Free Takeover by Diana Dwayne Page A

usual: everyone talks over each other while Simon and Beth sit in one corner, watching everyone else, wondering if anyone can pick up on the fact that they’re stoned. Spoiler alert: we can, we just don’t care.
    By the time that dinner is over, Matthew and Jordan make their quick exit; their usual excuse that having three kids entitles them to leave any function as soon as possible. As they’re leaving, Luke, Molly, John and Alice also pack up their kids and hit the road, leaving me with only a full room to deal with as opposed to the clown car that my family events usually end up being.
    “So,” Mark says, “just out of curiosity, did you actually kill the guy or not?”
    Let me tell you a little bit about Mark. Well, I guess there are only two things that you really need to know about him, other than the fact that he’s married to a woman named Sarah who had gone to high school with Jordan. He’s a venture capitalist who can always be found checking the stock market via the ticker app on his phone, and he’s kind of an asshole.
    I don’t generally like to use such brash terms, but there doesn’t seem to be another that quite fits him. He’s the kind of guy who’s been taught by years of bad reactions to keep his mouth shut most of the time. The problem is that the small percentage of the time that he does open his mouth, you can generally expect something rather blunt and unsavory to come out.
    “Mark!” my mother scolds. I love the woman, but sharply intoning the name of one of her errant children hasn’t really been very effective since we were kids.
    “I’m sorry,” he says, very much the child being forced to apologize to someone after a rude question. “What I meant to say was, I’ll love you no matter what the answer to the following question is.” He looks at my mom, then at me. Simon and Beth are having a very difficult time keeping their hushed giggles to themselves. “Did you kill the guy?”
    I stand and move from the steps to the chair across from where he’s sitting with Sarah. Don’t worry; there won’t be a test on this later. “Mark, how can you ask me that?” I respond.
    “Well, someone’s suspected for murder, it’s the first question that naturally comes to mind,” he answers as his wife just glares at me. Ah, Sarah. If you think Mark is bad, you’ll find Sarah to be more than a little frightening.
    “No,” I say, “I would never hurt anyone. Mr. McDaniel may not have been the nicest boss on the planet, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted him dead.”
    My mother does a quick headcount to make sure that all of my siblings with children have gone, and then she focuses her attention on me, obviously interested in the answer herself.
    “So, why’d they arrest you?” Sarah asks.
    “I’d like a beer, would anyone else like a beer?” James asks. It’s so funny, back in high school, he seemed invincible. Now, he gets so uncomfortable around my family. Well, not my family in general, I guess. It’s mostly just Mark and Sarah that drive my future husband to the bottle.
    “One of my coworkers told the detective that she saw me go into his office after he let me off for the day, and that the only other person to so much as approach it was the woman who found him,” I answer.
    Nobody’s taken James up on his offer, but that’s not going to stop him from drinking. A wicked little smile comes over Sarah’s face, a rarity, and usually not a good sign. “So you were the last one to see him alive?” she asks.
    “I would imagine that the person who jabbed an icepick into his neck was the last person to see him alive, Sarah, but thank you for the implication.” The best way to deal with Sarah is to... Well, the best way to deal with Sarah is to not have to deal with Sarah. She’s a tattoo artist, and I’m not entirely convinced that she didn’t go into that particular field so she could get paid to gouge people with needles.
    “Now kids,” my dad, Ian, starts. “I