all. She could have been one of those spirits who embrace heaven and move forward with no regrets and nothing left unsaid.”
“I get that attitude, Bertha, I really do, but have you ever seen anything like it in a murder victim?” Ten sure as hell hadn’t.
“No, I haven’t, and that’s the reason I kept my mouth shut last night. I wanted to learn everything I could about her based on her answers to your questions and the way she treated you.” Bertha’s look turned sour. “If she were alive, I’d call her a stone-cold bitch. You know, one of those Devil Wears Prada types.”
“I’d agree with you there. What’s your next step?” Ten was hoping the other reason Bertha had stayed out of things was because she had a plan for how to go forward with this investigation from her side of the veil.
“I want to see how things go with the girlfriends first, but after we get a temperature check from each of those women, I’ll go and introduce myself. Skye had a grandmother who grabbed her like a chicken nugget up against the five-second rule. Her attitude now could be a result of the way her spirit was coddled when she first got here, or a defense mechanism built up over what happened while she lived with her parents and went to high school.” Bertha shook her head. “High school was awful for every kid from prom queen down to the runt of the litter. No one gets out of it unscathed, not even someone like Skye with her three best friends.”
Something niggling at the back of Ten’s mind finally clicked into place as Bertha spoke about the friends. “You know what was interesting about the diary?”
“What’s that? I read it over your shoulder, so I’m up to speed.”
“Of course you did.” Ten rolled his eyes. “Skye mentioned one friend barfing over the biology frog and another with a cafeteria mishap and the third with bad hair days…”
“But she never mentioned what high school troubles she faced,” Bertha finished for Ten.
“Exactly. That was just one more bizarre thing about this case. Skye was faithful with her entries, but she almost never wrote about herself. Well,” Ten amended, “not until she mentioned this Kyle person.”
“Keep this between the two of us, but when Cole was little and I kicked Corny out, I went to see a psychologist.”
Corny, short for Cornelius, was Bertha’s ex-husband and father to Carson and Cole. He was a deadbeat and a grifter. He’d promised Bertha he would cut the shit when Cole was born, but was only able to keep his promise for a month or two. Bertha kicked him out and never saw him again, which meant neither did Carson or Cole.
“I can understand why you did that. You were a single mom of two, trying to keep yourself, your family, and your business afloat.”
“It wasn’t just that, Tenny. I was angry.” Bertha frowned. “Fuck it. I wanted to kill him.”
Ten’s eyes widened. He was about to call her bluff until he took a minute to read her. Bertha was dead serious. “Why did you feel that way?”
“You know Corny, he was always looking for an angle. For a way to work the situation to his favor, and I was stupid enough to fall for his bullshit. I didn’t want to get together with him after he left me and Carson. Corny worked on me and on my mother’s instinct, proving that he could be a good father and provider. Just when I let him back in, I got pregnant. I wouldn’t trade Cole for anything in the world, but I should have kept my guard up when it came to Corny and his wandering dick.” Bertha’s eyes went glossy. “I believed him when he said he’d be there for us and the new baby because I wanted to, not because he’d given me any proof that he could keep his word or his dick in his pants.”
Ten knew what Bertha was saying. “We’ve all been there with an ex who was too good to be true or who used our own good nature against ourselves. I get being volcanically mad that he made you throw his no-good ass out, but what I don’t get is why you wanted to bump him off.” He hated putting it in words like that, but they were true.
“I might have been psychic, Tenny, but I had no way of knowing if the shop was going to take