Familiar Foe √

15. Familiar Shadows

     Sade moved quickly and purposeful around the living room, cleaning, dusting, rearranging. There was an officer by the staircase as I descended, keeping a close eye on her as she robotically carried out her chores. He saluted as I walked past him to where Sade was puffing cushions.

She turned around and regarded me with an expressionless face, not a drop of sweat on her skin.

"Detective, is there something I can do for you?" She sounded like a customer service agent for some online agency.

She looked a little better generally, her skin was no longer the dull grey it had been a few days ago.

"Yes. I want to talk to you about Theo." The emotions crossed her face too quickly for me to register all of them. I could only see the last one that lingered in her eyes; sadness.

"Go ahead." She nodded curtly.

"I hear you two are engaged and have been dating for over two years. Is that correct?"

"It is." She affirmed.

"I was just wondering how much he knows about your family. Seeing as he is going to be a part of it and all."

She gave me a quizzical look.

"Probably more than I think he does. He was close with my mom, she considered him a son and liked to tell him what we were like growing up. He and Tamara were close for a while too." Until his promiscuity was exposed.

I knew she wasn't going to talk about it and was probably trying not to think about it.

"So it's safe to assume that he knew about the cameras." Her face crunched in thought.

"Yeah, he asked me about them once and likes to make jokes about them." She chuckled fondly as she thought of memories she'd shared with the man she loved.

"I think my mom told him about it."

It puzzled me how he could go and betray not just Sade but her mom like that after all the love they showed him. Some people simply could not be satisfied.

"Is there a problem?" She asked. "Why is it important?"

Because if Theodore Enun knew about the cameras, he'd have known to avoid them and that still left a possibility that he might have murdered Mrs. Coker and for biased reasons, I wanted that possibility. If the woman had told him about something as private as the cameras, who is to say she hadn't told him about the inheritance? The one Sade stood to inherit if her mom was out of the picture. The one he'd have direct access to when they get married.

"It's not. Just cross checking facts." I lied.

"Theodore was here?" There was a hopeful glint in her eyes that I didn't want to get rid of even if it was born out of love for an asshole.

"This place is out of bound to everyone else, Sade. I did speak with him though and he sent his condolence." I was trying to find the line between truth and false hope but when her face fell, it was obvious I hadn't found it.

"I miss talking to him." For the first time, she truly sounded lonely and it made me want to comfort her in a way.

"He is okay." At least that wasn't a lie and she seemed to be okay with it.

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       Saturday morning runs were always a little less fun because the streets were crowded with people finally getting a break from work to stockpile their homes with supplies for the next week and shirtless guys with airpods and fancy shoes sweating down the sidewalks with a smirk as if to say; I'm physically fit, bow down bitches.

Then there were of course the older rich guys who you glance at worriedly because they look like their legs are about to snap into a million pieces but God forbid they let obesity kill them before diabetes does.

I return to the Coker house after 45minutes of huffing and puffing, more agitated because I had forgotten to grab a bottle of water on my way out and was dehydrated. I walked straight into the kitchen to grab one from the fridge but stopped when I found Tamara there in a big polo with a cute doe eyed cartoon printed on the front, sat on the worktop, eyes trained on the wall opposite her.

It was odd to see her quiet and while I was curious, I thought it safer to hydrate before dealing with whatever this was so I proceeded to grab a bottle of water from the fridge and chugged it while leaned on the other side of the marble worktop.

"You seem to know your way around here." She said without much movement.

"It's not hard to recognize a fridge." She turned and smiled.

It wasn't the response I had expected, it was more like her to say something witty. I had a feeling she didn't excel in school not because she wasn't intelligent but because she didn't try.

"Do you know how long I've sat here? Thirty minutes." I raised my brows and cocked my head to the left. She laughed.

"I don't know where they keep the flour, I wanted to make pancakes."  She laughed again, humourlessly this time.

"I don't think I even know where the salt is, I never really spent much time in this kitchen. Just come down, get food, return to my room and chat, all day long."

She spun around to face me, placing her legs on the worktop as well.

"My mom always complained about my phone, she'd issue threat after threat but I could tell they were all empty, she was too soft to cut off my allowance. She used to say that I won't last three days in a man's house because I don't even know what ogu looks like and that I'll be miserable without her to keep cooking for me but I've never had plans of leaving this house. I mean I have everything I need right here." She gestured at the kitchen and then giggled.

"Sometimes I wake up and rush down here, forgetting that she is no longer in this house and I have to make pancakes myself."

"Can you even make pancakes?" I asked and she laughed so hard I feared she'd fall over. She clutched her stomach and wheezed for a while, pointing at me.

"You__ you know I didn't even think of that, my God! Who dash me? Pancakes my ass." She laughed harder and I could see tears slip out the corners of her eyes.

I stood there watching her laugh like she was high off her ass on nitrogen oxide but when she eventually calmed down, it was almost like she hadn't smiled in weeks.

"You know, it's just wild. I never thought about leaving this place but it never felt to me like she could but now she is gone and she was right, I am fucking miserable."

Her legs were curled beneath her and her eyes were looking, past my head at the wall behind me lined with closed cabinets. She seemed eerie, like an apparition, an illusion built to resemble her, unreal. Suddenly, she jumped to her feet and grinned.

"Anyway, I'm going to go torment sister Sade until she agrees to make those pancakes because I've talked about them too much and I just won't feel alright until I've had them."

She dashed out of the kitchen like a hyperactive kid, a ball of sunshine but I could never see her that way.

Tamara Coker was a lot of things; an arrogant cat, a sly fox, a party animal, untrained parrot and a possible murderer but if there was something she wasn't, it was a happy child.

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Long time, yeah?
Honestly I got bored with the story(which isn't new, I'm bored all the time😖) but I promise not to outright drop it.