Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [74]
“I’m really sorry. I’m just so preoccupied with this situation with Sam and this nutty family he’s marrying into. I don’t want to worry about you being hurt because you’ve gotten in over your head.”
An ominous prickling rippled through me. The last part of his sentence almost word for word mirrored Cappy’s statement.
“I know,” I said, reaching under the covers, taking his hand and lacing my fingers through his. “I’ll stay out of this as much as possible. I promise.”
“Good,” he said, bringing my hand to his lips and kissing it. “Lydia sends her regards. Said she was sorry you didn’t come.”
I’ll bet, I thought, and the possibility ran through my mind that I was indeed being naive, that my husband was being stolen right from under my passive little nose.
Then I went to sleep and dreamed fitfully all night of gravestone rubbings and clouds and wine bottles that sprouted legs and became racehorses, and beautiful Mexican women wearing cowboy boots in all the colors of the rainbow.
“IT’s A FULL moon tonight,” Gabe said, glancing at the kitchen calendar the next morning. “All the loonies will be out.”
“Isn’t that an old wives’ tale?” I asked. “I saw on one of those magazine shows some statistics that said that there wasn’t any more crime on full moon nights than any other.”
He stood next to the toaster in his jogging shorts, waiting for a bagel to pop up, his strong thighs still tight and twitching from their morning run. I watched him over my coffee through bleary eyes, feeling like, with all my crazy dreams, I’d only slept two hours instead of eight.
“Let that television reporter take the next seven p.m. to three a.m. shift during a full moon and see if he changes his tune.” He grabbed his toasted bagel, juggling it from one hand to the other before dropping it on the plate across from me. As he spread grape jelly over it, he glanced at the morning headlines, then peered at me over wire-rimmed glasses. “Are you going to talk to Detective Hudson today?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Okay, yes, I’ll talk to him. I don’t really have anything to tell him, though. The conversation with Rose Brown that he’s putting so much stock in was nothing that would help him find out who killed Giles Norton.”
“What was it about?”
“She rambled about her dead husband, how much he loved beautiful women and good horses.”
“That’s it?”
My big gulp of coffee burnt my throat. He waited while I waved my hand in front of my mouth. “She also told me I should fix myself up or you’d leave me for someone prettier.”
He laughed out loud and took a bite of his bagel. “Lucky thing for her she’s elderly and Dove taught you to respect your elders. I take it you didn’t smack her.”
“No, but I sure wanted to.”
“You look fine just the way you are,” he murmured, his attention distracted by the newspaper.
And is fine good enough? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I contemplated whether I should tell him about Cappy’s reaction to my conversation with her mother. Since we had enough other things creating barriers between us these last few days, I decided to be as open and honest as possible.
“Cappy reacted real strange when she saw me talking to her mother.”
His head came up. “How so?”
“She seemed to have the impression that her mother told me something she shouldn’t have, that I should ignore what her mother said and to basically mind my own business.”
He looked at me over his glasses again, his nonverbal agreement with her obvious.
“I’m no more involved than you,” I said petulantly. “She didn’t even give me time to say that her mother didn’t reveal a thing, only insulted my looks.”
He thought about it for a moment. “That bothers me. If Cappy is involved in Giles’s murder and she thinks you know something . . . ”
“It didn’t feel like she was threatening me, Gabe. Besides, I don’t think she’d hurt me. Don’t forget, I’ve known her since I was a girl.”
“That doesn’t make any difference,” he said, looking worried for the first time. “If she felt her family was threatened, if she or someone in her family committed that murder and it appears they did, how