Good, Clean Murder by Traci Tyne Hilton Page A

wondered, with a
little smile, if she could get extra credit for finding out who had killed the
Crawfords.
     

Jane had managed to
get all of her clients cleaned despite the additional work that came with
cooking for Marjory and Jake. By the time Friday night class rolled around,
Jane felt tired, but satisfied. The fluorescent flickers and the aroma of dust
greeted her like an old friend. She had made it back to class again after the
most trying week of her life. However, try as she might, she still struggled to
pay attention to the whole lecture.
    Three hours of
lecture was long at the best of times, but when trying to sort out the major
players in a suspicious death, plot a plan to retrieve her confiscated
belongings, and keep her face from blushing magenta every time she looked at
the tall, dark, and disarming lecturer, it was a Herculean event. And she
wasn’t Hercules.
    Hercule Poirot,
perhaps, but not Hercules.
    She had a list of
people she needed to talk to about Pam and Bob, and next to each name she had
noted what she knew of their psychology.
    Since she had
grown up with Phoebe and Jake at their exclusive Christian prep school, they
were easy.
    Jake: lazy,
self absorbed, emotionally stunted. She scribbled possible motives onto her
paper next to his name, but they seemed foolish. Seize power of the company.
Scratch. If it had been a motive he certainly hadn’t exerted himself to do it.
Escape being sucked into the family company? That one seemed more likely, but
with Bob’s plans to shut the burger business down being public it seemed
unnecessary. What company was Jake at risk of being sucked in to? Unless she
came up with something better than the last one on the list, “Erratic behavior
indicates mental imbalance,” Jake was not her first suspect.
    She considered
Phoebe. Despite being on campus at a university a mere two miles from her
parents’ home she hadn’t been seen since the deaths were reported. Well, Jane
had to admit, she herself hadn’t seen Phoebe, but Jake, Marjory, or any number
of their other family members may have. Under psychological notes Jane listed:
Determined, driven, hardworking. In general those were good qualities and only
applied, as far as Jane knew, to Phoebe’s soccer career. The notebook paper
line allocated for motive was blank. Why would Phoebe want her parents dead?
They were paying a pretty penny so she could play soccer for a team that had
recently won the national championship. One doesn’t hamstring one’s gravy
train, usually.
    Marjory was a
different story. Marjory, Bob’s sister-in-law via her marriage to his deceased
brother, had grabbed the reins of the business that had funded her lifestyle
all these years. When William had passed away, his shares had gone to her. Or were
they shares? Is that what it was called? Jane had to admit that she didn’t know
what kind of financial stake Marjory had in Roly Burgers.
    Financial stake.
Marjory wanted status quo…that’s what Jane had gleaned from the bits of
conversation that had fallen by the wayside. If she were financially dependent
on the burger business would she have been willing to kill to keep it running?
    Or, by status quo,
did Marjory really mean they needed to continue Bob’s plan to shut it down?
Jane picked through her memories of overheard conversations.
    Jane scribbled big
X’s across all of her notes. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her business, and it
was distracting her from the real and present danger of not getting her lock-box
with her emergency credit card back from the apartment. Plus her futon, privacy
screen, side table, locally-sourced honey mustard, alarm clock, iPod, swimsuit,
Excedrin migraine, shower foof, the OED on CD Rom and Nave’s Topical Bible. She
stopped. Was that all she owned in the world besides the junk in her car and
the laundry that she had finally managed to wash? No, she also had the complete
works of L M Montgomery, a hummingbird feeder, a pair of Gucci sunglasses,