Chapter 2 #2
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Hale?”
“Josephine, please.” She set the portfolio on the table but didn’t open it.
Her hands rested on top of it, fingers laced, knuckles white.
“I have a brother. Had a brother. He died twenty-five years ago, and I’ve spent every one of those years trying to get someone to believe me when I tell them he was murdered. ”
The shift in tense, from have to had, cost her something. I heard it in the breath she took after.
I’d put orange pekoe in the teapot and I poured out before I sat down across the table from her. She took her time putting cream and sugar in her cup. I didn’t rush her. Twenty-five years of trying to be heard couldn’t have been easy.
“His name was Henry Wainwright,” she said. “Dr. Henry Wainwright. He ran a medical practice on the island for more than twenty-five years.”
The name rang a distant bell. I’d heard it mentioned over the years, one of those names that floated through island conversation the way old stories do, attached to a face I’d never seen and a life that ended before I’d paid much attention to Grimm Island’s history.
“As I said, he was murdered twenty-five years ago,” Josephine continued, and her voice had the practiced steadiness of someone who had told this story many times to many people who hadn’t listened.
“In his study, at his desk. They found him with a gunshot wound to the head and Sheriff Milton ruled it a suicide before the sun went down. He took one look at Henry and decided it was an open-and-shut case. Milton declared that he just never recovered from Charlotte’s death a couple of years before. ”
“Who’s Charlotte?” I asked.
“Henry’s wife. She died of ovarian cancer much too young.” She took a delicate sip from her cup. “There was no autopsy. No investigation. Case closed.”
I raised my brows at that information. Even I knew that suicides were automatically treated as a homicide until the medical examiner signed off on the death certificate.
“I’m not dismissing you,” I said gently. “But the question has to be asked. Is there a possibility that Henry could have taken his own life?”
Something flashed in her eyes that was hotter than grief and older than anger.
“My brother was not suicidal, Mrs. McCoy. He was fifty-five years old and he loved his work. He loved his patients. He had friends, hobbies, a full life. Did he miss his wife? Of course he did. You don’t lose the love of your life and whistle your way through the rest of it.
But Henry was a man who kept going. He always kept going.
And he’d found love again there at the end. A nice woman from Charleston.”
She leaned forward, and the morning light caught the lines around her mouth that twenty-five years of this fight had carved there.
“Mrs. Hale,” I said, wondering how in the world a case like this could possibly be solved after so much time. Or if it was really a case at all. People never wanted to think their loved ones could end things so tragically. But it happened every day.
“You haven’t heard the most important part yet,” she interrupted, before I could tell her I wasn’t sure I was the right person to help her. “Henry was left-handed. Always had been. But the gunshot wound was to his right temple.”
The kitchen went very quiet. Even the air-conditioning seemed to hold its breath.
“Milton never acknowledged it, and I told him he was wrong,” she said.
“Evil, horrible man. All he cared about was money and power. I even told him I’d contribute to his campaign fund if he’d reopen the case and look at things a little closer.
But he wasn’t interested. And not one of Milton’s deputies asked why a left-handed man shot himself with his right. ”
I set my teacup down because my hands were not entirely steady.
“I wish I could say hearing this about Milton surprised me,” I said. “But it doesn’t.”
“He released Henry’s body to the funeral home in under twelve hours.
” Her voice was ice over bedrock. “Henry kept a pistol in the top drawer of his desk. Everyone in his circle knew about it. He’d mentioned it at a party once, said he had plenty of protection after some unhappy patient had made threats.
Milton decided Henry must have gotten drunk and used his own gun on himself.
There was about two fingers of bourbon sitting in a glass on the desk.
Henry always had a nightcap before bed.”
I wrapped my hands around my teacup and let the warmth of it anchor me. Outside the kitchen window, a mockingbird was running through its repertoire in the magnolia, cycling through stolen songs like the morning was anyone else’s business. It wasn’t.
“Was there anyone you can think of who wanted to hurt Henry? Or threatened him?”
Josephine’s composure held, but I could see what it cost her. The tendons in her neck tightened. Her fingers pressed harder against the leather. She opened her mouth to answer.
The doorbell rang.
Her mouth closed. The moment hung there, fragile as glass.
“That’ll be…” I trailed off, already standing. “I’m so sorry. Excuse me for just a moment.”
I hurried back to the front of the house and opened the front door to find Dash on my porch holding a bouquet of flowers and wearing the expression of a man who had been looking forward to biscuits and a quiet morning and could already tell from my face that one of those was not on the menu.
He held out the flowers. “For the table.”
“You brought me flowers?” I asked, already breathing them in. He’d brought me sunflowers mixed with jasmine and tiger lilies and the fragrance was beautiful.
“It seemed only fitting since I wasn’t allowed to bring coffee.” He leaned in and kissed my cheek, casual and warm, like he’d been doing it for years instead of weeks. Then he pulled back and read my face. “Something wrong?”
“I have a visitor,” I said, lowering my voice. “Josephine Wainwright Hale. She’s here about her brother.”
Dash raised a brow in question. “I don’t think I’ve met her.” He glanced past me into the house. “What does she need?”
“She believes her brother was murdered. She was just getting to the good stuff when you rang the bell.”
He nodded and said, “I can smell those biscuits from here.” Which was his way of saying he understood, and that he’d follow my lead.
I led him to the kitchen. Josephine had not moved. Her hands still held her teacup, and her spine was a vertical line that would have made a ballerina weep.
“Josephine, this is Sheriff Beckett. Dash.” I hesitated, feeling the strangeness of the introduction. “He’s also…we’re…”
“I have functioning eyes, Mrs. McCoy,” Josephine said, and the ghost of a smile crossed her face for the first time. “Half the island was watching you two at the fireworks last night.”
Dash pulled out a chair and sat across from her. He picked up a biscuit, buttered it, and gave Josephine the kind of attention that made people feel like they had all the time in the world.
“Josephine was telling me about her brother Henry,” I said, sitting back down.
“He was a physician here on the island about twenty-five years ago. He was found in his study with a gunshot wound to the head, and Milton ruled it a suicide.” I looked at Josephine.
“You were about to tell me if anyone would have wanted Henry dead.”
Josephine looked at Dash for a long moment, measuring him against every sheriff and deputy and officer who had failed her before. Whatever she was looking for, she must have found enough of it, because she continued.
“Henry called me that evening. Around seven o’clock. He was agitated. Upset in a way I hadn’t heard since Charlotte died.”
She took a breath that shook at the edges.
“That night he told me he’d discovered something about someone he trusted. He called it unforgivable. He said he should have seen it sooner, that he’d been a fool, and that he intended to make it right as soon as possible.”
Her blue eyes moved between Dash and me, and in them I saw not grief but something forged in the furnace of it, hammered into a shape that would not bend.