Page 102 of Rest In Pink

“No idea.”

“Whose writing?”

“No clue.”

She frowned. “It’s some kind of code. Both the letters and the numbers. Is it Navy’s writing?”

I shrugged. “Never saw his writing, so, again, I don’t know.” I checked my notepad, thumbing back to that event. “Margot said Navy left to go up to the Blue House. She doesn’t know why he was driving to town, which is the other way.”

“To see Faye Blue initially,” Rain said. “Did he make it to the Blue House?” she asked. “Or did he head directly to town?”

“Faye was on Navy for money,” I said. “But a hundred thousand is a lot.” I indicated the ledger. “I tried matching numbers with the spreadsheet I found in his car but nothing connects.”

Rain put the ledger back in the briefcase. “Maybe the money wasn’t for her. Mickey got out not long before that night.”

“It was for Mickey,” I said.

“Why would the Blues need to pay Mickey off?” Rain asked.

“I have my suspicions.” I closed the briefcase. “Let’s go ask Faye.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

I worked on getting Chapter Eight into shape which wasn’t that tough since Anemone had been sort of resting for the past ten years. She mostly traveled around, doing a lot of stuff, staying in hotels, and that bothered me because I’d been working on the whole Anemone and houses theme, and here she was, going ten years without one. We were going to have to talk about that.

At four, I packed Peri up and got her to the Red Box for Mandarin. Molly was already there. Sun took Peri to the table in the back, and I slid into the booth across from Moll, now definitely concerned. She was pale and her hands were trembling on the table top.

“Whatever it is,” I told her, “I will take care of it. I will fix it.”

“You can’t.” She stared at me for a moment, swallowed hard, and then leaned forward and whispered, “I’m a lesbian.”

I blinked at her. I’d been so fixated on arson and Mickey Pitts that I’d forgotten other people had lives. “Okay. Probably not the most popular thing you could be in Burney, but why are you looking at me like that?”

“You don’t care?”

I drew back, stung. “Of course, I don’t care. Why the hell would I care? Well, wait, I would care if you were sleeping with somebody lousy, but I don’t care if they’re male or female. Come on, Molly. I’m insulted. So, who’s the lucky girl?”

Molly blinked at me, and then she put her head down on the table and cried. I pulled a lot of napkins out of the holder and handed them to her, and then decided it needed more than that and changed to her side of the booth and put my arms around her.

Hugging wasn’t my thing, but she was my sister.

Welcome to Burney. We hug and so will you if you stay here long enough.

My phone buzzed then, but I ignored it. “You’re my sister,” I told her. “Don’t you know I’ll love you no matter what? And this isn’t even a what. This doesn’t matter. It’s a surprise, yes, and how the hell did I miss this, but I don’t give a damn, Molly. How could you think I’d care?”

She sat up, and I handed her the napkins, and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I went to the prison to see Mom this morning.”

“Oh, God. Did you tell her?”

She nodded. “I said, ‘Mom, I’m a lesbian’, and she said, ‘No, you are not’.”

“Of course, she did, she’s a vicious hag from hell.”

“She said it was vile and disgusting and no daughter of hers would do that.”

“This from a woman who murdered somebody over a string of pearls and tried to murder two other people with somebody else’s car. And she thinks there’s something wrong with you?”

Molly nodded. “The thing is . . .” She stopped and swallowed hard. “The thing is, I’ve been keeping this secret from Burney for so long. Out on the road, it doesn’t matter. I don’t even sing under my own name. I can be anybody I want out there. But here in Burney . . . I think it matters. But I can’t go on pretending while I’m here anymore.”

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