Read Online Guilty as Cinnamon by Leslie Budewitz - Free Book Online

interest, but he’d been a gentleman. Despite our recent evenings out, we weren’t dating, exactly. More like trying to figure out what “just friends” means. We’d known each other twenty years, been married thirteen, divorced two. I like him. Don’t trust him. Can’t live with him. But we do have fun together.
    â€œBecause,” she said, as if explaining to a two-year-old why she had to keep her diaper on at the park, “of the look on your face.”
    â€œIt’s not what you think.” She thought I was upset over the cancellation, that work had won out over private life as it often does in cop marriages. In every marriage, far as I could tell. Even though we weren’t married anymore.
    â€œSo, are you going to tell me?”
    I looked her in the eye—she was my oldest, bestest friend in the world, and I owed her that—and told her the truth. “No.”

Seven

    Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails,
    That’s what little boys are made of.
    â€”19th-century nursery rhyme
    Don’t tell my father I let Arf ride in the Mustang. I put a sturdy cover on the leather seat, but this car is his baby. Bought it in San Diego from his commanding officer’s widow when he came back from Vietnam. Drove it to St. Louis to see his parents, then to Seattle—the farthest city he could reach in the Lower Forty-Eight—where it had lived a sheltered life ever since. He’d entrusted it to me when he and my mother decamped for Costa Rica.
    And I know it’s not the safest place for the dog, but he loves it. The skies had cleared, so I put the top down and the two of us sped north on 99 toward Greenwood, Tag’s spare house key in my pocket.
    â€œThe tickets are on the desk,” he’d said. “In the TV room, on the first floor.”
    As if I didn’t know where the TV room was. He’d hardly moved a dish or chair since I’d left. I’d taken only a few pieces of furniture: The Chinese apothecary he’d always complainedabout that now stood in the shop. The two-tiered tea cart, in red-and-white enamel, also now in the shop. And a cedar-lined mahogany chest, one of the first antiques I’d ever bought—a reminder of the hope chest my grandfather bought my grandmother when they were courting, lost in the fire that destroyed their home the winter I was fourteen.
    It’s odd to walk into a house where you used to live. We’d bought the run-down bungalow from Tag’s elderly aunt and spent all our spare time those first few years restoring it, adding modern outlets and appliances to the 1930s charm. We’d scraped and painted inside and out, congratulating ourselves for accomplishing such a major chore with only one spat, when Tag yanked the drop cloths off the roses before I finished the last window trim.
    I climbed the steps and crossed the porch. Not the time to wonder what had happened to us. Not after Tamara’s murder and Alex’s arrest.
    The oak door opened without a squeak. Inside, I punched in the security code—our wedding date. The sweet purple smell of lilacs mingled with beeswax and orange oil. Tag’s cleaning service used the same products I always had. And a hint of—what?
    In the corner stood the wingback chair his mother and I had redone—my first upholstery job—on one of the Persian rugs we’d found rolled up in the back of an upstairs closet. I stuck my nose in the lilac-filled Rookwood pottery vase—another family piece—on the dining room table.
    Ah, that’s the smell.
I wrapped the blue cheese he’d left on the kitchen counter and tucked it in the fridge, between the bottles of Corona and the mustard.
    I’d been here a few times since I left, making a pickup or drop-off. And once or twice this past winter for Sunday game day.
Go, Seahawks!
But I had not been alone inside since moving out.
    Weird, weird, weird.
    The tickets lay right where Tag