Still Lake - Anne Stuart [37]
“Suit yourself,” he said. Zeb’s “boy” moved past him into the house, thirty-five if he was a day, looking just as grim and not nearly as smart as his father. “Just keep out of the bedroom for now. I’ve got work laid out and I don’t want anyone messing with it.”
“We ain’t interested in your work,” Zeb said. “We’re just here to fix the place. And you keep away from my woman.”
At that point Addy rushed into the kitchen. The woman was in her sixties, built like a sack of potatoes, with iron-gray hair tucked in tight little pin-curls that had probably never been in fashion in her entire lifetime. “I’ll resist temptation,” Griffin said dryly.
Zebulon King wasn’t the sort to find humor in a situation. “See that you do.”
The woman jumped a mile when he walked into the kitchen. She had already begun scrubbing the oilcloth-covered table, and she looked at him as if he were a hound from hell. Or the man who murdered her daughter.
He had no idea whether she’d been at his trial. He hadn’t owned any glasses besides his shades, and his court-appointed, totally incompetent lawyer frowned on a teenage malcontent wearing sunglasses on the witness stand. For all he knew Addy King could have been sitting there glaring at him, memorizing his features and branding them into her soul with a fiery hatred.
She looked too beaten down for anything that energetic. She focused on scrubbing the table while he started a pot of coffee for himself.
“Gonna need new oilcloth,” she muttered in a barely audible voice.
“Do they even sell oilcloth nowadays?” He made an effort to sound pleasant and unthreatening.
She didn’t look up. “Audley’s does. Audley’s sells everything.”
“How about a new life?” he muttered to himself.
“What?” Her head jerked up. “I’m hard of hearing.”
“Just talking to myself,” he said, leaning against the sink and staring out at the lake as it glistened through the trees. It looked deceptively peaceful, as if it had never held the blood-soaked body of his murdered girlfriend. Looking at it didn’t remind him of death and despair—it had a curiously tranquil effect on him. But he still hadn’t talked himself into actually swimming in it.
He looked at the timid little woman. Her dour husband wouldn’t have been much comfort when she lost her daughter, he thought. She looked as if she’d never had much comfort in her life.
He racked his brain, trying to remember what he knew about the King family. They’d been in Colby since the 1700s, but the blood had grown pretty thin by the twentieth century. “Lived here long?” he asked casually.
“My husband said I wasn’t to talk to you,” the woman muttered, still scrubbing. The oilcloth tore beneath her fierce handling, and she let out a mournful cry.
“There’s no harm in talking, Mrs. King,” he said. “And don’t worry about the covering—as you said, it needs replacing.”
She looked up at him, with eyes filled with such deep sorrow that for a moment he felt ashamed of himself. Only a moment. “I don’t talk to strangers, Mr. Smith. I don’t trust them. I’ve lived in Colby all my life, and I know everyone I need to know.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly. The coffee was ready, and he poured himself a mug, black the way he liked it. She was a tough one, and he didn’t expect he’d get very far with her. He might just as well head out to the porch and drink his coffee in relative peace, despite the hammering that had started from behind the house, joining in with the distant buzz of the chain saw.
He tried one more time. “That’s a fine son you have, Mrs. King,” he said, heading toward the screen door that was barely attached to its hinges. “It must be nice to have your children close to home when they grow up. You have any other kids?”
Her reaction reminded him what a bastard he really was. Her tired face crumpled for a moment and her milky blue eyes filled with tears. “He’s the only one we were blessed with,” she said.
He