Window of Guilt by Jennie Spallone Read Free Book Online

don’t need no fancy camp. They need to be home with their parents.”
    Laurie swallowed hard. “The newspaper article said you were away from the house Friday afternoon.”
    “Once a month, for the last twenty years, the ladies get together for lunch at The Depot, then head over to the antique shop. Your mother, now she was a friendly sort. When your family bought old Biesterfield’s cottage, she came right over and introduced herself. She joined us every now and then.”
    Laurie grudgingly acknowledged a memory track of summers involving Helga and her mother before her parents’ divorce. Card games. Scrabble. Grown-up chitchat. Ancient history.
    “Friday afternoons are one of the few pleasures I got left,” mused Helga. “Only time I leave Paulie and Priscilla.” The older woman flicked tweezer-sized turds from her shoulders.
    How do you spell disgusting ?
    Helga’s parakeets chirped gaily, unaware of their owner’s eccentricity.
    “What time did you arrive home?”
    “Five o’clock. I pulled into the driveway and what did I find?” Helga paused as if she was recounting a ghost story.
    Laurie looked at her strangely. “A body?”
    The older woman looked crestfallen. “Who told you?”
    “Um, you did.”
    “Right,” said Helga. “There passed out on my driveway was this young guy in a yellow nylon shirt with the letters ‘TG’ and a number ‘7.’”
    “Did you recognize him?”
    “Thought he was my friend’s grandson. Then I remembered her boy’s married with children of his own. Me, I got a ninety-one-year-old brother who lives alone in Baraboo. Then there’s Margaret, my niece. Your family invited her to their barbecue the summer before you went off to college. She and her husband live in Jefferson County now. Got those three pit bulls to keep her busy.”
    Laurie grimaced. Her parents had bought her a red Porsche as a high school graduation present. She’d been screeching down the country road when three big dogs jutted out from Helga’s property. She’d braked so hard she almost went through the window.
    “Good guard dogs, are Jim, Joey, and Jack,” continued Helga. “I seen your toy dog barking in the kitchen window when I take my walks. He don’t do nothing but yap, yap, yap.”
    Laurie stiffened. Rocky alerted me to the dead body on my lawn, she wanted to protest. But for right now, the initial discovery of that body needed to remain holed up in her consciousness until evidence could confirm her story. She kept silent.
    Helga raised her eyebrows at Laurie’s lack of response. “Your tenant get a teaching job?”
    “Shakia?” Laurie. She was unaware they’d ever spoken.
    Helga gently stroked one parakeet’s lime-green tummy. “Shakia was a good girl. She tutored the Spanish-speaking kids at the library on Saturday mornings.”
    Chagrined her neighbor knew more about her former tenant than she did, Laurie shifted the conversation. “You’re sure you never saw that kid in the yellow jersey before?”
    “People are more than a blur to me, missy.” The older woman’s trembling hands fell to her side, causing the green parakeet and his aqua-breasted friend to flee to the drapery rods.
    “I didn’t mean to upset you,” said Laurie. “Please accept my apology.”
    Silence.
    “I’m thinking he could have been a grocery clerk,” Helga confided.
    “The boy on your driveway?”
    “Your parents put you through college and you can’t follow a tiny thread of conversation without losing the needle?” taunted the older woman.
    “Sorry.” Laurie wanted to fling parakeet poop in the venomous woman’s face. But before she could slam out of here, she needed to wring from the older woman’s lips any information that would identify the dead body.
    “They’re always hiring new kids when the others get pregnant or graduate high school,” Helga gossiped. “Then again, he could’ve been a pizza delivery boy. Last year Margaret came down with the flu and had to cancel