CHAPTER TWELVE
A Boy With a Notebook
The unease crept in slowly over the following day, the particular quiet, uninvited kind that didn't announce itself so much as gather in the corners of ordinary conversation until you noticed it had been sitting there the whole time, and I first felt it properly during breakfast, when Carla, ladling out oatmeal from the pavilion's makeshift kitchen, said something offhand that lodged itself in my chest and refused to leave.
"Strange, isn't it," she said, to nobody in specific, "a man drops dead of a bad heart the very same winter a murder investigation's been quietly simmering under this complete county. Probably nothing. Just strange, is all."
Nobody answered her directly, but I noticed more than one head turn slightly at the words, more than one measured glance exchanged across the crowded room, and by midmorning the still had taken on a texture I didn't much care for, conversations dropping half a beat whenever Everett's name came up, eyes sliding sideways toward the equipment shed's far door with something that had shifted, subtly but unmistakably, from grief into some part of it closer to wariness.
"People are talking," I told Sam, finding him near the office end of the pavilion where he'd set up what amounted to a makeshift workspace for himself, his notebook and the few case files he'd carried with him from the sheriff's office spread across a card table.
"About whether it's connected. Everett, I mean.
To the letter, to Curtis Pratt, to any of it. "
"I've heard some of it too." Sam rubbed the back of his neck, tired in the particular way that came from carrying too many people's worry alongside his own. "It's a natural thing for folks to wonder, given what they know about the case I've been working. Doesn't make it true."
"Do you think it could be? Connected, I mean?"
"I think a seventy eight year old man with an undiagnosed heart condition can die of a heart attack in the middle of a stressful, cold, exhausting week without anybody needing to reach for a conspiracy to explain it.
" Sam said it plain, though I noticed he didn't say it with quite the total certainty he usually brought to things he'd fully settled in his own mind.
"I also think I won't know that for certain until I've actually gone through his things truly, medication, medical history, anything that tells us plainly what happened, and I'd rather do that carefully and respectfully than let rumor get ahead of the facts. "
It was Theo who brought the question to me directly that afternoon, finding me folding blankets near the far end of the room with his notebook clutched tight against his chest and an expression on his face that told me he'd been working up his courage for a while before approaching.
"Josie, can I ask you something? A serious question, not a kid question."
"Of course. What's on your mind?"
"Everybody keeps whispering about whether Mr. Boyle's death is connected to the case Sam's been working.
The letter case. Idella's case." He said it carefully, the way he said most things when he wanted to be taken seriously, and I saw, beneath the careful phrasing, real worry sitting plain in his young face.
"I want to investigate. Properly, I mean.
Not just guessing like everybody else is doing.
I liked Mr. Boyle. If something bad happened to him on purpose, I want to help find out, the same way I helped with the other cases. "
I sat down on the bench beside him, considering my answer carefully, because I understood, watching him, that this mattered to him in a way that went beyond his usual eager enthusiasm for playing detective, that Everett's death had cracked a piece of it open in him that needed cautious handling rather than a quick dismissal.
"I think that's a kind thing to want to do, Theo.
Truly. But I need you to understand something first. If it turns out Mr. Boyle's death wasn't connected to anything, which is what Sam and I both actually expect, I don't want you carrying around the idea that you failed to solve something that was never a mystery to begin with.
And if it does turn out to be connected somehow, that's not a thing a ten year old should be chasing down on his own, no matter how good your notes are. "
"I wasn't going to go anywhere dangerous," Theo said, quick, a little defensive. "I just wanted to write down what people are saying, and notice things, the way Denny taught me. I wasn't going to do anything Sam wouldn't want me doing."
I thought about it a long moment, watching his earnest, worried face, and found Sam approaching from across the room, drawn, I suspected, by the certain tone of a conversation he'd learned to recognize even from a distance.
"What's the case, detective?" Sam asked, settling on Theo's other side, gentle.
"Whether Mr. Boyle's death is connected to your case. The letter case." Theo looked between the two of us, gathering his courage. "I want to help. Just noticing things, writing them down. Nothing dangerous."
Sam considered this with the same careful seriousness he'd have given any deputy proposing to join an active investigation, and I watched him weigh it out plainly on his face, respect for the boy's grief and genuine investigative instinct balanced against a father's and a lawman's equal caution.
"Here's what I'll allow," Sam said finally.
"You can keep your notes, same as you always do, and you can tell me or Josie anything you notice that seems worth mentioning.
But you don't go asking anybody direct questions about Everett's death, and you don't go poking through anybody's belongings, and the moment either of us tells you to stop noticing some part of it, you stop, no arguing about it.
This isn't a game, Theo, not this time. A man's really died, and if there's anything more to it, it's a serious, deliberate kind of work, not the kind that gets rushed by an eager detective, however good his instincts usually are. "
"I understand," Theo said, solemn, and something in his posture straightened slightly, the particular pride of a boy who'd been trusted with real responsibility rather than simply humored. "I'll be careful. I promise."
"I know you will." Sam clapped a hand on his shoulder, warm. "You've earned that trust, over the years. Just don't make me regret extending it this time, all right?"
"I won't."
True to his word, Theo spent the rest of that day observing rather than interrogating, his notebook out again but his questions gone gentler, more measured, the specific quiet watchfulness of a boy who understood, perhaps for the first time in his young detective career, that the thing he was investigating carried real weight, real grief, real consequence beyond the satisfaction of solving a puzzle.
He noted, in careful, cramped handwriting he showed me later without being asked, that Deloris Vance had grown even more withdrawn since Everett's death, barely eating, spending long stretches simply staring out the window.
That Otis Rowe had stopped writing in his own notebook fully for most of that day, sitting instead with his hands folded, unusually still for a man rarely without something to occupy them.
That Nina and Jared had argued, briefly, in low voices near the supply closet, though Theo, mindful of his promise, hadn't gotten close enough to hear what about.
"None of it proves anything," he told me that evening, a little deflated, curled beside me on a bench near the stove. "It's just people being sad and strange, same as everybody else. Maybe there's nothing to find after all."
"Maybe there isn't," I agreed, gentle. "And if there isn't, Theo, that's not a failure. That's just the truth of it, and sometimes the truth is that a good man's heart simply gave out, and there's no larger mystery waiting underneath it to be solved."
"But you don't totally believe that," Theo said, watching me with the particular sharp perception he'd inherited, I sometimes thought, from spending his whole short life surrounded by people who noticed things for a living.
"I can tell. You've got that look Sam gets, when he thinks there's more to a piece of it. "
I considered lying to him, some gentler, simpler reassurance that would let him rest easier, and found I couldn't quite manage it, not with him looking at me that plainly, not after the year we'd both spent, in our different ways, chasing a mystery that refused to stay buried.
"I don't know what I believe yet," I told him honestly.
"I think it's probably exactly what it looks like, a sad, hard thing that happened because bodies get old and hearts give out sometimes, storm or no storm.
But he told me something, the night before he died, about a promise he was working up the courage to keep, and I haven't been able to stop wondering what he meant by it.
That's not the same as thinking somebody hurt him, Theo.
I want to be very clear about that. It's just a loose thread I can't quite leave alone yet. "
"Denny says you follow loose threads until they either tie into something or prove they were never attached to anything at all," Theo said, solemn, clearly quoting this directly. "He says that's the only honest way to investigate anything."
"Denny's not wrong about that," I said, and pulled him a little closer against my side, watching the fire and thinking, not for the first time that long, uneasy day, that whatever thread Everett Boyle had left dangling behind him, gentle and unfinished, we were all of us, old detectives and young ones both, going to end up pulling at it eventually, whether we meant to or not.