For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,36

video games tonight. You’re not playing video games tomorrow night. And you’re not playing video games the night after that. You choked somebody at school, and you have to pay the price for it. Now, go to your room and shut up!” Abby was frowning at me. She thought this was her argument and didn’t want to see it degenerate into what she calls “a scene.”

Ethan, despite having heard this speech before, had the nerve to look surprised. “It’s not FAIR!” he bellowed, and ran back up to his room. Abby folded her arms and looked at me, a 43-year-old man pointing a menacing finger at a pre-teen no longer in the room, his eyes wide, his teeth tightly clenched. I couldn’t see them, but I would have bet that the veins in my neck were sticking out about four inches. I was moments away from hyperventilating.

“Nice work, Dad,” she said.

Chapter 21

Diane Woolworth was a fifty-ish woman who clearly wished she had been born in a Jane Austin novel. Her home was awash in dark maroons, royal purples, doilies, and tea sets, and her manner was that of a woman who should have been living in England, but by accident had been set down in suburban New Jersey. If she had been able to pull it off, she would have spoken with a British accent, like Madonna.

I had spent the bulk of Wednesday morning ringing doorbells on Beckwirth’s street, and being told politely by local residents that they hadn’t heard a damn thing on the night in question.

Once in a while, I’d hit a house where the doorbell was not answered. These were generally the ones with no vehicle in the driveway, indicating either that some rich people in Midland Heights actually work for a living, or need two incomes to be rich.

Occasionally, the residents who answered the door were not quite so polite, like the guy who told me to “get lost” because he was “sick and tired of snooping assholes asking questions about the bitch across the street.” Not Noel Coward, I’ll grant you, but certainly to the point.

Diane Woolworth’s doorbell was the third-from-the last one on the block, but the first whose owner had invited me in for a cup of tea (which I declined—if anything, tea actually tastes worse to me than coffee). And—I swear on all that is pure and decent—she also offered me a “crumpet.” I don’t mean the Tastykake kind with the butterscotch frosting on the top, either.

“You’re looking into poor Mrs. Beckwirth, then, are you, Mr. Tucker?” Diane asked, stirring the fat-free milk (you can’t call it “skim” anymore) into her tea. “The poor woman. I can’t imagine what might have happened to her.”

It occurred to me to ask why she’d invited me in if she had no information, but one thing a reporter learns is to let people talk. They’ll eventually say something you can use, even if they don’t intend to. Especially if they don’t intend to. So I sat back and took a bite of my crumpet, which is the dirtiest sentence I’ve ever committed to paper. (A crumpet, by the way, is nothing more than an English muffin that has a publicist.)

“You know, I used to see her out in her garden with her gardener, telling him where to put the shrubbery,” Diane continued. “You get used to seeing someone, and then just out of nowhere, they’re gone. Unsettling, it is.”

The lamentations went on for a few more minutes while Diane drank two cups of “very nice tea” and offered me another crumpet, which I declined. I began to wonder if my reporter’s tricks would come up short this time, and I’d just walk away with a crumpet-enhanced waistline and no additional information.

Just when I was about to stand and thank Diane for her hospitality, her daughter Jane, about 22 and one tattoo short of a biker chick, stormed down the main hall stairs and into the dining room, where Diane and I were having our very nice tea and crumpets. It was as if Freddy Krueger had wandered onto the set of The Remains of the Day.

She was short—around five-foot-one—not slim, dressed in old, unwashed jeans, an Aerosmith T-shirt, and no bra. Her feet were bare, and had last been washed when I was still a real investigative reporter. I was willing to bet that beside her ears and her nose, there were other parts of Jane that were pierced, but I was better off not speculating