attack?”
“Is there a reason you didn’t call 911 right away?”
Tabitha paused before speaking, as if it was difficult for her to remember what she’d been thinking. “When I saw him lying there like that . . . completely still, eyes open . . . it was very unnatural-looking, you know? I felt
