coming home to stay.” The words burst from him in a panicked rush, as if they’d been waiting for hours to be shared, which they had. Drew hadn’t told his mother the latest. “Jane sent me a text this morning.”
“What?” Pris clutched his arm, digging in her false nails. “When is she moving back?”
“I don’t know.” Oxygen was a problem. Drew forced himself to fill his lungs with air.
“Let’s not get all maudlin.” Pris released his arm. “This is Jane we’re talking about. She never does anything without an agenda that benefits Jane. How will gaining custody of Becky help her?” One set of Priscilla’s fake eyelashes stuck together. She squinted and carefully pried her eyelids apart. “Wendy isn’t the answer. Oh, I know, no one ever has a bad word to say about her. She lives at home with her parents and helps care for her mother. She donates her time to the community.” Pris blinked the sticky-lash eye. “But she’s boring. She came to Shaw’s one Sunday, and I swear she never said a word.”
“She’s not like you or Eileen or the twins or Jane.” Or Lola. Wendy was low maintenance, even-keeled, safe. “Maybe shy is what I need.”
“Not hardly,” Pris allowed, peeling off one black eyelash and looking at it in disgust. “What do you like about Wendy other than she doesn’t talk back to you?”
Drew couldn’t think of a single thing.
“Do you know anything about her other than what you could fill in on a rap sheet—age, residence, employment history?”
“Um.”
“Drew.” Pris loaded his name with sisterly disgust. “We live in Sunshine. I can tell you what kind of ice cream Pearl buys every week. I can tell you where Bitsy shops on Saturday. I can tell you who Iggy kissed on Saturday night.” Her cheeks colored slightly. “But I can’t, for the life of me, tell you one personal thing about Wendy, and you can’t either.”
Drew opened his mouth to say something, but he couldn’t. He’d stood in line with Wendy for movie tickets and then for popcorn. Wendy had smiled and occasionally nodded in agreement to whatever he and Becky were talking about. He didn’t know whether Wendy liked her job or enjoyed working with children or loved baking something other than Bundt cake.
“Don’t jump in a well without a flashlight, Drew.” Pris scrunched her nose, trying to find the right words, when she should have been peeling the other caterpillar off from her eye. “For all you know, Wendy could be a serial killer.”
Drew had had enough. He turned away. “Someday, that imagination of yours is going to get you in trouble.”
“In the meantime, go see Rupert Harper,” Pris called after him. “Get a good lawyer, not a good wife.”
Chapter Twelve
Good morning.” Beatrice, the receptionist at the Sunshine Retirement Home, greeted Lola on Tuesday.
It’d been two days since Lola had featured Randy and Candy in her window. Two days since she’d breathed the same air as Drew and thought about kissing him.
That was a lie. She’d thought about kissing Drew every time she’d looked at Randy’s mementos. So far, she’d learned nothing new by asking the grocer and the pharmacist if anyone had asked about a lost bracelet, necklace, or earring. But today would be different. Today would be spent with the most talkative and sometimes longest-memoried residents in Sunshine.
“You have a full schedule until three.” Beatrice handed Lola a sheet of paper with her appointments on it. She was a slender woman in her fifties with gray-brown hair that could use a strong relaxer or, at the very least, stronger mousse.
Lola pretended to scan the sheet while she reached into her vest-jacket pocket for the clip-on ruby earring from Randy’s box. Despite Drew and Avery’s advice to the contrary, she couldn’t let her search for the truth go. The best place to find the owner of a clip-on earring was the retirement home. And who saw everyone coming and going? Beatrice.
“Good morning, Ms. Stephens.” Beatrice straightened in her chair before Lola got the earring out of her pocket.
Marcia Stephens entered. She was a well-preserved woman approaching fifty with precisely applied makeup and a thick white-blond bob she tucked behind her ears. A few kinked stragglers floated above her crown, like alert antennae. Marcia volunteered at the retirement home where her mother resided, reading romances to those who could no longer read for themselves. Like her daughter Barbara Hadley, she was always well turned out. Today she wore platform sandals, formfitting white capris, and