Page 84 of To Die For

My head whipped around and I glared at him. “He did, huh? Funny thing, he didn’t mention it to me until tonight.”

Wyatt shrugged and looked totally unrepentant. I could tell I was going to have my hands full with him over the years. He was way too sure of himself.

“Well, I wondered why you hadn’t said anything,” Mom said. “I was beginning to feel hurt.”

“He’ll pay for that,” I said grimly.

“Oh, shit,” Wyatt said, knowing good and well I was talking about him, but without knowing exactly what his transgression was. He could probably get in the ballpark, since he knew what we were talking about, but he hadn’t yet realized what a no-no it was to hurt Mom’s feelings.

“There are two schools of thought concerning these situations,” Mom said, meaning she had considered two angles of approach. “One is that you come down hard on him, so he’ll learn how to handle things and won’t make that mistake again. The second is that you cut him some slack because he’s new to this.”

“ ‘Slack’? What’s that?”

“That’s my girl,” she said approvingly.

“Why are you still awake? You answered the phone so fast you must have been sleeping with it.” I was a tad curious, because Mom always slept with the phone when she was anxious about any of us. It was a habit she developed when I started dating at the age of fifteen.

“I haven’t slept with the phone since Jenni graduated high school. No, I’m still working on these damn quarterly taxes, and this stupid computer keeps freezing on me, then losing touch with its parts. Now it’s typing gibberish. I’d love to send in the taxes typed in code, since the IRS instructions and rules are so clear even they don’t know what they’re doing. How do you think that would fly?”

“It wouldn’t. The IRS has no sense of humor.”

“I know,” she said glumly. “I could have done this by hand much faster if I’d known this stupid machine was going to go bananas, but all of my files are in the computer. From now on I’m going to keep a paper copy.”

“Don’t you have a backup disk?”

“Well, of course. Ask me if it’ll work.”

“I think you’ve got a major problem.”

“I know I do, and I’m just about fed up with the whole mess. But it’s become a point of honor now not to let this demented monster win.”

Meaning she would keep at it way past the point where any normal person would have thrown in the towel and taken the thing to a computer hospital.

Then I thought of something, and looked at Wyatt. “Is it okay if I tell Mom about the hair y’all found?”

He briefly thought about it, then nodded.

“What hair?” Mom asked.

“Forensics found some dark hair, about ten inches long, stuck under my car. Can you think of anyone with dark hair about that length who might want to kill me?”

“Hmmm.” That was Mom’s thinking sound. “Is it black hair, or just dark?”

I relayed the question to Wyatt. He got that expression that said he wanted to ask what the difference was, but then he thought about it and realized the difference. “I’d say black,” he said.

“Black,” I relayed.

“Natural or dyed?”

Mom was on a roll here. I said to him, “Natural or dyed?”

“We don’t know yet. The evidence will have to be analyzed.”

“The jury’s still out on that,” I said to Mom. “Have you thought of someone?”

“Well, there’s Malinda Connors.”

“That was thirteen years ago, when I beat her out for Homecoming Queen. Surely she’s over it by now.”

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