Death at a Fixer-Upper Read Online Free PDF Page A

hastily and focused on a banner stretched between the two tall palms at the Plaza’s northeast corner; it proclaimed that the twenty-third annual Kinetic Sculpture Race would be held on Memorial Day weekend, which happened to be this weekend. Thousands of tourists flocked to town to watch the race kick off from this very location, to drink beer and smoke dope and to cheer on their favorites. I’d been a dedicated spectator of the off-beat, oftentimes bizarre event for as long as I could remember—but never so much as this year, because Max was racing.
    Arlinda’s a funky little seaside town of fifteen thousand people, less than a third of whom supplement their income by growing marijuana in their garages. I’d spent my formative years here, with what could only be described as mixed results. Sometimes my personality seemed mirrored in the character of the town: independent, eccentric, and a little off-putting until you get used to it. I’d earned a degree from Redwood State, and somewhere at the bottom of a moving box had the diploma to prove it. I’d also met a man, married him, had a baby, and been abandoned by the guy, all in the space of a few short years Not what I’d expected from life, but one adapts.
    I took a bite of muffin. It was moist and rich. Until recently, I thought I had the single-parenting thing handled. But a few weeks ago Wayne, Max’s father, had shown up at my door after an absence of thirteen-plus years. And I hadn’t told Max. Yet. What was I waiting for? I suppose, for starters, I wanted to be sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I’d been under a lot of stress at the time. A psychotic break, or whatever they called it these days, could happen to anyone. Just look at Biddie.
    Moodily I finished my second breakfast, brushing the crumbs from my jacket and thinking of my exchange with the chief of police. A little cautionary bell was going off in my head about Bernie Aguilar. It had been a long time—thirteen years, in fact—since I’d let down my guard. I was too careful, too wounded to make that mistake again. Now I had a dinner date. Better I should have my head examined.
    On top of that was the family connection. There was something positively Oedipal about dallying with your sister’s ex-husband. Then again, Stacy’d cut him loose with relatively little fuss. She’d always had a short attention span when it came to men: the four years she’d been married to Bernie, before she found her soulmate in her Pilates instructor, was an eternity by her standards. Still, there was history there, messy and indisputable. I didn’t need the complications.
    The orange-and-yellow city bus rumbled down Ninth Street toward the Plaza. Five minutes after the hour, right on time. It made its ponderous right turn to head to the university and points north. I watched the faces flash by, framed in the big Plexiglas windows down the length of the bus. Most bent their heads over laptops or talked into their phones, but others gazed back at me incuriously, like a woman with a round pasty face, and that man in the…was it…Wayne?
    In a flash, I was on my feet and running. The bus growled its way up the hill, belching a cloud of exhaust from the vent on top. I was gaining, even in my clogs, which were not ideal pursuit footwear. But, goddammit, I needed some answers. I shouted and waved, trying to catch the attention of the driver. There was a bus stop outside Wanda’s Waffle Emporium and I heard a grinding of gears as the bus slowed down, preparing to pull over. The signal flashed. I was going to catch it.
    Inexplicably, the bus surged back into traffic and picked up speed.
No!
It was pulling away from me. I put everything I had into a last, frantic sprint. My left shoe flew off and landed in the street. The bus crested the hill and was gone.
    My cell phone rang as I gulped in air like a stranded fish and retrieved my clog before some rude driver ran it over. I yanked my phone out of my bag and