Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month by Elizabeth C. Main Page B

today?”
    “Right. They all went to Juniper High—Gil, Vanessa, Harley, and Kurt. They were even in the same class, which seemed to make Kurt particularly mad at the indictment.”
    “So I gathered. He thinks the D.A. was too hard on his son?”
    “Max did set off a bomb in the school.”
    “A smoke bomb. There’s a difference.”
    “But people can’t just go around setting off bombs. You’re an officer of the court, aren’t you? You must agree with that.”
    “I was also a boy once, and I have a couple of rambunctious sons. Maybe I’d like to hear the defense’s side of things before I decide whether to hang this kid out to dry.”
    “The case was supposed to be pretty clear-cut.”
    “I didn’t think anything relating to kids was clear-cut,” he countered.
    “Spoken like a true parent,” I acknowledged. With everything that had been going on since the book club meeting, I’d been able to put Bianca out of my mind, but now she was back.
    “That’s two down,” Nick said. “Now, what’s the problem with your date for the reunion, other than that he’s a stuffed shirt?”
    “Would you quit saying that? Harley is a very nice man. Anyway, I think I can handle dating questions without your help.”
    The phone on the wall behind me rang, and Nick waved a hand in farewell as I turned to answer it. The hollow, crackling line told me immediately that Emily was weighing in from Peru.
    “Mom? Mom? What’s all this about Bianca?”

 
Chapter 7
     
     
    Early the next morning I drove toward the dilapidated trailer Bianca called home, rehearsing my pledge not to confront her. If I failed to remain calm, she wouldn’t hear a word I said. Raymond Morris’s Rule Number One would be my mantra: Make each conversation a positive experience . Usually by the time I heard Bianca’s first three words, my resolve to be conciliatory had disappeared like apple pie at a potluck. Today though, I vowed to pry open the gates of communication and hold them wide until I could get my message across.
    This time I wasn’t talking about something as simple as her recent stunt of lying down in the road to hold up traffic in protest of the shortage of “duck crossing” signs at Drake Park in nearby Bend. Raymond Morris said such actions merely proved that Bianca was testing her own values as she learned to separate from her childhood home. I understood the concept, but couldn’t she test with green hair or something?
    I soon covered the ten miles east of Juniper on Highway 28 and bumped my way down the track to Bianca’s trailer. A cloud of dust enveloped my tan Volvo as it bounced to a stop. It was an old car but, thanks to Tony’s care over the years, still dependable. I grabbed a dirty envelope from the floor on the passenger side and wrote, “Tune-up?” Now that Tony was no longer here to take care of such things, I wrote many such notes to myself. How often did cars need tune-ups anyway? It had already been over a year.
    I squinted through the now grimy windshield, trying to make out whether Bianca was home. Of course there was no car parked out front, as Bianca had informed me recently that a bicycle was the most acceptable mode of private transportation if one were serious about wanting to avoid polluting the environment. Too bad she hadn’t taken that attitude in high school when she and her friends spent most of their time racing off to the Juniper Park Mall in our car.
    Watching our sunny, scatterbrained daughter grow up, Tony and I had at times suspected that we had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital at birth. When Bianca announced her plan to embark on a photographic tour of the United States after her high school graduation, we concluded that our suspicions had been right. We didn’t want her wandering across the United States by herself, and we were still arguing with her about it when Tony died.
    Under the circumstances, I’d hoped she’d forget the trip, and she actually did start a summer