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or allows someone to cut off her air supply.”
    “I’m all out of love,” I crooned in a horribly off-key voice. This was why I was now a food truck operator and not a karaoke queen.
    “Not that Air Supply. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing either. I’m the mother. I know these things.” She sniffed, but no signs of any waterfalls appeared. Since my mother was the one who had taught me humor as a tool to deflect awkward situations, I knew she would recognize it. Even so, it had kept the tears at bay.
    “So what do you think happened?” I asked. I recognized that this was going to be a long haul for me. There were no quick answers when the body was gone, and the police had no evidence. Everything would be speculation and rumor.
    “I don’t know. Maybe it was just Alice’s time to go. Sometimes you just have to accept that. I miss her every day though.”
    “Me too,” I replied, thinking of the good times I’d had with my aunt. “So why a food truck?”
    “Alice always recognized a trend. She was good that way. She saw that this market was about to take off, and she wanted to jump on it. The work would appeal to her. She moved around. She didn’t work in an office. She met lots of new people. She would have suffocated, pardon the expression, if she’d worked in an office. It just wasn’t her.”
    I nodded. My mother was right about that. Alice was not the type to be tied down to an office job. I couldn’t see her in a 9 to 5 environment, though I wondered how she’d done with 4 to 2. Even so, in listening to the other owners, the food truck was a major cash investment to get started. I wondered where Alice, who had tended to live from hand to mouth, had found the cash to start her own truck.
    I decided to stay at my parents’ house for dinner. I thought I owed it to my mother since I’d taxed her emotions with my questions plus, of course, making food all day left me with no desire to come home and do it again. I thought I deserved a meal prepared by someone else.
    After I finished my second helping, and put some more in a bowl to take home, I said goodbye to my parents and headed home.
    My apartment complex bore an eerie resemblance to the Bates Motel. It was a series of one level apartments slung out around the circumference of a parking lot. Just by pulling into the driveway, I could tell that my front door was open. My heart froze. I knew that I’d locked the door that morning and I hadn’t been home since. I felt a lump in my throat as I thought that I could be the next person to have my head removed from my body. I pulled close to the door of my apartment and put my headlights on bright. The lights allowed me to look inside of my place.
    There was no movement inside the apartment. I had no pets, so there was no concern that I was going to be chasing after Fido all night. I grabbed my gun out of the car’s console. While I wasn’t a huge fan of weapons, my father had insisted that I learn how to shoot when I began to go downtown at 4 a.m. and carry large sums of cash. I thanked him now as I pulled it out.
    With the headlights still on, I approached the apartment. I realized that if they were planning on hurting me that my shadow was making an easy target. However, my rationale was that if they wanted to kill me, there were millions of better ways to do it than to break into my home, leave the door open and shoot me upon entry. On the other hand, the subtlety of my aunt’s death, compared to the gruesome nature of Fred Samples’ death, meant that this killer was nothing if not versatile.
    I made it to the door unscathed and looked in, gun still in my outstretched, locked hands. I tried to mimic the hundreds of cop shows I’d watched in the past six months. At least my hours of television had come in handy for something. I slammed my body against the wall, only because I’d seen it done on Law & Order . I took one trembling hand off the gun and turned on the lights. The living