Quiet in Her Bones Singh, Nalini (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

“Oh, yeah. Number two.” Another giggle. “He didn’t have much with wife number one, but he was rich by number two. He made me sign a prenup. Boo.” She sounded like she was pouting.

“Oh, so he would’ve been in a bad financial position after the divorce?”

“Which one?” Mellie began to hum dreamily.

“The second one.”

“No.” Another giggle. “He hides money.” It was a whisper. “Thinks I don’t know but I found statements and Margaret figured it out. She says he’s had pots and pots of it for ages. In places like the Cayman Islands.”

“How much do you mean?”

“Millions.” A small clattering sound. “Oopsie, dropped the lipstick.” More humming. “Poor wife two didn’t know. She thought she won the battle because he had to buy her out of this house and give her a few hundred grand.”

I crossed Isaac’s name off my mental list of suspects; yes, there was a tiny chance he’d been my mother’s lover, but I couldn’t really see it. Isaac went after voluptuous ­blondes—­every single wife had fit the template. “Good luck with Isaac.”

“Uh-­huh.”

After hanging up, I wondered why Mellie’s ­infidelity—­if it was that, and not just some communal ­pot-­smoking—­didn’t bother me. Maybe because her relationship with Isaac had always felt superficial. All gloss with nothing underneath.

The question about Isaac answered, I turned my mind to a far harder task, and called the local funeral director. The voice that came on the line was warm and soothing, a woman with ­long-­term experience dealing with grieving relatives. When I identified myself, the pause was minuscule but present.

Apparently even experienced funeral directors didn’t expect to plan the funeral of a woman whose name was currently all over the media.

“Of course, that’s not a problem at all,” she said, recovering quickly. “If you wish, we can arrange to pick up the remains directly from the police. When would you like to hold the service?”

After deciding on the date, the funeral director asked me when might be a good time to meet to go over the details of the service.

Details.

Like her favorite song, or photos of her for a montage. Normal things children did. I barely kept myself from laughing, suddenly conscious of attempting to at least act normal.

Since I hadn’t figured out where to go from here when it came to finding my mother’s murderer, I sat down after the call to gather the photos for the montage. After my mother’s disappearance, my father had told me he was throwing out all the physical albums and deleting all the digital images that featured ­her—­if I wanted anything, I had the day to grab it.

I’d taken it all, then scanned the ­non-­digital images into the cloud. Now her face filled the screen over and over again. My mother in a cocktail gown. In a day dress with Diana by her side. In that ­halter-­neck ­one-­piece yellow swimsuit. She was crouched beside me on the beach, our hair damp and our skin glowing.

Her head was lifted in a laugh, no bite or anger to her.

This was who she could’ve been if Ishaan Rai had been a different man.

“Don’t make up stories about me, Ari.” Wicked laughter in my ear. “You know I had a craving inside me that nothing could fulfil. Maybe it came from a bachpan of never having enough, but I wanted everything.”

She’d never said those words to me, but they rang as clearly in my head as if she were sitting right next to me.

My hand clenched on the external mouse paired to my laptop, highlighting the image of us on the beach and saving it in the file for the ­funeral director. This was the mother I’d loved, the mother I wanted to remember.

I scrolled on.

As I aged, she grew more glamourous and impossibly more beautiful. Her smiles stopped being as ­wide-­open, and began to hold the edge of a secret. Her body turned sleeker, her cheekbones sharper.

I paused on an image of her in a blue gown, champagne in hand. She was looking straight at the ­camera … straight at me. I’d taken this photograph downstairs, when my parents had friends over for drinks and canapés. I hadn’t been allowed to stay long, had spent the short time taking snapshots.

“Do you want to try champagne, Ari?” A whisper, sparkling eyes, before she switched to Hindi and said, “I’ll sneak you a taste.”

“No.”

“No?” Laughter. “What a good beta I have.”

What she’d had was a son who’d seen her drunk more than once. Alcohol was a smell that had lodged in my lungs and on my tongue, until I thought I’d never get rid of it. Then I’d fallen into its arms, just another casualty of the need to go numb, forget.

I saved the photo.

40

I also saved photos of my mother with her parents.

Most were sepia snapshots she’d carried with her to her new home, but she’d also traveled back to India twice. I’d gone with her when I was about five; my strongest memory from that time was of sitting with my grandmother around an outside fire at dawn while a cow lowed nearby and the last of the stars faded from the sky. The fields had been full of corn, the air a rustle of green stalks.

“Why don’t you bring Nana and Nani to visit us?” I’d asked her once.

“Oh, mera pyara beta,” she’d said, her fingers sliding over my cheek.

That’s all the answer I’d ever gotten: Oh, my sweet boy.

But the older I grew, the less I’d needed her to put the truth into words. In their neat little home in rural India, complete with a shiny TV that my mother had sent them the money to buy, new tiled floors, and pretty curtains, my grandparents could imagine that their daughter was living a glorious life “abroad” with a wonderful, generous husband.

My father had been generous with his money in one ­sense—­he’d set up accounts at designer boutiques all over the city. My mother could always