The Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Susan McBride Page B

duh .
    She stopped fooling with her hair and gave me a long, slow smirk. “What if I tried, but the lock was broken?”
    Call me gullible, but I went back and checked the mechanism myself, and it seemed perfectly fine. “Nope, it works like a charm.”
    “Really? Silly me.” Kendall laughed, and I lifted my eyes to hers, seeing something in them that made my toes curl.
    Oh, my .
    Suddenly, I had a darned good idea of her true intentions.
    To get nailed being, uh, nailed. Only the wrong person had come along and caught her in a compromising position with Marilee’s boy-toy.
    She’d been shooting for her mother to appear and flip on the light.
    Talk about an attention-getter.
    That certainly would’ve done the trick.
    “You must have a serious death wish,” I scolded, pushing the door shut again and skulking toward the desk.
    She ignored me and tugged at her pantyhose before stepping into a pair of lethal-looking Jimmy Choos. The spiked heels were stiletto-slim and at least four inches high. Kendall obviously liked to live dangerously in more ways than one.
    If Marilee had made her cry earlier, she’d long since dried her tears. She didn’t seem sad so much as spiteful.
    “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
    “Bite me,” she said.
    “Not even if you were a Krispy Kreme.”
    So much for my attempt to reach out to a troubled teen.
    It struck me then that there were good reasons people sent their kids to boarding school. If I were Marilee, I would’ve packed Kendall’s bags and put her on a plane to the most remote location in Vermont long ago, and I wouldn’t pay for her return ticket until she turned thirty.
    Okay, maybe I was being a little harsh, but Kendall’s tough-girl attitude made it hard to like her. Yet I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.
    Perhaps that’s how my mother felt about Marilee.
    As my daddy used to say, that’s called a “pair a ducks.”
    I set down my purse and pulled back the padded leather chair before sinking between its arms. As soon as I turned on the computer, I felt Kendall’s presence behind me. I didn’t turn until I had booted up the program and connected with the web-hosting network for Marilee’s site.
    “I apologize,” she said quietly, a far cry from her snooty tone of moments before. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. You’re not going to rat me out, are you?”
    From “bite me” to contrition in ten seconds flat.
    Yo, Sybil?
    I swiveled around so I could see her face. The heavy black liner around her eyes was smudged, whether from earlier tears or her tryst with Justin, I couldn’t be sure. A tiny diamond glinted from above her right nostril, replacing the usual gold ring. So she’d broken out the formal nosewear. How classy. A small round mole dotted her right cheek where a dimple would have been, if she’d had dimples.
    She had enough blush in the hollow of her cheeks to more than enhance her prominent bone structure, lending her a skeletal air. The black of her hair had inch-wide platinum streaks in it, reminiscent of Lily Munster. She managed to look fragile and frightening at the same time.
    Kendall was so thin her exposed arms seemed all bones and taut ligaments. Her clavicle jutted out above the low-cut line of her cocktail dress, a flashy number that screamed Dolce & Gabbana. Size zero.
    “You can relax. I won’t blab about Justin,” I promised, figuring the girl had enough troubles as it was. Besides, I figured, she didn’t need me making things worse for her. Kendall seemed determined to screw up her life all on her own. “Look, I know you have problems with your mother, but . . .”
    “Problems?” She snorted, cutting me off. “Problems are like one plus one equals two. It’s not that simple. You can’t possibly understand what it means to be the daughter of Marilee Mabry. Everyone assumes she’s so perfect, that she does everything right, and it’s so far from the truth it isn’t funny.”
    “But maybe I do understand,” I