Lying in Wait (9780061747168) by Judith A. Jance Page A

worked like a dog to hold it all together. And it paid off. We own this house free and clear, BoBo. And the boat as well. We don’t owe a dime on it, either. That’s why, even these last few years when the fishing openers have been so short and when every man and his dog were out there trying to grab what few fish were left to catch, Gunter was still able to make it and do all right.
    â€œWe were lucky. For one thing, when the iron curtain fell, Gunter got in on the ground floor with some of the new joint-venture things coming out of Russia. For another, we didn’t owe any money while everyone else was being eaten alive by interest rates.”
    Something was starting to bother me. Else Gebhardt was talking a blue streak, telling us all kinds of things we hadn’t asked and didn’t necessarily need to know. I wondered if we weren’t being fed a line of some kind; if the tales Else was telling us were nothing more than a thick smoke screen designed to hide something else—something she didn’t want to say.
    â€œWhat happened last night?” I asked, inserting the question in a place where Else had most likely only paused for breath.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWhat was he doing down at the boat in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter?”
    A slight flush crept up Else Gebhardt’s neck. “He stayed there sometimes. Overnight.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause he wanted to.”
    I don’t like boats much. They smell of dieselfuel and grease and dead fish and mold. They’re dank and damp and cold.
    â€œWhy?” I asked again. “In the winter, if someone can choose between sleeping in a hard, narrow bunk on a boat or in a nice warm bed in a cozy house like this one, you’d have to be crazy to choose the bunk.”
    â€œWe had a fight,” Else said quietly. “He left the house and said he wasn’t coming back.”
    â€œWhat did you fight about?”
    â€œMy mother. She’s the one thing we’ve always fought over. You see, this house belonged to my parents originally. We bought it from them, and Daddy used the money to buy an annuity for Mother, so she’d have some kind of pension income of her own. And Gunter promised my father that Mother could always live with us; that we’d take care of her for as long as she lived.
    â€œGunter was a man of his word. He took that promise very seriously, and he kept it. We both have. But it’s cost me more than it has him. You don’t know what it’s like living with her day in and day out. Mother still acts like the house belongs to her, like we’re only living here because she lets us. The towels have to be folded the way she likes them. Everything has to be done her way, and I don’t have any say in it at all.”
    Else paused again, and I thought I could see how this was all shaping up. In the age-old battle between contentious in-laws, someone is always bound to be caught in the middle.
    â€œLet me guess,” I said. “Gunter gave you an ultimatum. He told you that you’d have to choosebetween them. Either your mother was out the door or he was.”
    Else shook her head. “No,” she said. “That wasn’t it at all. I told Gunter last night that I wanted to sell the house and put my mother in a retirement home. I’ve found one I think she’d like down in Gig Harbor. I told him that if he didn’t agree to back me up on this and sell the house, I was leaving—that I’d go live in an apartment over someone’s garage if I had to.
    â€œI tried to explain to him that sometime before I died, I wanted to live in a house of my own—a place that belonged to me more than it did to my mother. A place where I could leave the dirty dishes in the dishwasher overnight without running it and no one would ever know about it but me.”
    â€œWhat did Gunter say?”
    â€œNo. Not just no, but