Page 4 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
The doors of the third and fourth bedrooms stood open. Norah heard the rumble of a male voice coming from room three. She hurried toward the doorway, skidding to a halt when she reached it.
Mrs. Miller huddled against the far wall, her rounded heavyset frame shuddering with her uncontrolled wailing. Her pink velvet pajamas were a brilliant backdrop to the man lying in the bed. He lay still, his balding head on the pillow, his eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, his mouth agape.
Norah knew with one glance that Mr. Miller was dead.
The occupant of the neighboring room had rounded the Millers’ four-poster bed and was reaching for Mrs. Miller. He wasshirtless, wore flannel pajama bottoms, had a mass of tousled dark hair, and his thick black glasses were jammed crooked on his face.
Sebastian Blaine’s accented voice filled the room as he crooned calmly toward Mrs. Miller. The English-born guest was also an enigmatic and increasingly popular true-crime podcaster. That he was staying at her bed-and-breakfast already had her nerves taut and ready to snap. Norah distrusted the man, and not even the sight of Sebastian’s shirtless, muscular form could change that.
True crime was not meant for entertainment. Not in a podcast, not in a documentary, not ever. So it was sheer irony that he was here at the deathbed of her most recent guest.
“Water?”
Norah snapped out of her intentional effort to find the negative about the man in front of her—and not the dead one.
Fingers snapped with urgency. “Miss Richman!Norah!Can you get Mrs. Miller a glass of water?” Sebastian’s insistence, along with the pooling brown of his eyes, jolted Norah back to the grave moment.
She pushed hair from her face, her fingers trembling against her cheek as she did so. She wasn’t good with emergencies. They immobilized her. They triggered every barely healed wound and sent her spiraling.
“Norah!”
Sebastian’s command caused her to rush to the en suite. She twisted the knob for the cold water, and it gushed out of the spout. Snatching a paper cup from the too-modern paper cup dispenser she’d had installed on the wall, Norah held it under the water. The cup’s thin sides buckled as it filled with water. Glasses were so much better, but people were careful about germs these days, and most weren’t keen on the old-fashioned glasses Aunt Eleanor had supplied for her guests in their bathrooms.
With the cup full, Norah hurried back into the bedroom,averting her eyes from the dead man on the bed. She handed the cup to Sebastian, whose fingertips brushed hers as he gripped it.
He offered the cup to Mrs. Miller. “There, there,” he crooned in that sultry, deep accent of his. “Steady now. We must settle down, Mrs. Miller. Deep breaths an’ all that.”
“My husband...” the older woman whimpered in reply, her hand shaking so violently that water from the paper cup spilled onto the wood floor.
Sebastian ignored Norah’s attempt to find something with which to wipe up the water. Instead, he ran his sock-covered foot over the floor to soak up the drips. “Can you find Mrs. Miller a chair?” His question was directed at Norah, who stared at him for a moment before Sebastian cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “Aye?”
She was helpless. Hopeless. Helpless and hopeless. Norah spun and made quick work of pulling an antique wing-back chair from beneath the window. Its clawed feet scraped on the floor, pushing up one corner of a faded antique rug.
“Aye, that’s right,” Sebastian said as he assisted Mrs. Miller onto the chair. Her well-rounded backside made a spring in the seat groan. He patted her shoulder. “I’ve already called 911, even though we know they’ll be of little help to your husband now.” He crouched in front of Mrs. Miller.
Norah had to give the man props for being so calm and gentle. She held on to the bedpost for dear life, her body on the verge of uncontrollable shaking. This was going to be a setback. It was everything she’d tried her entire life to avoid. But death was inevitable. And Norah detested it.
“Norah?” Sebastian was looking up at her from his crouch in front of the pale and eerily silent widow. “The medics will be arriving any minute now. Will you go an’ let them in?”
She nodded and took the opportunity he’d just handed her to get out of the death room, away from the bald man with his unblinking stare into the otherworld. She might be the ownerof 322 Predicament Avenue’s bed-and-breakfast, but no one in her family, and definitely not Norah herself, believed she’d be any good at running such a business.
She was here only for Naomi’s sake.
The only thing worse than death itself was the way a soul passed. At least Mr. Miller had died in his sleep. Unlike Naomi whose decomposing body had been discovered weeks after she’d gone missing. Unlike Naomi whose murder had rocked the community of Shepherd, Iowa. The town’s first murder in over a century. This safe, quaint, historic place.
It was a macabre fact that the murder of 1901 had also been committed on the grounds of 322 Predicament Avenue. It too had been violent, with repercussions that reached well into the future.
Death had been a guest here at Predicament Avenue for decades, and it was clear that Death wasn’t ready to check out quite yet.
Dawn was breaking on the horizon. The pink streaks of sunlight matched the pink blossoms on the crabapple trees in the front yard. Norah had given Mr. Nielson the side-eye as he’d entered the house with his assistant. Nielson Funeral Home, with himself as the mortician, had been the same ones to care for Naomi’s remains—after the county coroner was finished with them, and after they’d been mutilated further by an autopsy.
“Norah.” Mr. Nielson hiked back up the porch steps once the body had been loaded to be transported to the funeral home. The expression on Mr. Nielson’s face was one of sympathy.
Though this recent death wasn’t Norah’s personal loss, Mr. Nielson knew she was returning to the scene twelve years ago when she was nineteen. Naomi had frozen there in time and had left Norah behind to age alone. And she hadn’t aged well. At least Norah didn’t think so. She’d become a shell of what she’dintended to be. Worst of all, she was half terrified of people. Even ones she knew well. Who knew what secrets they were hiding? Who could she trust really? Shepherd was a small town, its population the kind where everyone knew everyone else, and it had been the same way when Naomi was alive. For the last twelve years, Norah had looked into every face of every person she met and asked the internal question:Did you murder my sister?
It was the not knowing that made trusting others almost an impossibility.
“Norah?” Mr. Nielson’s raised voice encouraged Norah to lift her eyes and meet the mortician’s. He had wrinkles. He was balding, not unlike dead Mr. Miller. He was wiry. Why were morticians always skinny? “We’ll need to consult with your guest, Mrs. Miller, on the specifics of what she wants done with her husband’s remains.”
