Dead over heels - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,17

waiting for me to say something.

I sighed. “Excuse me, I wasn’t paying attention. Could you repeat that?”

“Do you know how to fly an airplane?”

I laughed at the idea. “No,” I said, since he obviously wanted an answer on the record. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in the cockpit of a plane.”

“What about you, Mrs. Youngblood?”

“I had a few flying lessons in Florida,” she said calmly. I noticed Angel’s long fingers were resting across her flat stomach. It was incredible to me that a child could be in such a small space, invisible and unknown to anyone around Angel. What an amazing thing to carry inside you; the other choices were so mundane or deathly, like a cold, or cancer, or appendicitis ...

I had been drifting again.

“. .. you remember the name of your instructor?”

“Bunny Black. She was the owner of this little flying school, Daredevil . . . but we had to move and I never had another chance to get my pilot’s license.”

Dryden was jotting all this down, which was plain ridiculous, since Angel had been standing, both feet very much on the ground, while the plane had been absolutely up in the sky.

I said as much, politely.

He shrugged, and continued to scribble.

If he was this exasperating at home, his wife would take a meat cleaver to him one of these days. I leaned over slightly to check his left hand. No ring. Well, I wasn’t surprised.

Suddenly he looked up from his notebook, his eyes unexpectedly sharp and blue. We stared at each other for what seemed like a very long moment.

I eased back against the chair with an uneasy feeling I’d just contacted Mars.

We continued trolling drearily over the horror of yesterday, with Angel and me unable to add a scintilla of information to what we’d already told the county people. I began to be sorry I couldn’t suddenly recall some amazing fact to tell him. “I just remembered! I had a camera in my hand and I think I clicked the button just as the pilot leaned out of the window of the plane!” I bet that would change the expression on Dryden’s face ...

Shoot, I’d done it again.

“About your relationship with Jack Burns, Ms. Tea-garden ...” Dryden was saying, and I snapped to attention in a very big hurry.

I couldn’t help glancing over at Angel. Her eyes narrowed, she was looking at Dryden carefully, as if deciding where her first blow would fall.

“I never had a relationship with Jack Burns,” I said flatly.

“So it’s not true that he expressed hostility to you publicly on at least two occasions?”

“I didn’t count,” I said flippantly, and was instantly sorry. “Truly, Mr. Dryden,” and I abruptly remembered police remarking in some article I’d read that suspects invariably were lying when they prefaced a statement with “To tell the truth,” or “Honestly.” “To the best of my recollection, Mr. Dryden, I hadn’t spoken to Jack Burns in over two years, so I don’t think you can say that we had a relationship.” Jack Burns had just seen me in the vicinity of too many corpses to suit his strong police sense. He’d felt I just about had to be guilty of something.

But I didn’t want to try to explain this. And I didn’t feel I should have to.

“Mrs. Youngblood, you live in the garage apartment over there?” Dryden pointed with his pencil to the garage, clearly visible out the south windows of the living room.

Angel nodded.

“You rent from Ms. Teagarden here?”

“We live there rent-free in return for helping Roe and Martin.” Angel looked completely relaxed, completely blank. She just almost wasn’t there at all.

“Helping?”

Angel raised her eyebrows very slightly. “We help with the yardwork, I help Roe with her housework, we do all the things you need an extra person to do. Martin travels a lot, and it works out conveniently for Roe.”

I would like to see the day I asked Angel to help me with my housework. But a realistic answer—“We’re bodyguards”—would require a lot more explanation than either of us wanted to give.

“And this working relationship has existed for how long?”

“Oh, come on, what possible bearing can this have on Jack Burns being murdered?” I asked, suddenly sick and tired of the presence of Dryden in my house, the boredom of these interminable and uncomfortable questions. I could think of lots of things I needed to be doing and would rather be doing than this. And Angel’s husband would be home in about ten minutes, and she