Page 137 of It Runs in the Family

After I made sure Garrett wasn’t coming out of Deanna’s house, I hurried around the front porch of the house next door and found the front door unlocked. This house was bigger than the other houses in the neighborhood. A couple of steps inside was all it took to tell me it was a whole lot nicer than the others too. The floor was black-and-white-marble tile, and the curved staircase was polished wood. Whoever owned this house had money.

“Hello?” I called out, worried someone else was there and would think I was breaking in.

“Up here!” the woman called out from upstairs, her voice muffled.

I climbed the staircase, glancing around with every step. This seemed like something that would happen in a Lifetime movie—stupid woman enters a house to save someone and ends up needing help herself, yet I kept going upstairs anyway.

By the time I reached the top of the stairs, my paranoia had gotten a solid foothold, and I was about to turn around and bolt out the front door. But the woman called out through the wooden door directly across from the top of the stairs. “Are you out there?”

“I’m here.” I walked toward the door, stopping when I saw a skeleton key in the doorknob.

Someone had purposely locked her in.

I quickly unlocked the door and the older woman hobbled past me, across the hall, and through another door. “Don’t go anywhere!” she shouted as she slammed the door shut. Seconds later, I heard running water. Or maybe her peeing.

I went into the room she’d been locked in. It was a large bedroom with a full-size bed covered with a colorful quilt. A sitting area was arranged at the other end, with an older blue love seat and a wing back chair, facing an old TV on a stand.

A tray with an empty plate sat on a coffee table in front of the love seat.

I walked over to the open window she’d leaned out of. She had a perfect few of Deanna and Rebecca’s house.

“Come on out of there,” the woman said from the hall. “Let’s go downstairs.”

“Who locked you in here?” I asked as I followed her. The stiffness in my ankle was better.

“My fool grandson,” she said in disgust as she continued down the staircase. “He lives with me and locks me in my room every morning when he goes to work.”

“We should call the sheriff!” I said in horror.

She reached the bottom and waved a hand in dismissal. “They won’t do a thing. They encourage it.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he says I’m gamblin’ his money away,” she turned back to look at me. “But it’s my money, not his. He just counts it as his because he thinks he’s gonna inherit it when I’m gone.”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying.

She headed through a short hall and into the kitchen. She grabbed a kettle off the stove and started to fill it up with water at the sink.

“Can’t you kick him out?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, putting the kettle back on the stove and turning it on. “I’ve got him under control. I’m Loretta by the way. And who are you?”

“Iris.”

“Well, Iris, I’d rather talk about something other than my grandson. Let’s talk about why you and your gentleman friend went into Deanna’s house. Why a sheriff deputy showed up, and why you’re hiding next to my house while your gentleman friend is in that house with the deputy.”

“I guess you notice a lot,” I said.

She gave me a mischievous grin. “Got nothin’ else to do while I’m up in my room.”

Oh. “Wait, you’ve seen Deanna’s roommate? Rebecca?”

“Sure did. But tell me why you were over there.”

“I was lookin’ for Rebecca.”

“You and everyone else.”