Read Online Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) by Tim Cockey - Free Book Online Page B

The photograph had been taken outside. There was something about it that seemed familiar to me. Then I saw what it was. In the background was a large, slanted pane of glass reflecting the green of trees as well as something that I couldn’t exactly make out, something brown and white.
    “Did you take this?”
    “Me? No. I found it in Bo’s room when I was packing his things for him to come over to my place.”
    “This was taken at the zoo.”
    “It was? How do you know that?”
    “Here. Look.”
    She rose partway out of her chair to lean over the desk for a look. “In the background, see? That’s the new visitors center. I was out there just the other day for its opening. That’s an antelope, I think, in the reflection.”
    Vickie dropped back into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. The sun was angling in through the window behind her, slicing a golden streak diagonally across her lap. A partial corona hovered about her hair.
    “It’s a good picture of my sister,” she said simply.
    I agreed it was. But what was I supposed to do with it? I suppose this was how Vickie Waggoner wanted to remember her sister, despite everything. Smiling and happy on a beautiful autumn day with her son. What I had down in the basement was a ravaged wreck, halfway gutted and stitched back up with a crude Frankenstein scar. I couldn’t work the magic that would return Helen Waggoner to the pretty, smiling woman in the photograph. I had done what I could. But my best shot could never be good enough.
    Vickie Waggoner was crying softly. I hadn’t even heard her start.
    “My sister deserves better than this,” she said in a small voice. “This is so unfair. She … to live the kind of life she was living, and then end up like this. My stupid, stupid sister. She deserves to be alive. She …”
    The floodgates opened. The woman hunched over in my small armchair and brought her hands to her face and wept with abandon. About time, I’d say. My guess is that she had been holding it all in. Maybe for the sake of the boy. That’s no good. I let her have her cry, sliding a box of Kleenex to the corner of the desk. It would have been rude of me to just sit there and look at her so I picked up the photograph and studied it again. I agreed with Vickie Waggoner. This woman didn’t deserve to die. She was all of twenty-five. She had this little boy and another child on the way. She was carving out her place in the world. Helen Waggoner looked out at me from that photograph with a large, happy, going-to-live-forever smile, a smile she would never smile again. Not in this life anyway. Now she was simply a ruined creature in the dark basement directly below us.
    Heavy stomping sounded from overhead, followed by laughter and a high-pitched squeal. I knew what Billie was up to. Her old Bride of Frankenstein routine. She probably had Bo cornered and was tickling him unmercifully. I looked back down at the photograph. Somebody out there was responsible for making an orphan of this little boy. His mother would never again hear her son’s high-pitched squealing or his laughter. She would never again be there when he cried. All that was already over.
    It was totally unacceptable.
    “I’d like to help you find out who did this.”
    I wasn’t even certain that I had spoken out loud until Vickie looked up from her tears and blinked her red-rimmed eyes at me. A mixture of uncertainty and grief. And a bruised look from the running makeup.
    “I don’t really know what I can do. But … but I want to help. Is that okay with you?”
    That’s when I learned that Vickie Waggoner also had a beautiful smile. Just like her sister’s. It was the first time that she’d shown it to me.
    The tears on my cheeks weren’t mine. They were Vickie’s. They got there when she wrapped me in a grateful hug as she was leaving my office.
    “Is that ink?” Billie asked, coming up to me at the front door. Vickie and Bo were making their way carefully down the