“What did he do?” I chirped, my chest feeling tight, even though the women were clearly all safe.
“Well, he came up behind me, got real close, and whispered in my ear. Unfortunately, it wasn’t about how well my house dress shows off my figure. He said that if I wanted to see my granddaughter alive again, I’d better come with him.”
“And then?” I asked.
“Well, my dear, I wasn’t about to let a man threaten me and my family. I grabbed the tea kettle and whacked him in the head with it.”
“He went down,” Loretta continued.
“But then he came up,” Katherine piped in.
“With a gun,” Barbie finished.
My heart tripped into overdrive at just the vision of one of Marco’s men holding a gun, threatening these old ladies. Even if, clearly, they could handle themselves.
There’s a body in the bathtub.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I was about to swing the teapot again…”
“Then I rushed in and shoved him,” Loretta said.
“He flew forward, whacking his head against the edge of the counter,” Katherine supplied.
“Then… lights out,” Barbie said.
“He was bleeding everywhere,” my grandmother said, shaking her head.
“So we wrapped his head in a trash bag,” Barbie went on.
“Was he still alive?”
“Oh, no,” Katherine said, waving off my worries. “We just wanted to contain the mess.”
Contain the mess.
“Yeah, it’s important to keep the crime scene as small as possible,” Barbie added.
Good God.
Whowerethese women?
“Are you okay here for a minute?” Kylo asked, looking down at me. “I need to go see,” he said, choosing his words carefully, clearly sensing my overwhelm.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I told him. It was only a partial lie. I was, physically, okay. Mentally, though, that was another story entirely.
My grandmother and her friends had killed someone.
Sure, it was in self-defense, but the outcome was someone being dead.
Then, they had calmly and methodically wrapped him up, put him in the tub, and begun the process of erasing the evidence.
“You have no shoes on,” Katherine noticed.
“Your feet are filthy,” Loretta piped in.
“I ran over here when I realized you might be in danger too.”
