“What do you want? You’re not here to buy a scarf.”
I realized it was time to get serious, so I said, “Your boyfriend Carl is in love with Denny the hairdresser.”
“Denny’s a barber.”
“Whatever. Denny and Reverend Hessel used to PNP together.”
“What’s PNP?”
“Party and play.”
“Is that what it sounds like?”
I nodded.
“You think Reverend Hessel and Denny… that’s stupid.”
“Denny admitted it. Didn’t Carl say anything to you about it?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?
“I think I’d remember that.”
“He could have come to you and told you what he’d done and asked you to give him an alibi.”
“You really think I’m the kind of girl who’d lie for a guy?”
“A guy she loved. Sure.”
“Get out.”
“You can’t throw me out. I’m a customer.”
“You’re not a customer. You’re an asshole. Get out.”
“A girl who lied for a guy would throw me out.”
That stopped her. She glared at me, pursing her lips and grinding her jaw. “Look, this is what happened. I wasn’t planning to see Carl that night. But he called around seven-forty-five, said he wanted to come over and hang out. He got to my house around eight. I had a couple of DVDs I’d rented.Adaptation, which was weird, andThe Pianist, which was depressing. Carl seemed nervous or whatever. Upset maybe, but he wouldn’t tell me about what.”
“And normally he would tell you?”
“He didn’t kill his stepfather,” she said. “He couldn’t have. According to Detective Lehmann, Reverend Hessel was still alivewhen Carl got to my house. And he was with me the whole time. It’s impossible that he killed him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
All right, so I guess she had a point. If everyone had their times right, then it was true, Carl couldn’t have killed his stepfather. Opal could still be lying, but I didn’t have any proof of that. She’d been pretty consistent. So that left me with the same question I’d been asking myself all month: Who killed Reverend Hessel?
It was nearly five when I got home. I was starving, which was ridiculous. Dinner at five in the afternoon was a senior citizen move. Still, I stopped at the refrigerator immediately and poked around looking for a casserole. One that had already been sampled and was clearlynotpoisonous.
I put what looked like some kind of pasta and chicken casserole—no green vegetables in sight—into the oven and went in search of Nana Cole. She was not in the living room watching Fox News, so I walked through the room and cracked open the door to her bedroom. She wasn’t in there. I made my way back to the hallway and walked down to the bathroom. The door was standing open and she wasn’t in there either. She wasn’t anywhere in the house.
Opening the back door, I looked out to see if she was taking a walk, which would really have been more of a hobble. I didn’tsee her anywhere on the property. She couldn’t have gotten far. I called out her name a few times but quickly gave up.
Of course, she refused to carry her mobile phone. Yes, they were very expensive, but that wasn’t the problem. She was highly suspicious of radio waves or whatever kind of wave was used to make them wireless, and completely convinced that the government was attempting to control us through those radio waves. This, I’d found out, was also her rationale for not having a microwave.
The one or two times she’d brought this idea up, I’d bit my tongue. I could have said, if the government really wanted to control us they’d use Fox News. But I hadn’t. Mainly because I didn’t think she’d get it.
