Free Good Little Wives by Abby Drake Page B

brother? Will he go without you?”
    â€œA whole bunch of kids from school will be there, Mom. Besides. He’s a big boy now. He can take care of himself. Me, too. Please, Mom?”
    â€œOh, honey,” she said. “I don’t know.” What she did know was that Ben was the party boy and Sam, the stay-at-homer, the quiet, shy one, who never cost her any sleep. “Well,” she said, “Maybe…”
    He took that as a yes and pulled out a stool from the breakfast bar. “So, did she do it?”
    Dana sighed. “Kitty? No. She says not.”
    â€œWho else then?”
    She could have told him about Lauren but she really was too tired to get into that now. It was bad enough she hadn’t called Lauren yet and the police might have showed up at her door. “There’s a chance Vincent had at least one mistress,” she said.
    â€œA mistress? Cool.”
    â€œNot to his wife.”
    â€œWhat about her? The new wife? Has anyone checked her out?”
    Dana held the tea mug to her lips and stared at her son as if he’d just asked if she’d walked on the moon. “Yolanda?”
    â€œWell,” he said, “she’s probably the one who gets the life insurance, or at least a bunch of money from his estate. Like everyone in New Falls, Vincent’s probably loaded, so it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
    Â 
    â€œDetective Johnson from the New Falls Police Department. Are you Lauren Halliday?”
    Luckily Lauren had seen the cruiser pull into the driveway. She’d ducked behind the six-panel, early nineteenth-century Chinese screen with the soapstone inlaid artwork of cranes and pine trees and other images that symbolized long life in the Asian culture. Her husband had shipped it home from Canton as part of his efforts to deny his oncoming mortality.
    â€œMrs. Halliday is not available.” Florence had been around since before Bob’s first wife died. When it came to protecting the family, she was tougher than a pair of big-toothed sentry dogs.
    â€œWe’ll wait,” the detective said.
    Silence followed. She pictured Florence, hands on square hips, eyes narrowed and glaring.
    More silence.
    Could they hear Lauren breathing?
    Perspiration rose on her forehead. She remembered the time when she’d been a kid, trapped in the closet of her aunt’s bedroom at the house on Nantucket. She’d been hunting forher sandals; she’d thought her cousin Gracie had borrowed them. ( Stolen was more like it.) But when she’d heard voices Lauren had closed the door. How was she supposed to know Uncle Raymond and Aunt Clara would choose that very moment in the middle of the day to have sex on the four-poster bed? Or that Uncle Raymond really did have sex on the brain the way she’d overheard Aunt Jane say to her mother?
    â€œMaybe she’d rather come to the station,” the detective said now, and Lauren blinked back to the present and the Chinese screen and the bleak situation at hand.
    She would not go to the station because that was where Kitty had gone and look where that had gotten her.
    â€œGentlemen,” she said, propelling herself from behind the screen, the courage to do so greater than the fear of ending up in a cell. “You must excuse my housekeeper. We’ve had some problems with men snooping because of my husband’s business. He deals with investors who are out of the country.” She knew it made no sense, but it was the best she could do. “Florence was merely doing her job.”
    â€œIf you have problems,” the detective said, “you should call the police.”
    She smiled, but did not say she’d call. “How may I help you?” she asked, her Boston–Palm Beach–Nantucket upbringing usurping her terrified self.
    â€œWe’d like to know where you were at eleven-thirty in the morning the day Vincent DeLano was murdered.”
    She tipped her head to one