Page 14 of Again with Feeling

“I just said none of us had seen him!”

It was the first time her annoyance had bled through the story, and the bright edge of it made me sit up a little straighter. Something at the back of my head stirred, and I studied Candy more closely.

Bobby seemed to be considering her more carefully too. “And what happened then?”

The rote nature of Candy’s answers changed again, and what sounded like genuine emotion filtered into the words. “It was horrible. Nobody knew what had happened. He was gone, that’s all. His friends didn’t know where he was. We called the police, and they weren’t any help. They thought he’d run away and taken the money with him. By the time they really started looking, we all knew it was too late. They finally said it might have been a robbery. Might.” She laughed, and the sound had an old, jaded quality that was the first honest thing I thought I’d heard from her. “They weren’t wrong about that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Viv,” she said, and her tone suggested that—to borrow Fox’s phrase—my cheese done slid off my cracker. “I mean, she wanted to move to Portland. That’s all she’d talk about, how she had to get away from here. But Daddy wouldn’t give her any money, and she’d already divorced Neil, and she and Richard were at it like cats and dogs all the time.”

“Vivienne and Richard fought a lot?”

“And then one day Richard’s gone, and the money’s gone, and a couple of weeks later, Viv’s gone too. Took herself off to Portland. Where’d she get that money from, that’s what I wanted to know at the time. Guess we know now.”

I tried to wrap my head around that, but Bobby was the one who spoke first. “You think Vivienne killed Richard and took his money because he wouldn’t give her enough to move to Portland?”

Candy stared at the vape pen as though she’d forgotten what it was. And then she said, “You know what she did with all that money she made? All those books? The TV show, all of it?” It was a rhetorical question because Candy answered it herself. “She spent it on herself. All of it. She never sent a dime back. You could call her up and tell her you didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and she wouldn’t give you a cent. She changedher number—did you know that? So we couldn’t bother her. Oh, sure, when Daddy got sick—”

Heavy footsteps came from the hall. Candy’s father appeared in the opening, his face dark. On my second look at him, I took in the man’s big frame. He was tall, and at some point in his life, he had been strong, but now that strength had wasted away, and he had that too-thin look some men age into. “All right, that’s enough. Get out of my house.”

Bobby only said, “Hello, sir. Who are you?”

“I’m the son of a gun—” (My words, not his.) “—who owns this house, and I want you out. Right now.”

“That would make you Arlen Lundgren, then?”

“Daddy,” Candy said, “this is Dash Dane.”

“I know who he is,” Arlen said, “and I want him out of here.”

“Mr. Lundgren—” I tried.

“They want to talk to us about Richard,” Candy said.

“Talk?” Arlen said. “Nobody wants to talk to you. If men wanted to sit around all day listening to you yap, you’d still have a husband, and I’d have some gosh darn peace and quiet.”

(Again, I’m paraphrasing.)

Tears rushed into Candy’s eyes, and her doughy cheeks filled with color. “I can talk to whoever I want. Go back to your room—”

“This is my house,” Arlen shouted and slapped the wall. The crack of the blow rang out in the tiny house, and Candy jumped out of her chair. She raced past Arlen, and a moment later, a door slammed shut. Then Arlen turned his gaze on me and Bobby.

“Mr. Lundgren,” I said, “Vivienne asked us to help—”

“That woman hasn’t been part of this family for thirty years. She’s no daughter of mine, and I don’t care what she wants or how much she told you she’d pay you.”

“No,” I said, “that’s not—”

“You get out of here. And don’t come back.”

At a nod from Bobby, I got to my feet. We’d barely made it out the door when he slammed it behind us, and as the crash faded, I thought I could hear Candy crying in the distance.

Bobby and I made our way around front, and we got in the Jeep. I started it up. And then I said, “That could have gone better.”

“Drive to the end of the street,” Bobby said.

“What?”

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