Buried Secrets Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mysteries, Book #14 (The Charlie Parker Mysteries) Read Online Free

her husband.
    Jerry shrugged. “Fate. I just happen to look okay for the cameras. But I still read the balance sheets every single month.”
    “I’ve admired your home my whole life,” I said to Felina. “We live over on San Feliz and I wandered the neighborhood all the time as a kid.”
    “Amazing that we never knew each other,” Jerry piped up. “I guess I’m enough older that we wouldn’t have been in the same class.”
    I had a hard time imagining the Brewster kids in public school, but he was probably right about the age difference too. He was closer to Drake’s age, I guessed.
      “Let me show you around,” Felina offered.
    I didn’t have to be asked twice. We broke away from the men and she led the way up the curved staircase. At the first landing, candles and greenery topped a small table. Above it, a round leaded window with about a million tiny pieces of glass depicted birds and flowers. It would be stunning during the day.
    “The window is original to the house,” Felina said when she saw me staring at it.
    We arrived at a wide hall, from which doors opened in three directions. All three doors led to one massive room with fourteen-foot ceilings. Four impeccably trimmed Christmas trees, each with a different theme—birds, flowers, snowflakes and glass beads—along with garlands on the chandeliers and massive potted poinsettias, filled the room with holiday cheer and probably made some nursery salesperson ecstatic the day Felina showed up. At the moment, the lights were dimmed and the lavish room felt lonely.
    “We’ll have the New Year’s Eve party here in the salon,” she told me. “You and Draper must come. I’m afraid there will be enough food for a cruise ship full of people.” Felina laughed at her own joke, a high trill. “We’ll catch the third floor quickly and then go down to join the party.”
    I followed her upward to the next level, not bothering to correct her on Drake’s name since she was already five stairs ahead of me. The elaborate wood paneling from the first two floors had given way to faux-finished walls. The traditional portraits that hung in the stairwells below were replaced here by modernism, paintings which seemed purchased to match the color scheme and not because anyone actually liked them.
    Felina led me toward the door on the right, showing off a master suite that took up half the width of the house. It had probably originally been two or three rooms. She confirmed this when she told me they had knocked out a wall and combined the bedroom with the old study, and made a maid’s room into a closet. The closet was nearly as large as my living room.
    “The children are in this wing,” Felina said, ushering me back to the hallway after I’d been sufficiently impressed by the master suite.
    We headed down a corridor of ivory walls and burgundy carpeting, the kind that’s wide enough for there to be an occasional table or chair or potted plant, without danger of everyone tripping over them. She passed two or three doors before stopping to open one. The room was furnished for a young child, with a rocking chair in one corner and a youth bed made up in puffy blue linens. A young woman sat in the rocker with a blond-haired child on her lap.
    “My baby, Adam,” Felina said with a little wave toward the pajama-clad boy.
    I stepped forward to say hello but he buried his face in the bosom of the au pair. His slender arm had a tiny cast on it.
    “Mrs. Brewster, he’s fussy and complaining about the arm. Is it time yet for more of his pain medication?”
    Felina glanced at a diamond watch on her wrist. “Yes, Julia, that’s fine. Give it to him and put him to bed. He probably just needs sleep.”
    Adam’s face was flushed and his blond curls seemed damp. He whimpered a little and buried his face against Julia’s neck.
    “Poor little guy,” I said.
    “He went down a couple of the stairs pretty hard. It was very frightening,” Felina said. “So scary what can