Board Stiff: A Dead-End Job Mystery by Elaine Viets Page A

swore my oath on the Missouri Revised Statutes. But it was still binding.
    I tossed my wedding ring in the Mississippi and left everything behind, driving in crazy crisscrosses around the country. Only Kathy knew how to reach me. My own mother thought I should forgive Rob and go back to him. Somewhere in Kansas, I traded in my Lexus for a clunker. It died in Fort Lauderdale. That’s how the Coronado became my home and Margery the mother I should have had.
    Rob searched for me relentlessly. He wanted his money. If he’d worked as hard to find a job, he would have been a millionaire. My ex finally trapped me when I went back to St. Louis for Mom’s funeral.
    Funny, wasn’t it? Mom brought us together again. They were buried the same day.
    Helen looked up and realized the Igloo was behind a flatbed truck loaded with concrete burial vaults.
    My mother’s casket is in a vault like those, she thought. Rob is sealed under the concrete of the church hall basement. Both of them were buried in the church.
    A horn blast brought Helen back to the present. She saw the Riggs Beach exit, swung across two lanes and soon found herself at the pier parking lot.
    Once again, Helen couldn’t bury her terrible memories. The air in the Igloo felt dirty and bitter, but she knew Sybil’s cigarette smoke wasn’t to blame. She would never rid herself of her ugly role in Rob’s burial.
    Helen stepped out and breathed in the soft ocean air. She saw Phil at Sunny Jim’s, pulling a yellow paddleboard off the rack for a dreadlocked beach bunny. As she got closer, Helen saw the young woman had roses tattooed on her pale back and a green lizard on her foot. The lizard’s tail wrapped around her ankle.
    Helen found the reptile oddly appealing. The woman’s pale skin was a good canvas for the needle artist’s work. The roses-and-lizard woman insisted on carrying her own board to the water, so Phil loped alongside with her paddle and made sure she had the life jacket on her board.
    Sunny Jim was leaning against his trailer, pulling frantically at his frizzy hair and talking on his cell phone. As she got closer, Helen heard him say, “Are you sure?”
    Then he punched his fist in the air and said, “Yes! I knew it. Thanks for telling me.”
    Phil rejoined Jim and Helen. Jim clicked off and smiled for the first time since Ceci died. “That was Becky, the nurse at Riggs Beach hospital,” he said. “She told me Ceci Odell was murdered.”
    “What? She couldn’t have been,” Helen said. She felt like she’d been walloped with a wet towel.
    “She was. The ME said so,” Jim said. “Becky read me the autopsy report. It said she was stabbed twice in the back by a knife with a serrated edge, like a dive knife.”
    “Stabbed in the back?” Helen said. “Are you sure? I saw a cut on her forehead.”
    “That was there, too,” Jim said. “The stab wounds went through two right ribs, lacerated the right lung and slashed some large vessels. They bled into her chest cavity and gave her a hema-something.”
    “Hemathorax?” Phil guessed.
    “That’s it,” Jim said.
    “Did Ceci drown, or did the stab wounds kill her?” Phil asked.
    “She had salt water in her lungs,” Jim said. “She might have been breathing for a little bit, but the stab wounds were enough to kill her. I don’t know if she was conscious.”
    Now Helen felt sick. The sun seemed unbearably hot. “That poor woman,” she said. Those three useless words were all she could manage.
    “You gotta find out who murdered Ceci,” Jim said.
    “How? You saw her die,” Phil said. “We were all there when it happened. There was nobody in the water near her. Her husband is the main suspect, and he was sitting on the beach in front of us.”
    “Somebody killed her,” Sunny Jim said. “Maybe Daniel Odell hired the killer. Or one of my competitors did.”
    He must have seen the doubt on their faces. “I know what people say about me. They think I’m paranoid and my enemies are all