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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Incoming messages with attachments dinged at me in quick succession. From Kit.

I’d wanted to talk to her anyway, so I called.

“I found footage from the trial that I’ve sent you and Clara,” she said without a greeting.

“That’s great. We read the transcript. Really appreciate that.

Being out all day talking to people, we haven’t had much time to do other kinds of research.

It’ll be interesting to see these same people back then.

Jaylynn’s sister said Derrick was hot in high school, but not by the trial.

On the other hand, she clearly wasn’t a fan. ”

“Perhaps not a fan, but accurate. He’d gained weight and it made his cheeks puff out. Not in a cute chipmunk way, either, but in a way that squeezed his eyes and mouth smaller.”

“Kit—” I didn’t finish my remonstration.

“Wait. You’ll see. Besides, he’s not as interesting as the others around him.”

“Do you mean his family? Or Jaylynn’s? Hard to decide which was less likable — not that likability should count in an investigation, I know.”

“You met both families?”

“Yeah.” I gave her a rundown of the encounters, concluding with, “Long day.”

She grunted with minimal sympathy. “Meeting them in person gave you a better gauge than video from more than a decade ago will. Still, probably not completely useless.”

“Not useless at all.”

“Humph. What about the second wife?”

“Dova? Yeah, we talked to her, too. Yesterday and today. She’s devoted to Robbie and vice versa.”

Another grunt, even more neutral. Yet I had the feeling there was something behind it.

This feeling tossed me into a Kit conundrum.

If she’d wanted to tell me outright, she would have. That meant that my asking directly what she was thinking wouldn’t get a straight answer. On the other hand, not asking wouldn’t get me any answer.

I kept talking while I cast about for an approach. “I think Clara wanted to like her for her devoted mom-ness, because Clara’s sort of taken Mamie under her wing and that brings Robbie along as a package deal. And with Dova devoted to him...”

“Uh-huh. The halo by association effect. Opposite of guilt by association.”

“Exactly. So, Clara extended the halo by association to Dova, but she said something kept bothering her, though she couldn’t pin it down. I told her it was Dova’s mouth. She pulled back her lips—”

“From the top and bottom teeth. Horses, donkeys, and asses do it. It’s called the Flehmen lip curl or Flehmen response.

I slowed the video way down to catch it.

She also has a slight case of duck lips and then compounds it by pursing them, segueing from the duck face pose to the fish gape pose to the scrunch face pose. ”

“The...? What?”

“Don’t you keep up with selfie pose trends?”

She wasn’t kidding. I spend half my time saying or thinking, Who? when other people talk about celebrities, but Kit always knows.

“No.”

“I researched selfie poses for a character.” Of course she did. “But when I found the Flehmen lip curl done by a donkey, I knew I had the right expression for that character.”

“Not a hero, I suspect.”

She chuckled. “Definitely not a hero, except in his own mind.”

My antenna went up. “You think Dova—?”

“I’m not saying that. The expression can reflect the character. But the expression doesn’t make the character. Speaking of characters—”

“Let’s not.”

“Sheila—”

“I’m really tired, Kit. Clara got me up early this morning and she’s threatening the same tomorrow.”

That was some kind of record, me interrupting her twice in a row. And then a pause before she spoke.

“Okay. For now. But promise you’ll open the manuscript right now.”

“Kit—”

“Open it.” The world was back in order, with her interrupting me. “Look at it. Talk to you later.”

And she ended the call.

I downloaded the attachments she’d sent, but didn’t open them. Yet.

I opened my manuscript.

And stared at the screen with far too few words on it to make a real story.

I thought about Kit naming her book Abandon All . It was her inside joke about publishing and literary critiques valuing anything that was depressing.

I remembered her telling me, “Publishing, as practiced by the known companies, is incapable of selling books to true readers, the ones who dearly love books, who have personal relationships with books. It can only sell an image to the unimaginative who pick up a book now and then because that’s what everyone else is doing.

For those people it’s about buying the book, not about living inside it. ”

“But then why sell Abandon All ? If it’s your best work—”

“Oh, it’s not. Not to me. But it’s a nice fat pitch that New York publishing could hit out of the ballpark.

Besides, it was my one crack at the kind of money New York publishers can rake in with a certain book and if they do things right, which I made sure they do.

Because they can sell the heck out of that image when they’re handed the material to work with, including the right author. That’s where you came in.”

Have I mentioned Aunt Kit leapt at the chance to publish independently and more recently to sell directly to readers? She positively chortled as she cut out a chunk of middle people between the readers and herself.

Truly, chortled.

I’d read the word chortled, of course, but don’t believe I’d ever heard someone do it before then.

For me to do the same thing, I had to have a complete story.

And that meant I needed to write another word. Then another. And another.

But first...

I looked up Flehmen lip curl.

Kit was right. Of course.

Then I messaged Clara, to be sure she’d seen the videos of the news reports Kit sent and to tell her to look up Flehmen lip curl.

I heated soup for my dinner — for some reason, I wasn’t very hungry — then started through the transcript again.

Clara messaged back That’s it! D’s mouth, exactly. And that she was watching the videos.

Me, too.