Page 19 of Be A Detective, They Said. It’ll Be Fun, They Said

Chapter Seven

“Neerie thought something was going on at Tamlin’s school?” Naida asked in disbelief as she shifted in her chair. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what?”

We were all in the murder basement on very little sleep, tired from a long night of going through Neerie’s texts. Some more outrageous than others, but the ones with Thad? Probably the scariest.

Amidst all their arguing—over everything from the payment for the landscaper, to putting the kibosh on him taking Tamlin to Aspen with his latest “tramp”—there were the texts about something going on at the school.

Unfortunately, she was as cryptic about whatever she thought was going on there as she was about the basement she mentioned in her text to Earl.

Naida had come over, and she brought Tamlin with her to play with Olivia and Sam for a bit, to take her mind off missing her mother. Now we were trying to squeeze even a drop of information from her.

Leaning over my desk, I asked, “Did Neerie ever mention anything about a basement to you?”

Naida wrinkled her nose. “A basement? Hers, maybe? Can you give me some context?”

Nina clicked on the TV, pointing to it with the remote. “She sent a text to one of her Bigfoot-hunting buddies that read, ‘I have to go to the basement’. We can’t figure out if it means something important.”

Naida gripped the arms of the chair, the multiple rings on her fingers clacking against the wood. “She has a basement for sure. I guess we can look there, but I can’t think of another basement she might mean.” As she looked around our space, she cocked her head. “Where was her phone and how did you get into it?”

“If we told ya, we’d have to kill ya,” Nina joked, leaning back in her office chair and putting her feet up on the desk, but Naida blanched.

“Nina!” Marty admonished with a quick smile of reassurance. “She’s joking, of course. Our sources are confidential for obvious reasons.”

I gave Nina my “knock it off glare” before turning back to Naida. “What do you know about Tamlin’s biological father, Will?”

Now she sat up straight and made a face—an angry one. “That dirty dick? I know all I need to know about him to know he shouldn’t be anywhere near Tamlin. Neerie keeps her from him for a reason.”

My ears perked up. “Did you know he emailed her and threatened to make her life a living hell if she didn’t let him see Tamlin?”

Naida’s eyes narrowed. “Right. Know what that means? It means, he probably has a new chick in his life who has kids. He likes to use Tamlin as a prop and play at being a good father. It’s how he sucks ’em in. Then he does what he always does. He screws up the new woman’s life and leaves her when something shinier comes along.”

“That has to be hard on little Tamlin,” I muttered.

“You bet it is. It’s why Neerie won’t let Tamlin see him. Because he only needs her when he wants to put on a big show. Then he skips out and disappears, leaving Tam confused and feeling abandoned. When she finally asked why Daddy Will hadn’t seen her in a long time, she assumed it was because she’d done something wrong. That was it for Neerie. She put the kibosh on future visits.”

“How long ago was that?”

Naida shrugged, yanking at the bottom of her short leather jacket. “At least three years ago. She’s long-since forgotten he exists, so for him to pop up now means something fishy’s going on.”

I asked something I’d been wondering for no particular reason. “Is he fae?”

Her snort was filled with disgust. “Yep. He’s fae. A disgrace to the fae, but he is.”

Marty looked as though she were measuring her words before she asked a direct question. “Was he ever abusive? Physically or even mentally? Would he hurt Neerie to get to Tamlin or because she said he couldn’t see her?”

Naida’s jaw tightened, her eyes fiery, the tips of her pointy ears red. “He never hit her, if that’s what you mean, but he was plenty mentally abusive. He was always drunk, and when Will drank, he was meaner than a racoon cornered in an attic. Neerie kicked him out when Tamlin was only two because of it. From that point on, he drifted in and out of their lives.”

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I tapped my pen against the pad on my desk. “How about Thad? Her texts with him were pretty argumentative. He said she was obsessed, and he seemed pretty angry about whatever she was obsessing over.”

Naida sighed, and it was sad and long. “Like I said, Neerie was paranoid about everything, so it could have been about anything. But Thad was a good guy. He was nothing like Will. He’d never hurt either her or Tamlin. In fact, I thought they were happy. I felt like their divorce happened so fast. Almost out of the blue.”

“Didn’t your sister talk to you about what happened with them? Isn’t that what sisters do?” Nina pressed, her eyes hard.

Naida toyed with the rings on her fingers. “That’s what most sisters do, I guess. We’re not like most sisters. Neerie’s not like me at all. I’m easier going, I guess. She’s always wound up so tight. We don’t have a lot in common and never have, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her. I just love her from afar, and I’m there when she has a problem—like this one, where she dumps poor Tam and runs off.”

Marty’s eyes were suddenly very alert. “Has she done something like this before? Run away and left Tamlin with you?”

Naida’s lips thinned. “Only once and it was when she and Thad broke up. She showed up, no explanation, said she needed a minute to breathe, asked if I’d look after Tam, and split. But she kept in touch the whole time, checking on Tamlin, making sure I wasn’t feeding her garbage and so on. She wouldn’t tell me why she was so upset or what happened between them. She came back like three days later as if nothing had happened. Thad moved out and she went on, business as usual.”

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