Murder, She Muttered

Chapter 4

"You're coming home with me."

I blinked. My mother had brought a flower shop into my room.

"Mom, what are you doing here?"

"My baby is in the hospital and you think I wouldn't be here?"

Rachel Forrester, nee Shapiro was a force of nature and nurture. My lack of height and coloring was all her. When I was younger people always commented that I was my mother's carbon copy. I often wondered if my father had seen how little of himself was imprinted on me and that begun his disinterest.

But he left me almost everything. My hands clenched blankets.

"Baby, are you okay?"

I had to concentrate on my breathing. Just my breath, moving in and out of my lungs. The world was nothing more than that: inhale, hold it, exhale. Do it again.

The world didn't stop but I could feel myself. Outside my hospital room door people walked, had conversations, lived their lives and breathed their air and the world kept going on.

Inside my body the panic ebbed. It was always right there but it moved back into the manageable place. It lived inside me in its own bubble, the goal was never to let the bubble pop.

Apparently it had.

"Where's Carol?"

Mom was standing next to my bed, tension holding her still. "I can find her honey."

"No, stay here." I reached out and she grabbed my hand. "I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare apologize." Her Mama Bear was out and vicious. "This isn't your fault."

"I haven't..."

"I know baby. But this is a lot to handle."

I needed to tell her but the words promised to send me right back into the dark place. "The reason."

"Carolina told me." Mom's face was set. "Nobody in the world is going to think that you killed your father for the money."

"A lot of people will think that Mom."

"She's correct."

Mom jerked and turned as my eyes cut to the doorway.

"Who the hell are you?" Mom demanded.

"Daniel Kang," I said as he did also.

"We need to talk," he said and I nodded and clutched the blankets.

**

"You've become a person of interest."

Her eyes were too big and her skin too pale. This wasn't just a panic attack that put her in the hospital, there was something else. And whatever was happening looked to be more than she could handle.

"I didn't kill him."

"I know." He knew it as surely as he knew what he had for breakfast that morning. She didn't and he was damned sure her sister hadn't done it either. He trusted his instincts as well as he trusted the facts and they all said the same thing.

"Do they think I need the money?"

He almost smiled. Almost.

"This is ridiculous." Her mother was posturing. It would be good to look at her finances also. All the wives. Ex-wives. No matter what, it was almost always about money or sex. And with the very rich, those two could be interchangeable.

"Mom," Aberdeen said warningly.

"Mom nothing," Rachel said. "I'll be damned if anyone is going to call you a murderer."