Free Murder in the Milk Case by Spyglass Lane Mysteries Page A

said.
    Max motioned for her to wait.
    She sighed hugely and put her hand over the receiver. “What, Dad? This is really important. Julie is afraid her mother has a boyfriend. He’s a loser who works at some school. Julie’s crying. She wants her dad.”
    Lee Ann dating someone else? She and Norm had been together since high school—inseparable. He’d rescued her from an abusive home situation. I still couldn’t imagine their breaking up.
    “Were there any phone calls for us?” Max asked.
    She shook her head. “Nah. No phone calls except Grandmom. Oh, and Abbie called to say she’d pick up doughnuts for the health fair.”
    Those weren’t considered real phone calls, since they weren’t for Karen.
    She tapped her fingers on the railing. “Sammie’s in bed and wants you to come up and hug her good night. Charlie’s in his room. He keeps talking about dead people.” She sighed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Why do I have to have such a weird brother? Why do I have such a weird family?” She put the phone back to her mouth and tromped up the stairs.
    Max and I exchanged glances. “I think I’ll talk to Charlie tonight about the dead people after I tuck Sammie in and pray with her.”
    “Okay,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s any big deal. He’s probably just teasing the girls. You know how he is.”
    I did, perhaps better than Max. Charlie and I are like soul mates. We feel deeply, have great imaginations, and we’re both scrappers.
    I went upstairs to say good night to Sammie, but I was too late. She was already asleep. I stood next to her canopy bed and watched as hair that had fallen over her face rose and fell with her breaths. My baby. I was praying for her when Max joined me. He stood quietly next to me until I was done.
    When we were back in the hall, he headed for the stairs. “I’ll be in my office,” he said over his shoulder. “I have to call George. Remember, he’ll be in tomorrow morning to talk about the figures you put together. Since you know all the details, you can explain them to him.”
    “Okay.” I watched him go downstairs and wished we could have one day with no one around and nothing between us.
    I peeked into Charlie’s room. His wiry, pajama-clad body was huddled in a chair at his desk, where he intently studied an open book.
    “You ready for bed?” I asked.
    He jumped as if I’d set off a firecracker. “Uh, yeah.” He slammed the book shut and shoved it under his schoolbooks.
    Nothing says guilty like a child hiding something from his parent’s view. “What is that, Charlie?”
    He stared at me defiantly. “It’s just a book.”
    “What book?” I walked over to his desk.
    He heaved a sigh and pulled it back out from under the pile with exaggerated motions. “Here.”
    Mysterious Disappearances—The Facts, Plain and Simple. Okay, well, at least it wasn’t a book of naked women.
    Still, the way he hid it told me he knew what I’d say about it. “So they put out a book?” I fingered the cover, illustrated by superimposed, graphic, black-and-white crime images. “Whose is this?”
    “Mike’s.”
    I didn’t know how to handle this situation. “I told you I don’t like that show.”
    He stared at the floor. “I know.”
    I ruffled his hair. “Sweetie, is this what makes you see ghosts?”
    His head shot up. “What are you talking about?”
    “You don’t see ghosts?”
    His disapproving frown was similar to Max’s. “Mom, I don’t believe in stuff like that.”
    “But Karen said something about it,” I said.
    Charlie snorted. “Karen. She’s a girl.”
    “And that means?”
    “Well, all she does is talk on the phone with Julie. She needs a life. She needs to stop listening to other people and make up her own mind about things.”
    Okay, then. I guess that settled that. Perhaps Max was right, and Charlie was just teasing his sisters. “Well, why don’t you return the book to Mike tomorrow? We’ll just drop the whole