“I’d like to talk to you!”I bellowed.
“There’s no need to yell, girl.”She reached out and dropped the volume on the TV.“I’m not deaf, you know.”
Could have fooled me.Or at least I had assumed she was hard of hearing, with the way she had the sound turned up.The silence was so loud it practically rang in my ears.
I cleared my throat.“My name is Gina Beaufort Kelly.”
“Araminta Tucker.”She looked me up and down.“You’re quite attractive for a police detective, dear.”
Hard to tell whether she approved or disapproved.
“I’m sorry to disappoint,” I said.“But I’m not with the police.”
She hadn’t asked me to sit, but I sidled a little farther into the room and positioned myself next to one of the wingback chairs, with my hand sort of casually propped on its back.It was positioned well out of the way of the sofa’s view of the TV, I noticed.
She waved me into it, sort of vaguely.“I saw what happened next door.I thought maybe that handsome detective would show up to talk to me.”
I perched on the edge of the wingback.“Mendoza?”She must have seen the interview the blonde reporter had done earlier.Hard to blame her for wanting him to stop by.
She nodded.“Such a good-looking boy.My poor husband wasn’t much in the looks department, bless his soul.But he was a good provider.”She crossed herself.
“If you want to see Mendoza,” I told her, “I’d be happy to put in a good word.Do you know something he might want to hear?”
“I knew Griselda Grimshaw,” Araminta Tucker said.
Griselda?Really?
I made myself more comfortable in the chair.“Did you used to live in the house next door?”
She nodded.“All through my marriage.Poor Patton, tied to his sister’s apron strings his whole life long.”
“Wait…” I wasn’t sure, but it sounded like… “Mrs.Grimshaw was your sister-in-law?”
She snorted.“Mrs.Grimshaw?If anyone had the right to call herself Mrs.Grimshaw, it was me, dear.Griselda never married.Never found anyone who was good enough for her, Patton used to say.Between you and me, I don’t think she found anyone crazy enough to take her on.And so I told him, too.Repeatedly.”
“So Mrs.Grimshaw wasn’t Mrs.Grimshaw at all.She was Miss Grimshaw.”
She nodded.
“But you…?”
“Kept my maiden name,” Araminta Tucker said.“Going through life as Araminta Tucker was bad enough.Could you imagine being Araminta Grimshaw?”
I couldn’t.It sounded like something out of Harry Potter.As did Griselda Grimshaw.Or Patton Grimshaw, for that matter.
“I took my husband’s name,” I said.“And tacked it onto my own.”
“Nothing wrong with Kelly, dear.Good Irish name.”
There’d been something wrong with my husband, though.But before we could wander down that garden path, I dragged the conversation back on track again.“So you and your husband lived next door to Mrs….um… Griselda.Before you moved here?”
She nodded.The bouffant swayed.“Patton died two years ago.I moved out a week after the funeral.Couldn’t stand being near her any longer.And she must have felt the same, because I haven’t seen her since.She hasn’t visited me even once.”
“And you haven’t gone back to see her?”
She shook her head.“She despised me, dear.Never failed to tell poor Patton what a rotten choice he’d made.”
“That must have been tough.”David hadn’t had any sisters.His misfit brother Daniel could take me or leave me, but until recently, Daniel had lived in California, so he’d only been a drag on David’s finances and not the rest of our lives.
