Chapter 8 #2
“Oh,” she said. “I see what you’re asking.
He was obviously upset and anxious when he was telling me someone he trusted did something unforgiveable.
Those are heavy words, especially for Henry.
He was a good Christian man, and he wasn’t one to hold a grudge.
I knew whatever betrayal had occurred must have been very serious.
“But something changed when he started talking about us all getting together for dinner. He was happy.” She sighed. “Hopeful. I hadn’t heard that quality in his voice in quite some time. I couldn’t wait to meet the woman who’d given that back to him.”
“That’s a good memory,” I said.
“Yes, and a man who is happy and hopeful doesn’t kill himself just a short time later.”
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”
Dash came back from the windows and sat onto the sofa beside me. “I know you don’t have a name for her. But think back on that call. Did Henry give you any details about her? Even something that seemed like nothing at the time.”
“You think I haven’t gone over that call until I’ve worn it smooth?
” Josephine turned her cup a slow quarter-turn in its saucer.
“Every investigator I hired had me recite it word for word, and not one of them ever did a thing with it. After a while you start to feel foolish, telling the same story to people who’ve already decided it’s nothing. ”
“Those men were listening for a confession or a name,” I said. “Something to close a file. I’m listening for who Henry was like. And you knew him better than anyone. Humor us.”
She studied me a moment, and some of the starch went out of her shoulders.
“He said she understood the hours,” she said finally.
“I asked what he meant, and he laughed and told me she didn’t fuss when he had to work late or when he was out of the country doing charitable work.
” She lifted one shoulder. “He said she had her own career that kept her busy, and the hardest thing was finding time when their schedules aligned.”
The doorbell rang and I realized it must be the deputies here to haul the boxes. Dash let them in and they were quick about getting the boxes loaded into the backs of the department-issued Tahoes.
“Will you let me know if you find anything?” she asked as she walked us to the door.
“You’ll be the first person I call,” I promised her.
The deputies followed us back across the island to my house.
Chowder had been shut up inside since church and met us at the door with the wounded dignity of a dog who’d missed an entire outing, and he made his feelings known by pouting on his daybed in the living room where he could see the back-and-forth traffic of the boxes coming in.
By the time the last box was finished it was near four o’clock. The living room looked like the back of a moving truck had thrown up in it. Twenty-three boxes, I counted, stacked two and three high against every wall.
“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t use this room that often,” I said.
“Not true,” Dash said. “We sat on that couch and kissed.”
I felt the heat sting my cheeks. “We were watching a movie.”
“That’s funny. I don’t remember the movie. But I do remember the kissing.”
Chowder made a low noise from his daybed that was either disgust or solidarity. It was hard to tell with him.
“Since I’m guessing we’re not going to be kissing anytime soon, where do you want to start?” he asked.
“I want to start with a glass of iced tea and the Sunday crossword puzzle.”
“What’s your second choice?”
I was still thinking about kissing on the couch, but knew better than to suggest it. Dash took kissing very seriously.
“I’ll be right back,” I said and hurried off to the kitchen before my face could give me away.
“Coward,” he called out, and I could hear him laughing.
I got us both glasses of tea and a plate of lemon bars, and when I came back I was composed and had my hormones under control. I toed off my Mary Janes and sat down on the floor with my tea, resigning myself to spending the rest of my Sunday cross-legged and hip deep in a dead man’s paperwork.
“It’s a shame,” Dash said, looking up at the golden cedar beams on the ceiling and the exposed brick fireplace. Then he looked out the bank of windows toward the water. “This really is a nice room. Very cozy. You should use it more.”
I loved my house. I really did. But it was hard filling up all the rooms with just me and Chowder padding around.
This was a house that was meant for family and children.
It would have been if Patrick had lived.
But he hadn’t, and this room sat pristine and untouched with its white couches and neutral throws and rugs.
“We’ll have to watch more movies,” I said as a concession. “Now, it’s time to get serious. We’ll sort first and read second. Otherwise we’ll lose three hours on box one and never get to box twenty.”
“So wise for someone so young,” he said.
I snorted. “I’m thirty-four. That’s not exactly young anymore.”
“Settle down, Betty White,” he said. “You’ve still got some good years left.”
He sat across from me with his back against the sofa and pulled the nearest box toward him.
“All right. Money goes by the window. Personal and correspondence by the fireplace. Practice and patient files in the middle. Photographs and household odds and ends against the far wall unless we get a reason to care.”
“What about tax returns?”
“Tax returns go in their own. I can’t imagine there’s anything in his tax returns that will lead us to his killer.”
I opened the first box and started sorting. And then I started singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” because I couldn’t think of anything else that would be appropriate for organizing.
“Where’d you learn to sing?” Dash asked.
“My grandmother,” I said. “She loved all the standards. She had this old radio in her house where you could turn the dials and hear the crackle before the music came on. We’d make scones and sing, and then when we were done baking we’d eat them hot out of the oven with a cup of tea and listen to old vaudeville recordings. ”
“It sounds like the two of you were close,” he said.
“Very. Closer than I ever was to my own mother.” I paused because I wasn’t sure that came out right. “It was no fault of her own. I love her. We just don’t have anything in common. Are you close with your family?”
He was quiet for a moment as he shuffled through papers. “My parents are both gone. I don’t have any family left.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, wanting to probe deeper.
“It was a long time ago. And not having a family has made things easier for my career.”
“You mean because you move around so much?”
He looked up from separating bills, and I got the impression he was trying to remember if he’d let something slip he shouldn’t have. Or maybe that was my own paranoia that he was hiding things from me.
“New Orleans, Seattle…Grimm Island,” I said. “Those are very different places in very different parts of the country.”
He grunted and then looked out the bank of windows. “You’ve got company.”
I bit back a groan of frustration just before the doorbell rang.
Chowder lifted his head off the daybed, barked once at the ceiling, decided he’d done his duty, and lay back down.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Mrs. Pembroke?”
“Right on the money.”
“I’m surprised it took her this long. She’ll have seen the deputies, and she’ll have seen your truck, and her curiosity is louder than her arthritis.”
“You want me to get it?”
“Lord, no. She’d swallow her own teeth. You stay put.”
I went to the door barefoot and there she was, eighty pounds of nylon housedress and Aqua Net, holding a Tupperware of an unknown casserole I had not asked for and could not refuse.
“Mabel honey, I saw the police cars and I was just so worried.”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Pembroke. It’s just another case I’m helping the sheriff’s office with is all.”
“The sheriff’s office? On a Sunday?” She craned to see past me. “How are you going to find a husband when all you do is work all the time? Is that Sheriff Beckett’s truck in your drive?”
I kept my eyes on the doorframe. “It is. He’s been kind enough to help.”
“Don’t take too much help from him unless he puts a ring on it. If you know what I’m saying.”
“I, ah…” I stared at a fixed point over Mrs. Pembroke’s shoulder and held very still.
Mrs. Pembroke pushed the casserole dish into my hands. “I made too much for one person. You and your young man can have it for your supper.”
“That’s very thoughtful. Thank you.”
“And you’ll send Sheriff Beckett my regards?” She tried to peek in and look around, but I’d learned early on with Mrs. Pembroke that if you gave her an inch she’d take a mile, so I moved my body to block her view.
“I will.”
“And tell him my smoke alarm has been chirping for the last couple of nights. I tried to hit it with the broom, but those ceilings are so high I can’t reach.”
“I’ll let him know,” I said. “Thanks again for the casserole. Are you okay walking home?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “I was about to go on my afternoon walk anyway. Gladys Richardson bought one of those expensive metal yard sculptures from some artist in Charleston, and Dennis Yaeger said it looks like Satan is peeing all over her morning glories. He said it would scare the daylights out of any kids walking by.”
I knew exactly the sculpture she was talking about and had to agree with Dennis Yaeger. I drove by it on my way home and almost ran off the road.
“I figured I need to go check it out and see if she needs to be reported to the city council. The island has an image to maintain.” She looked thrilled at the possibility of reporting Gladys to the city council, and hurried off without saying goodbye.
I closed the door, and I carried the casserole into the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator and went back to the dining room.
“Mrs. Pembroke sends her regards,” I said. “She brought us a casserole for dinner, and she says her smoke alarm has been chirping.”
“I heard that part,” he said. “I’ll stop by on my way home and change the battery for her.”