Page 104 of Heidi Lucy Loses Her Mind
I reach out and take her hand, and she twines her fingers through mine without hesitation, without even looking down.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice heavy.
So many implications to everything that man said. And yet to me, the most striking things we learned are that Carmina may actually have been justified in reporting her neighbor to the HOA, and that Mr. Foster was there the day she died.
“He’s pretty horrible.”
“He is,” Heidi says. “I wondered if I’d been imagining things, thinking he seemed familiar. I must be remembering him from the shop that day. And the dog thing—”
“She was old,” I say, my mind whirling as I try to imagine it. “Think about how thin and rickety she was. A dog that size jumping up on her would absolutely have thrown her off balance.”
“It would have,” Heidi agrees, and she sounds as grim as I do. Her hand tightens in mine as we trail down the driveway and then down the sidewalk.
I open the passenger door for her when we reach my car, and she slides into the seat silently.
“What about the fish thing?” I say when I’ve gotten in the driver’s side and closed the door. “‘The fish don’t like her,’ or whatever she said.”
“There were fish,” she says, her voice musing, her eyes far away—searching her memory, maybe. “In the hallway upstairs. Right?”
“Yes,” I say with a nod. “It was a gross fish tank.”
“Yeah,” she says. “And I wonder…” She falls silent, but a second later, she turns to me. “If a fish tank is gross like that, all murky, it means no one is taking care of it. No one is cleaning it or whatever. And Elsie said that Carmina didn’t like animals, but…I don’t know if that’s true. I kind of wonder if the fish tank was gross because Carmina had died, and she was the only one who’d been taking care of the fish.”
I sigh, leaning forward so that I can see Elsie and Phil’s townhome through the windshield. “I think that’s possible.”
“I do too,” she says. She squeezes my hand. “Let’s head over to the police station. They need to see these photos of the receipt.”
27
IN WHICH HEIDI MAKES A MIDNIGHT PHONE CALL
“All right,” I whisper to Soren, crouching in front of his chair. “Let’s think about this.”
He looks at me, startled, and then sighs, his shoulders slumping. “Oh, good,” he says. “It’s you. Distract me, please.”
Paper Patisserie is lively with customers today; the weather is getting warmer, and spring is morphing into summer, which means that Sunshine Springs is getting more and more tourists.
Soren has taken to sitting at the chair by the window rather than the chair he and Carmina always fought over. I haven’t asked, but I know it’s because he feels guilty. I wish I could absolve him of those emotions, but that’s not my place. So I try to keep an eye on him instead, to stop by his seat whenever I spot a frown pulling at the corners of his lips.
Right now, though, I’m not crouching next to him because he’s frowning. It’s because my mind is speeding in twenty directions at once, and talking to Soren always seems to help me figure out my thoughts.
“Why do you need distracting?” I say, glancing at the laptop open in front of him. “Bad writing day?”
“Not exactly,” he says, grimacing at the computer. “I’m reading the rough draft of my bestseller.”
I raise one eyebrow. “I see,” I say. “I’m proud of you. That’s probably scary.” I hesitate and then ask, “What’s the verdict?”
He rubs one hand over his face. “It’s…not good,” he says.
“I thinknot goodmeans something different to you than it does to me,” I admit, “but that’s good, right? It’s good that the rough draft is not good?”
“In theory, yeah,” he says, “because hopefully that means I’ve grown as a writer. But it’s still not fun to read.”
“Huh,” I say, thinking about that. Then, curious, I ask, “What is it like, reading your own writing? Do you read your own books?”
“No way,” he says with a snort. “Never. Not ever. I mean, I like seeing the characters again, but after the book is published, I can’t really make changes, and that’s what my brain always tries to do. If I went through and read my books, I’d constantly be finding things I wanted to change or fix. So I steer clear.”
I nod. “That makes sense.”
