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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Still remembering, Payloma said, “Dova always said she wanted to be the opposite of her — a good mother, a respectable person, someone her kid could be proud of.”

“And not a bottle blonde or always having things sucked out or plumped up or frozen solid,” Olive added. “She said that a lot. Especially when she was telling me how she admired how I kept my hair natural.”

“She was saying you looked old, just in that fake nice way you never could see through.”

“She was not. You’re jealous.”

Of whom? Dova? Or Olive herself?

Payloma rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I introduced her to a bunch of my friends and pretty soon they were all her friends, too.”

Her mother cackled, which turned into a cough. “Too? They were her friends, period. Left you in the dust. Except Jaylynn, because you were her sister.”

“They turned on Dova fast enough when Derrick was charged with murder,” Payloma fired back.

“Never came back to be your friends, did they? All those you’d introduced the Diva to.

Not to mention most of them have sidled back to her over the years as everybody started seeing her as some kind of saint for raising Robbie, forgetting she’s only doing that because she married the monster who murdered my girl.

” From an invigorating satisfaction — though hard to tell with what — that had brought her upright in the chair, Olive sank back.

“But you know, in general, how Robbie has been doing over the years?” Clara pursued. “How he has been — at least before this?”

“I see things, don’t I?” his aunt responded. “See him around with more money than a kid should have.”

That surprised me. He hadn’t struck me as a flashy kind of kid. And dating the granddaughter of a flower shop owner didn’t fit the picture she painted. Also different from his paternal grandmother’s vision.

“See his name in sports stuff, school lists and such,” Payloma added.

Olive lifted her face from the crumpled paper towel. “His mother was so smart and so popular, a good student and a good athlete. If you’d worked harder at either one, you would be a lot better off now, not stuck here like me.”

“Yeah, and what would you do then? Besides, he was the star football player,” Payloma objected. “As you were always reminding her, right up to the end, telling her not to let go of a good thing because he’d get a lot of money someday.”

“He might have been a star, but she was so graceful.”

Clara cut me a look. I agreed with every word of that look — these sounded like lines they’d exchanged so often neither one truly paid attention to what they were saying.

I wondered if that had always been this family’s dynamic — Jaylynn was the good daughter, Payloma was not — or if it happened with the murder.

Speaking no ill of the dead could go quadruple for the murdered and facts often disappeared in the mists of trauma and drama.

I’d learned that in theory from listening to Kit and her writing pals gnaw away on murder cases, theorizing and separating fact from chaff.

I’d watched it in practice while accompanying Kit as she interviewed families, suspects, investigators, witnesses, lawyers, and even convicted murderers in numerous cases.

Olive tore off another piece of paper towel. “Nobody cares about my loss. And how I don’t get to see my daughter ever again. How I miss her. And how much I hurt.”

“ You, you, you. ”

My sympathies swung toward Payloma with those words. Her mother’s plaint was glaringly self-centered.

“What about me? ” Payloma added, swinging my sympathy arrow away from her.

But not toward her mother, either. What about Jaylynn? What about Robbie?

As if she’d caught a whisper of my thought, Payloma said, “And I know it’s her that won’t let us see Robbie, whatever she says about him making decisions for himself. Keeping the boy away from his own flesh and blood.”

While my sympathy arrow hung, limp and broken, Clara said, “That must be so hard on you both.”

“You want to know what’s hard?” Olive asked.

“You finally get to where you stop crying all day, every day, get back to almost living, and then you find out some politician with no brain and no soul, much less a heart, gets the murderer of your baby out of prison, so he can spend his last days in comfort and without pain, after he shot her in the face and left her on the side of the road to bleed to death in the cold, with her baby in the back seat. Anybody who’d done that deserves all the pain that comes his way. ”

No one argued with that. Including Payloma.

“Did you go to see him at Kentucky Manor?” I asked them.

“Hell, no,” Olive snapped. “If I saw him, can’t say I’d be responsible for my actions.

You want to talk to people who have seen him lately?

Go see the Dorrios. What I heard is they were over to the hospice every minute, weeping and wailing about losing their boy.

When they’ve had all these years more with him than I had with my girl. ”

“How did Jaylynn get along with her in-laws?” I asked.

“They loved her,” Olive said.

Payloma grimaced her disagreement. “She was getting tired of sucking up to them. They’d been all gooey when she was pregnant, but after the baby came, it was pick, pick, pick.

Everything she did or didn’t do. And they sure weren’t happy about us taking care of him while she was teaching. Not that they helped any.”

“What about Derrick?”

“He helped some,” she said grudgingly, then quickly added, “Not as much as we did. And, of course, he was busy with Dova.”

“The night Jaylynn died—”

Payloma cut short Clara’s introductory phrase, lifting both hands and letting them drop sharply. “Again? We’ve gone over and over and over that.”

“Worst night of my life,” Olive wailed.

“Was not. Because you didn’t know anything until the next day.”

The older woman ignored her daughter’s interpolation and sobbed louder.

Payloma grimaced, but patted her mother’s hunched shoulder and gave us an unfriendly look that blamed us for her mother’s sorrow.

I can’t say we’d overstayed our welcome, because we hadn’t ever had one. But we had reached the end of our visit.