Tell Me by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

She took side streets to an alley where Ruby Daltry had her little shop. Hurrying, Nikki made her way through a short gate and along a brick walkway to the back porch. Over the screen door, hung a hand-painted sign, RUBY’S RUFF AND READY, in script, with colored paw prints of various sizes surrounding the letters.
    She rang the bell and stepped onto the porch, where several dog crates and beds had been placed. A large, tile sink dominated one corner, and unmoving paddle fans hung from the elevated ceiling.
    “Comin’,” a voice called from inside, and Ruby, a fiftysomething woman with fading red hair pinned into a knot on her head, appeared in one of the three, small, descending windows in the door, walking awkwardly before reaching forward to unlatch the door. A child of about three, her hair in pigtails, was wrapped around one of her grandmother’s legs and seemed fastened there. “I was wonderin’ if you’d show up,” Ruby said, offering a gap-toothed smile.
    “Sorry about yesterday,” Nikki apologized, stepping into a large open room to be greeted by a chorus of barks and yips. Three or four dogs, tucked into crates, peered through the mesh of their doors, and within his carrier, Mikado, ecstatic at the sight of her, was turning in tight, little circles.
    “I’m glad to see you too,” she said to him, leaning down and wiggling her fingers through the mesh. “Hang on for a sec.”
    Mikado yipped excitedly as Nikki straightened.
    “You’re not the only one who left a pup here. I don’t know what people are thinking. Must be the rain . . . or maybe all that business about Blondell O’Henry. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you?” Ruby was always one for juicy gossip.
    “Only that she might be released, that testimony is being recanted.”
    “Unthinkable what that woman did,” Ruby said. “Those poor kids. One dead, the other two growing up knowing their mother tried to kill them.” She sighed heavily. “I just can’t imagine.”
    “Blondell has always claimed that she was innocent, that some intruder came into the cabin.”
    Ruby’s eyes met Nikki’s in an “oh sure” stare. “What else was she going to say? That she did it? I don’t think so. Nope, she’s guilty as sin, and if you ask me it was all because of a man. She was involved with that . . . oh, what was his name?” She let out her breath in a low whistle.
    “Roland Camp,” Nikki supplied.
    “Right!” Snapping her fingers, Ruby added, “A nasty one, him. Good-looking, I suppose, but a real lowlife. Don’t know what she saw in the likes of him when, in her day, she could have had any man in Georgia, let me tell you. I’m a little older than she is, but I’m telling you all my brothers had their damned tongues hanging out at the thought of Blondell. Sickening the way men acted around her. Boys, men, she dated them all.”
    “You knew her?” This was news. Good news, actually. Another source of information. Even if it was, at the worst, suspect and, at the best, laced with gossip.
    “I knew of her. She went to the school across town, but the boys, they knew all the hot girls in the area, and by that time, I was out of the house and set on marrying Seth. Blondell, she had her eyes set on someone to get her out of a crappy home life, I think, and I swear she was involved with some older guy who was rumored to be the baby-daddy of her first kid.”
    “Calvin O’Henry,” Nikki said, distracted; she clipped Mikado’s leash to his collar and held him back as he strained forward.
    “Uh-uh. He wasn’t the father of her first baby, as I understand it.”
    “Yes, you’re right. Sorry. Amity was adopted,” Nikki corrected herself. “Mikado, slow down!”
    “Who knows who the real father was?” Ruby went on. “The truth is, I didn’t really think much about Amity, you know, until she . . .” Ruby glanced down at the girl still wrapped around her big leg and decided to let that thought go, but Nikki made a mental note