AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Fran swiveled her sharp blue gaze over to Carine. “That girl ain’t been bothering you, has she?”
“What girl? Heidi?”
Fran giggled. “Is that what they’re calling it now? Bothering? Used to call it something else back in our day.”
“Oh, hush,” Mrs. Murray said. “They’re not sneaking around like we were.”
“We’re not doinganythingaround,” Carine mumbled. She’d fully intended to say the words too quietly for the elder pair to hear, but apparently, their ears worked just fine. They stared at her like her hair had suddenly changed from red to blue.
“What’s that mean?” Mrs. Murray asked.
Damn it.
Carine stuffed the unneeded blueprint alternations into her tote and pulled up a chair. While she gathered her thoughts, she stared at the empty eyelets of her shoes.
She’d never been the gonna-tell-your-mommy-on-you sort, and being in the lifestyle she’d become entrenched in had made her default to a higher level of secrecy. She thrived under that code, but those circumstances had always made sense.Heidihad always made sense…until she didn’t.
“I only mean that…I thought Heidi and I had come to an accord about what we wanted from each other,” Carine said carefully, “and I guess she changed her mind.”
The women kept staring at her, offering not even a single word of conversational fodder.
“It just didn’t work, I guess.”
Carine didn’t know how many seconds passed before Mrs. Murray and Fran broke their stares and turned to each other, but every one of them seemed interminable. She suddenly had a good idea of what purgatory would feel like.
“You don’t think she was bothering Heidi, do you?” Mrs. Murray asked Fran.
“Oh, I bet she was. She was over there at the desk playing cards with all the aides,” Fran said. “Probably went through the papers and things and got her number out.”
At first, Carine thought the “she” who’d been bothering Heidi was her, but she hadn’t been playing cards anywhere. She certainly hadn’t been doing any more rooting through paperwork for numbers than she’d been required to do for work.
Fran tapped the crook of her cane against her open palm and shook her head. “Oh, I oughtta go knock her into yesterday.”
Feeling uncomfortably unintelligent, Carine lifted her hand to signal for mercy. “May I ask whoheris?”
“Her daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Murray said after sounding an assertive grunt. “Same one who keeps trying to visit.”
“And what is it you think she’s done?”
“Oh, I don’t think it. I know she’s done it,” Fran said. “She was here last week talking about maybe I should come live with her if I’m so hellbent on leaving. Said I needed to quiet all this talk about living with strangers.” She grunted again and gestured toward Heidi’s grandmother with her cane. “I told her I’ve known this woman almost my whole life. How’s she a stranger? Didn’t make any sense, all that mess she was talking about. She said it weren’t right and started making all this fuss about what folks would think.”
“Think about—”
Fran waved off the interruption. “Don’t even fret about it. She’s got no business casting stones after all the trouble she’s gotten herself in. She’s just looking for any old excuse to make me seem like I’m not well so she can try to control this little bit of money I get every month. To hell with her, I say.”
There was exactly one person on the planet who could tell Carine not to fret and make her obey, and that person had said a terse twenty words to her in a week’s time.
“Probably got Heidi spooked.” Wearing a look of steely determination, Fran tapped the cane against her palm once more. “And got me wasting money on mental evaluations just so I can have a piece of paper saying I’m of sound mind.”
“I’m sorry if I seem slow to catch on,” Carine said, “but are you telling me that someone’s said something to Heidi? About me, or—”
“No, no, no,” Mrs. Murray said in a rush. “Not about you. Aboutme. And whatever it was must have made Heidi think about some things that aren’t true.”
“Can you be more specific? Because she’s given me next to no clues. I’m trying to understand why she’d change her mind so quickly. I’ve always known her to be careful in the decisions she makes, and this seemed knee-jerk. I know she was worried I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into, but I thought I’d convinced her otherwise.”
Mrs. Murray rolled her eyes. “It’s that Murray stubbornness. Probably think she knows better than you.”
“She does most of the time, and she’s frightening, actually. Usually, in the way I like.”
