Dexter Is Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppositions, and conjectures regarding the All-Important Case of Dexter Detained. “I think I have a major lead,” I said. “Anyway, it’s at least something to investigate. Anderson was here—and from what he said, and then what my lawyer said, too, it seems like a good bet that…”
    I trickled to a stop. Deborah was not merely paying no attention to my excited rambling. With her face still set in its mask of granite indifference, she had actually put the phone down and turned sideways, away from the window, away from any possible glimpse of offensive little old me.
    “Deborah…?” I said, quite stupidly, since I could see the phone lying there, several feet away from her ear.
    She turned back to face me, almost as if she’d heard, and waited a moment—an interval filled with no more than an unblinking stare from that hard face that had become so monotonously unfriendly. Then she picked up the phone again.
    “I’m not here to listen to your bullshit,” she said.
    “But that’s…But then…But why?” I said, and in my defense I have to say that her comment had rendered me even stupider than I sounded. It was a true miracle of wit, in fact, that I could speak at all.
    “I need you to sign some papers,” she said. She held up a sheaf of official-looking documents, and in spite of all the massive evidence to the contrary, I actually felt a small surge of relief. After all, what official documents could she possibly bother to bring down here, other than something dealing with my case? And since the true and hidden meaning of “my case” actually meant “my release,” a little ray of sunshine peeped out from behind the newly formed dark clouds.
    “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be happy to…You know that I…What are they?” I said, all pathetic eagerness to please once again.
    “Custody,” she said, grinding the word out as if one more syllable would have broken her jaw.
    I could only blink in surprise. Custody? Was she really going to take me into her house, assume the role of legal guardian to Dexter in Disgrace, until such time as my good name was re-untarnished? It went far beyond what I hoped for—it sounded very much like a full pardon, if only a nonlegal one from Deborah. “Custody,” I repeated inanely, “well, of course, that’s—I mean, thank you! I didn’t think you would—”
    “Custody for your
kids,
” she said, nearly spitting the words. “So they don’t go to a foster home.” And she looked at me as if it had been my plan, my entire purpose in life, to send children to orphanages.
    Whether from the look or from her words, I felt so completely deflated that I had to wonder whether I would ever hold air again. “Oh,” I said. “Of course.”
    Deborah’s look changed at last, which was all to the good. On the downside, however, what it changed to was a sneer. “You haven’t given those kids one fucking thought, have you?”
    It may not stand as absolutely the best character reference for me, but in truth, I had not thought about the kids. Cody, Astor, and, of course, Lily Anne—they must have been scooped up somehow when I was arrested. And naturally, Deborah, as their closest relative—because of course my brother, Brian, would be totally out of the question, and…Honestly, I had not devoted even one gray cell to thinking about the kids, and I am quite sure that anyone with actual feelings would have a rather large lump of shame in their lap. I did not. In my defense, however, I would like to point out that I did have other things to think about—for instance, I was actually incarcerated. For multiple murders, remember? And unjustly. “Well,” I said, “I have been kind of, um…in jail?”
    “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Not one fucking thought.”
    For a moment I was too stunned to respond. Here I was in quite literal chains, with reason to think it would soon be my permanent condition, and she was blaming me for not thinking of the children.