“All right, Mrs. Madison, can I ask you a few questions about the woman renting your house on Willow Street?”
“You can ask whatever you want, and I’ll answer whatever I want. And of course it’s my house on Willow Street. It’s the only house I own.” She humphed. “So? What do you want to know? I’m ninety-six years old, honey. Time’s a-wasting.”
JJ muttered, “And they say the good die young.” Her voice was barely a whisper, and her mouth hardly moved, but that wasn’t going to save her, Quint knew. Georgie heard everything.
Georgie’s brows drew together in a frown. He thought for half a second about intervening but decided against it. The old woman was more than happy to spread her ire around, and he was more than willing to let her. Instead, he sat back, rested his ankle on the other knee and rubbed at a scuff on his boot.
“Let me tell you something, little girl. Disrespecting a fragile elderly woman that you want information from isn’t the smartest way to go. My hair may be gray, my bones may be weak and my body may be giving up while I’m still using it, but my hearing is as good as ever, so a little politeness is in order here.”
Quint waited for JJ’s flush, for her eyes to widen with dismay and words of apology to tumble out of her mouth. That was how people always reacted to Georgie, especially coppers. But not this one. JJ arched one brow and fixed her steady, challenging gaze on her adversary. “That politeness extends both ways. Besides, I bet you never aspired to be good or die young, so that’s probably more of a compliment than an insult.”
Okay, she’d surprised him. He wouldn’t be surprised by Georgie’s response, because he had zero idea what it would be. He’d never known anyone who, when dressed down by Georgie for her attitude, displayed even more attitude.
He should have left JJ downstairs in the lobby. Better yet, he should have just called Georgie and asked about Maura. But hell, who ever would have thought he would be the more tactful of any two people in the world?
Georgie’s stare simmered for a long moment, then she pointed one long, thin finger JJ’s way. “You should be scared of me.”
“Ha. You never met my grandmother Raynelle. She was a lot like you, only she was really scary.”
Georgie considered the name a moment. “I don’t know any Raynelles. Where are you from?”
“South Carolina.”
“And they say Southern women are genteel. Apparently, they never met you.” Georgie snorted before relenting. “You’re right. I never did aspire to be good, just like you never cared about being genteel. And you can call me Miss Georgie. I like the la-di-da sound of that. So what do you want to know about Maura Evans?”
Quint blinked. He’d seen Georgie chew up grown people and spit ’em out. If she’d been a cat, she would have been the sort who tormented the mouse mercilessly before killing it. JJ should have been lucky to walk out of here with her skin intact.
Instead, they both looked smugly satisfied. Like they’d come to some kind of agreement and would now make nice of their own accord. He’d never seen Georgie make nice with anyone outside her family or his.
JJ set her clasped hands on her lap. “Have you met Maura?”
“Of course. I’m not going to let someone move into my own house without getting a good look at her. My granddaughter showed her the house.” Georgie’s faded gaze darted to Quint. “Twenty-three and hasn’t been to jail once.”
“Yet,” he tacked on, making her grin. Truth was, none of her family had been to jail in his lifetime. They’d gotten tamed before he was even born. But they’d still nursed that family animosity toward the law.
“She’s going to be a schoolteacher. Graduates from OSU next December.” Georgie rummaged in the drawer beside her chair and drew out an electronic cigarette. Her smoking had been the nastiest habit under the sun, his mother used to declare, even though Georgie had never smoked in anyone’s house, not even her own. At her age, he figured, she was entitled to a few vices. Smoking, a glass of whiskey before bed and terrorizing the other old folks in the home were all she could manage.
“When Maura decided she wanted the house, I had her come over here to sign the papers. We had lunch, just me and her and that obnoxious little friend of hers. Mel. I hope her real name was something like Mellissandriennalou. That twit walked through the door—” she gestured with her e-cig toward her own door “—took a sniff and said old people smell like death. Like she even knows what death smells like. Rude kid. I should have pinched her ear.”
JJ grinned. “You are like Grandmother Raynelle. I was convinced my right ear was going to be bigger than the left because of all the times she tweaked it.”
“Sounds like you needed it.”
Quint couldn’t quite see JJ as a disrespectful kid. Disobedient, sure. She struck him as someone who acted first and apologized later—sweetly, innocently and even faintly sincerely—if it was necessary. Even in her earlier exchange with Georgie, he suspected she’d already known how the old woman was going to react, so there’d been no real disrespect intended.
“Do you remember Mel’s last name?”
“Wasn’t even polite enough to offer it.”
“What did you think of their relationship?”
With the push of a button, Georgie reclined the chair, stretched out her legs and crossed her ankles, propping hot-pink running shoes on the footrest. “I thought they were family at first. Mel’s hair and eyes were brown, and Maura was a blue-eyed blonde, but other than that, they could have been sisters.
“But you could tell Maura had always had money and Mel never had. Maura was all elegant and confident, and Mel… There was a sort of hunger about her. Not physical, you know, but more as if life had been tough and she’d never known anything better. She didn’t look like money, you know? And telling me I smell. Twit.”
The image that formed in Quint’s mind didn’t create a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. Rude, disrespectful, didn’t know how to behave and eager to trade her tough life for something better. And that was apparently the only friend Maura had had. And then Mel had left her.
As unsympathetic as he intended to be, that thought told him he wasn’t succeeding.
Because that was just damn sad.
JJ tipped her head back and gazed at the ceiling. The mysterious Mel sounded like Maura’s friends back home, except that the Carolina friends mostly came from money, like her. JJ was familiar with some of them because of their run-ins with police that never resulted in consequences, some because of their parents’ friendships with her parents. Most of them she could recognize, maybe even identify by name, but that was all. She couldn’t recall a brown-haired, brown-eyed hard-luck kid who’d infiltrated the Evanston crowd and stuck with it.
The two women could have met in college or on the road. It didn’t seem possible Mel had toured a winter’s full of ice palace hotels in Norway or cruised the Mediterranean, but Maura had spent plenty of time in American cities, as well. They could have run into each other in any number of ways, hit it off and decided to roam together with Maura picking up the tab. She was very generous, Morwenna had said.
Because her companions had let her thoughts wander undisturbed—Quint probably preferred her silence, but as Miss Georgie had said, time was a-wasting—she filled the silence with an absentminded comment. “Your glass is beautiful.”
“It is. That swirly red-and-green one there—that was a Christmas gift from Maura. She brought it when she delivered the December rent. We had lunch together every month when she paid the rent, but after that, I never saw her again.