CHAPTER FOUR
Harold Carlisle looked like a man who hadn’t slept in days.
When Kate and DeMarco found him in the cardiac observation unit at Richmond General Hospital, he was sitting upright in the narrow bed, staring at his hands with the kind of hollow expression that Kate had seen too often in her career.
The monitor beside his bed showed a steady but elevated heart rate, and his gray hair stuck up at odd angles as if he'd been running his fingers through it repeatedly.
He looked confused and out of sorts, as if he had just woken up on a strange, new planet and was trying to make sense of everything.
"Mr. Carlisle?" Kate said softly, approaching the bed. "I'm Agent Wise with the FBI, and this is Agent DeMarco. We're investigating your wife's death. Are you feeling well enough to answer a few questions?"
Harold looked up at them with red-rimmed eyes that seemed to have trouble focusing.
He was probably in his mid-sixties, with the kind of lean build that suggested he'd been active before grief and shock had hollowed him out.
His hospital gown hung loosely on his frame, and Kate noticed his hands trembling slightly as he reached for the water cup on his bedside table.
"I keep thinking I'm going to wake up," Harold said, his voice barely above a whisper. "That this is all some kind of nightmare. Margaret was supposed to outlive me. I was… I was supposed to go first.”
DeMarco pulled two chairs closer to the bed while Kate studied Harold's face. The man was clearly in shock, but there was something else there, too. A deeper kind of despair that went beyond the immediate trauma of finding his wife's body.
"We're very sorry for your loss," Kate said, settling into her chair. She waited a beat or two and then said, in the most caring voice she could muster: "Can you tell us about yesterday evening? What time did you get home from work?"
Harold's hands shook as he set down the water cup.
"I work the late shift at the grocery store twice a week. I usually clock out around ten thirty or eleven, just depending on what’s going on at the store.
This time, I think it was right at eleven when I left.
I got to the house around eleven- fifteen, I think. "
"And that's when you found Margaret?" DeMarco asked gently.
Harold nodded, then seemed to fold in on himself.
"The front door was unlocked, which was strange.
Margaret always locked up after dark. I called her name when I came in, but she didn't answer.
I thought maybe she'd fallen asleep reading in the library.
" His voice broke slightly. "She spent most of her evenings in there with her books. "
Kate watched Harold struggle to continue.
The man was clearly fighting to maintain some semblance of composure, but the effort was costing him.
She'd interviewed countless grieving family members over the years, and Harold's devastation appeared genuine.
More than that, there was an additional layer of anguish that suggested Margaret's death had compounded some existing pain.
"I saw her in her chair, and at first I thought she really had just fallen asleep," Harold went on.
"The way she was sitting looked so peaceful.
" Harold's voice became even quieter, and she could see his eyes focusing on something far away—perhaps the memory itself.
"But then I got closer and I could see the blood.
On her head, on the chair. And that candlestick on the floor.
I tried to check for a pulse, but I already knew.
" He stopped talking and covered his face with his hands.
DeMarco leaned forward slightly. "Mr. Carlisle, we understand this is incredibly difficult. But anything you can tell us about Margaret's routine, about who might have had access to your house, could help us find whoever did this."
Harold lowered his hands and looked between the two agents. "Margaret knew everyone in the neighborhood. She would have opened the door for any of them. She was too trusting, especially since I started working longer hours."
"Can I ask… why you’ve been working late shifts?" Kate asked.
"They pay better,” he said. “Margaret didn't like me being away so much in the evenings, and really, we’ve always gotten by just fine on retirement and savings. But… but we needed the money for medical bills."
Kate felt a subtle shift in the conversation's direction. "Medical bills?"
Harold was quiet for a long moment, staring at the hospital blanket covering his legs.
When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft they had to lean in to hear him.
"Margaret was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two months ago.
Stage three. The oncologist said she had maybe a year, eighteen months if we were lucky. "
The information instantly altered the shape of the case in Kate’s mind. Terminal cancer diagnosis just two months before Margaret's murder was too significant to be coincidental, though she couldn't yet see how the two events might be connected.
"How was Margaret handling the diagnosis?" DeMarco asked.
Harold's laugh was bitter and heartbreaking.
"She didn't handle it at all, not at first. For about three weeks after Dr. Patterson told us, Margaret just shut down completely.
She stopped reading, stopped going to book club, barely got out of bed some days.
She would just sit in that library staring at nothing.
I guess she was just trying to ignore it completely.
She floated through those weeks like a ghost. I kept trying to talk to her about treatment options, about specialists we could consult, but she wouldn't discuss it. It was like she'd already given up."
"But something changed?" Kate asked.
"Sort of. I… well, about two weeks ago, I came home and found her reading again.
Not just any book, but 'Murder on the Orient Express.
' She said she needed to prepare for book club, that she'd missed enough meetings already.
" Harold's eyes filled with tears. "I was so relieved to see her engaged with something again.
The book club meant everything to her after I started working late. Those women became her lifeline."
Kate exchanged a glance with DeMarco. The book club connection was becoming more significant with each piece of information they gathered.
Margaret's return to reading after weeks of depression, her specific choice to reread a Christie classic, and her preparation for what would turn out to be her final meeting.
"Can you tell us about the book club?" DeMarco asked. "How long had Margaret been a member?"
"Oh, for a while. Several years. I’m sorry to say I don’t know how many exactly.”
“But she wasn’t new to it?”
“Oh, no. It’s been at least five years, but probably more than that. They meet at each other's houses, rotating who hosts. Margaret was supposed to host next month, in fact."
"Did she ever mention any problems with the other members?” Kate asked. “Any conflicts or disagreements?"
Harold shook his head slowly. "Margaret loved those women. She would come home from meetings talking about their discussions for hours. It was the most animated I'd seen her since my schedule changed."
Kate considered the timeline. Margaret had received her terminal diagnosis two months ago, had withdrawn from all activities for three weeks, then gradually returned to normal life with the book club as her primary social connection.
Someone in that circle would have been aware of Margaret's emotional state, her vulnerability, her schedule.
"Mr. Carlisle, did anyone else know about Margaret's cancer diagnosis?" Kate asked.
"We’d told only a very select few,” he said, shaking his head.
“Margaret made me promise to keep it quiet until she decided how she wanted to handle it. She was still processing everything, still trying to figure out if she wanted to pursue treatment or just focus on quality of life.” He hesitated for a moment and then added: “Do you think her cancer had something to do with what happened? "
Kate wasn't sure yet, but the timing bothered her. A woman receives a terminal diagnosis, withdraws from life, then gradually re-emerges through her connection to a book club. Two months later, she's murdered in a scene staged to replicate the very book she was preparing to discuss with that group.
"We're exploring every possibility," Kate said carefully. "It’s too early to make such assumptions. But tell me, can you think of anyone who might have known your Tuesday evening schedule? Anyone who would have known Margaret would be alone?"
Harold considered the question. "My work schedule is pretty regular. Anyone who paid attention would know I get home pretty late on Tuesdays. The neighbors probably noticed the pattern. Margaret's book club friends might have known, since she sometimes mentioned having the evenings to herself."
Kate made a mental note to ask Sandra Morrison about what the book club members knew regarding Harold's schedule. If the killer had deliberately chosen Tuesday evening, they'd done so knowing they would have time to stage the scene without interruption.
"What about the house itself?" DeMarco asked. "Who has keys? Who knew your security system code?"
"Just Margaret and me. We never gave spare keys to anyone, and the alarm code is something only we knew." Harold paused. "Although Margaret sometimes forgets to set the alarm when she’s home alone. She said it made her feel trapped in her own house."
Another piece of information that pointed toward someone Margaret trusted. If the killer had found the front door unlocked and the alarm unset, they wouldn't have needed keys or codes. They would only have needed Margaret's willingness to answer the door.
“I think that’s all we need for now,” Kate said. DeMarco looked to her, nodding in agreement. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Carlisle. Although… if we wanted to learn as much as we could about the book club, who do you think we should speak with?”
He thought about it for a moment before saying, “That would be Eleanor. Eleanor Whitman. She’s sort of the founder of the group.
She’s the leader, I guess you’d say.” He smiled at this thought and then looked to them with sharp sadness in his eyes.
“You’ll… you’ll find who did this, right?
” he asked, his voice catching in his throat.
"We're certainly going to try our very best," Kate said, standing up from her chair. "In the meantime, is there somewhere you can stay once you get out of here? Family or friends who can help you through the next few days?"
Harold nodded weakly. "My brother lives in Norfolk.
He's driving up this evening." He looked up at Kate with haunted eyes.
"Margaret was just starting to fight again.
She was reading, going to book club, making plans for how she wanted to spend whatever time she had left.
Someone took that away from her. Please… please figure out who did this."
Kate could only nod as she and DeMarco left. She wondered if she felt sharper heartbreak than usual because it was an older couple at the core of the murder, for a killer to go after someone of an advanced age felt cheap and especially vindictive.
As Kate and DeMarco left the hospital, Kate found herself thinking about Margaret's journey from despair back to engagement with life.
The book club had clearly been crucial to that recovery, which made it even more likely that her killer had come from within that circle.
And while that did seem to promise a small pool of potential suspects, she knew it also meant a tight-knit group of women, capable of sitting on even the darkest of secrets without so much as blinking.