Jeanne Glidewell - Lexie Starr 05 - Just Ducky by Jeanne Glidewell Read Free Book Online Page A

placed it on her chair before pushing the chair up under her desk. It looks as if she then carried out her final mission.”
    “What exactly did the note say?” I asked. I was still very skeptical about the true nature of her death, and felt a little uncomfortable knowing my daughter would be involved in slicing Ducky open like a watermelon in a few short hours.
    “Just that she could not face the changes in her life that retirement would entail. For many years, her world had revolved around spending her days at the library and the idea of nothing but idle time spent in the company of her husband was more than she could bear,” Wyatt explained. “I didn’t actually read it myself, but was told that she basically said she’d lost the will to live, and was apologizing to her loved ones for ending her life.”
    “Ducky had no intention of idling around the house with her husband. She planned to spend time enjoying her grandkids, Melissa and Barney. And she and Quentin were going to learn ballroom dancing together,” I said. “Well, let me take that back. She was going to take ballroom dancing lessons and I assumed Quentin would be her partner.”
    “She must have had a change of heart,” Wyatt said. “When push came to shove, those desires may not have been intriguing enough to ward off her sudden despair. Severe, overwhelming despair can come on in an instant, causing the affected person to react without giving their decision much thought. Having been in the department for many years, I’ve been involved with quite a few suicides, and this incident seems very reminiscent of many of the cases I’ve seen in the past.”
    “But she had a lot of plans and dreams for her retirement that she told me about, with great enthusiasm I might add. I certainly didn’t sense any ‘overwhelming despair’ from her. She could hardly wait for her retirement to commence.”
    With a little chuckle, Stone said, “She told Lexie she wanted to go sky-diving and get a Harley Davidson tattoo.”
    Turning to me, Wyatt asked, “And you believed that?”
    “Well, yes. She already had a tattoo on her bum, and you know how eccentric she was. I felt like, with Ducky’s personality, anything on her bucket list was apt to be odd and unusual.”
    “I guess you’ve got a point there,” Wyatt said. “She once told me she kept a pet iguana named Pookie in her bathtub, and was looking for a mate for her. I have to admit, I know very few senior citizens who breed iguanas in their tub. Like, exactly no one other than Ducky.”
    “I can picture that,” I said. “But didn’t her husband have a say about her desire to house an entire family of iguanas in their bathroom?”
    “You would think so. One has to wonder what kind of character Quentin is, being married to Ducky, and all. He and Ducky had only been married a couple years though. I do know Ducky and her first husband went through a very nasty divorce about five or six years ago. There were several domestic dispute calls involving the two of them during that time. If I remember right, her ex-husband’s name is Bo Reliford. I’m not positive about the first name, it could be Bob, but I know Bertha’s last name was Reliford for many years.”
    “Have you ever met her ex?” I asked.
    “Yeah, I went out on a couple of those calls, and he was a real hot head and very abusive and belligerent when he’d been drinking, which was the majority of the time. He was arrested one time after a serious bender for assaulting a police officer, who just happened to be my partner at the time. Bo went after Clayton with a broken beer bottle, but in his drunken stupor, he stumbled to the ground and cut his own leg with it. He was a real schmuck, but I think he moved to Lee’s Summit not long after that incident.”
    “Hmm, that’s interesting,” I said. “I can’t imagine why Ducky stayed with him as long as she did. She didn’t seem the type to put up with that kind of behavior, and tiny as