Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman

reprogrammed all the ringers on our various phones so they did anything but ring. They beeped, they twittered, they squawked.
    I left Ruby to her fashion design and went to answer the phone. Kat didn’t even bother to say hello.
    “She says if I even
talk
to them she’ll force me to manage rental units for the next thirty years.”
    “What?” I asked, perplexed.
    “Nahid. My mother-in-law. My
boss
,” she snarled. “Shecaught me going through the computer looking for Felix’s phone number. She freaked. I mean, freaked.”
    “Why? What did you tell her?”
    “I didn’t tell her anything.” Kat paused. “Okay, I told her that we’d decided to approach Felix to see if he’d be interested in a quiet sale.”
    “You what?” I’m ashamed to say I shouted. “Why? Why would you tell her?”
    “You don’t understand the woman,” Kat shouted back. “She’s a
djinn!
I couldn’t help it. I had to tell her.”
    Now, Peter’s mother and I weren’t friends. I had never managed to muster sufficient interest in her Hummel figurine and Beanie Baby collections even to feign a relationship. Did I think Peter’s mother was crazy? Sure. Did I find her irritating? Definitely. But even I had never thought of the woman who insisted on being called “Mother Wyeth” as being a demon capable of assuming both human and animal form. But then, perhaps I’d change my tune if I had to work for her.
    “It’s okay,” I said to Kat.
    “No it’s not,” she groaned. “You loved that house. We’ll never find you anything like it again.”
    “Spoken like a true real estate agent.”
    “Oh, shut up.”
    We both sighed at the same time, and then giggled half-heartedly.
    “I’m not giving up,” I said.
    “I am.”
    “Look, I’m not afraid of Nahid. She can’t hurt
me
, I’m not married to her son.”
    “But I can’t get Felix’s number. And even if I could, I can’t give you any kind of introduction. She’d kill me.”
    “There’s got to be another way to get to him. Once he hires me, what’s she going to do?”
    “Sic the forces of evil on you. Curse you and all your progeny for a thousand years.” Kat didn’t exactly sound like she was kidding, but I laughed anyway.
    “You, butt out, okay?” I said. “You’re no longer involved. The next thing you’re going to do is cash your commission check. Other than that, you’re an innocent bystander.”
    She grunted. “Yeah, she’ll believe
that.
”
    “She’ll have to. It’s the truth.”
    I hung up the phone and peeked a head into the kitchen. “How long until dinner?” I asked. Peter and Isaac were lying on their backs on the kitchen floor, their faces covered with flattened pancakes of raw pizza dough.
    “Like, ten minutes,” my husband said, his voice muffled.
    “We’re monsters that don’t have any faces!” Isaac said, lifting up a corner of his mask. “Get it?”
    “I do. You definitely scared me.”
    “But you didn’t scream!”
    I obliged with a howl of shock and fear, and went back out to the living room. After a minute, I dialed my friend Stacy, the one person I knew who was sure to have a way in to Felix.
    Stacy and I have been friends since college, when our competitive natures and single-minded ambition forced us either to become enemies or intimates. We’d chosen the latter, and had spoken pretty much every day for the last seventeen years. We’d gone to graduate school together at Harvard—me to the law school and Stacy to the business school. She’d moved out to LA as soon as she’d graduated, taking a job at ICA, one of Hollywood’s top agencies. She’dsoared up through the ranks, swiftly becoming a star at the agency. Through the first years of our careers we were pretty evenly matched, Stacy and I, although she always made much more money than I did. Despite that financial disparity, we excelled at more or less the same pace. I won my first jury trial, Stacy signed her first major star. I appeared on NPR to discuss a