Page 35 of Death on Riddle Road

Donna chuckled slightly.“That sounds like Rose.She wouldn’t approve of something as irregular as murder, though she was the one responsible for an assistant coroner being called in and that’s who alerted the sheriff’s department.”

“You know her — the hospice nurse, I mean, not the assistant coroner —reallyknow her?”I asked.

“We’ve been friends since kindergarten.”

Clara brightened, like a spotlight flipped on.“You’ll tell her to talk to us?”

After a beat of consideration, Donna said, “I’ll talk to her about whether or not she might choose to talk to you.”

It didn’t sound nearly as good as Clara’s suggestion, but coming from Donna, it was worthy of that spotlight.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I pulled intothe driveway at the address Clara had looked up amid our situating the dogs — Murphy and Gracie at my house, LuLu at hers — and changed out of our dog park clothes.

With the snow lessening and mostly confining itself to grassy areas, we also swapped to my sedan.

Parking in the driveway wouldn’t have been my first choice, but there were stern signs about not parking on the street.

The snow looked fake.Like someone had cut the edges of foam with scissors and pasted it down.The holiday décor didn’t make it any more cheery.

I’m all for evergreens used in decorations, but these were packed so thickly on the railings that they made the curved steps feel not only narrow and unwelcoming, but like this carnivorous vegetation spent the rest of the year as props for productions ofLittle Shop of Horrors.Being punctuated by massive golden bows every foot didn’t help the feeling of claustrophobia.

At the front door, a massive fruit fan, gilded to match the bows, loomed over our heads.

A lecture from my great-aunt echoed in my head about how those who associate fruit fans with colonial times are far off the mark.

Whatever decorating they did was inside.Not to mention fresh fruit was far too expensive and rare in December to waste tacking it up over the front door.

I could imagine what she’d add about it being gilded.

I was suppressing a grin when the massive door opened.

The woman who held it gave me a sharp look, so either I didn’t suppress the grin as well as I’d hoped or the effort twisted my face.

Alternatively, she was prone to sharp looks.

“Hello, I’m Clara Woodrow and this is Sheila Mackey.We are so deeply sorry for your loss with your son’s death.”

“I don’t know you.”

“No, not personally.But your grandson does and we are here on his behalf.”How did Clara sound so entirely believable?“You might have heard of other situations in which we helped people who have lost a loved one find the truth that lets them grieve without battling unanswerable questions.”

I stood beside her and tried to look a tenth as trustworthy and open as she was.Try it sometime — it’s darned hard.

In this case it probably didn’t matter.

The woman — presumably Derrick Dorrio’s mother, Beverly Dorrio — paid no attention to me at all, as she stared at Clara.

Her tailored beige sweater and pale sage blouse were silk and expensive.So was her haircut — expensive, I mean.Waves framed her face in a way that made me think of a long-ago TV star.Mary Tyler Moore maybe.But I doubted this woman’s face could form a sunny smile on her best day.

By the furrows between her brows, across her forehead, under her eyes, and around her mouth and nose, she hadn’t had many good, much lessbest, days since way, way before the recent death of her son.

Looking at the line of her mouth as she started to speak, I extended that to way before her son’s arrest, too.

The words were “Come in,” so maybe Clara connected with a speck of Mary Tyler Moore deep inside her.

But only a speck.