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Her nostrils flare and her left eye twitches. “Your garage. How odd,” she says tightly. “I can’t imagine what anyone would want to take from a garage.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you can,” I reply, fake smile still tacked on. Jack tugs me by the elbow, seeming to sense that I’m going a little rogue here. Better to get me off this property before I come straight out and accuse her of stealing her husband’s body and putting it on my front lawn.
Yup, not a discussion I need to have right now. I let Jack pull me away and focus on keeping my mouth shut despite the burning need to know if it was her.
Jack practically carries me off her front porch in his haste to get me out of there. “Keep it together, Nora,” he says in a low voice as he propels me forward. “You can’t just outright accuse her of moving the body. Sure she might get in trouble if it comes out she moved it. But, as I’m sure you can guess, the punishment for tampering with a crime scene is nowhere near as severe as the punishment for committing actual murder.”
“So you agree with me?” I hiss back as we reach the sidewalk. “She has to be the one that moved it, right? But why? And how? She’s so small.” I glance back over my shoulder to check my memory of her, but Connie has already shut the door.
“She couldn’t have moved it alone,” Jack agrees. “And I don’t know why either.” His voice is a more normal volume now that we’re out of range. “Obviously they had a weird marriage. She knew Ian cheated on her. Then again, maybe she was cheating on him too. Who was this darling she was expecting instead of us?”
“Could be a lover,” I agree. “But she called me darling too. So it could also just be a friend.”
Jack nods, then sighs, shoving his hands in his pockets. I look away, not wanting to get caught staring at the muscles of his forearms or his thumbs. Yes, that’s right. I said thumbs. Call me crazy, but there’s something inexplicably sexy about a man’s thumbs sticking out of his jean pockets.
I can’t explain it.
I think it might just be science. A chemical reaction of some sort. I’ll figure out a testable hypothesis about this after I get away with murder.
“Either way,” Jack hedges, “who makes plans to go out on the day after their husband is murdered? Not a grieving widow.”
“Yes,” I counter, “but maybe a widow who is pretending she doesn’t know her husband was murdered does make plans. After all, making plans supports the idea that she didn’t know he’d been murdered.”
“Even though she absolutely did,” Jack mutters darkly.
“Agree.”
We walk in silence for a minute, both lost in our thoughts.
“What do you think she’s going to say to Anderson and the others when they come?” I ask tentatively.
Jack inhales deeply before answering. “I’m not sure,” he admits. “Hopefully she’ll tell them we came to chat with her, since that’ll make it look as if we’re investigating the murder. And who investigates a murder when they already know who did it?”
“Yeah, that’s true.” I hadn’t considered that potential bonus of going to talk to Connie. I just thought Jack wanted to know if she knew about his sweatshirt and the car. Speaking of which… “We never asked her about Ian’s car!” I exclaim.
“Yeah, I know.” Jack is unconcerned. “I didn’t want to call attention to it. I left it in the driveway last night and it’s not there now. That means someone, her presumably, moved it into the garage. I couldn’t ask about that, though, without her wondering how I knew about his car being in the driveway in the first place.”
“Ah.” I nod. “Of course.” I run my bottom lip through my teeth, a nervous habit of mine, then say the thing I’m desperate to get off my chest. “Just so you know, she was way off base with what she said about me. Calling me an eager puppy and suggesting I’d had a fling with Ian. I like my job and I’m good at it. I would never try to use my feminine wiles, or whatever you want to call them, to get ahead.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Jack says with a dismissive snort. “I never would've thought otherwise.”
“Oh.” There’s a warm feeling spreading from my heart to my whole body. “Well, okay then.” I nod. Then I nod again. I shove my own hands in my pockets so my arms don’t do what they’re begging me to do and throw themselves around him in a hug. Reckless abandon. That’s what that would be.
Not today, reckless abandon. Not today.
But check back with me tomorrow.
Jack, never being one to wax poetic, doesn’t say anything more about it. Instead he circles back to Connie’s potential role in moving Ian’s body.
“I think we should look more into who may have moved the body and why,” he announces. “Who could have helped Connie? And what was their goal? To pin the murder on you? Well not exactly pin,” he amends with an apologetic grimace.
“You can’t pin a murder on the murderer,” I agree, attempting to keep things light. No need to dwell on the fact that I’m a killer…only one jury of my peers away from imprisonment. “But yes, perhaps she, or whoever it was, moved the body to my front lawn to make sure I wouldn't get away with what I did. The question is how did they know what I did in the first place?”
Despite my best efforts, my voice is shaking. Apparently my body has decided now is the time to have a trauma response. My blood feels as if it is zipping through my body at an unprecedentedly fast pace, my thoughts have turned incoherent, and I’m not sure that there’s any part of me that’s not trembling. When spots flood my vision I pull to a stop and fight to get air into my lungs.
I’m only vaguely aware of Jack drawing closer to me. The internal war going on inside me is taking up too much of my attention. My chest is so tight.
There’s pressure on my shoulder and I know it’s his hand trying to pull me out of the darkness, but it’s pitch black in here.
