Page 21 of Mother-Daughter Murder Night

“I just want you far from trouble,” she said, retrieving her waffles and returning to the sofa.

“Why am I being punished if I didn’t do anything?”

“I know you didn’t. But they don’t.” Beth wondered if her mother had made any headway yet on finding them a good lawyer.

“Mom, don’t I look even more guilty if I stop going out there? Isn’t it, like, a sign? If I change my routine?”

“The only thing it’s a sign of is that you listen to your mother.”

Jack’s eyes went dark. “It’s not like I’m some scared bunny rabbit.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know how to take care of myself.”

“Honey, I’m not saying you don’t. But this is serious. Can we just take this one step at a time?”

“Please, Mom. I need to get back in the water. Remember when I fell off my bike and you told me to get on it again? And the first time it was weird, but then after six times it felt totally normal? I think that’s what I need to do now or—”

Jack’s voice broke, and she collapsed into her mother’s shoulder. “Every time I close my eyes, I see him. I see the mud and the pickleweed and his red life jacket. It’s like the slough isn’t my place anymore.”

Beth stroked her daughter’s hair. Jack’s head rose and fell with Beth’s even breaths. “It’s awful when someone dies. Even someone you didn’t know very well.”

“I only met him once.” Jack’s voice was muffled against Beth’s sweater.

Then, the girl looked up. “How do you deal with it? Seeing death every day?”

“It isn’t every day. And it usually isn’t shocking, like what happened to that young man.” In a soft voice, Beth told her daughter about the patient who had passed away the night before. A gentle rancher who’d lived across the slough with his cows and his vegetable garden, a man who was pleased to hear about Jack going out to paddle every day. A man who lived long and died without pain. Beth’s words formed a monotone lullaby, softening death into something both far away and ordinary, with no hard edges, no surprises.

* * *

Lana sat at the table, stone-faced and silent. She couldn’t buy the fairy tale Beth was spinning. Every ragged breath she took reminded her of the tumors attacking her lungs, death rattling its alarm clock against her rib cage. Half of her wished she could escape to Los Angeles, to toast a real estate deal with cut crystal in a restaurant that would never dream of serving waffles for dinner. The other half of her wished she could slide onto the couch, join the embrace, maybe even offer something heartfelt to her girls.

But heartfelt wasn’t going to make this go away. Beth was right. The detectives were going to come back, and Lana wanted to be prepared. Nicoletti’s dismissive words still rattled in her ears, most of all that horrible, nasal ma’am, flattening her into something used up and worthless.

Lana hated being invisible. It was only slightly less terrifying than being dead.

She wasn’t going to just sit there waiting for the detectives to move along. She might be sick, but she wasn’t incapable. She was going to find a way to clear Jack.

She just needed to figure out how.

Chapter Twelve

Lana’s first day as an amateur detective began with a whimper. She woke up late. Groggy. After a coughing fit that left her heaving over the bathroom sink, she pulled on her robe, dumped honey into her tea, took her morning pills, and got back into bed.

But Lana was a woman who had renegotiated a contract during her daughter’s bat mitzvah. If she knew how to do anything, it was how to work. She downed her tea, got back up, and hauled out her neglected boxes of files and office supplies from under the bed. She wiped the dust off her chamber of commerce award for “fearless real estate mogul” and put it on the desk, alongside a stack of favorite books that used to line the shelves of her office. Then she pulled out a pen and a legal pad to take notes. She resisted the impulse to write a header across the top announcing her intention to find the true murderer and clear Jack’s name. She settled for neatly inking the date into the corner.

Lana wrote down what she knew. It wasn’t much. Ricardo Cruz was murdered. He died sometime between Friday evening, when he made a kayak tour booking for Saturday, and Sunday midday, when Jack found his body in the slough.

She racked her brain for more. There was the strange man with the wheelbarrow. Lana heard the detective’s voice in her head telling her she was a day early and a mile off. But she didn’t care. She’d seen him on the north bank of the slough, the same side where Ricardo was found. It was something to write down.

She looked at the legal pad in frustration. Half of what she’d written down was common knowledge, and the other half probably wasn’t relevant. She turned to a fresh page and made a list of important questions. Murder questions. The detective had said there was more than one way for someone to die in the slough. If Ricardo hadn’t drowned, how was he killed? Was there a weapon involved? Who exactly was Ricardo Cruz? Was his death related to the water sample testing he’d been doing a couple months ago? How did he get to the slough the day he died? Was his car still nearby? Had he been out with a girlfriend or a wife or a buddy who killed him?

By mid-afternoon, Lana’s page was full of questions and her head was cooperating. She got a fresh Diet Coke and, as she’d promised Beth, called a criminal defense attorney, an ex of hers who had retired in San Francisco. He offered to put her in touch with a good lawyer in Monterey. Lana ignored the follow-up texts he sent, providing names, numbers, and an awkward string of winking and kissy-face emojis. She could deal with all of that later. She had other calls to make.

Lana dialed the Central Coast Land Trust, where Ricardo had worked. A perky young woman answered the phone. She expressed a feathery desire to help and an iron unwillingness to do so. No, the director wasn’t available. No, she didn’t know when he would be back in the office. No, she couldn’t discuss the terrible thing that had happened to Ricardo. No, she couldn’t give Lana anyone else’s number. Yes, she could take a message . . . but by then Lana was so exasperated she just hung up.

The sheriff’s office was no better. The number on Detective Ramirez’s business card just rang and rang. The same was true for Nicoletti. Lana tried the main line and reached a clearinghouse of operators who passed her from extension to extension, each voice more doubtful she had useful information to offer. She ended up listening to a prerecorded, gruff-sounding man inviting her to leave a detailed message on the tip line, and if she was playing a prank to PLEASE HANG UP NOW before she did something she would regret because providing false information to police officers was a SERIOUS CRIME for which one could be SEVERELY PUNISHED. When the signal came, Lana politely asked the detectives in the Ricardo Cruz case to please call her back as soon as they could.