"Hello, this is Birdie."
"You're next," a soft voice said.
"What? Hello? Hello?" A dial tone buzzed on the other end.
Jesus. Birdie felt so ill. She couldn't eat a thing. Nothing appealed and nothing stayed down. She was almost paranoid enough to believe she was being poisoned. Max's kids hated her; that much was clear. And people with money were always at risk. She glanced around the elegant room, wondering which things could hurt her. She knew that people could be poisoned by their clothes, by their toothpaste, by the air they breathed. Again she had that nagging worry. Max had not been sick. He'd died without warning. Everybody, including his doctors, had thought he was just old. But she wondered. The voice on the phone unnerved her. She wasn't sure anymore. She just wasn't sure.
Ten
As far as catastrophes for April went, second only to not witnessing what went down between Bernardino and his killer and not being able to save him was not being able to ask any questions about it. She'd recovered quickly enough from her exhaustion to tackle Bill Bernardino with a pad and pen. He wasn't answering her questions any better than she'd answered his.
Bill, what had your father been working on these last weeks? she wrote and passed over for him to read. As with the earlier questions she'd posed to him, this one sat heavily on the page, giving Bill ample opportunity to twist his mouth into any number of disgusted shapes while he pretended to decipher her perfectly legible handwriting.
There was no nuance to the written word, no tone of voice to temper her line of questioning. The questions looked like something out of a survey, not a personal exchange between two people who'd lost a loved one. With April's side written down, the interview was between Bill and the page, not between her and him. So he was having an easy time avoiding her.