Page 62 of Deja Who
THIRTY-THREE
Clusterfuck!
Total, utter clusterfuck. And all Archer could do was sort of stare, horrified, and be pulled in—sucked in—like Leah’s rage and hurt was the damned tide and he was the hapless swimmer. And that made Detective Preston Jaws.
She’d been a block of ice once she recovered from her “it’s not a faint, dammit!” It was funny that the one thing in all this awfulness, the one thing about the murder that threw Leah and freaked her out was the realization that her mom, the poster mom for selfish maternity, tried towarnher only daughter as she was dying.
Her mother’s dying act had been selfless and Archer could see the exact second Leah made the connection; the color justfellout of her face and her eyes rolled up and then he was moving and sort of walking her out of the room, into the piano room. She never lost her feet but she wasn’t exactly all there, either.
He’d made her sit on the nearest bench and just sort of held her wrist to check her pulse (ninety-plus, yikes) and stroked her hair away from her face until her eyes came back and she was glaring at him and batting his hands away. Relief? Putting it mildly. It had been damn near joyful to have Leah back to her old grumpy chilly self.
And then shit gotreallyweird. Even for a murder scene. Even for a murder scene when yourmomhad been murdered with your Emmy from when you were a resentful, talented child actor. That Preston cop was telling her all sorts of awful things, things that would have made anyone else throw up or cry or both, and Leah just got icier and icier. Archer wanted nothing more than to get her the hell out of there, back to his house, where he could comfort her and maybe even get her to laugh and kiss her until they were dizzy, which probably wasn’t the best way to deal with grief (if that’s what Leah was even feeling) but it wasn’t the worst, either.
And then it was like she was going out of her way to make the cop think she had guilty knowledge, when Archerknewshe didn’t. And she kept calling the cop Aaron for some reason, and then made a whole bunch of guesses about him, except they probably weren’t guesses because by the time she was done Preston had the cuffs out.
“You can’t arrest her for making you mad!” he yelped, torn between taking a swing at a cop and getting his own set of cuffs, or trying to stay calm so he could bail Leah out.
“No, but he can arrest me because I have motive, means, and opportunity,” Leah told him, and the horrible hilarity of it was, she was trying to soothe him.
“But you were with me!”
“Yes, but we’re each other’s alibi.” Soothe, soothe. “If one of us is the killer—”
“What?”
“—my alibi is worthless. Oh, and so is yours. Plus I was recently here; my prints will be here somewhere.”
“You were her daughter! Of course your prints are here!”
He tried to beg her with his eyes. Leah liked his freak mismatched eyes, so he stared at her and thought really really hard:Do something! Come on, Leah, be your brilliant self and read my mind.
And she did.
“I do not deny it: I wanted her dead.”
Just not the way he expected.
“Wanting her dead is not a motive!” Archer howled.
She blinked. “I’m pretty sure it is. Also, my mother died in the picture of health. If someone hadn’t coshed her over the head with my Emmy, she could have lived for decades. Perhaps I was after her money. Which, the police will soon discover, is my money. She spent her life robbing me and my resentment is a matter of public record. I knew I should have told that stupid judge he used to be Lavinia Fisher.”
“Leah, stop it!”
“What? I haven’t said one thing that isn’t the complete truth. The judge was stupid, and he did used to be the first female mass murderer. And of course, all the things I said about Nellie, and my relationship to her, are true.”
“Don’t be...”He stopped, tried to calm down, tried again, softer. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’ll be stupid whenever I like!” she snapped, a crack in her control showing at last. “You don’t get to decide when I’mstupid. I decide when I’m stupid. You are not the boss of how and when I am stupid!”
“Do you hear yourself? This is nuts. Tell him you didn’t kill her.”
And I thought it was weird when she stabbed me. That was the most normal interaction I’ve had with this woman. The stabbing!
“Oh, that reminds me, the murder weapon: my Emmy. Come on.” She glanced over her shoulder at Preston, who was cuffing her. “That’s pretty indicative, don’t you think? Symbolic of my crushing resentment, which I then used to crush her skull? It’s pretty perfect.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Preston said, but he was talking like he wasn’t at all sure what he was saying. In fact, Preston looked like someone had hithimover the head with an Emmy. Just not repeatedly. There were three dangerous adults in the room (well, two at least) and none of them seemed to know what they were doing. Leah had that effect on people.
“Don’t feel bad, Aaron.” Leah actually sounded comforting now, instead of chilly. “It’s not your fault that the Boston Strangler was able to kill many more women because you were an ineffectual crybaby.”
“Leah!” Archer screamed, fingers plunging into his hair and yanking, hard.
“Don’t mind him,” Leah told the cop as he dragged her away. “He thinks I have it in me to be a good person. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Actually,” Preston replied in a low voice, carefully steering her out of the room, “yeah.”
