Chapter 20
My mouth was dry. I curled my fingers in and out, forming them into a sort of gnarled, stiff ball, then releasing them.
Ricky, who had lowered himself into a chair along the wall behind me, softly put a hand to my lower back. “Do you want me to start?”
“Spit it out,” Wiley snarled from the piano bench. “I assume this is going to be your confession.”
I found my voice. “No,” I said, more clearly and steadily than I’d expected of myself. “Ricky and I have nothing to confess.” I swept a meaningful gaze across the room.
“I think I should start,” I continued, “by making it plain that, all appearances to the contrary, I am not naturally the kind of person who likes to involve himself in other people’s business.” Denise chuckled softly, and behind me, Ricky, the traitor, stifled a snort. I turned to glare at him.
“Sorry. Trying not to sneeze. Carry on,” he grinned.
I took a second to remember where I had been going.
“Ricky and I came here to gather material for an article about travel on the Oregon coast, but on our first night here, Richard Rose fell to his death on our balcony. On our second day here, Cecilia Rose died on the massage table in the room next door while we were getting massages. And on our third day, Tawny Rose was murdered while waiting for a meeting she had requested with us. It wasn’t our intention to intrude on your family gathering this week; I think it’s fair to say instead that your family gathering kept intruding on our work. ”
“I’m sorry, Oliver,” Lis said. “I wish you hadn’t gotten caught in our mess.”
“I appreciate that,” I replied with a slight smile.
“But it seems like your family’s mess has gotten too big to contain.
Someone was bound to get caught in it; it ended up being us, and for our own peace of mind, it’s become important to us to sort through and understand your mess.
I think—with the help of Brad Benson and Deputy Duncan and, in your own ways, most of you—we’ve been able to get close to understanding what’s been going on here.
Some of this is guesswork, but I think a few of you here today can fill in the last gaps. ”
The younger of Richard and Rachel’s daughters, leaning forward on her bar stool and waving her arms mockingly, cried out, “I don’t know nothin’!”
Her sister devolved into a fit of giggles, but their mother silenced them with a sharp look and a sharper tone.
“Reille! Rayleigh! If you can’t be mature, I think you’d better leave.
Go wait for me in the room.” As the girls sullenly trooped out of the room, Rachel turned her attention back to me.
“I’m sure none of us knows anything that we haven’t already told the proper authorities. Which you are not.”
“No, I am not,” I conceded. “But Deputy Duncan is, and we are here with her permission and this meeting is happening under her supervision. And I don’t think it’s true that everyone here has told everything they know. Isn’t that right, Wiley?”
He rolled his eyes, but his convictions, and with them, his rage, seemed to be wavering.
“So,” Denise wanted to know, “what’s the story? What’s it all about?”
“Ultimately, it’s all about two things: money and sex. Let’s start with sex,” I said.
From behind me, I caught Ricky mumbling, “Why haven’t you ever said that to me?”
I stifled a laugh, straining to maintain a serious expression, and pressed on. “Ricky and I never met Richard, but we did hear something of his final moments in the room above us.”
Denise gasped. “You heard him having sex?”
“No,” I said, blushing, “but we did hear something that led us to believe that he wasn’t alone.
He was playing music in his room, but the music was turned off after he fell off the balcony.
That tells us that someone else turned off the music before leaving the room, because the room was empty and no music was playing when the sheriff arrived.
We knew that that person was not his wife or one of his daughters; the three of them had gone to town, the girls to a movie and Rachel to the café.
So we wondered who the other person could have been.
There were a number of clues that it was Tawny. ”
Rachel made a snort of disgust.
I went on. “The relationship between Richard and Tawny could have been innocent, but we suspect it was an affair. The first, and biggest, clue came from Richard’s daughters.
” Rachel shot another angry look toward the bar before realizing that she’d sent the girls out of the room.
“They mentioned to me that Tawny had made multiple visits, without Wiley, to their home in California, and always when their mother was away.
“Wiley, you all but told me about Tawny’s affair with Richard, didn’t you? You insinuated that Tawny often told you she was taking walks on the beach, but she was actually doing something else. You even suggested that Tawny was taking one of her fictional ‘walks’ at the time of Richard’s death.”
I looked his way, but Wiley remained seated on the piano bench, his shoulders slumped, staring vacantly into the distance.
“That definitely suggests that Tawny was the other person in the room with Richard when he fell. I think you know about their affair, but that perhaps you learned about it this week. The night Richard died, you expressed surprise at Tawny’s strong reaction.
What changed? How did you learn what was happening? ”
Wiley finally seemed to come back to himself, though it was a weak, dejected version of himself. “I don’t know nothin’,” he shrugged in a meek imitation of his young cousin.
“I think you do,” I said, “but we can come back to that. I’ve heard it said that happy people in healthy relationships don’t cheat, and Ricky and I know that Tawny was not a happy person, and she was not in a healthy relationship with you, Wiley.
She all but forced her friendship on us, because she was so lonely, feeling like an outsider in your family, especially once Richard was gone.
She confided in me that she desperately wanted to be a mother.
She told us that she hadn’t known until only a year ago—well into your marriage—about your boyhood cancer, and even then didn’t know, until you told her, that it had left you sterile.
She dropped other hints, too—this woman that you all knew as a hard-living party girl spent this week entirely sober, having even completely given up nicotine.
The medical examiner confirmed it from her records this morning.
Wiley, when did you find out Tawny was pregnant? ”
The piano made a discordant plunk as Wiley put his elbows up on the keyboard, resting his forehead on his hands. He sighed deeply, then, pulling his head up halfway, said from behind his fingers, “The morning after Richard died. I found the ultrasound, or sonogram or whatever, in her suitcase.”
Ricky leaned forward. “Did you tell her you knew?”
“No.” Wiley shook his head. “But I think she figured it out. She asked if I’d been in her suitcase. I probably wasn’t very careful about putting it back in exactly the same spot.”
“And you knew the baby wasn’t yours,” Denise said, piecing it together.
“Obviously not,” Wiley said, shrugging.
“So Wiley killed Richard and Tawny over their affair,” Denise announced to the room triumphantly. “But what about Cecilia? And where does the money come in?”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said.
“And we’re not quite through with sex yet.
” I shot Ricky a preemptive look of warning.
He gave me an angelic smile. I kept going.
“There was one more thing, which Erik helped us learn. He mentioned that he’d had to make up both beds in Richard and Rachel’s two-bedroom suite.
And you, Denise, mentioned that their marriage had long been on the rocks.
We know that, on the night Richard died, while their daughters were watching a movie, Rachel met with Brad Benson, Cecilia’s lawyer, at the café in town to discuss a personal matter.
Brad, I won’t ask you to violate attorney-client privilege, but I suspect that Rachel, too, had discovered Richard’s infidelity and was asking for advice about initiating a divorce. ”
Rachel spun to look at Brad, who had taken a bar stool behind her. He gave an affable smile, putting a finger to his lips—but as soon as Rachel turned back around, he also winked.
“And that,” I said, “brings us to money. Cecilia Rose and her late husband had a vast fortune, but their children, Richard and Lis, had no trust funds or other support from their parents after finishing their education. Most of the money in Richard and Rachel’s marriage came from Rachel and her family.
Richard and Tawny, fearing discovery by their respective spouses, or maybe simply wanting to run off and start a new life together, were, in Tawny’s words, ‘desperate’ to figure out how to get some money.
Aside from Rachel, Richard had one other avenue to wealth: he knew that if she died, he would inherit his mother’s millions.
Lis, you had been written out of your mother’s will a number of years ago. You knew that, correct?”
“Yes, I did,” she said calmly.
“Can you tell us why?”
“Because I was—am—gay. Because my mother thought love and money were the same thing, and she withheld both as a means to get you to do what she wanted,” she said sadly. Denise reached over and took her hand. “And because she couldn’t fathom a gay daughter as anything other than an embarrassment.”
“Thank you, Lis. I’m sorry to bring up such a difficult subject. And apologies to all for the detour back into sex,” I said.
I could feel Ricky getting ready to jump. “I’ll—”
“No, you won’t,” I said firmly. “Back to money. Richard was Cecilia’s primary heir,” I said. I looked around the room. “Wiley, were you aware of that?”
He nodded.
“Rachel, did you know that?”