Free Stalker (9780307823557) by Joan Lowery Nixon

pulled a small notebook and pen from the pocket of her jeans. “I’ll go to LaSalon tomorrow,” she said. “But—”
    “What’s your question?”
    “I don’t understand how Mrs. Trax’s job means anything at all in how or why she was murdered, and I don’t understand why Mrs. Aciddo should lie about where Mrs. Trax worked.”
    “That’s what detecting is all about,” Lucas said. “Lots of questions, lots of answers. They start fitting together like pieces in a puzzle.”
    “It’s frustrating.” Jennifer sighed. “I’d like it better if we could just find the murderer right away.”
    “Like in the movies where you’d open a door and there he’d stand, with a gun pointed at you?”
    “You are so aggravating!” Jennifer said. “I didn’t mean that at all. I—I don’t know what I mean.”
    “Then suppose we get back to work. Want to check the bedrooms?”
    “Not really,” Jennifer said. “But I will.” Reluctantly she entered the hall that connected the two small bedrooms. The door from the living room was near the door to Bobbie’s room. The bathroom door was in the middle of the hallway. Jennifer decided to start with Bobbie’s room and work her way down the hall.
    The bulb was missing from the naked fixture in the hall, but it didn’t matter. She flipped on the light in Bobbie’s room. The room looked as it always had. The headboard of the bed, the chest of drawers, and the small desk and wooden chair had long ago been painted white. Now they were as yellowed and chipped as old piano keys. The corners of the worn, faded rose corduroy bedspread were neatly tucked in place, but the room was bare of mementos. With the exception of Bobbie’s notebook and textbooks on the desk, there was nothing to show who lived in this room. Jennifer shuddered. The room alwayslooked the same, but the sorrow of it had never reached her before. Why did Bobbie keep her room so bare?
    Jennifer shook her head. Now she was behaving like Lucas with his endless questions. She went down the hallway to the bathroom, stepped inside and thought what a contrast it was to Bobbie’s clean room. The cracked mirrored door to the medicine cabinet hung open on one hinge. Bottles were strewn on the ledge and the sink. A couple of towels lay on the floor, and there was a sour smell, as though someone had been sick.
    Jennifer, trying not to gag, quickly stepped back into the hall. Yuck! What a mess! Shouldn’t someone come into this house and clean it up?
    Although the door to Bobbie’s bedroom had been open, the door to Stella’s room was closed. With trembling fingers Jennifer slowly turned the knob. She had no right to pry into the privacy of the woman who had lived here. After all, Stella had been her best friend’s mother. Although Jennifer had often been in this house, she had never been in Stella’s bedroom. It was a personal place, a—
    She groped for the light switch, since the thin light that filtered from the living room wasn’t strong enough to do more than create shadows. But her hand froze, and she barely managed to clutch the doorframe to steady herself as a shape detached itself from behind the bed, rising with a groan.
    Jennifer screamed as it lunged toward her and collapsed in a sour, ragged heap at her feet.
    Lucas appeared, roughly elbowing her aside and muttering, “Be quiet!” as he bent over the body.
    “I thought—It looked like a monster. I mean, coming out of the dark like that—”
    “Call an ambulance,” he said. “Do you know how?”
    “Well, of course I do!”
    “Then move it!”
    She quickly did as she was told, muttering to herself because he was treating her as he would a child. She stomped back to the bedroom and snapped, “I called your ambulance.”
    “Good,” he said. “Do you know who this is?”
    Lucas had rolled the man on his back. His eyelids were closed, one of them centering a deep purple bruise. His breath shuddered through swollen lips, and clumps of vomit had