DOMINION by Bentley Little (interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

Penelope sat back down. In addition to its formality, dinner in their house was also uncomfortably ritualistic, and though she had lived with that every night of her life, it was still something that made her feel slightly uneasy. They dined at precisely seven-thirty every evening, and no matter what any of them were doing, they had to stop at seven, wash up, and change into a green dress. Her mother’s dresses were all identical—simply designed full-length gowns—while hers was slightly different, not quite as expensive. They began each dinner with a song, any song, which they took turns initiating. To leave the table after eating, each of them had to ask the permission of the others; if the decision was not unanimous, the person had to wait. Until she’d been in fifth grade and stayed overnight for the first time at a friends’ house, she had thought all people ate this way. She had even begun to panic when she’d discovered that she’d forgotten to bring her green dinner dress to her friend’s house. But after embarrassing herself by asking detailed questions of her friend’s mother, she’d learned that not everyone ate dinner in such a ritualized manner, that in fact hardly anyone did. The knowledge had made her extremely uncomfortable.

She picked up her empty glass, poured the last few drops of grape juice onto her tongue. She fiddled with her fork.

It was Mother Felice who brought up the subject of Dion.

“So how’s your boyfriend?” she asked casually.

“Dion?”

“Of course.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Her mother’s next question died in her throat. She looked quickly around the table. There was silence.

“Penelope.” Mother Margeaux’s voice was quiet, but it was strong.

Penelope looked toward the head of the table. Mother Margeaux dabbed at her lips with a napkin and replaced the napkin in her lap. In the warm low light of the dining room, her lips looked almost as dark as her hair. The whites of her eyes seemed large as she focused her intense gaze on Penelope.

“I thought you and Dion were dating,” Mother Margeaux said.

Penelope squirmed in her seat. “Not exactly. Not yet.”

“Well, what exactly is your relationship?”

“Why do you want to know?” Penelope felt herself reddening.

Mother Margeaux smiled. “We do not disapprove of Dion. Nor do we disapprove of you going out on dates. We would simply like to know the status of your relationship. After all, we are your mothers.”

“I don’t know,” Penelope admitted. “I don’t know what our relationship is.”

“Are you planning to go out sometime?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“But you do like him?” Mother Felice asked.

“Yes!” She stood, exasperated, embarrassed. “May I be excused? I really do have a lot of homework.”

“Yes, you may be excused.” Mother Margeaux looked around the table.

There were no objections.

Penelope strode quickly from the room, running upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. She had avoided the Big Discussion she’d been anticipating, but her mothers’ quiet probing had been even worse. There seemed something secretive about it, something that made her uneasy. The questions themselves had been innocent enough, but they had been asked in a manner that was anything but innocent, and as Penelope flopped down on her bed, she could not get out of her mind the satisfied way in which Mother Margeaux had smiled.

20

Lieutenant Horton stood in front of the printer and read the report as it ran out. He held up the long roll of perforated paper and frowned as he read the DUI statistics. Up two hundred percent from last month? Up a hundred and ninety-six percent from the same period last year? That wasn’t possible. Someone must have made a mistake. He dropped the paper.

The printer continued to noisily click out its dot matrix, one line at a time.

Now he would have to spend an hour double-checking the input.

He was going to have a lot of comp time accumulated by the time this was all over. In addition to working full-time on the murder investigations, he still had to perform his regular duties, which meant that he was putting in twelve-hour days as well as working weekends.

He took a drink of his lukewarm coffee, put the paper cup down on one of the shelves housing the tech manuals, and bent down to peer through the printer’s smoked plastic window at the latest lines of the report.

Drunk and disorderly arrests up a hundred and fifteen percent.

Something was definitely wrong.

When he had transferred here from San Francisco over a decade ago, Horton had been surprised by the relatively few alcohol-related arrests made in Napa and the surrounding communities. Incidents of public drunkenness, reckless endangerment, DUI, etc., were surprisingly low, particularly for a region so heavily devoted to the production of alcohol. It was as if people, overly conscious of the area’s economic dependence on liquor, made a special effort to behave responsibly when it came to imbibing. It was something that had remained constant during his tenure on the force and which he and everyone else took for granted.

Horton sat down on the low, empty table next to the door and waited for the report to finish printing. He pulled a bottle of Tylenol from his coat pocket, shook out two caplets, and washed them down with the last of the coffee. He didn’t have a headache, but he could feel the blood thumping in his temples and his thoughts were heavy, muffled, coming to him as if through a thick fog.

He stared across the room at a faded poster someone had tacked up on the wall years ago: a stylized cancan girl kicking up her leg in a dance.

The poster reminded him for some reason of Laura, and he found himself wondering what had happened to her. It was not a thought that occurred to him often these days, but even after all these years it was one tinged with more than a hint of sadness. The alimony payments had stopped when she’d remarried, and though he’d thought at the time that he should