Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

honey?” I could have bitten my tongue. Only everything was wrong.
    I said, “I just saw your mom. She said to give you her love and tell you she’ll be home real soon.”
    Actually she hadn’t, and now that I thought about it, that was another thing that was wrong.
    Libby got up and started to walk out of the room. I chugged cabooselike behind her. I said, “Young lady, you answer when I talk to you!”
    She turned around and stared at me in shock. But it was nothing compared to the shock I was in. I sounded like my own first grade teacher. The horrid phrase must have been curled up, dormant, in some sort of mental cocoon. In no way did it resemble a butterfly.
    Libby picked up a ceramic dish from a table that also held a lamp. She threw it hard and I feinted instinctively, a bad move—better the dish had hit me than the wall, which it did.
    “Now look what you’ve done!” I couldn’t believe the sound of my own voice.
    “Shithead!” shouted Libby, and my ears rang as I heard her steps pound up the stairs.
    She wasn’t kidding. “Shithead” about summed it up. I literally couldn’t believe the way I was behaving. Some internal trigger had betrayed me. One cross word from a kid and I turned into instant virago. I sat down, shaking, trying to figure out what to do.
    Ava came in, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Did I hear profanity coming out of that child’s mouth?”
    “I’m afraid I made her mad. I’m sorry.”
    “Where does she
get
that kind of language?”
    “The playground, I guess. All the kids—” But it wasn’t a serious question.
    She sat down and looked me in the eye, getting intimate.
    “That child is
bad
. Has been from the first day they brought her home. Some kids just come out that way. Wouldn’t even nurse, cried all the time, woke up three times every night screaming like a banshee. It was like she was born with a mission—to drive all the adults out of their minds. When she was four years old, she’d take her bath and leave her panties in the bathroom. Can you imagine that? Four years old and still leaving dirty panties on the bathroom floor! When she was a guest in someone’s house!”
    “You don’t like her, do you?”
    Her brown eyes snapped hatred—whether of me or of Libby, I couldn’t tell. “Like her? Whoever heard of not liking a child? She’s like her mother, she needs discipline. She needs to have some boundaries set, and know she can’t cross them. Of
course
she wouldn’t like the person who tries to set them. It’s not that I don’t like her—that’s absurd. Everybody likes children. She doesn’t like
me
, Rebecca. No matter what I do, I can’t get her to warm up to me. My own granddaughter.”
    I was reeling. First from the back-and-forth stances of victim and aggressor, which I’m sure would have taxed a psychotherapist, let alone a mere houseguest. And second, from the concept of Libby’s mother needing discipline—Marty, who resembled a calculator more than a human being while waiting for bail to be set. To Marty, that was all it was—waiting for bail, getting over the next hurdle.
    I had spent a night in jail once—or most of one—and you never heard such a whining and caterwauling. I like to think of myself as no more neurotic than the average, but at the time, I was worried I’d get a venereal disease from the blankets on my bunk. Being in jail brings out the terrified child in you—unless, of course, you’ve been “disciplined” out of most of your emotions.
    I was willing to bet Marty had not only picked up her dirty panties, but rinsed them and mended the lace by age four. After that she’d probably earned enough washing dishes and setting tables to buy new ones in case they wore out from too much scrubbing. And still she couldn’t appease this great maw of judgment and censure.
    I stood up, feeling slightly queasy. “I’d like to take the kids sailing with a friend. Do you think you could clear off a space in the kitchen so I can make a snack for us?”
    I was truly shocked at the edge to my voice. I needed to get along with this woman—she had the power to throw me out of here, and for some stubborn (probably not too healthy) reason, I very much wanted to stay right now, to see the thing through, at least till Marty was released. I had the sinking feeling of wanting desperately to help, and that frightened me, seemed inappropriate; this family had been muddling through one way or another before I came along. Who