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“Isn’t a skeleton, like, an old body that lost its pep? Like a certain person we know?” She cocked an eyebrow at Vesta, who decided to ignore the slur.

“I’m sure that skeleton has been there forever. From what my daughter told me it’s probably been there from when the house was built, way back in the fifties.”

“Is that right?” said Scarlett, clearly not believing a word of this. “I’ll bet it’s that no-good husband of yours. Do you think the police are going to exhume his coffin now? To find out if it’s really Jack we buried, or a pile of bricks?”

Vesta directed her most fiery glare at the woman.“How dare you speak of my husband like that?”

“Well, he was my husband as much as he was yours, now, wasn’t he? At least in the biblical sense.”

She had half a mind to grab the woman’s blond hair and give it a good pull, to find out once and for all if it was a wig or her real hair, but restrained herself with a powerful effort. Tex had recently reminded her, after a similar altercation with Scarlett, that she was the public face of this office, and that if she misbehaved itreflected badly on him, and might even put him out of business. She’d argued that, if anything, a fight put bodies in seats, as everybody likes a good scuffle, and none more so than those cheapskate patients of his, who never enjoyed their entertainment more than when it was free of charge. So heshould probably give her a pay raise each time she and Scarlett squared off.

Scarlet had casually taken a small black object from her purse and placed it on the counter.“Oh, look at the time,” she said. “I have to be going.” And then, before Vesta’s widening eyes, she folded the object open and the screen suddenly doubled in size.

It was a foldable smartphone—the holy grail of smartphones.

“Where did you get that?” she demanded heatedly.

“Oh, Dick Bernstein gave it to me,” said Scarlett.

“No way,” said Vesta. “Dick gave one to me.”

“I know! But you broke it, didn’t you?” She held up the nifty little gadget and tapped at the screen with her freakishly long fake nails. “So lucky for him he was fully insured, so he bought himself another one.”

“And then gave it to you? Has he lost his mind?”

Scarlett shrugged.“He knows I’m more careful with his gifts than you are.”

“Can I help it if he gave me a lemon?”

“The story he told me was that you dropped it in the soup.”

“It broke first. I only dumped it in the soup to put out the fire.”

“A likely story,” said Scarlett with a little laugh, and once again Vesta had to suppress a strong inclination to put her hands around the woman’s neck and squeeze. “At least he gifted me this phone. He only loaned you his, before you decided to dunk it in your soup.”

“I’m telling you, it broke and caught fire!”

“Yes, well, I guess that’s your story and you’ll stick to it, won’t you? But Dick was pretty cross, Vesta. He said he’s never coming near you again. And I can’t blame him. First you go and destroy his nice new phone, and then the police start finding dead bodies in your basement, so… Well, I must be off now. Give my love to Tex, will you?”

“Didn’t you need to make an appointment about something? Those hemorrhoids of yours, for instance?”

Shocked, Scarlett glared at her.“I don’t have hemorrhoids.”

“You don’t? So maybe one of your fake boobs sprang a leak?”

Scarlett’s lips drew together into a thin line, which was an amazing feat, given the fact that they were stuffed to the gills with collagen. “One day, Vesta, something really nasty will happen to you. Something that’s gonna knock that mean streak you got right out of you. And when it does, you’ll need a friend, and you’ll be sad to discover you don’t have any friends. You managed to scare them all away with that forked tongue of yours.”

“Oh, just buzz off, will you? And tell Dick his phone is a piece of junk.”

“I will tell him no such thing. And when we’ve been going steady for a month, and he gifts me a diamond necklace, I’ll tell him he’s much better off with me than he ever was with you. If he’d stayed with you he probably would have found himself murdered and stuffed down your basement, andthat skeleton they found is living proof I’m right.”

And with this powerful harangue she was finally off, slamming the door as she went.

“Skeleton… living proof,” Gran muttered with a grin as she wrote down the gist of the conversation. She’d been keeping a diary for a while now, all colorful stories about the colorful people that inhabited this colorful town of hers. Odelia often borrowed from her observations for her pieces in theGazette. She could have used a note-taking app on her phone, of course, but with the NSA spying on every phone in existence, she didn’t need her deepest darkest secrets being salivated over by some government pencil pusher.

Having preserved Scarlett’s words for posterity, she picked up her phone and called her daughter. Marge picked up at the first ring. “So who the hell is that dead body?”

Chapter 9