Page 7 of Guy (House of Frazier #4)

“I don’t understand.” Shawn was sick of his sister never seeming to understand what he’d say to her.

It was getting on his last nerve to have to explain things to her like she was five years old when she was as old as he was.

“What does her having cameras all around her home have to do with us trying to get into her house? It’s not like she’s going to tell the police anything.

I can’t believe that she’s gone this long without telling on us now. She’s stupid or something.”

“She’s putting the cameras in so that she’ll have proof that we’ve been trying to get into her home.

And there are locks on the windows that will sound an alarm when someone tampers with them.

” The look on her face made him want to bash her skull in.

“She’ll have proof that it’s us, not just her telling the police.

Now, when they come and ask us about it, they’ll have the proof they need to have us arrested.

And she did too tell on us before. It’s just that she never had anything that she could prove that we’d been tearing up her home. ”

“What’s that have to do with us?” Growling at her, he just walked away.

It was getting harder and harder to want to be in the same room as she was, and he didn’t like that feeling.

They were twins and were supposed to be on the same page about everything.

“I’ve been watching the bank like you told me, and she’s not been there but the one time with that big man.

You said you didn’t want to be around her when she had someone in her corner. ”

“No, because she might well have told him that we’re hurting her and that would be the end of our little bit of fun.” Margaret started to ask him another question, but he cut her off. “It just will, that’s all. I’m not going to tell you why again.”

“All right, but I know who the big guy was. That’s funny.

Because the big guy’s name is Guy. Get it?

His name is Guy and he’s the guy.” He rolled his eyes at her, then asked what his last name was.

“Fraizer. Didn’t you have some trouble with one of the Fraizer boys when you were in high school?

Something about you saying that he cheated on a test?

That didn’t work out well for you, if I remember.

The school made you both retake the test, and you still flunked it.

Didn’t he ace the test the second time around? ”

“Just shut up about the Fraizer men.” He had to think about what it was he had heard about them lately that made him think that he didn’t want to fuck with them at all.

Then he remembered. “They’re dogs, the lot of them.

” She asked him what he meant, of course.

“They can be dogs or something when they get pissed off. Tear your throat right out of you if they get pissed off enough, from what I heard.”

He believed it too. Once, when he’d been about ten years old, he’d seen his mom shift into a large tiger.

She’d been bigger than the ones he’d seen in the zoo, not the week before, and was terrified of them.

Margaret was going on about how their mom was a tiger and she’d never do that.

He knew better. He’d seen her in action when someone tried to take one of them from her while out shopping.

“Besides, Mom is gone, thank goodness. I can’t believe that we got away with that twice in our lifetimes.

” He wanted to pretend that he didn’t know what she was talking about, but didn’t want to get into it with her again.

He walked into the kitchen to have some time to think.

There was a great deal for him to think about, too.

They’d missed out on the insurance money because someone had called Amber and let her know about it.

No matter how many times they tried to convince the policyholders that Amber was as dead as their parents, they wouldn’t believe it without a death certificate.

Not only that, but when they put the ad in the paper for her to be notified, they’d have to go to all the trouble of stealing her newspapers for the time the ad was being run.

It was a lot of work, and if she’d just not known about it for one more month, they would have gotten the money instead of her.

As it was now, all they got was their childhood home and nothing more.

There was very little money left over from what their father had left them, and Belinda leaving them the house didn’t mean as much if there was no way they could live in it for free.

Taxes were due again, and they just didn’t have the money without the policy. Margaret followed him into the kitchen.

“I’m hungry.” So was he, but it did very little good because no one would bring them food anymore.

Not even the dumbest of places like pizza.

Though he was surely sick of pizza, it would have filled the void about right now.

“What do you say you write another check to the bank and they cash it and we have ourselves some feast someplace? You have plenty of checks left.”

Another thing that he couldn’t make her understand was that just because there were checks that could be written, if there was no money to cover them, then you were more broke than before because of the bounced check fees.

She either didn’t want to understand or couldn’t, but again, it got on his nerves.

This time, he didn’t even bother with trying to explain.

“We’re going to have to sell some more stuff around here.

” They’d about sold everything that was in the house, from their dining room table and chairs to the pocket watch that his father had left him.

Why? No one knew why, he had a cell phone and didn’t need a watch that fit in your pockets.

He was forever forgetting about it anyway.

“How many more pocket watches do we have?”

“Four. And one that I got from mom when she was killed.” She could remember stuff like that, but nothing important.

“You know, we should have gotten the policy because we had to go through all the trouble of killing her. The least she could have done was leave us some of the money that Dad had left her. And what about the money from Dad’s death? What happened to all of it?”

“We spent it poorly and now it’s all gone.

” That was the truth. The first thing they’d got with the money was a new car each.

Then they’d splurged on a cruise. And boy did they splurge on it.

When they got back, there were taxes to pay, and they were nearly broke by the end of the first month.

Two million dollars didn’t go as far as they thought it should have.

“We should have put some of it to better use than to just spend it like we did. But it was fun.”

“Yeah, it was a blast.” Margaret sat down at the kitchen table, a table that he’d never eaten at in his entire life. That’s what the dining room was for. “We should go on another cruise. We can not spend as much as we did the first time, but just enough to have some fun.”

“We don’t have enough checks to cover that.

” He wasn’t going to explain that having checks didn’t mean you had money again, so he changed the subject.

“Tomorrow we’ll go and talk to Amber and see how much she’s going to give us of the money.

Like we’ve been saying, they were more our parents than they were to her.

She just had her dad, and we had them both.

And why is Mom even leaving her any money in the first place? We’re her kids.”

Going up to his room, he was glad that he’d forbidden her from coming to it.

She wasn’t allowed to knock on his door unless it was an emergency.

And the house had better be on fire if she was going to disturb him.

Laying out on his bed, the thought of all the things that he wished he’d known before.

Like, millions of dollars wasn’t all that much in the long term of things, and that spending it like they had would net them nothing.

They had nothing to show for the trip. They’d not purchased any souvenirs, nor had they taken all that many pictures.

Wasted money, he thought, and now they didn’t even have the cars.

Last month, they’d had to sell the cars so that they could afford to have their bills paid.

It sucked that there wasn’t anyone around who could have paid them for them.

When their mom was alive, she always made sure that the power was on and that they had cable and internet.

Now they only had internet because having all the channels was much too expensive right now.

He knew what Mom would have said about that.

She would have told them to get a job again.

That was why they’d killed her in the first place, because she was ragging on them to get one so that she would not have to pay for everything that they needed as adults.

“Being an adult sucks.” As a teenager, he’d counted the days until he could be an adult.

To be able to do what he wanted because he was old enough in the eyes of the law to make his own decisions.

But right off the bat, he’d made the wrong decision about some things and had nearly ended up in jail.

Then he realized that he had to be the adult for Margaret, too, or they’d be in worse trouble than they were now.

Shawn looked over at the desk that had all the final notices on it for their household.

Some of them were behind as much as three months, and he saw no way to pay them.

He supposed that he could pay them like Margaret said, just write them checks, and that would be the end of it. Not really, but that wouldn’t work anyway; they no longer took his checks for bills because they bounced higher than he could jump.