Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery by Sarah Graves Page A

followed him to the back porch. “Wade, you told, didn’t you? You put the word out about Steven Garner, and—”
    “Hey, it never hurts to have your folks know you might need them to watch your back.”
    “So? Did somebody find out something …?”
    Bad
, her mind finished, grimly. Wade paused at the door. “No. Well, not exactly. But I called a few guys and they called a few guys.”
    When Wade called his buddies, it was like casting a fishnet. It always caught something.
    Not always something good. “Gave them a description of your pal.”
    Jake nodded eagerly. “And?”
    “And nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him. Well,” he amended, “downtown last night, one guy said he might’ve seen somebody like that nearly getting pounded by a few hooligans. But he didn’t see him up close, and Bob Arnold broke it up before it could turn into anything. And after that—nothing.”
    He held the door open for her. Inside, the kale soup aroma was warmly comforting. “The state cops are here, by the way,” he added. “They still think the girl on Sea Street was accidental.”
    A sound from the street cut him off, one bright, sharp
brring!
Abike bell … the too-familiar sound revived her earlier feeling of being watched; turning to the door, she scanned up and down the sunlight-flooded street.
    On it, though, there was no sign of any bike or rider; if it had been him, Steven Garner Jr. was gone.
    But in her heart, she knew now that he would be back.
    SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. BUT SHE HAD NO CHOICE . A blast from the past was here, and she could either warn them about it or not.
    “Listen up, everyone,” she said when she had gotten them all gathered around the dining room table.
    Bella served the soup, accompanied by hot, crusty sourdough rolls and glasses of sparkling apple juice made from the windfalls she and Jake had collected the previous autumn. Then she sat, too.
    “What’s happened?” she asked, clasping her large, bony hands anxiously together.
    “I’ll tell you,” said Jake reluctantly. “Right now I’m going to tell you all about it.”
    Wade knew her history, of course, and her dad did, too. But the others didn’t; she’d never wanted them to.
    “Eat some of your soup first,” Ellie said kindly. So she did, hoping it would give her strength. Then she began:
    “Back in the city, I was a complete jerk.”
    Bella’s bony face took on a rebellious look. “No,” Jake told her stepmother, “let me finish.”
    She looked around at the others. Sam, especially, was not going to like this.
    “See, I was a money manager. Freelance. An advisor to the rich and loathsome,” she added with a crooked smile.
    She’d also been (1) married to a brain surgeon who thought that fidelity was only the name of a large investment firm, and (2) themother of a boy who at age twelve was so worldly-wise, he already had his very own stash box, stocked with his own marijuana and rolling papers.
    But never mind that now. “Sam and his father and I lived in a coop building so exclusive, even the pets had trust funds.”
    She paused, took another spoonful of soup. Her neighbors in the city had regarded the smell of cash as aromatherapy, and she’d been no different.
    At first. “So on the plus side, we had plenty of money,” she said. “But on the minus side, some of it was dirty, because some of my clients were so crooked, their limos should’ve been fitted with machine-gun turrets.”
    And though she’d tried to ignore this fact about them, in the end, she couldn’t. After a while it had gotten so bad that she couldn’t buy a Ferrari, a new pair of Jimmy Choos, or a baby grand piano for the apartment where no one ever played so much as “Chopsticks,” without seeing a body in a car trunk or a forehead with an icepick in it, through the lens of her mind’s eye.
    “So eventually I gave it all up.”
Not soon enough
, she added mentally as around the table, they all listened with interest.
    Again