Mandy nodded.
I wanted to sink down to the floor, but I couldn’t. If that blood was human, this room was a crime scene. The less either of us touched, the better.
I imagined steel running up my spine and hardening. Mandy had latched on to me because I was her friend, and she needed help and support. Whether I wanted to faint or be ill wasn’t important.
I glanced at the ceiling. It was clear of blood spatter. I hadn’t looked in the closet or behind the bed, but there wasn’t blood within my line of sight or anywhere I’d seen when I first entered the room. “Where’s the rest?”
The tremor that rolled over Mandy’s body made her shiver like I’d forced her to run outside in a Michigan January without any shoes on. “In the freshly washed laundry I folded this morning.”
My mind split down the middle, with one side wanting to know who would have put blood-covered items in The Sunburnt Arm’s washing machine but left a giant puddle on the floor, and the other knowing I had to keep this on track. “Have you called the police already?”
“Not yet.” Mandy couldn’t seem to stop shivering. Her teeth rattled slightly as she answered. “I didn’t want to call them over a misunderstanding and upset my guests. Even if it’s blood, someone might have cut themselves shaving. Or maybe they have bad hemorrhoids. Or…”
She brought her shoulders all the way up to her ears and dropped them down. Her voice had that please-tell-me-I’m-overreacting desperation to it.
I stripped off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders. It was too narrow for her to actually put her arms through the arm holes, but it’d give her a little extra warmth at least. We needed to call the police, and then I needed to move her somewhere she could sit. She could be going into shock.
First, I should at least assuage her fears that she might cause a fuss over nothing by making sure it wasn’t an overreaction. “How much blood was on the laundry?”
She ran a hand down her front from her chest to her waist.
I took a step back. Good Lord. That wasn’t I-cut-myself-shaving blood. That was I-decided-to-gut-a-deer-in-my-bedroom amounts of blood.
“We have to call the police.” I held my hand out to her. “Right now.”
She shrank away.
She could be involved in whatever happened here, the lawyer voice in my brain that sounded suspiciously like my mom said. You caught her, and now she’s making up a story to cover up.
I shook my head. Mandy wasn’t a killer. Not that senior-aged women couldn’t be killers. They could. But Mandy loved murders in the pages of a book, not in real life. Despite feeding almost daily on the Fair Haven rumor mill, she’d shied away from speculating on any of the murder investigations I’d been involved in previously.
Still, I’d expected a different reaction. I closed some of the distance between us. “Is there a reason you’re worried about calling the police?”
Mandy hugged my jacket around her broad shoulders like a cape. “What if they think I did it?”
“They might,” my mom’s voice said from behind me.
I gasped and jerked around. My mom stood inside the doorway, much too magazine-perfect for a woman who’d traveled all day yesterday. Her charcoal-gray designer pantsuit looked freshly ironed. Her makeup accented her natural good looks without being obvious, and her short hair could have been fresh from the hairstylist.
It was completely unfair that none of her natural composure had carried through her genes to me. If it wasn’t for the obvious physical similarities, I might have accused my parents of adopting me and lying about it. They certainly weren’t above lying under the right circumstances.
Most mothers and daughters would have hugged after not seeing each other for months. I loved my mom as much as any of those pairs, and we talked on the phone multiple times a week, but I knew better than to seek a hug—even though I could really use one right now, given the scene in the bathroom.
Instead, I said, “You scared me, sneaking up on us like that.”
My mom pursed her lips. “It’s hardly sneaking when you’ve left the door open so anyone can hear you. You know better. You should never hold a sensitive conversation when you can’t control who might be listening in.”
Mandy was beside me now. Her gaze bounced between my mom and me, and her eyebrows had descended over her eyes in the closest I’d ever seen Mandy to a scowl.
I couldn’t blame her. From her perspective, a stranger had invaded a private and stressful situation between friends. Invaded the situation and reprimanded me.
My mom shut the door, made eye contact with Mandy, and extended a hand in a way that clearly implied she expected the handshake to be accepted. “Kathleen Fitzhenry. Nicole is my daughter.”
Mandy gave her a limp hand, as if she’d been sucked in by the tractor-beam force of my mother and couldn’t resist regardless of her intentions. “Amanda Gibson.”
“I know.” My mom broke the contact. “Now tell me what’s happened so we can get your story straight before we call the police.”
Mandy opened her mouth. I held up my hand, and she clamped it shut again.
Forget tractor beams. My parents were like bug zappers. I felt like screaming don’t fly into the light. She’d have Mandy pawning the family heirlooms to pay for legal services before there was any need to.
“Mandy’s not a client. She hasn’t done anything wrong, so she doesn’t need to get her story straight. We just need to call the police and let them figure out what happened.”
An expression I couldn’t quite decode flashed across my mom’s features. If she’d been anyone else, I’d have sworn at least one of the emotions was pride.
Was that the first time I’d stood up to my mom in person?
She strode past Mandy and me, and stopped next to the vacuum. She drooped her pointer finger toward the vacuum handle. “I assume you cleaned the room, essentially destroying evidence, before you noticed the blood.”
Crap. I saw where my mom was going with this. Mandy’s innocent action could easily be spun to look guilty. Cleaning the room meant all trace evidence in the vacuum would be inadmissible because no one could prove what room it’d come from, and she’d have wiped away any fingerprints.
What my mom didn’t know but I did was that Mandy also had a tendency to come up with crazy theories. If she started spinning those for the investigating officers, she could make herself seem like she was trying to distract the police or cover up her actions without even realizing it. And heaven knew she’d never pass a polygraph, innocent or not.
I wasn’t going to win this confrontation, and it wouldn’t hurt to take a minute to protect Mandy from herself. Plus, it’d help the investigation in the long run. Making sure Mandy didn’t create a false lead meant the police could focus on finding the real killer.
I licked my lips in place of the sigh I wanted to heave. Sighs, my dad always said, show disrespect. “Fine. We’ll make sure she has a clear explanation for the police before we call them.”
Mandy handed my coat back to me. She’d stopped shaking, and her skin had returned to a normal flesh tone. No doubt warmed by the heat of my mom’s confidence, I told myself with a mental eye roll.
