Murder in Store by DC Brod Read Free Book Online Page B

smiled for the first time. It was unforced and warm, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile do so much for a person’s looks.
    “I guess I can’t blame you.” She picked at the gauze on her burned hand. “You must have thought you’d stepped into another dimension.”
    My mind replayed some of the highlights from last night. She must have been thinking the same thing because we both laughed a little. Then I decided it was time to get the whole mess straightened out. “Aren’t you supposed to be in a foreign country?”
    “I was,” she said. “England.” She sat cross-legged and picked at the carpet, making a pile of tiny lint balls. Finally she continued. “I was riffed.”
    “I’m sorry.” What could I say? “You were what?”
    She looked up at me. “Reduction in force.” She pounded the pile of lint with her injured hand. “Damn.”
    She was bitter, and as she explained I could understand that emotion. She’d been with the company for ten years, starting out in data entry and working her way up to manager of customer education. As she talked, her voice rose and she had trouble keeping it even. But she tried. The company had a couple bad years and started cutting staff. Her position was one of the first they eliminated.
    Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “At least that’s what they told me.” She paused and sighed. “I think they just wanted to get rid of me.”
    I couldn’t tell whether she wanted me to pursue that so I kept quiet.
    Finally she said, “So what it boils down to is I need a roommate or I’m not going to be able to pay the mortgage on this place.”
    “You seem pretty certain you aren’t going to get another job.”
    “I don’t have any college, let alone an MBA. Nobody hires you for the kind of money I was making without an MBA.”
    I wanted to tell her that employers look for more than a diploma. They look for character and assertiveness, and a little bulldog tenacity didn’t hurt either. She seemed to have more than her share of all that, but she wasn’t looking for a pep talk right now. She wanted to allow herself the luxury of wallowing in her own misery for a while first. I knew how she felt.
    “So. You need a roommate.”
    She nodded. “This is a one bedroom with a den. There’s a pull-out sofa in there. I can sleep on it.” I guess she interpreted my silence as reluctance. She was right. “You could leave whenever you wanted to. It would be cheaper than a hotel.”
    As insane as the idea was, it was beginning to make sense, but there was one point I wanted to air out. “I thought I was scum.”
    Elaine shrugged. “Actually, what Pam said was that you were a nice guy having a tough time handling the aging process.”
    “The aging process? Pam never told me she was a certified psychologist.”
    “She said you thought you could recapture your youth with a self-centered twenty-one-year-old.”
    “Twenty-three-year-old,” I corrected her, then folded my arms across my chest. “She said that, did she?”
    “Uh huh. She also said this woman was a ball-crusher.”
    I shrugged. “I like that in a woman.”
    She smiled. “You want to try this arrangement for a while?”
    I’d like to think I did it for convenience’s sake—no apartment hunting, no hassling with landlords over security deposits—but I think deep down, while I knew that
    there are a lot worse things than being alone, there are also a lot better things too. I figured I could invest a week or so in that possibility. Still, I didn’t answer immediately. There was something else to consider here. The woman needed me. More specifically she needed my money. My bargaining position would never be better. “Who gets the parking space?”

6
     
    I T IS AGAINST my nature to admit that I have made a mistake of colossal proportions. So, as I drove to Harry’s lab on the northwest side to give him the photos for analysis, I made a point of not thinking about my new living situation.
    I