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find out about Berta?’
    She sighed as she stood up. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come over here. Yes, I’ll let you know. But only about Harris! Got it?’
    ‘Got it!’ I said enthusiastically as she walked out the door.
    I went to the kitchen to look for something in the freezer to try to defrost for dinner.
    But then I thought of Kerry’s twin sons. The same age as my girls – fifteen going on sixteen. Kerry ran her home like she did her office – a place for everything and everything in its place. I wasn’t sure if Ken and the boys – Keith and Kenneth, Jr – would be able to survive without her.
    But beyond all that, she had been loved. Her boys idolized her and her husband grinned whenever he saw her. Willis sometimes does that and I know what it means. It means love. It means I know your panties have a hole in them and you threw the dirty dishes in the oven when Graham’s counselor came over, and when you scolded the girls you were really laughing inside at their ingenuity. It means I know you lied about spending that money at the mall and you know I peek at you in the shower. It means I know you forgive me for what I said to your father back in ’eighty-nine, and that first dinner you made for me wasn’t really all that bad. It means after twenty-something years of marriage, I would still follow you across the quad and try to get the nerve to talk to you in the book store. It means I love you.
    Something had been going on with Kerry. Ken knew that. He’d come to Willis for help. Fat lot of good that did him – seeking advice from Mr Don’t Get Involved. Ken had said she’d been nervous, jumping at shadows, staring out the window. Looking for what? I wondered. When Trisha and I saw her she was perky to the point of manic. What was going on with her, and did it have anything to do with Berta Harris’s murder? Because now I was convinced Berta had been murdered. And I was also convinced something had been going on between Berta and Kerry. Had she and Berta Harris been involved in something together? Something illegal? Fraud? Robbery? Drugs? Kerry could have been using her real estate office to launder money, or to fence stolen property, or to make drug deals. But why? Ken was a corporate attorney who headed up his firm’s office in Austin. He commuted three days a week and played golf the other four. They couldn’t be hurting for money. Kerry was a volunteer at just about everything Black Cat Ridge had to offer, and still had time for a couple of charities in Codderville. The woman knew how to organize a day, I can tell you that. OK, had known. Jeez, it was hard to believe Kerry Killian was dead. She’d been a force to be reckoned with. Like a hurricane churning in the Gulf of Mexico.
    I felt my eyes well up with tears and headed to my bedroom. Twenty minutes later I was awakened by my three daughters. For the uninitiated, let me explain the circumstances by which Willis and I have ended up with, count ’em, three daughters. I’m going to explain this in order of their appearance in our home: Megan arrived in our apartment in Houston one sunny February morning, two days after a ten-hour labor and five-degree episiotomy. She weighed eight pounds, four ounces, and was fourteen inches long. Our second daughter, Elizabeth, now called Bess, we acquired four years later when her birth parents, our best friends, Roy and Terry Lester and their two older children, were murdered in their house next door to ours. We legally adopted her about two years later. Our third daughter, Alicia, we took in last year as a foster child. We were thinking of starting adoption proceedings, but then Willis suggested we put that off for a while. When I asked him why, he said for me to check out the way our son Graham looked at her. When I finally noticed, I had to agree. It would be much less complicated for everyone if they were not legally brother and sister. So far I don’t think Alicia has a clue, or the other girls for