A Body to Spare (The Odelia Grey Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

since Monday was a holiday.”
    “Did you tell Clark you’ll be gone?” I asked, walking into the living room from the dining area. Except for the bedrooms and bathrooms, our home has a huge open floor plan, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen flowing one into the other. Greg designed it, buying a duplex and turning it into one very large easy-care home. “He said he was staying with you while he’s here.”
    “He’s a big boy, Odelia. He can stay by himself a day or two. And he has a key to my place.” She looked up at me. “But I guess I should tell him, shouldn’t I?”
    “Ya think?” I scowled at her. Grace Littlejohn had never been mother of the year, and she wasn’t about to start now. She’d had three kids by three different fathers. Clark had been fathered by Leland Littlejohn. I was conceived with Horten Grey, whom my mother had married after taking off and leaving Clark with his father. When I was sixteen and my parents were already divorced, Mom left me and ran off with some guy who impregnated her with our half brother Grady. She returned to Leland after Grady’s father abandoned her, and Leland adopted Grady and gave him his name. And that’s where she was when I finally caught up to her several years ago. Both my father and Clark’s are now deceased, and so is Grady.
    For better or for worse, that leaves me with just two blood family members. Clark and I have become quite close; we are a lot alike and even resemble each other a bit. And both of us have this love-hate relationship with our mother, which has improved over the past few years. I have friends who complain that their aging parents have no life outside of that of their children, but Clark and I worry about the life Mom has away from our watchful eyes. What’s worse, she seems absorbed in my occasional trips to murderland and sees us as a sort of mother-daughter PI team. I can’t tell you how many times Greg has told me how thankful he is that his parents are normal. They are, and I love them for it.
    Mom looked up at me through her glasses, the thick lenses enlarging her eyes. She looked like a startled lemur. “But maybe I shouldn’t go.”
    “I’m sure Clark won’t mind, Grace,” Greg told her. “And you’re only going to be gone one night.”
    “I’m not worried about him,” Mom told him. “I’m worried about that dead body. Odelia might need me to help figure out where it came from.”
    I had to nip this line of thinking right in the bud, and pronto. “The police are handling it, Mom,” I told her firmly. “Tomorrow I’m going to work, then later to dinner with Dev, Clark, and Greg. That’s it.”
    “I’m sure you’re going to do all that, Odelia, but I’m not stupid. Your brother, Dev Frye, and even you and Greg are going to be looking into this, and I want to help. In fact, I already have.”
    I moved closer until I was right in front of her, staring into her lemur eyes. “What do you mean, Mom?”
    In answer, she turned her iPad around. “I’ve been online looking up whatever I can on that Finch guy.”
    I was annoyed. Not because she looked up the dead man online, but because she had done it before I did. It was something I had been planning to do later. “And?” I asked, putting aside my pettiness in favor of information.
    “And if this is the right guy,” Mom said, pointing at the tablet, “the top just got popped off a whole different can of worms.”
    I sat down on the sofa next to Mom and picked up the iPad to study it closer. As I read, my eyes widened and my heart nearly stopped. I checked the date of the old news article Mom had unearthed. It could be the same Zach Finch, or Zachery Finch. The age of the person in the article about matched up with the age of the guy in my trunk, given the time lapsed. There was even a photograph, taken years ago, and I could see similarities. I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man’s face while he was in the trunk, but the police had shown me