Turn up the Heat

you made!’ ”
    It was true that Heather had resorted to expressions so old-fashioned that it was embarrassing to be caught in public with her. She said stuff like “Heavens to Betsy, that cab driver almost ran us over!" and “Goodness sake’s alive, what a bozo!”
    “Just work on it, Ade. Okay, the first thing we should do is get all these boxes into the rooms they’re supposed to be in. Why don’t you take a breather, and I’ll do that.” I didn’t want pregnant Adrianna moving anything larger than a salad bowl. I made her sit down. “Give me ten minutes, and then we can move some furniture.”
    I successfully pushed boxes down the hall into the bedroom but ran into problems in the galley kitchen, where the boxes were too wide to fit in at all. Ade started unpacking the kitchen boxes just outside the tiny area. Meanwhile, I shifted boxes from the living room into the hallway so we could arrange furniture in the living room before moving the boxes back.
    Ade stood in a corner and directed me. “The couch should go here, in front of the window.” I heaved and pushed and prayed I wasn’t scratching the wood floors. So much for a security deposit. “And obviously the coffee table in front of it.” More pushing. “And this armchair facing the window. Then the TV stand can go here. I’ll let Owen hook up the whole sound system later.”
    “See, this is better already,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow.
    “I think Owen will like how we’ve set this up. I can’t wait until he gets home! I’m dying to hear about his meeting. It’s so nice that he’s finally found a regular job. Remember when he worked for that blimp company? But I really think the puppeteer was the worst. I thought I’d spend my life surrounded by freaky marionettes with wooden jaws. And at least this delivery job isn’t boring. You know how Owen isn’t a desk-job kind of person, and with the Daily Catch, he’s always on the move driving, delivering, talking with people. It’s really perfect for him.”
    Another Psychopathy Checklist item: “Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom.”
    Ade continued talking happily as she cut open a box of books. “Once he’s able to buy his own truck, his commission will increase, and all these big accounts will get even bigger!”
    Owen already had his own truck! Another checklist item: “Pathological lying. Lack of realistic, long-term goals.” Owen was certainly lying about quite a bit these days. The debt he’d gotten himself into suggested that he was being completely unrealistic about the future. The DSM’s antisocial personality criteria included the “failure to conform to social norms.” Owen was one of the most nonconformist dressers I knew; he drove according to his own idiosyncratic traffic rules; and his odd career path, no matter how amusing, was hardly the steady work that the DSM and the checklist valued.
    And what about Adrianna’s stealing? Was it as harmless as she thought? Hers was yet another name to add to the list of people Leandra might have witnessed taking Gavin’s possessions from Simmer. Leandra sounded like someone who’d have taken nasty delight in reporting even a single incident of thievery to Gavin. If she’d seen Ade making off with restaurant property, she might have threatened Owen with the knowledge.
    Even worse, Leandra had worked in restaurants for quite a while and could easily have heard the gossip that Josh had passed along to me: that Owen had bought his truck and that he was lying about the quality and quantity of his seafood accounts. Leandra and Kevin, I remembered, had worked together somewhere. Digger and Lefty had both known her. She could easily have tapped into the restaurant grapevine. I was sure that Leandra would’ve enjoyed confronting Owen with what she knew and making him squirm. Because Owen was determined to provide for his new family, he would have interpreted her slightest taunts as major threats; and in a person with a psychopathic personality, the result might have been homicide. Owen, in a fit of protective rage, yanked out his stolen apron and choked the life out of Leandra!
    Okay, I had my doubts. Still, I simply had to have a frank discussion with Owen about his recent behavior. Adrianna deserved better than lies, and Owen had to let her know what he had been up to. I’d worked hard at Adrianna’s, but I’d worked efficiently. Maybe it was still early enough in the day for me to get to Simmer before Owen