Free An Affair to Dismember by Elise Sax Page B

Pretend you’re not scared.” Lucy gripped the steering wheel, and her knuckles turned white.
    “Should I be scared?”
    “Yes,” she said. “And today’s his poker game, and having all those men around makes the dogs extra nervous. They’re Rottweilers, the biggest Rottweilers I’ve ever seen. Every time Uncle Harry has a poker game, he has to have an ambulance standing by.”
    “Can’t we just call him?”
    “Uncle Harry is more of a face-to-face person.”
    LUCY ANNOUNCED us to the guard at the gate. He wrote something on his clipboard and opened the gate with a push of a button. I heard that the cheapest house in the neighborhood was $9 million. The homes were all large, sprawling affairs, stone-faced structures in earth tones. Lucy drove to the top of the hill. There was another gate with another guard. She gave him ournames, but this time the guard checked the inside of the car, the trunk, and underneath.
    “I didn’t know you had family in the area, Lucy,” I said while the guard shimmied on his back.
    “Uncle Harry isn’t technically family,” she said.
    The guard opened the hood and inspected the contents. “How did you meet Uncle Harry?” I asked.
    “It was at the beginning of my career,” she explained.
    “He’s in marketing, too?”
    “Uh, something like that.”
    The guard gave us the thumbs-up and opened the gate. As Lucy drove up the driveway, we heard the dogs bark, growl, and snap their teeth.
    “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said.
    Lucy reapplied her lipstick. “Listen, Gladie. We are meant to get to the bottom of this. I’m sure that a murder took place across the street from your grandmother’s house. You are involved, whether you like it or not. The murderer is still hanging around town, and the police are not looking for him because some stupid eggnog-addicted coroner says it was an accident. For all we know, a killer may be living across the street from you. Did you ever think of that? Doesn’t that make you the least bit nervous?”
    I did think of that, and it did make me nervous. It also occurred to me that Peter and Jane were playing a cat-and-mouse game with me. And I wasn’t the cat.
    “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s say hi to Uncle Harry.”

Chapter 6

    A little boring goes a long way. Just ask anybody unlucky enough to be at a Cannes mayoral inauguration speech. You could die from that much boring. A little interesting goes a long way, too. A man doesn’t need to be too interesting to be a good man. You know who was very interesting? Al Capone. There was an interesting man. Jack the Ripper, also interesting. So, my words of wisdom to women are, fall in love with a man who has a little boring and a little interesting in him. But no one listens to me, Gladie. They all want interesting and only interesting. The world revolves around interesting. You get sucked into interesting, and you won’t be able to breathe from it. The Chinese—also interesting people—have a curse: May you live in interesting times. They knew what they were talking about
.
    Lesson 29,
Matchmaking Advice from Your Grandma Zelda
    THE DOGS threw themselves against the closed, thick wooden door, making a terrible racket, like bears caught in a trap.
    “Don’t show fear, don’t show fear, don’t show fear,” Lucy repeated over and over—to me or to herself, I wasn’t quite sure. I was trying to recall the last time I’d had a tetanus booster when the door opened, and a bald man—the butler, I assumed, who resembled Lurch from
The Addams Family
—greeted us with a nod. He motioned us to enter, but the Rottweilers were jumping and barking with drool spilling from their fangs, and I didn’t know how we were expected to get past them alive.
    Nevertheless, Lucy stepped over the threshold. I held my breath, waiting for her screams of pain, but the dogs didn’t touch her. They didn’t calm down, either. They continued their growling and barking. I closed my eyes and followed