Over Her Dead Body(5)

“Braannnnndo!” I sang, “C’mon boy!”

I waited at the base of the driveway for a long, anxious beat. Ten seconds. Then ten seconds more.

My dog was not coming back.

Which meant I was going to have to go after him.





CHAPTER 4




* * *



LOUISA


“There’s something I need to show you,” I told my nephew, after his third cookie. I stood and he followed me into my study. Even if he wasn’t willing to step up as my heir, he could still be useful to me. An opportunity to enact my plan would eventually present itself, and I needed to be ready.

“I have a folder here in my desk,” I said, opening the bottom drawer. “I’ve labeled it ‘Louisa’s Death Folder.’ It contains instructions about what to do when I die.” I extracted the folder and handed it to him. His eyes got wide like an owl’s.

“Louisa, why are you showing me this?”

He looked frightened, so I tried to reassure him. “I should have shown you a long time ago.” Of course there was a reason I was showing him now, but if he wasn’t going to help me, there was no point explaining.

“Is everything . . . all right?”

“No,” I quipped. “I’m old. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.” He smiled a little, like he thought I was joking.

“Sometimes I forget,” he said, and once again I was reminded why he was my favorite. Unlike my children, he hadn’t run away when my husband died and things got hard. He stepped up, like family is supposed to.

We returned to the dining room to clear the table. Nathan insisted on cleaning the dishes before he left. I allowed it under the pretense it was his penance for refusing to step up as my heir, but the truth was I welcomed an excuse to sit and close my eyes for a few minutes. The high-back sofa in the parlor was great for encouraging good posture and not much else, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the kitchen while he was tidying it, so it would have to do.

“Thank you for the lovely meal and conversation,” Nathan said as he leaned over to kiss my cheek.

“Oh! Of course,” I said, blinking myself awake. I blotted the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand, then leaned on the arm of the sofa to stand. “I’ll walk you out.”

“I know the way,” he replied. I noticed he had already put on his coat. I chided myself for napping in front of my nephew. He was family, but it was still not very gracious to fall asleep on your dinner guest.

“You must think me an abysmal hostess,” I said, rising to my feet.

“But a fine cook,” he said with a wink.

He kindly waited for me to open the door for him. My brother was a snore, but he had raised at least one well-mannered child. That’s more than I could say for my husband, rest his soul.

“Give my love to your mother and father,” I said, and I knew he would. Unlike my children, he spoke to his parents daily.

“I shall,” he said. “Sleep well.”

I closed the door behind him, then glanced at the antique grandfather clock my husband had bought at Sotheby’s. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else besides going to bed. Perhaps it was I, not my brother, who was the insufferable bore. When I was running my business just a few short years ago, I often worked sixteen-hour days: emailing at dawn, then jumping in the car or on a plane to scout new talent or check in on a client. Running a casting agency was relentless, and I did it with vigor and grace. It annoyed me that something as simple as cooking a meal could knock me on my ass now. I had become that person I had always reviled: ornery, self-pitying, and old.

I told myself I would read in bed before going to sleep, even though I knew it was unlikely I’d get through much more than a page. I had left my book in the library, which was at the opposite end of the house. I adored my sprawling English storybook, but its whimsical floor plan was exhausting. I had to go downstairs to go up, left to go right. When the kids were little, they delighted in all the nooks and crannies that inspired endless games of hide-and-go-seek, but the quirky up-and-down, round-and-round floor plan was terribly impractical.

I traversed the living and dining rooms, then swirled down a short crescent-shaped staircase to the library. It was at the back of the house, and all you could see from the crisscrossing farmhouse-style windows were dense plumes of shrubbery and ancient ivy-covered trees. When I bothered to fill my bird feeder, I had a veritable aviary back there: regal blue jays, playful sparrows, chalky-gray doves, even the occasional peacock. I loved my enchanted forest. It was not just the books that made this my favorite room in the house.

My current guilty pleasure, Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest, was sitting on the arm of a leather reading chair that was so old and worn you could see the imprint of my derriere in the cushion. I had no plans of replacing it: nobody came in this room but me, and I could always throw an afghan over it if someone did. As I tucked the twisty thriller under my arm, the floodlights in the backyard suddenly turned on. I wasn’t alarmed. Besides birds, my backyard hosted a menagerie of rodents, some of them sizable enough to tip my trash cans. One of them must have lumbered by the sensor. I had security cameras, of course, both inside the house and out; I was a senescent widow living alone in a house with considerable treasures. The monitor was in the pantry; I would check it before heading up to bed, just to be sure my “unexpected guest” was not of the same troublesome ilk as Ms. Christie’s.