Real Murder (Lovers in Crime Mystery Book 2) by Lauren Carr Page A

people, being killed. But someone has to make the hard decisions. I can only pray that the decisions I make are the best ones overall.”
    “I’m talking about a kid making a foolish, purely selfish decision that cost a good man his life.”
    “What decision was that, Mrs. Gardner?”
    “Ava was a fool.” Her face was hard. “A selfish fool. Her boyfriend, Douglas O’Reilly, got appointed to West Point. He went away. She was scared to death that she was going to lose him, so the next summer, when he came home, she got herself pregnant.”
    “Got herself …”
    “She seduced him with the intention of getting pregnant and then forcing him to marry her,” Mrs. Gardner said. “She was sixteen years old and so wrapped up in herself that she thought that he would take her back to West Point as his wife.”
    “Wives can’t live on campus—”
    “This was nineteen sixty-six,” she said. “You couldn’t be a cadet at West Point and be married. In order to marry her, Doug would have had to drop out of West Point. Or, to stay  in school, he would have had to abandon her. He was nineteen. Back then, if he had done that, he could have been charged with statutory rape, which would have gotten him kicked out.” She dropped her head. “The morning after she told him, he was found in his Mustang at the bottom of Raccoon Creek. Everyone knew that Ava drove him to kill himself. I was already married to Lyle. After she had the baby, we moved here, hoping that people wouldn’t know about  it. Ava blamed herself … I guess. She was completely lost. Next thing I knew, she was one of Dolly’s girls.”
    “Dolly’s girls?” Joshua asked.
    “Private club out by the race track in Newell,” she said. “Dolly’s. The girls would dance for the customers and then, if they wanted something extra …”

“My father dealt in libations.”
    “Libations?” Cameron fought the tug at the corners of her mouth at the old-fashioned term Dolly used to describe her father’s business.
    The inside of Dolly Houseman’s red brick colonial home was exactly as the detective had imagined. It was neat, tidy, and old. Cameron guessed that the décor was like a flashback to the 1940s, or maybe even to the 1930s.
    Jan had unsuccessfully tried to give her an out. “You look tired,” she noted when Cameron climbed out of the SUV along with Dolly. “The doctor said you shouldn’t exert yourself. You really should rest.”
    “I’ll go home and rest after visiting with Dolly,” Cameron said with a slam of the door before taking the elderly woman’s arm to help her up the sidewalk to her porch.
    Lorraine, who appeared to still be stewing about Dolly’s comment at lunch, had climbed out of her seat in the front of the SUV and closed the door.
    “Lorraine,” Jan objected, “I’ll drive you home.”
    “No need to,” Lorraine replied over her shoulder while storming up the hill to her home, which was on the street behind Dolly’s house. “I’ll walk.”
    “But I was plan—”
    “I’m old, not crippled,” Lorraine shot back.
    With a sigh, Jan climbed into the driver’s seat of the  SUV, put it in gear, and pulled it into her driveway across the street and next door to the Thornton’s three-story stone home.
    After Cameron took a seat on the Queen Anne style sofa, Dolly placed a photograph album in her guest’s lap.
    “Is Ava’s picture in here?” Cameron opened the cover to look at the first picture.
    “If she isn’t in this album, she’s definitely in another one.” Dolly tottered over to the bookcase against the wall and peered at the album covers. “I have pictures of all my girls.”
    Cameron let out a gasp and instinctively reached for her gun, which she forgot she didn’t have strapped to her hip, when there was an abrupt movement next to the sofa.  A black and white body leapt from the floor to land on the arm of the sofa. With a sigh of relief, she realized it was Irving who had tucked his head under her