Blessed Is the Busybody Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll talk to anybody I want to, tell them anything I feel like telling them. I don’t care who gets hurt!’ ”
    I didn’t doubt Teddy. The inflection was not my daughter’s. She was imitating what she had heard and doing a chillingly fine job of it. I felt as if I’d just heard the dead woman’s voice.
    “Well, Daddy will tell the police everything he knows,” I said, trying to sound reassuring and maternal. “Whatever was wrong with her, he’ll be sure to tell them.”
    I wondered, though, if it were true.

3
    Detective Kirkor Roussos was not exactly what I had expected. After the ethnic melting pot of Washington, Emerald Springs is Wonder Bread bland. Our most diverse citizens are third-generation Italians and Poles, with blocks and blocks of Anglo Saxons to water down that heady mixture. We have a small but vital African American community and just recently we’ve attracted a few Latinos. But Greeks, especially one who looked pure enough to be posing in a provocatively draped chiton, laurel wreath, and sandals, seem to be rare here.
    Actually, the detective was wearing faded jeans, a black T-shirt, and a worn silk sportscoat. The last, I guessed by the wrinkles, had been pulled on in a hurry as he left to take this call.
    He shook my hand as he introduced himself, but he assessed me, much as Gelsey always did. Thankfully, he seemed to find me less distasteful. He granted me one brief white smile, made more so against tanned olive skin, and asked me to take a seat in my living room.
    “Call me Kirk,” he said, dispensing with the formalities as he took a seat just across from me.
    I guessed he was in his early forties, with black hair cut short and eyes nearly as dark. Surely there were entire fishing villages in the Aegean populated with men who stopped female hearts the way this one did.
    I tried to make myself comfortable. “I’m Aggie.”
    He glanced down at a paper in his hand. “Short for Agate?”
    “My mother polished rocks for a living the year I was born.” Junie’s rock-polishing stage had lasted long enough to include my baby sister, Obsidian, forever after known as Sid.
    “How long have you lived here, Aggie?”
    “Going on a year.”
    “In this house?”
    “The whole time.”
    “Do you work outside the home?”
    I assumed he was trying to put me at ease, but that question was destined not to. Lately I’d been feeling very Donna Reed and wishing I had some place to go in the mornings other than the supermarket.
    “I’m a homemaker,” I told him. “And mother.”
    He rested his notes on one knee and sat forward. “Tell me about your morning. What you did. Where you did it.”
    I left out waking next to Ed and the lovely things we had done immediately after. “I got up about seven thirty—”
    “I’m sorry, does your bedroom face the street?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you didn’t hear any unusual noises while you were in bed?”
    Just the ones Ed and I had made, but I couldn’t say those were unusual. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I heard the newspaper hit the sidewalk at the usual time—”
    “Which is?”
    “A little before seven. It always wakes me up, but most of the time I go back to sleep for a while.”
    “What happened after you got up?”
    “I took a shower, dressed, and went downstairs.”
    “Did you get the newspaper?”
    “I made coffee first and got out milk and cereal for breakfast.” I scoured my memory. How often was someone interested in the mundane details of my day? “I let the cat out the backdoor. Then I went out front for the paper.”
    “Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
    I wished I had. I wished I had the perfect detail to insert here, the winning lottery ticket in the murder investigation that would make this man’s teeth flash again. But the morning had seemed like every other. The girls were still in bed. Ed was upstairs showering and getting ready for the day. Moonpie was stalking butterflies.
    “Concentrate on what you saw,”