Moments later, Samantha Kendall came into the room. “Sorry I’m late.”
As always, Mary took the time to just…be in awe of the statuesque redhead. To her, Aunt Samantha was the embodiment of grace, poise, and what she liked to call “kickassness.”
Then Samantha’s words hit home. She met her aunt’s gaze and could have sworn she heard the metallic clunk of a metaphorical trap slamming shut.
“You’re not late, my dear,” Grandma Kate said. “Come make yourself comfortable. Hot tea is on its way.”
“Hot tea is here, and you’re absolutely not late, Sam.” Bernice Benedict and her sister-in-law, Abigail, came into the great room right behind Samantha. The women wheeled in a single cart that this time held a large tea service and five cups.
“I hope you like Darjeeling,” Abigail said to Mary.
Mary smiled despite the sense of impending doom. “I think I’m about to find out.”
“We’re not holding an intervention—exactly,” Samantha Kendall said to her. “So do relax, Mary.”
“Oh, a ‘not exactly’ intervention,” Mary echoed. “I haven’t ever had one of those, either.”
It took only a few minutes for them to get their cups of tea. Once they were all sitting again, it was Kate, not Samantha, who got the ball rolling.
“Have you told Adam why you’re here, sweetheart?”
Mary wasn’t as successful as she would have liked to be in controlling her reaction to that surprising question. She should have feigned innocence, as if she had no idea what Grandma Kate was talking about. Or, she should have put on her sympathetic face and told them that she hadn’t, but she appreciated their concern, and left it at that. She did neither of those things, and she blamed her lack of sleep for it. What she did was revert to her teenage self—a definite sign that she really needed to spend more time with these women as an adult human being.
Mary felt her eyes roll and couldn’t stop that impudent gesture. “I don’t see why I should. I had a problem, and I dealt with it. Besides, Adam is a cop. Do you have any idea how cops tend to react when they talk to me?”
“If I may?” Bernice asked.
“Have at it, Bernie,” Samantha answered.
“I would submit that the usual reason you speak with police officers can be filed under the heading of research. And when you hound them with suggestions for the cases they’re currently working on, why, I do believe that the real reason for their visceral reactions to you has to be that they’re embarrassed to have been shown up by someone they consider to be a civilian and a nuisance. Not that you are a nuisance, of course.”
Mary sighed. Had she ever realized that Aunt Bernice was such a clever smartass? It was a trait she admired and one she would try to emulate. She’d have to make a note to spend more time one-on-one with the woman. In the meantime, she needed to respond and was determined to do a better job of it than she had to this point.
“I do have a tendency to be dogged,” she said. She took a sip from her cup. She’d added just a bit of sugar and a dollop of milk to her tea, as was her usual habit. Darjeeling. She thought she liked it. More than she’d expected to. Then she set her cup down and folded her hands.
Having grown up in a family in which the women were outnumbered by men—she didn’t even have a sister or a female first cousin—she hadn’t ever been the focus of this much adult female interest—well, except when she had been a teenager.
None of these women were strangers to her. She’d been spending summers and some Christmases in Lusty for all of her life. Her Aunt Samantha was as much an aunt to her as were her father’s twin brothers’ wives, Aunt Lynn and Aunt Erica.
She’d often thought that the circumstances of her father and his brothers, a set of triplets discovering they also had a set of triplet half-brothers, lay at the heart of what she’d chosen to do with her life.
Mysteries had always drawn her in. The only surprise was that real-life mysteries could be just as compelling to her as fictional ones. That realization hadn’t, in her case, lead to the obvious conclusion when it came to her life’s work.
Mary Kendall was not a cop nor an investigator.
As far as her family was concerned, and by family she meant, of course, her brothers and cousins, she wasn’t much of anything. Some of them called her a professional student, and others suggested that she might want to find a husband so that she at least could count on a regular income.
She hadn’t planned to tell anyone the truth. Sure, she presented herself as a woman who had it all together. Inside, she was as introverted as an introvert could possibly be. To her family, she appeared to be a woman who drifted aimlessly through life, taking one course after the next, none of which delineated a specific field of interest, let alone study. But the reality was that she was focused like a laser beam on a goal only she could see. Research, indeed.
It was actually Aunt Samantha who guessed first, and of course, her aunt told her mother, who told her sisters-in-law. She’d only recently discovered that her father and uncles knew, as well. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before everyone else knows what I really do for a living. And a damned fine living it was too, because she was very, very good at her chosen craft.
Mary Kendall in fact had an alter ego, the acclaimed mystery author, MJ Kendall. And the real reason she was in Lusty, the reason Grandma Kate referred to, was because New York no longer felt safe to her. Determined to be that adult now, she allowed herself to declare, mentally, that she did not feel safe
