Five minutes later Rosie was sitting across from the admissions clerk, a middle-aged woman with a pinched mouth and piercing eyes, who kept handing her endless stacks of papers to sign so her mother could be admitted.
“That lady over there is pointing at you,” the woman said, just as Hazel began to shriek again. “Is that your sister?”
“My mom,” she said through gritted teeth.
Her mother’s screams grew more frantic as an orderly wheeled her toward the bank of elevators at the end of the hall.
“I was a virgin and didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Hazel yelled. “Daddy had never had sex before, either. I was a nymphomaniac and screwed everything that came down the walk.”
When Hazel suddenly spotted Rosie, her voice grew louder. “Rosie—do you know what’s wrong with you? You’ve been frigid ever since you screwed that motorcycle guy! You need to learn about oral sex!”
“Mom!”
“My cats! Charlie and his friends! I’ve got to get home!”
“I’ll feed Charlie, Mother.”
Hazel struggled to get out of the wheelchair, but the orderly gripped her arm. At the use of force, Hazel’s voice grew more hysterical.
“My daughter killed Dr. Carver! She stabbed him! Because I told her to. And because she’s still in love with that motorcycle guy.”
Shuddering Rosie covered her eyes with her hands. When she looked up and peered through her fingers, the admissions clerk’s huge, magnified gaze was devouring her with what seemed to be excessive lurid interest.
Story of her life—being publicly humiliated by her family. Reason number one Pierce had dumped her for Anita and her girls, which he’d once described as aristocratic little ladies.
“I’m sorry,” Rosie whispered. “There’s not a word of truth in anything she’s said. She’s totally out of her mind.”
“Not about Dr. Carver, she’s not,” the clerk stated in a conspiratorial whisper.
“What?”
The woman’s thin brows lifted as she continued to study Rosie as if she were a microbe under a microscope. “I heard about his murder when I took my break. He’s dead. It’s a real shame, too. He had a lot of talent. We have lots of his patients here. He used to bring us candy all the time. Chocolate truffles. The best. Godiva.”
Rosie blew out some air and then fought for her next breath. The blood drained from her face. She almost felt as if she might faint. Pierce…dead?
He’d been horribly alive last night. He’d been his impossible, arrogant self. He couldn’t be dead!
He’d better not be, girlfriend. What if you were the last person to see him alive?
“You…you can’t be serious…about Dr. Carver…”
“He was stabbed in the face. Him, handsome as he was even at fifty. Multiple stab wounds. They say that except for the eyes, you wouldn’t know him. His head was practically severed from his body.”
Unconscious of the movement, Rose Marie sank her own head lower into her shoulders as if to protect it from being lopped off. “Oh, no. No. No.”
“Crime of passion,” the admissions clerk continued. “A woman did it, if you ask me.”
“Why do you say that?”
Lowering her voice even further, she said, “Dr. Carver had a real reputation with the young nurses around here. I’d see him come in here, smiling at the prettiest women. He thought he was God’s gift.”
Oh, my God…What if I really was the last person to see him alive…I mean, besides the real murderer? My bra and panties!
What if the police found them?
Why did I have to tell everyone last year every vengeful fantasy I had about him, including joking about wanting his head on a platter?
“Be careful what you wish for,” her daddy used to say before the tragedy, back when she’d been a kid and they’d still been pals. “Because it’ll come back and bite you in the butt. Every time, sugarbun.”
What was she going to do?
Five
“There’s damn sure no page-turner as good as reading about the vicious murder of your ex, is there?” Yolie said, fluffing her spiky blond hair.
Yolie’s big white house was located in a posh, central Austin neighborhood. Todd, her seventeen-year-old son by Pierce, occupied the pool house when he was in town, which wasn’t often, since he went to boarding school. Darius, her twenty-five-year-old stepson, Pierce’s son from Vanessa, his first wife, who’d killed herself, stayed in the pool house as well on the rare occasions when he was in Austin. A college dropout, he did a lot of drifting.
The sun beat down on the pool as Rosie swam frantic laps. Yolie avidly read the newspaper in a chaise longue next to the pool house, which the maid was readying because both boys had called and said they would be arriving soon due to their father’s demise.
Yolie looked up from the paper. “Hey, can you believe this? It says right here that Michael Nash is the detective in charge of the case. Wasn’t he the guy you used to date, the hottie who gave you that ticket last year?”
Yolie tossed a section of the newspaper onto the ground and grabbed another.
At the mention of Michael, Rosie felt sick and faint as she emerged dripping from the pool. She toweled off before sinking back onto her own chaise longue. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“You damn sure got your wish. You should be a happy camper.”
“What?”
“Pierce getting himself murdered and all. It’s what you wanted.”
“No. How can you say that?”
“You do remember telling everybody you wanted his head on a platter?”
“I was joking.”
“Frankly, I loved the image.”
“Yolie! Listen to me! I went over there last night. To Pierce’s! And then Michael Nash…who must have already known about Pierce by then…answered the call about Alexis.”
Slowly, Yolie set the paper down and stared at her.
“Pierce called me. Not Jennifer. I…I let Harry think it was Jennifer.”
“You went over there? Were you out of your mind?”
“He owed me money.”
“That is so lame. That’s not why you went over there, and you know it.”
“He was alive and furious at me, but he was searching the house for an intruder when I left him.”
“What time did Nash show up over here?”
Rosie froze. “I…I think he already knew. I think that’s why he came. He kept asking me if I’d seen Pierce…And I lied.”
“You should talk to a criminal attorney first thing,” Yolie said in that maddeningly decisive way of hers—like there was no other opinion in the universe.
Despite the intense heat, Rosie shivered. “A criminal attorney?” She moaned. “But I didn’t do anything!”
“But the police—that Michael guy—obviously thinks otherwise. You were there last night. Lucky thing Joe Benson’s right next door.”
Joe Benson was both a criminal attorney and