Sprayed Stiff Read Online Free

else. What kind of people would choose to raise kids here? Gargoyles perched on corners of the gables; bloodthirsty-looking, six-foot-tall lions guarding the front steps. I knew I was going to have nightmares, and I was thirty-one. I tried not to imagine little five-year-old, artistic Lexa catching a ball in the yard and looking up into one of those pointy-toothed faces. I was amazed it had taken her this long to go loopy, having to sleep here night in and night out.
    The house—castle, mausoleum, whatever you wanted to call it—certainly made a statement. To me, it screamed, “Run for your life!”
    I’m going to learn to listen to my intuition one day. It just wasn’t going to be this day.
    “Psst!”
    I’d gone around the back of the house as instructed and saw Lexa’s slim, pale arm beckoning me from a doorway. I parked the truck next to Lexa’s battered old orange Pinto and got out. I considered locking the doors, then scoffed at myself. Although the three-car garage about forty yards from the house could hide the Barristers’ cars, no others were evident on the premises. No party was happening, that was for sure, not unless they’d been bused in.
    “Psst! Reyn, hurry, please!”
    “I’m coming,” I assured her as I slammed the truck door shut and stepped around a fifteen-pound (five of them hair) gray and white cat who’d slid out the door and was now winding around my ankles in an overly friendly manner that made me instantly suspicious. I like cats, but I’ve got to say, they are a little sneaky. They are the only animals on earth with an ulterior motive.
    “Guinevere,” Lexa called. “Leave Reyn alone.”
    Guinevere? Now I knew her ulterior motive—she wanted to find a new home where she would be named Fluffy or Mouser or something much less fatuous. With my new best friend between my legs, I walked to the door like a cowboy after a ten-day cattle drive. Lexa grabbed my forearm and drew me into a kitchen lit only by a couple of night-lights. Guinevere came, too, and I nearly tripped and fell over her as I made my way into a chef’s paradise. The kitchen had not one, not two, but three islands—one with a built-in cutting board, one with an eight-burner stove, and one that was plain countertop, albeit two-hundred-dollar-a-foot Texas pink granite countertop—probably where Wilma let the servants eat. Perfectly polished copper pots that had never graced a burner hung from racks. Four ovens banked the back wall. The gleam of a chrome Sub-Zero refrigerator/freezer could be seen at the end of the cavernous room. This was a kitchen for the Four Seasons, not the private home of a family of three, one of whom was skinny enough to be on the verge of anorexia. I reached up to the wall to flip a light switch, but Lexa caught my hand. Okay. Maybe they were into energy conservation—in a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion. Right.
    “Where is everybody?” I asked. This kind of space required reinforcements. No three people could keep this much kitchen clean.
    “The help?” Lexa asked. I held my hands out, palms up, hoping she would volunteer the whereabouts of everyone she could think of. I didn’t want to catch Mr. “Predestined for the Bar” Barrister in his skivvies in the hall. Lexa’s eyes shifted to the closed doors that led, presumably, to the rest of the house. “The staff?” She paused, distracted, then her eyes cleared. “Micah does the yard; he leaves at dark. Cindy is our house manager…”
    “House manager”? Was that the current politically correct term for “maid”?
    Lexa must not have noticed my eye roll. “…she goes to her sister’s for dinner every Wednesday night. Mr. and Mrs. Carricales, the butler and cook, live in. But it’s their night off. They usually go watch their grandkids at flamenco class, get some enchiladas at Blanco Café, then play bingo down on West before heading home.”
    Suddenly she gasped and grabbed my forearm again, dragging me through the French