Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [494]
Lillian stacked the paperbacks, making a creative pyramid, then chose a half dozen to stand up, using some of the innovative new plastic stands she had convinced Rosie they needed. She sandwiched the stark white and ice blue of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River between the black and red of Jan Burke’s Bones and the black-and-white, hard-to-find copy of The Prettiest Feathers by John Philpin and Patricia Sierra. This would be an excellent opportunity for her to prove to Rosie that her compulsive buys were wise financial moves, after all.
The store’s front door chimed and she looked over her shoulder. Her brother, Wally, gave a one-finger wave. Lillian returned the wave, then stiffened when she saw Calvin Vargus following behind. Immediately, Calvin seemed to fill the store with his wide shoulders, thick neck and booming laugh. He patted Wally on the back, more of a slap with a hand that looked like a racket. Lillian returned to her display. She didn’t want or need to know what the private joke was between the two of them. There was always something. And she hated watching her brother take Calvin’s abuse. Of course, Wally would never call it abuse.
Her brother and his business partner had a strange relationship. Calvin had grown up to be a bigger and meaner version of the bully he was when the three of them knew one another in junior high school. Wally, the eternal nerd, seemed content, almost pleased to have the bully now on his side, despite the ramifications or the cost. Lillian gave her glasses a quick, nervous nudge and shook her head. She wasn’t the only one who noticed the men’s strange arrangement. Why else would they have been anointed with the nickname Calvin and Hobbs after the comic strip of an imaginative and sometimes strange little boy and his pet tiger? A tiger that came to life only in Calvin’s presence.
Lillian Hobbs watched the regular performance of the bully and his willing patsy. Only today it wasn’t just with distaste. Today she watched with embarrassment. Embarrassed that her brother was weak. Embarrassed that he didn’t seem to mind. No, it almost appeared as if he enjoyed the attention, attention at whatever the cost. Why else would he put up with it? Or had it been all those years of training? All those years of growing up with a mother who bullied and praised, often in the same sentence.
Maybe it wasn’t embarrassment she felt. Perhaps it was regret, regret that as the older sibling she should have also been her brother’s protector. But how could she? It wasn’t as though their mother had spared her from the same ritual. Lillian, however, had found solitude in books. She had learned how to escape to her own world of imaginary friends and fantastic places. But Wally. Well, he hadn’t been so lucky. Funny how a murder could dig up such things. Dig up! Oh, dear, what a pun. But it made Lillian smile.
Calvin was bragging about how he had found the first body, bragging and telling. How many times had it been? And in only a matter of twenty-four hours. Yet, each time the story became more elaborate with new details added, ones he seemed to have forgotten in the original telling.
“I knew right away that she was dead,” Calvin boomed to a new audience, waiting for every gruesome detail. “I could see that her fucking skull had been bashed in. There was