Leave No Stone Unturned (A Lexie Starr Mystery, Book 1) (2 page)

Should I warn my daughter that her husband could be a murderer, or go home and file
my nails while I sip on a cup of strong coffee? Coffee sounded tempting, but it'd
have to wait, I decided, as I pulled into Wendy's driveway on the way home from the
library. My son-in-law, Clay, was in the front yard talking to a couple of friends
he'd met at a gym he'd joined when he first moved here. Clay and Wendy had just returned
from a week's vacation in the Colorado Rockies. It'd been a belated honeymoon.

It was unseasonably, almost unbelievably, cool for early October. I could see Clay's
breath as he spoke. He was telling a story with his hands, making large, sweeping
motions that held his friends in rapt attention, their eyes open wide and transfixed.
As I watched, Clay aimed an invisible gun at the mailbox and fired, apparently killing
it instantly. His friends high-fived him, showing admiration for his aim and skill.
The gesture sent chills up my spine and made the hair on the back of my neck stand
on end like a cat who'd just seen its reflection in a mirror.

It was then I noticed in Clay's truck bed a very large, very dead, bull moose with
an immense span of antlers and the customary large hump on its nose. Its chin was
propped up on the tailgate, its eyes open, its tongue lolling out the right side of
its mouth. Couldn't someone have showed a little respect and closed its eyelids? Being
stared at by a dead moose was giving me the willies.

For a moment, I wondered if the animal was poached, or bagged legally. Then I realized
that you couldn't just prop a poached moose up in the bed of your truck and drive
four hundred miles down I-70. I felt bad for the animal, though, and sad for its family
and friends. I also felt sorry for anyone who'd been following the truck from Colorado
with a dead moose staring down into his windshield. It would have made it difficult
to concentrate on driving.

The front door of the house was open, so I walked into the foyer. My daughter was
on the phone, speaking with a taxidermist. The Yellow Pages, lying open on the counter,
showed an ad that claimed, "You bang 'em, we'll hang 'em."

"Okay, okay—okay, okay—okay," Wendy said into the mouthpiece. She sounded like Joe
Pesci in the
Lethal Weapon
movies.

"Okay, okay—okay."

Shouldn't Wendy have taken more time with her answers? I wondered. She was making
important—well, at least, permanent—decisions. That moose would most likely be looking
one way or the other for the rest of its dead life. I glanced beyond the foyer into
their family room. The massive moose head would have to hang from the stone fireplace,
which rose up toward the vaulted ceiling. To have him staring straight ahead would
be eerie, almost threatening. He should be mounted so he was looking left into the
room. Why would a dead moose walk into a perfectly well-decorated room and look the
other way? Martha Stewart would be appalled at the very idea.

Of course, I thought, if he looked the other way, he'd be looking directly into the
kitchen. And that made sense in an odd way too. Moose are huge animals. They must
be hungry a lot of the time.

Oh, good grief. What was I thinking? My recent discoveries were impairing my ability
to think rationally. I really did need a stiff cup of espresso, laced liberally with
Kahlua. I didn't imbibe often, but I could use a drink right then, for medicinal purposes.

I glanced around at the other family room walls and noticed for the first time a number
of animal heads. There were no full body mounts, just heads with fixed eyes staring
into the room. Wendy and Clay had lived in the house a month, moving in just after
their August eighteenth wedding. I'd hesitated to bother the newlyweds during the
first few weeks of their marriage, so I'd diligently kept my distance.

Wendy and Clay are both outdoorsy, and apparently Clay is a hunter, as well. I couldn't
visualize Wendy shooting a moose. She'd always had a hard time stepping on a spider.
Although she'd probably feel right at home in the middle of a forest, I couldn't quite
imagine her feeling comfortable in her own family room, surrounded by all these dead,
mounted animals. Maybe I didn't know my daughter as well as I thought.

"Okay, okay. Yeah, that's fine—okay," I heard Wendy saying. She looked at me and smiled.
It was the dreamy smile of a woman in love. My stomach churned.

What I now suspected about Clay scared me half to death and made me almost nauseated.
Suddenly I just wanted to go back to my own little house and think about it a while
longer. I wanted to prop my feet up in my own little family room with no accusatory
eyes staring down from the walls of the room. I wanted to sip at that cup of coffee
and Kahlua. I was no longer sure I should tell Wendy what I'd come to tell her. I
decided I needed to contemplate the potential consequences of that decision further
before I acted on it. An unwise, hasty decision could produce devastating results.
I was concerned about her safety more than anything, but didn't want to upset her
with my unconfirmed suspicions either.

I jotted down a note on a pad of paper from the hall table.

"Call you later," I wrote. Wendy glanced at my note and nodded. I hurried back to
my car, waved briefly at Clay and his friends, backed out of the driveway, and headed
south before Clay had an opportunity to walk over and speak to me. I couldn't risk
talking to him right now. I knew my voice would sound anxious and unnatural because
I'd just discovered there was a good possibility Clay had murdered his first wife,
Eliza, over two years ago. I was fairly sure my daughter had no idea Clay had been
married before, or that Eliza had ever existed, and I was suddenly not convinced it'd
be in her, or my, best interest for her to be informed of what I'd just learned.

After all, I was quite certain Wendy was aware of my skepticism about my new son-in-law,
as hard as I tried to hide my aversion to Clay. I realized part of my animosity might
stem from jealousy, for I was no longer the most important person in Wendy's life.
But mostly it was an uneasiness I felt around him, as if Clay wasn't being entirely
open with either of us.

Wendy had accused me of trying to control her and how she chose to live her life on
several occasions, so I was very hesitant to say anything negative about Clay now.
She might not be too quick to forgive my interference in her new marriage. Should
I risk her disdain, or should I first try to find out more of the details in case
the first wife had not been killed, as the authorities suspected, but had eventually
turned up safe and sound at a friend's house and the marriage had dissolved naturally?
Perhaps I'd even discover the Clay Pitt in question really didn't have a thing to
do with Wendy's husband.

I didn't often have to make such a critical decision, and I was afraid I'd make the
wrong one and endanger the close relationship I shared with my only child. And that
was the last thing I wanted to do.

Chapter 2

My name is Alexandria. Alexandria Marie Starr, or Lexie to my family and friends.
I'm forty-eight, and at that pre-geriatric age where I'm too young for my senior citizen's
discount, but knee-deep into middle age. I need one pair of glasses for distance,
another pair for reading, and have learned not to be too concerned about the clarity
of anything in between.

I have thick, curly brown hair with lighter highlights, compliments of a local beauty
salon. It's a constant three-month cycle of cut, trim, trim, perm, highlight; cut,
trim, trim, perm, highlight. During the three-month cycle there is a span of about
four and a half days that my hair, with no fuss or bother, looks exactly like I want
it to. The rest of the time my hairstyle resembles either a French poodle or that
of a heroin addict in a mug shot. But for four and a half days every season I look
pretty hot. Well, luke-warm anyway.

I stand a shade less than five feet, two inches tall, and weigh between 120 and 140,
depending on the season. During the summer, when my garden is producing and I'm eating
lots of veggies, I weigh in at about 120. During the winter, when I'm forced to substitute
chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream for asparagus and squash, my weight drifts up
toward 140. Fortunately, I have a good-sized walk-in closet that accommodates small,
medium, and large wardrobes.

Circumstances have required me to be independent and self-reliant. I've had to be
both mother and father to Wendy since she was seven years old. That was the year her
father, Chester, died from an embolism. As they say, he never knew what hit him. We'd
taken Wendy to the theater to see a Disney movie one night and had just returned to
the house. Chester walked in the door and fell to the floor. My husband was dead before
his head touched the carpet. That was the moment my life, and Wendy's life, changed
forever. It was suddenly the two of us against the world. Fortunately for me, Wendy's
a loving daughter, and our personalities are complementary. Throughout the years,
we've always been close.

In the years following Chester's death, I tried to give Wendy all the advantages a
child with both parents might enjoy. I wanted her to experience as much as possible
so she'd be a well-rounded individual. I wanted her to go to interesting places and
to do exciting things. I thought such adventures could only enhance her confidence
and self-esteem.

When Wendy was ten I took her to Disneyland. I bought her a cheap charm bracelet there,
so she could collect charms from the different places I took her in the years to follow.
"It's to show where you've been," I told her. By the time she was eighteen, a gold-plated
version, and then a ten-carat version, had replaced it. Finally a twenty-four-carat
gold bracelet graced her wrist. It was my gift to her on her twenty-first birthday.

The bracelet held many charms. Among others, there was one shaped like the Space Needle
from our visit to Seattle, a peach-shaped charm that had "Georgia" etched across it,
a miniature of South Dakota's Mount Rushmore, and an Eiffel Tower replica from our
trip to Paris. Wendy was proud of each charm and the memories they evoked. The charms
showed all the places she'd been. She wore the bracelet everywhere, even to bed much
of the time.

The two of us got by pretty well during those years. Chester had left me with what
would turn out to be several wise investments, and also a substantial insurance policy.
I wanted the money to last me through the "golden" years, so I was never extravagant.
But I was never cheap either. I'd scrimp on the trivial things so that I could afford
to splurge on the important things. I never wanted my daughter to be humiliated by
showing up at a school dance in a dress she wasn't proud to be seen wearing.

Throughout Wendy's teenage years I unfailingly put a hundred dollars a week into a
college fund. After her high school graduation she left Shawnee, Kansas, and went
east to Massachusetts to go to medical school, eventually settling on a career in
pathology. After returning to Kansas, she was quickly offered a position as an assistant
to the county coroner. To earn her living, she'd perform autopsies to search for the
cause of death. I had hoped she'd become a pediatrician.

"I get too emotionally attached to the patients. I can't handle it when medical technology
can't save them and they die, despite our best efforts," she told me when I asked
why she'd chosen working with deceased patients rather than live ones.

"But now all of your patients are dead!" I replied. "Every single one of them!"

"Yes, I know. But I'll never have known them as living, breathing human beings with
at least a sliver of hope to survive. There's no opportunity to become close to them.
It's difficult to become attached to a cadaver, Mom, trust me. Once a stiff, always
a stiff."

"So I guess 'bedside manner' is not a big concern in your chosen field?" I asked,
rather sarcastically. I didn't appreciate her lack of compassion. I hadn't raised
her to be so callous and insensitive.

"No, I guess not, and that's another advantage of this field. I can dance naked around
my customers while telling offensive jokes, and it doesn't seem to bother them a bit."
She saw the look of horror on my face and jabbed my shoulder playfully. "I'm kidding.
You know I'd never do that. Lighten up. I do have to be considerate of the survivors'
feelings. I take pride in being able to offer comfort to them at their time of loss."