The Final Victim by Wendy Corsi Staub

beach sooner or later, won’t she?
    Besides, anywhere is better than gloomy old Oakgate, especially tonight, with everyone moping around after Grandaddy’s funeral.
    Which is why she text messaged Kevin earlier and asked him to come get her. She didn’t even have to tell him where to find her. After a few nights of sneaking out to meet him, the routine is set. He always picks her up just beyond the plantation gates, where she waits in her usual spot in the shadows of a towering live oak.
    As far as her mother and Royce know, she’s locked safely and sullenly in her room.
    As far as Lianna knows, nobody—other than Kevin, of course—is aware of the concealed panel leading to a secret door beside the fireplace.
    Nobody alive today, that is.
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    â€œThe wipers on the bus go swish swish swish,” Mimi Gaspar Johnston sings for perhaps the twentieth time today. “Swish swish swish. Swish swish sw—”
    â€œBabe, have you seen my keys?”
    Unlike her son, Mimi welcomes the interruption. “On the hallway table,” she tells her husband, who’s standing in the doorway of the baby’s room, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and clutching his travel mug.
    Tow-headed, blue-eyed Cameron, who inherited his mother’s coloring and his father’s energetic personality, squirms in Mimi’s arms as she tries to jam his arms into his blue and white striped pajama top.
    Jed is speaking, but whatever he’s saying is drowned out by Cameron shouting, “Sing, Mommy! Sing!”
    â€œJust a second, Cam. What did you say, Jed?”
    â€œI said, I already checked there.”
    â€œMilky, Mommy!”
    â€œI promise you can have milk and cookies as soon as you’re dressed, but you have to let me and Daddy talk,” Mimi admonishes her son, then asks her husband, “Did you look under the pile of mail on the hall table?”
    â€œNo, but—”
    â€œLook under the pile of mail,” Mimi says above Cameron’s howl as, top on at last, she attempts to stick one of his chubby, wriggling legs into the pajama bottoms.
    â€œI don’t think they’re there.”
    She shoves aside a sweat-dampened tendril of blond hair that has escaped her ponytail. “They are.”
    â€œI don’t think so.” Jed turns on the heel of his steel-toed boot and leaves the room.
    â€œSing, Mommy!”
    With an inner sigh, Mimi obliges. “The wheels on the bus go—”
    â€œNo. Wipers! Swish swish, Mommy!” orders the mini-tyrant who has recently possessed her sweet-tempered child.
    Mimi sings about wipers swishing while getting his legs into his pajamas and his feet into the little suede-soled blue Padders. As she lets him squirm out of her grasp at last, she ruefully notes that Cam is rapidly outgrowing both the slippers and the pajamas.
    How the heck are they going to squeeze more out of this month’s already-exhausted budget? Mimi can’t ask her mother to stretch her fixed income again—she already paid for Cam’s last checkup at the doctor’s.
    â€œY’all really need medical insurance,” she recently admonished Mimi, as she often has. “If we hadn’t had it when your father got sick . . .”
    She always trails off at that point, but Mimi knows the rest of the story. Mimi knows her father had the best care possible after being diagnosed with lung disease; knows that the doctors bought him more time. Time enough to see his only daughter married and his first grandchild born.
    â€œWe’ll get insurance, Mom.” Yes, and someday, we’ll get to Europe, too. “Just as soon as Jed finds a regular job with benefits.”
    God only knows when that will be.
    Jed is back, standing in the doorway dangling his keys. “You were right.”
    She interrupts her singing and her private budget worries with a satisfied, “Told you so.”
    â€œDo you have to say