Murder Mile High Read Online Free Page A

unexpectedly steely. “You’ve come all this way. Sit down here.” She patted the bed, beside her.
    “You don’t look good, Mom. Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
    “No.” Her hand closed around mine, hot and dry but still with enough strength to pull me down beside her. “I’m getting over it now. There were a couple of days when I thought I would die, and that’s when I knew we’d have to talk.”
    I looked at her carefully, while she fumbled on the bedside table for her glasses. Her hair had gone from the gray I remembered to snowy white. My dad would be in his eighties, my mother pushing seventy-five, and neither had led the easy lives that keep a person young-looking. My mother’s hands were lumpy with arthritis, and I wondered if she could still hold a crochet hook or embroidery needle. Her blue eyes were filmed, her eyebrows sparser. Beneath the covers, her outline was insubstantial.
    “Well, you’ve changed a great deal,” she announced after examining me. Her hand moved restlessly, picking at the chenille bedspread, and I took it before I realized I was going to. After a moment, she squeezed my hand gently. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I was sorry right after I wrote you last summer, but I didn’t know how to make things better. He wouldn’t let me.”
    “Dad? Is he still so bitter?”
    She shook her head slowly, side to side. “You know your father.” Her eyelids drifted closed, and she spoke with a kind of detachment. “Although he probably doesn’t really care. He just goes through the motions these days, you know. I can tell. He acts the same and says the same old things, but he’s not really here.” She opened her eyes and fixed a painful gaze on me. “It’s not your father that’s worrying me so much. It’s Tony.”
    I couldn’t speak; my throat was closed with fear.
    “Tony,” she said again, helpfully. “You know. Your husband.”
    “Ex-husband,” I managed to whisper.
    “Divorce is not sanctioned by the Church.” For a moment the stern disciplinarian of my youth was there before me. I almost expected her to ask me to say the Act of Contrition. Then she closed her eyes again and let her head sink back into the pillow. “You should never have married him. He’s a very bad man.”
    “How—how do you . . ."
    “He came here a few weeks ago.” Her eyes were still closed, and her voice was becoming thready. “His car had broken down nearby, and he wanted to use the phone—that’s what he said. After he made a phone call, we talked. At first I had sympathy for him. He said he’d never gotten over you, that he’d spent a lot of money to try and find you and was broke.” Her eyes flicked open. “I gave him some money.’’
    I tightened my grip on her hand. “Mom—”
    “Let me finish. I felt sorry for him, like I said. It stirred up all that upset, all the disappointment I felt in you.” She was watching me now. “He was back in a couple of weeks. I told him I didn’t have any more money, and he suggested that I get some. He said—he said you’d told him that—” She drew in a deep breath. “That your father had—that there had been—episodes—when you were little.”
    I couldn’t be silent any longer. “He lied, Mom. I wouldn’t have told him anything like that, because it wasn’t true.”
    Something in her face relaxed. She was quiet for a moment. “I wondered,” she said at last. “You think you know a man, but you never do, really.” She pressed my hand again. “Thank you.”
    “So Tony was trying to blackmail you.” I started to get angry. “All you had to do was tell me. You could have written again, asked me about it. You could have gotten Drake’s phone number from Amy.”
    “I—couldn’t.” She turned her head away, nestling it into the pillow as if seeking refuge. “I didn’t want to think about it or deal with it. I got some money and gave it to him, and he said he wouldn’t be back.”
    “But of course he didn’t mean