Free The Perfect Coed (Oak Grove Mysteries Book 1) by Judy Alter

moped after she’d had a drink. By now, Susan had decided she wanted a comforting evening, not one spoiled by the news of the gift at her door.
    He poured her a glass of Chardonnay and opened a Shiner Bock for himself. Watching him prepare their dinner, Susan realized he was as efficient in his own kitchen as he was in hers, chopping lettuce for the sandwiches, slicing tomatoes and onions into the thinnest of pieces.
    Jake grilled on the Jenn-Air, preferring it, he said, to an outdoor grill. Susan sat at the kitchen table while he cooked the hamburgers, his medium well and hers rare.
    “What’s your news?” she asked.
    “I got reports from Jordan today about his interviews with Missy Jackson’s parents and with the boyfriend, Eric Lindler. Which do you want to hear first?”
    “The boyfriend,” Susan said unhesitatingly, her attention perking up quickly. Even if he doesn’t own a small, dark car, maybe something came out of that.
    “He’s Mister Squeaky-Clean, like I told you before. Was in the library studying the night of the murder…”
    “Who saw him?” Susan asked sharply.
    Jake laughed. “What’re you? The master detective? Jordan will check that out. But he says the boy is so obviously grieving and so obviously Mr. College America that he’s not a suspect. He had no reason to kill her.”
    Susan stood up impatiently. “Great! The person closest to her is not a suspect, and yet I am, just because her body was found in my car! And because I didn’t think she was perfect, like everyone else does!” She thought for a minute. “How do we know that she didn’t break off the relationship, or that she wasn’t two-timing him… or that something hadn’t happened between them?” As an afterthought, she added, “I assume she wasn’t pregnant.”
    Jake shook his head. “No, she wasn’t. First thing I asked too. And we don’t know for sure about what was between them, but we’ll keep digging. Lindler showed Jordan the engagement ring he had planned to give her at homecoming.”
    “How touching,” Susan said sarcastically. “It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”
    He shrugged. “Makes it unlikely.”
    “Okay. What about the parents?” She was getting snappish, and she knew it. Maybe food would help. Meantime she poured another glass of wine for herself and saw Jake grin ever so slightly as he watched her out of the corner of his eye.
    “Nothing much,” he said, turning quickly back to the hamburgers. “She was a wonderful child, the daughter every parent should have, and so on, everything they said to me, except…”
    “Except what?” Susan interrupted impatiently.
    “They said she paid all her expenses—clothes, meals outside the dorm, that kind of stuff—from her work-study job.”
    “What kind of work-study job lets a kid earn that much?” Susan asked.
    “She didn’t have one,” Jake said. “I checked.”
    Susan didn’t say it aloud to Jake, who would have forbidden her, but she needed to talk to the Lindler boy.
    She couldn’t bring up the kitten now.
    The hamburgers were delicious and the wine plentiful enough that Susan fell asleep as soon as she hit the bed.
    “Great,” Jake muttered, “I’ve wanted you to stay over here for a long time, and look what you do when it finally happens. You fall asleep!”
    She woke around two, when the wine wore off, and reached for Jake, stroking his chest. He neither grumbled nor pushed her away, but he did ask, “Are you sure this isn’t just a ploy to talk about some aspect of the murder that just occurred to you?”
    “It might be,” she said. “I…” Suddenly she sat straight up. “When I got home today, someone had left a dead kitten in a shoebox at my door.”
    “What?” Jake had been nibbling her ear and now came close to biting it off in his surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me hours ago?”
    She shrugged. “At first I couldn’t wait to tell you, and then I just wanted to get away from it and forget it. But,