Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online

illness. And I don’t want you listening to Madison anymore. Tab! Please. You’re a beautiful girl with a beautiful body. And that’s the end of it. Okay?”
    Ruby shook herself free of my hands. “Okay,” she said, and wafted morosely out of the kitchen.
    At that moment, as if to punctuate her exit, there was the sound of a huge crash, immediately followed by jackhammering. Our neighbors were beginning the demolitionof their house. We’d received notification a few months before that the young couple who had bought the duplex from the elderly brother and sister who had lived there for the previous sixty years planned to raze the place and build a McMansion on virtually the entire lot. We hadn’t paid much attention—after all, we were renters, and had little interest in the effects of the neighbors’ activities on property values. For some reason the sheer
volume
of the construction project had not occurred to me. I wrapped my bathrobe around my waist and ran down the steps to our front door, hoping to catch the workers before they woke my husband.
    “Excuse me!” I shouted at the hard-hat-clad young man wielding the jackhammer.
    No reply.
    “Excuse me!” I shouted, again.
    This time he raised his eyes, but pointed at his ears and shook his head. That’s when I noticed that he was wearing heavy plastic earphones. Lucky him. I waved my hands in the air, and he finally switched off the machine and took off his earphones.
    “Yeah?” he said.
    “Can you guys wait to do that? My husband works at night, and he sleeps in the morning. You’re going to wake him up.”
    “Huh?” he said.
    “My husband isn’t going to be able to sleep if you guys keep jackhammering!” I said.
    “Lady, we’re working here.”
    “I know that!” I said, exasperated. “But isn’t there some more quiet thing you could be doing? Couldn’t you leave the jackhammering until after lunch?”
    He shook his head. “Lady, city ordinances allow us to begin construction at 8 AM .”
    “I’m not asking you to stop. I’m just asking if there isn’t something more quiet you could do in the mornings.”
    He shook his head, put his earphones back on his head, and revved up his machine again.
    Defeated, I walked back up the stairs to our apartment. I found Peter huddled at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
    “I went to bed at four,” he said.
    “I know, honey. I’m really sorry. There’s nothing I can do. The city lets them start at eight.”
    “How long is this going to go on?”
    “I don’t know. Months, I imagine. Maybe even longer. I mean, they’re taking the thing down to the ground and rebuilding from scratch.”
    “Juliet,” my exhausted husband whispered. “Please go find us a house. Any house. As long as it’s quiet.”
    I thought of the bucolic garden in which Kat and I had waited for the police. The jasmine plants. The twittering birds. And the house! The giant tub. The Sub-Zero. The mangled corpse. I pushed that last image firmly from my mind and picked up the telephone.
    “You don’t want that house!” Kat said, dumbfounded.
    “Yeah, I do.”
    “But someone was killed there! We found her body!”
    “I know.”
    “How could you live there after that?”
    I looked over at my husband, drooping in misery over a cup of steaming coffee.
    “Easily.”
    She let out an exasperated groan. “Anyway, you can’t afford it.”
    “I couldn’t afford it two days ago, but I’m betting there’s some wiggle room in the price now, don’t you think?”
    “That’s sick!”
    “Kat, just do me a favor. Find out what the asking price is. And help me make an offer. I want that house.”
    “Oh, all right. But you know what?”
    “What?”
    “You are a
sick
person. Really.”
    I laughed. “I’m not sick. I’m just
cheap
.”

Five
    W ITH Peter awake and able, more or less, to help me get the kids into gear, we were dressed and ready for school almost on time. Before I had kids I never had the problems with