A Disguise to Die For by Diane Vallere Page A

into a pair of loose cotton pajamas that had pictures of little green aliens on them. They were silly and completely inappropriate for a thirty-two-year-old woman but they made me feel closer to my dad, who was on his own alien adventure. I pulled on fluffy alien-head slippers and called him—my dad, not the alien-head slipper—to see how his trip was going.
    â€œHi, Dad. Are you okay?” I asked.
    â€œYup. Are you?”
    â€œYup.”
    Over the past seven years that I’d been in Las Vegas, there had been times when this had been the extent of our daily phone call. After spending a lifetime in Proper City with him and Ebony, moving away had been hard. Part of me had wanted to cling to the people and place that I knew and never leave. The people who knew my mother used to tell me that I was a miracle, that the doctors didn’t expect me to survive childbirth. That’s a heck of a thing to carry with you when your mom was the one who sacrificed her own life so you could live.
    My dad had been the one to encourage me to move. “Margo,” he’d said, “I’ve never been able to show you the world because I’ve had to be here minding the store. But I promised myself when the time came, I wouldn’t push the shop onto you. You need to see what else is out there in the world before you decide where you want to be and what you want to do.”
    He gave me fifty thousand American Airlines miles and encouraged me to go anywhere I wanted. It was an amazing gift that allowed me to spend a week in Europe, but it might as well have been Oz, because as I traveled along the European rails by myself, the one thought that I couldn’t shake was that there was no place like home.
    I moved to Las Vegas—close enough to home to feel connected but wacky enough to stretch my boundaries—and bounced around a series of low-paying jobs. Eventually I took the job with Magic Maynard. It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it was fun—except for the nights he sawed me in half. I’d never get used to that trick.
    â€œHow’s Area 51?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s amazing. This guy papier-mâchéd a series of gray alien heads that are out of this world.” He laughed at his ownjoke. “After dinner he took us to his garage. He has the whole crew of the starship
Enterprise
. Even the red shirts who get killed in the first five minutes of the show.”
    My stomach turned at the mention of the word
killed
.
    â€œThere’s too much to fit in the back of Don’s car so we’re going to rent a trailer in the morning. What about you? How are things in Proper?”
    Judging from his tone, he hadn’t heard the news about Blitz. I didn’t want to tell him anything that would upset him—not while he was still recovering from his heart attack—but I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.
    â€œBlitz Manners is dead,” I said. “He was killed at his birthday party.” The phone was silent for a few seconds. “Dad? Are you still there?”
    â€œI’m here.”
    â€œThe police think Ebony was involved because she was standing over his body with the goose knife in her hand when I walked in on them, but she couldn’t have done it.”
    â€œMargo, slow down. Tell me what happened.”
    I closed my eyes. The image of Blitz’s body lying facedown in the puddle of blood slipped into place like a slide show. Slowly, I felt myself rock back and forth. “Ebony was in the kitchen. It was time to carve the goose. I wanted to be helpful so I went back to see if there was something I could do. When I walked in, his body was facedown in a puddle of blood and Ebony was standing over him with the carving knife in her hand.”
    â€œDid the police question her?”
    â€œThey questioned everybody. We all had to wait until they took our statements. I think Ebony and I were the last two people to talk to