Read Online Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) by Steve Ulfelder - Free Book Online

dad.
    Or I hoped it was. Couldn’t think of anybody else.
    Randall had agreed with my thinking. Our plan was to meet at the Biletnikov place and see what made the family tick.
    Sherborn is ten minutes southeast of my shop. It’s also a different world.
    The last address I passed in Framingham was a squat cluster of Section 8 housing. Once I crossed the town line, the first address in Sherborn was a horse farm. It’s up there with Wayland and Weston as the ritziest towns in the state.
    A few horse farms later I climbed a hill, angling northeast now, and turned where the GPS said to. Cleared a stone wall, drove up a steep gravel driveway.
    The house: a McMansion. New, designed to look old. Vast, designed to look modest. Flowing, designed to look rambling.
    I parked, rang the bell.
    A young woman in jeans answered. Chinese looks. Shoulder-length black hair thick as a horse tail. Perfect skin, sweat-sheen on her forehead. “Yes?”
    â€œMr. Biletnikov in?”
    â€œI’m afraid not.” Her accent was vaguely familiar and not what I’d expected.
    â€œThere a Mrs. Biletnikov?”
    â€œI’m afraid I can’t help you.” She began to close the door, but a phone clipped to her jeans buzzed. She raised a finger and took the call.
    Then everything changed.
    She hung up, smiling and half-bowing, and opened the door wide.
    â€œCome this way. Mrs. Biletnikov has been down in the cottage lately.” In addition to the cell clipped to one belt loop, she had a pink and white walkie-talkie clipped to another. She saw me looking at it. “I’m Haley. Nanny for little Emma.”
    â€œEmma is … Mrs. Biletnikov’s?” I knew Gus’s parents had split up. Looked like his dad had remarried and had a kid.
    â€œIn a manner of speaking.” Haley said it with a locked jaw. While I puzzled that through, she led the way.
    The house was clean and tidy, but with baby stuff scattered here and there: a dozen bottles on the kitchen counter, nipples to match, a stuffed giraffe with a bow around its neck. I checked out the place as we walked. Wide pine floorboards, probably scavenged from an old farmhouse. Overstuffed chairs with preworn arms. New paintings that looked like folk art. The most authentic country money could buy. Snap judgment: this was a poser house, the home of people who didn’t know who they were. If a decorator walked in tomorrow and told them to change over to midcentury modern, they’d write a check to make it happen.
    We walked a long hall, then down a flight of stairs. I tried not to stare at Haley’s rear end. I failed.
    We moved through a walk-out basement to the backyard. Wildflowers, oaks, a patio with thousand-dollar steel chairs prerusted. Patina, they call it. It costs extra. I kid you not.
    The lot was three acres, easy. And though the spring leaves were still puny, I couldn’t see even a hint of any neighbor’s house. No wonder Gus’d had room to hack out a motocross track.
    Haley led me down a short path to a green-trimmed cottage screened by trees. To my left, Randall’s Hyundai crunched gravel. He climbed out and joined our wagon train, introducing himself to Haley on the fly.
    She gestured toward the door of a cottage half-hidden in the woods, smiled without really smiling, and walked back the way we’d come.
    I knocked. Heard “Yes.” Entered a room with walls the color of peach ice cream.
    â€œI’m Rinn Biletnikov,” she said, stepping into the room from a hallway.
    I took a fast breath. Heard Randall do the same.
    Everything about her was just right. Genuinely blond hair, chopped at chin length. Smart blue eyes that said If you play your cards right and You wish all at once. Nose freckles, tiny gap between her front teeth. Cross a 1950s Hollywood starlet with a frog-catching tomboy, you had Rinn.
    Age? Call it late twenties.
    â€œI’m going to take a wild guess,” Randall said.