“Eh, that’s not quite true,” he argued with himself.
Cairo raised an eyebrow. Grady patted his noggin and continued.
“Here’s the thing, see? Chris Gilman was a garbage human, and he was probably killed by another garbage human, over some garbage deal gone garbagely wrong. But Kevin… he wasn’t so bad,” he explained to the dog in a voice that teetered perilously close to baby talk. “He’d been making changes to Dad’s company while Dad wasn’t looking. Offering parental leave, better health insurance, all the stuff that helps you keep quality employees. He even dabbled in philanthropy. He was in the process of establishing a scholarship fund at UW in memory of his mother. All of which begs the question…”
Molly poked her head into the living room. “Begs what question?”
Grady yelped, and Cairo jumped, and the contents of the messenger bag went scattering across the table and floor. “The hell? You’re supposed to be at work!”
“I got a nosebleed, and they sent me home.”
“What? Are you okay?”
“I slipped and fell, and hit the espresso machine with my face.” She did a quarter turn left, then right, as if to show off some tragic injury, curiously absent. Her shift at Starbucks was supposed to start at two. It was presently three thirty, and she shouldn’t be home until after five. If she’d gone to work, then she had not spent very much time there.
Grady didn’t see any signs of black eyes or a broken schnoz. “Well, you can’t tell at all, so congratulations. You’ve successfully weaseled out of your gainful employment yet again.”
“Nobody’s weaseling, Dad. It was gruesome. Blood and snot everywhere. Stray boogers flying around like tiny droids. Customers don’t want to see that, or so I was told.”
“Now I know you’re full of it, but I’m glad you’re okay,” he added, in case that part wasn’t clear. “Wish I’d known you were home, though.”
“I was taking a nap, and you disturbed me. You probably owe me a pizza or something.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Instead, he scooped up his sealed plastic bags covered in brightly colored warnings and began to stuff them back into the bag.
Molly came to sit beside him, reaching across his lap to pet Cairo, whose butt was shaking like a paint mixer. As if she were giving the dog her full attention and had only the most casual, innocent interest in knowing the answer, Molly asked, “How’d it go with the psychic? Should I gather from your mood that this little adventure went… poorly?”
He nodded, then shook his head, then shrugged. “She does this trick where she holds things and she can tell you something about them. Sometimes. That part was pretty cool.”
“Did she give you any good clues?”
“About eighty percent of what she had to say… it fit the facts; I can say that much for certain.”
“And the other twenty percent?” she pressed, leaning forward.
“The other twenty percent was either nonsense, or useful—and I don’t know which one yet.”
“But you’re going to find out?”
This time he nodded firmly. “I’m definitely going to find out. She said this one thing that really stuck with me, about a silver fox…”
“A fox? An actual fox, like the adorable mammal? Or like a sexy old guy?”
“More like… an attractive older man. Please don’t use that phrase, for the love of God.”
She laughed and threw a pillow at his head. “You’re ridiculous.”
He caught the pillow, startling the dog—who leaped down off the couch and wandered away. “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Or that Leda was wrong. See, there was a guy on the periphery of the case, named Richard Beckmeyer. We interviewed him as a person of interest but never really considered him a suspect.”
“Are you rethinking it, now that a psychic brought him up?”
“Slow your roll, kid—you’re jumping to conclusions.” He held up his hands and counted off a few of the variables. “I believe that Leda is legit, but I don’t know it for a fact. Even if I assume she knows what she’s talking about, I don’t know if the silver fox she described is Beckmeyer, I don’t know if she’s right about his involvement, and I don’t know why she wigged out on me before she left.”
“She wigged out? Did she attack you or something?”
“Not exactly. We were finished with our little meetup, and we shook hands… and she lost it. She shrieked and fainted. I called nine-one-one, and there were medics, and the hotel manager yelled at me because he was doing me a favor by letting us inside the room again, and the whole thing was just…”
“A shitshow?”
“Yes, dear. It was a shitshow.”
“Was the psychic okay?”
He hugged the pillow and wished the dog would come back. No wonder therapy animals were so popular. “She came around, screamed at me again, ran away from the ambulance, and drove off in her own car. If you want to call that ‘okay.’ ”
“Oh, wow.”
“Wow, for sure.” He let his head fall back on the couch, so he was staring up at the ceiling when he said, “I wish to God I knew what happened.”
Molly considered this, pouting her lower lip and tilting her chin back and forth like she was thinking. “You said she gets her info from touching objects, right? Do you count as an object?”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. What if she got a vision or something when she shook your hand?”
“God, I hope that’s not it.” Once again, he wished that the couch would eat him—thereby sparing him from further embarrassment. He wondered what she saw. Whatever it was, it must’ve scared her to death.”
“Maybe you just creeped her out,” his daughter suggested oh-so-helpfully.
“Thanks. That’s even worse.”
“I’m full of great ideas.”
“Always, yes.”
“I’ve got another great idea, right here on deck,” she hinted.
“All right, fine. Hit me.”
Molly pulled her feet up underneath herself, in order to sit cross-legged on the cushion beside him. “Why don’t you suck it up and ask her what happened?”
“I did ask, when she was standing in front of me having a meltdown.”
“Ask later. Ask tomorrow. Text her, and ask her to call you back.”
He turned to face her. “You don’t get it. She fled, Molly. She didn’t want to look at me for another second, much less answer any more of my questions.”
“Thus my suggestion that you send her a text. Listen to us kids, old man. We know things about how to communicate when the world is super awkward. Text messages are your friends. She can answer whenever she feels like it, or not at all. You have her number, don’t you?”
“I do. It’s not a terrible idea, and I appreciate you for being the voice of reason during this difficult time.”
“Don’t give me any avoidant-cop speeches. Just text her, find out what freaked her out, and quit worrying about it. Maybe she’ll talk to you again and you’ll learn the details, maybe she won’t and you’ll never hear from her again. That’s life.”