Out of all the parts of the holiday to enjoy, she liked the small workers who helped Santa. “The elves?” I repeated, my voice thick with disbelief.
Lemon pulled cellophane from the tray, revealing a platter stacked with roast beef, pastrami, turkey, ham, salami—anything I could want. She opened a clear bag filled with palm-sized slices of pumpernickel bread and pushed it toward me.
“Mother was always a little bit on the strange side,” she replied to my query about the elves.
“So I see.”
I slowly built a sandwich, wondering exactly how much information I could glean from Lemon without looking overly suspicious or being overtly nosy.
I took my time slathering mustard on one of the slices of bread. “How long had Luis worked for your mother?”
“Worked or…?”
“Worked,” I confirmed.
Lemon dipped her fingers into a jar of pickles that she’d pilfered from the fridge. The pickle crunched under her teeth, and the sound of her chewing filled the room.
“Luis conned Mother into hiring him about five years ago. Mother always had a thing for young, dark men. I suppose it was only a matter of months or even weeks before she was sleeping with him.”
“He seems to have loved her.”
She barks a laugh. “Her or her money?”
“You tell me.” I took a bite of the sandwich. The pastrami was amazing, and I immediately felt my body reacting to the nutrition, feeling stronger.
She finished her pickle and delicately wiped her fingers on a towel. “Luis likes her money. He doesn’t have to do anything. Oh sure, he piddles around the house, taking care of whatever she needs, but he doesn’t work.” Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “Let me tell you something about Luis.”
He’s secretly gay?
But that’s not what she said. “He comes from a violent background.”
I quirked a brow at that. “Does he?”
“That’s what my mother once told me, but she never said more than that. Like I always say, once a violent person, always a violent person.”
“But don’t you think Zelda trusted him? She wouldn’t have stayed with Luis if she thought he would cause her harm.”
Lemon shrugged. “I can’t pretend to know what my mother thought about anything. And of course now I can’t ask her because she’s dead.”
It was a risky tactic, but I turned my attention to my sandwich and said lightly, hoping that she wouldn’t shut down, “You don’t sound too upset about the fact that your mother is dead.”
“I wept when we found her body,” Lemon coolly reminded me.
I shrugged, took another bite. “You cried, I remember.”
She sailed down smoothly onto both elbows, gazing up at me with questioning eyes. “Even after what I showed you, you care about her?”
“The helmet, you mean?”
“The thing that would have killed you if you’d put it on.”
“I didn’t put it on,” I reminded her.
“She would have wanted you to. Mother was very convincing when she wanted to be. She could talk a snake into trying to eat its own tail.”
I recalled how even though I knew it was risky to perform the séance with Zelda, I had gone along with it. It would have been easy to back out, but the stakes were too high. I had wanted to talk to my father, after all, and was willing to do almost anything for that chance.
“But I wouldn’t have let her put that contraption on my head. I was leaving when we found her.”
