Page 147 of Murder on Charity Lane

to draw attention to his business.

The amount of blood is a MESSAGE.

Sophie

Oh. Yes. True.

Hamilton

So next we need to decipher what

that message means.

Anthony texted a thumbs-up and Miles shouted, “Oma! I’m home!” from the front of the cottage.

By the time Ocean got inside, he was lying on the couch with the iPad eating a bag of cheese puffs.

“You want a tangerine?” she asked.

“Yes please!”

She handed him a tangerine and removed the bag of cheese puffs. “How was school?”

He started telling her, but she wasn’t listening. Too distracted by the murder, by the blood. She regretted sharing any of that with Riley. A photorealistic painting of a hedge was one thing, but talking about “blood solids”? Badly done. Plus, she kept thinking about CJ’s phone. That she’d abandoned her phone … or someone had abandoned it for her. She kept thinking about that.

So the second time she missed what Miles was saying, she said, “Oh! I almost forgot. Why don’t you run and ask Lily-Ann to take you to the shelter to look at cats for Hamilton?”

“Really really?”

“Really really.”

“Kitty time!” Miles sang out, as he shoved through the front door.

Ocean smiled at his excitement, but only until the screen door slammed shut. Finding the corpse was bad enough. She shuddered at the memory. But CJ’s disappearance hit even harder. What if she was responsible for Sunny’s death? Ocean had introduced CJ to her kids. Could she and Mrs. B really have been so fooled by CJ? There was only one way to find out. The Marigold Murder Collective needed to finish this investigation for good.

71

LILY-ANN

Lily-Ann felt a spark of satisfaction every time she introduced Anthony to something new. She’d never shared her enthusiasms with Piotr, her ex-husband, because he’d mocked or belittled them, but Anthony thrilled to every discovery. And he’d missed a shocking number of basic experiences. He’d never eaten lamb or sushi or gazpacho. He’d never ridden a horse—or been on a plane—and he’d never even left California.

So she bought a rack of lamb home for dinner. She placed it on the cutting board, and when she reached for her boning knife, an idea occurred to her. Using butcher’s twine, she tied the rack into a loose cylinder, which she balanced vertically on the board.

Then she slid a chef’s knife from the block and imagined herself in the rear seat of a car. Holding the knife, reaching around the headrest to slice the rack like a neck. Aiming for the jugular. A vertical stroke? Would that really increase the amount of blood?

She brought the knife thoughtfully forward, then switched her grip and tried again. The rack was nothing like a neck. She couldn’t even picture the killing blow, yet she felt confident that it would require precision or experience. Perhaps not surgical precision, but basic knowledge. She certainly wouldn’t know how to cause a wound like that. So who would? Hunters might, if they field-dressed deer or—

Her phone rang and she answered hands-free.

“Hey, Lily-Ann!” Sophie said, her voice filling the kitchen. “You saw we had the meeting with Jane?”

She untied her rack of lamb. “You think she’s involved with Sunny Wheeler’s life-extension business.”

“It’s possible, I don’t know. Just a thought. I called to tell you what she said before we forget.”

Sophie relayed the conversation almost verbatim. Her memory for dialogue was close to perfect, possibly because of her passion for playwriting. She even gave Nicholas and Jane different intonations. As Lily-Ann listened she thought about awards and marriages and murders. What connected Frank to Sunny besides friendship? What could lead a killer to target them both?

“Losing the Millerbrandt Award pissed Jane off,” Sophie said. “But it’s not a motive for anything.”