Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(73)

Over dessert (which Hodges skips, Uncle Henry’s unapologetic gluttony serving as a minatory power of example), Janey invites the new arrivals to stay at the house in Sugar Heights starting tomorrow, and the three of them toddle off to their prepaid rooms. Charlotte and Henry seem cheered by the prospect of inspecting at first hand just how the other half lives. As for Holly . . . who knows?

The newcomers’ rooms are on the first floor. Janey and Hodges are on the third. As they reach the side-by-side doors, she asks if he will sleep with her.

“No sex,” she says. “I never felt less sexy in my life. Basically, I just don’t want to be alone.”

That’s okay with Hodges. He doubts if he would be capable of getting up to dickens, anyway. His stomach and leg muscles are still sore from last night . . . and, he reminds himself, last night she did almost all the work. Once they’re beneath the coverlet, she snuggles up to him. He can hardly believe the warmth and firmness of her. The thereness of her. It’s true he feels no desire at the moment, but he’s glad the old lady had the courtesy to stroke out after he got his ashes hauled rather than before. Not very nice, but there it is. Corinne, his ex, used to say that men were born with a shitty-bone.

She pillows her head on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you came.”

“Me too.” It’s the absolute truth.

“Do you think they know we’re in bed together?”

Hodges considers. “Aunt Charlotte knows, but she’d know even if we weren’t.”

“And you can be sure of that because you’re a trained—”

“Right. Go to sleep, Janey.”

She does, but when he wakes up in the early hours of the morning, needing to use the toilet, she’s sitting by the window, looking out at the parking lot and crying. He puts a hand on her shoulder.

She looks up. “I woke you. I’m sorry.”

“Nah, this is my usual three A.M. pee-muster. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yeah.” She smiles, then wipes at her eyes with her fisted hands, like a child. “Just hating on myself for shipping Mom off to Sunny Acres.”

“But she wanted to go, you said.”

“Yes. She did. It doesn’t seem to change how I feel.” Janey looks at him, eyes bleak and shining with tears. “Also hating on myself for letting Olivia do all the heavy lifting while I stayed in California.”

“As a trained detective, I deduce you were trying to save your marriage.”

She gives him a wan smile. “You’re a good guy, Bill. Go on and use the bathroom.”

When he comes back, she’s curled up in bed again. He puts his arms around her and they sleep spoons the rest of the night.

25

Early on Sunday morning, before taking her shower, Janey shows him how to use her iPad. Hodges ducks beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and finds a new message from Mr. Mercedes. It’s short and to the point: I’m going to f**k you up, Grampa.

“Yeah, but tell me how you really feel,” he says, and surprises himself by laughing.

Janey comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, steam billowing around her like a Hollywood special effect. She asks him what he’s laughing about. Hodges shows her the message. She doesn’t find it so funny.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Hodges hopes so, too. Of one thing he’s sure: when he gets back home, he’ll take the Glock .40 he carried on the job out of his bedroom safe and start carrying it again. The Happy Slapper is no longer enough.

The phone next to the double bed warbles. Janey answers, converses briefly, hangs up. “That was Aunt Charlotte. She suggests the Fun Crew meet for breakfast in twenty minutes. I think she’s anxious to get to Sugar Heights and start checking the silverware.”

“Okay.”

“She also shared that the bed was much too hard and she had to take an allergy pill because of the foam pillows.”

“Uh-huh. Janey, is Olivia’s computer still at the Sugar Heights house?”

“Sure. In the room she used for her study.”

“Can you lock that room so they can’t get in there?”

She pauses in the act of hooking her bra, for a moment frozen in that pose, elbows back, a female archetype. “Hell with that, I’ll just tell them to keep out. I am not going to be intimidated by that woman. And what about Holly? Can you understand anything she says?”

“I thought she ordered a sneezebagel for dinner,” Hodges admits.

Janey collapses into the chair he awoke to find her crying in last night, only now she’s laughing. “Sweetie, you’re one bad detective. Which in this sense means good.”

“Once the funeral stuff is over and they’re gone—”

“Thursday at the latest,” she says. “If they stay longer, I’ll have to kill them.”

“And no jury on earth would convict you. Once they’re gone, I want to bring my friend Jerome in to look at that computer. I’d bring him in sooner, but—”

“They’d be all over him. And me.”

Hodges, thinking of Aunt Charlotte’s bright and inquisitive eyes, agrees.

“Won’t the Blue Umbrella stuff be gone? I thought it disappeared every time you left the site.”

“It’s not Debbie’s Blue Umbrella I’m interested in. It’s the ghosts your sister heard in the night.”