“A bit,” she said. Hitting hard felt good.
When they got home, they sat in the living room, a pitcher of water before them. They didn’t mention separating.
Sara took a chair, put a pretty bamboo lap desk across her knees and began to write on small sheets of paper. Jack took a couch and opened his computer. On the sofa across from him, Kate was his mirror image.
“Which house are you looking at?” he asked.
“Shhh.” She glanced at Sara.
“She’s fine as long as no one asks her questions. What house?”
“Twenty-three Kingfish Drive has just come up. It looks nice.”
“The electrical needs work, but it’s a great location. Let me have it for six weeks and I can increase the sell price by twenty percent.”
“Yeah?” She made a note of it. “One eighty-two Redland Street?”
“That’s a good one. Dad and I waterproofed the basement.” Looking back at his computer, he groaned.
“What are you doing?”
“Downloading transactions from the bank, then categorizing them. I can’t read Gil’s writing.” He handed her the receipt.
“Six two-by-fours. Eight two-by-sixes. Four pounds of wood screws, size seven.”
For a moment Jack blinked at her, then handed her his laptop and put the plastic box of receipts on the coffee table.
She gave him her computer. “Write what you know about each house and include the history. People like to know about deaths and ghosts in the house.”
“Where do I write it?”
She moved to sit beside him and Sara left her narrow chair to go to the other couch.
It was hours before they started moving about. Jack went outside to lovingly bathe his new truck; Sara went to her bedroom to turn on the TV while she typed; Kate went to the kitchen.
It was while she was preparing a meal that Kate began to think about the case. She tried not to. She needed to go over the listings so she could answer all the clients’ questions, but her mind kept wandering. She thought of what Alastair had told her about Dan—that he drank so much that he was rarely sober and loved the glory days of high school when he was a sports star. Alastair said Dan thought of Cheryl as a trophy to be won, that he spoke of what he wanted to do to the young woman.
As Kate put a stuffed chicken in the oven, she told herself that Dan probably did commit the murders. Just as he’d written.
But what about the others? she wondered.
Sara did say that they thought Jack’s truck had driven over rocks. Maybe that was really how the brakes went out. As for Mrs. Ellerbee, maybe she actually had smothered in her sheets, and the timing of her death was just a coincidence. A wild, cosmic concurrence.
She was chopping zucchini. It was certainly nice of Alastair and his mother to buy all of the houses from Jack. And it might not hurt the resale value to add luxury floors and ceilings. Besides, selling wouldn’t happen until Mrs. Stewart left the earth. If she was still playing tennis, that was far away.
That thought made her think of Dan’s suicide. What were the repercussions of it? What was going on now that the confession had been found? How was his family?
When Kate got to the carrots, Jack came in and sat on a stool on the other side of the counter. He took one and crunched it. “Sara won’t eat those. No veg that grows underground.”
She didn’t respond.
Jack lowered his voice. “Been thinking?”
“Not at all.”
He stared at her.
Kate glanced at Sara’s closed bedroom doors. “Just a bit. I can come up with an explanation for everything.”