A Stitch to Die For (An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Book 5) by Lois Winston Read Free Book Online Page A

Argentina. Maybe he wasn’t so oblivious after all.
    “Would you try talking some sense into Mama?” I asked. “She won’t listen to me.”
    “I think she derives a certain amount of pleasure in baiting Lucille,” he said, stating what the rest of us in the family had known for years.
    “Perverse pleasure. But it only makes my life more difficult. She no longer has to live with Lucille; I do.”
    “I’ll talk to her,” he said, “but I doubt she’ll stop until Lucille is dead and buried.”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Then, even though I already knew the answer, I asked, “Are you and Mama planning to stay for dinner?”
    “Since we’re already here, we’ll help you polish off all those leftovers from last night.”
    Leftovers I had hoped would stretch for more than one dinner this week. Even without a murder on the street, Mama and Lawrence had probably planned to show up in time for dinner tonight. No matter how often I tried to impress my near-destitute situation on Mama, she seemed incapable of comprehending the financial realities of my post-Karl life.
    As for Lawrence, the man had turned out to be a consummate moocher, no better than his gold-digger daughter. What’s that saying about the apple not falling far from the tree? I could see why Cynthia had set her sights on Ira, even with the baggage of three kids, but if Lawrence thought Mama had money stashed away from her previous husbands, he was in for a huge shock.
    At least I didn’t have to deal with Ira and his bratty brood this evening, just Mama, Lawrence, Lucille, and a murdered neighbor—another typical evening at Casa Pollack.
    I excused myself and headed to my bedroom to rendezvous with a couple of Motrin. After gulping down the pills, I stripped off my office attire and slipped into a pair of jeans and a threadbare blue and orange Mets National League championship sweatshirt that I’d owned since the dawn of the new millennium. Glancing in the mirror at the fading logo, I wondered which would occur first—a debt-free Anastasia or a Mets World Series win. The odds for either looked equally dismal.
    Even with my bedroom door closed, I continued to hear shouts of “Stupid Bolshevik!” and “Ignorant Fascist!” hurled back and forth from the living room, interspersed with an occasional squawk from Ralph. Since dinner would take at least twenty minutes to heat up, I collapsed onto my bed, drew a quilt over my body, and buried my head under a pillow to tune out the shoutfest.
    If only such measures would dispel the vision of Betty Bentworth’s dead body, now forever etched into my brain. As I pondered what she might have done or seen that resulted in a gaping hole where her eye used to be, I realized that after nearly two decades of living across the street from the woman, I knew next to nothing about her. Did she once have a husband? Children? A career? Did she have any living relatives? I’d never noticed anyone coming to visit her.
    She rarely left her house except to attend church, run errands, do yard work, or shovel her walk in winter. Even at her advanced age, she refused to hire help of any kind. In a neighborly gesture, I once sent the boys over to dig out her property after a blizzard had dumped over a foot of snow on us. Instead of thanking them, she called the police to report trespassers on her property. So much for neighborly gestures.
    ~*~
    The doorbell rang before my first forkful of food rendezvoused with my taste buds. “I’ll get it,” said Alex, jumping up from the table.
    A moment later he returned with Detective Spader in tow. Nodding to me, the detective said, “Sorry to intrude on your dinner.”
    I’d expected the interruption. Spader had a murder to solve. For all I cared, he could set up a command center in my living room if it meant a speedier apprehension of the killer. I just wished the timing had allowed me to finish dinner first. I stood and directed Spader to follow me into the kitchen and