Free The Real Mrs. Price by J. D. Mason Page A

he’s ever come in contact with?”
    Lucy was reeling, but more at her own behavior than that woman’s. “No,” she snapped. “I couldn’t … I don’t know, Roman. I just got so angry at her.”
    â€œWhy? What’s she done to you?”
    â€œShe married my husband.”
    â€œWhat the hell, Lucy?” he said, exasperated. “Do you hear yourself? We’re talking about Ed Price, the man who threatened to come back and kill you. The gotdamned killer, according to you. And you give a fuck about who else he married?”
    God! He was right. This wasn’t about Marlowe Brown or Price or whatever she called herself.
    Lucy shook her head, disappointed. “I thought that if I saw her, if I met her, I would look back at a woman who was as wounded and disillusioned as I was.”
    â€œYou didn’t give her a chance to show you if she was wounded, and I guarantee you, she is. The woman’s under siege, Lucy, and not just from you or me, but from the police, the media. Hell, if he threatened you, who the hell knows what he did to her?”
    Roman started the engine and slowly pulled out of the driveway. Lucy stared out the window at the trees and open fields. She was no closer to knowing if Ed was alive or dead than she’d been before she’d made this trip. Was she crazy for even thinking that she could find out? Marlowe wasn’t going to volunteer a confession of killing a man to Lucy and Roman. And if she didn’t kill him, she’d have told the police where to find him if he were alive to save her own ass if nothing else. Lucy wanted him to be dead. Ed felt real down here. He felt a long way from dead.

 
    Belly of the Whale
    M ARLOWE USED TO LIKE the Internet. It had been great for her business, but since all this had happened, she’d come to loathe it simply because it gave every dim-witted asshole a platform to offer up an opinion and other dim-witted assholes the opportunity to “like” or to “follow” or to “share” bullshit that had made her public enemy number one.
    Quentin Parker headed up the police department in Blink, Texas, and he was the one leading this investigation on the homicide that had everyone in the town, and most of the country, watching.
    Marlowe had known Quentin all her life. After Marlowe and Marjorie’s mother abandoned them, Quentin was the one who’d picked the twin girls up from their temporary foster home and drove them to their aunt Shou Shou’s.
    â€œYou girls be good.” She remembered him kneeling on one knee in front of the two of them on Shou Shou’s porch. It had taken an awful lot to convince the state that a blind woman was perfectly capable of taking care of twin girls, but somehow, he’d done it. “If you need anything, anything at all, you call me.”
    He’d been a handsome young officer with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes. Quentin had to be at least sixty now. Most of that blond hair was gone, but he held on to what he had left with conviction. He’d put on some weight, but those eyes were still as blue as cornflowers.
    â€œYou need some water or anything?” he asked Marlowe, who had been sitting in that room for ten minutes, waiting on him to come in and finally question her about Eddie.
    Marlowe had been dreading this day, but she knew that it was coming. Quentin would come to the house every now and then and ask her some things, but this time was different. This time was “official.”
    â€œNo,” she said tersely.
    Quentin Parker wasn’t her friend. He was her interrogator. Of course she was guarded and defensive. In this capacity, Quentin was the enemy.
    â€œDo you believe that I killed my husband, Quentin?” Marlowe couldn’t help asking him “officially.”
    He wouldn’t even look at her, just wrote on that yellow legal pad of his like she wasn’t even there.
    â€œYou know