Chapter 9 #2
“I just got a glimpse of her,” she admitted.
“Henry obviously wanted to keep their relationship a secret. I never saw her car, so he must have driven her there and then back home again once they were, you know, finished. And he only ever brought her after dark. I did see his car leave early one morning after one of her visits, before sunrise and before his housekeeper arrived. I got a quick look at her in the passenger seat. She wasn’t from Grimm Island, I know that much. I’d never seen her before.
“How many times did she visit?”
“I can’t be sure,” she said. “I only noticed her through his curtains twice. But in my experience a man doesn’t get a taste of honey and keep it on the shelf.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, but worked to keep my expression blank.
“But like I said, he was real sneaky with her, so she could have come and gone dozens of times when I wasn’t at the upstairs window.”
“You weren’t the only one who knew about Henry’s new lady friend,” I said. “I’ve had two others tell me he was in a relationship, but no one knows who she is.”
“She’ll turn up,” she said, seemingly convinced. “People only think they’re keeping secrets. But something I’ve learned in sixty-eight years of living is that someone is always looking, and someone always sees.”
Considering she was the neighborhood Peeping Tom, she wasn’t wrong.
“Was there anyone else who came to visit Henry? Maybe you saw someone who was out of place, or a conversation that didn’t seem right?”
“Henry was a busy man,” she said. “He knew everyone and everyone knew him. He not only did house calls and worked at the clinic, but he saw patients out of his home office too.”
“He ever have trouble with any of them?”
“Only once that I saw, but I don’t think it was a patient.”
“Not a local?”
“No. And I knew most everybody who lived on Grimm Island back then. It’s too big now.
I miss how it used to be, where everyone knew everyone and all your business.
It’s too hard to keep up with the good stuff now.
” She frowned. “Anyway, this was a businessman in a suit with a briefcase. He pulled up in a Cadillac. Had a comb-over and glasses, but wasn’t a bad-looking fellow. Seemed intense though.”
“What happened?”
“Henry came out on the porch and the two of them got to talking, and it didn’t stay friendly.
The other one did most of it. Waving his arms, pointing his finger.
Henry mostly stood and listened.” She leaned in a little.
“I couldn’t hear what was said, if that’s your next question.
I was up at my window with the air running, and they were clear across the street.
I even cracked the window a bit. But you don’t need to hear a thing to know when two men are arguing. ”
“You couldn’t catch any of it?”
“A word here and there, when he raised his voice. Nothing that hung together.” She paused. “Money. That one came across plain, more than once. That’s the only word I’d swear to.”
“A lot of people will do a lot of things for money,” I said, remembering what Dash had told me about motive. Sex and money were the two big ones.
“Whatever it was about, it sat hard on Henry. The man left in a hurry, drove off fast. And Henry didn’t go inside.
He stood out on that porch a good while, both hands on the rail, just looking at nothing.
” She shook her head. “He was like a man who’d had the wind knocked out of him.
He stood there till dark, then went in. His lights were on up in his office late into the night. ”
“When was this?” I asked.
“A couple weeks before he died,” she said.
“The night he died there was a storm.”
“Boy, was there. It felt like the end of the world.” She poured herself more tea.
“October the thirteenth. I remember because the power kept flickering and Harold was trying to watch the radar on the TV. I told him to get one of those radios, but he never listened to me. The wind was coming across the water and the rain was sideways. We lost a couple trees in the backyard. There was no way anyone was out on the street that night.”
“Did you watch Henry’s house that night?”
“I wish I had.” For the first time something close to grief moved over her face, and I understood it was the grief of a watcher who’d had her one job and the weather had taken it from her. “We were all huddled in front of the television, me and Harold and the kids.”
“Any cars parked along the street you didn’t recognize?”
“If there was I doubt I would have seen it. Couldn’t see a foot out the window because of the rain. And before you ask I didn’t hear a gunshot either. It would have been impossible to hear over the thunder. It’s hard knowing he died like that so close to us.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“No,” she agreed. “But that’s not the same as forgiving it.
” She looked at me steadily. “The next I knew of any of it was the housekeeper’s car the following morning followed by Milton’s and a few other patrol cars, and then the coroner’s wagon came up the street and I knew he was dead.
By suppertime the whole island knew Henry Wainwright had shot himself because Milton said so. ”
“You’ve been a big help,” I said, setting down my cup and standing to take my leave.
“You’ll find who did it. You have that look about you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She stood on her own porch and saw me out.
The heat hit me the second I cleared her front door, thick and wet and waiting, and by the time I slid behind the wheel of the Karmann Ghia the backs of my legs had glued themselves to the seat.
I cranked the engine and put the air on full, and I sat a minute at the curb letting it blow lukewarm and then cold while I looked across the street at the pale yellow house where Henry Wainwright had lived and died.
Two shapes behind a curtain. A woman nobody could name.
A man in a suit and a Cadillac who’d come to argue about money two weeks before the end.
Estelle had handed me three things, and not one of them came with a name attached, which was the trouble with a case that had been left to go cold for a quarter century.
The people who knew were scattered or dead or, like Estelle, never asked.
But the man in the Cadillac was a thread I could pull.
A businessman didn’t drive onto this island, dressed for a boardroom, to shout about money on a doctor’s porch over nothing.
He’d come from somewhere. He’d had a reason.
And men like that left paper behind them the way Chowder left hair on the furniture, whether they meant to or not.
I pulled away from the curb and pointed the car toward home, and I had Henry so thick in my head that I drove the long way without deciding to, down along the water where the live oaks made their green tunnels and the big houses sat back behind their gates pretending they had nothing to hide.
I’d call Dash when I got home. He’d want the man in the suit, and he’d tell me to go slow and quiet about it, and he’d be right, and I’d do it anyway because slow and quiet was the only speed that ever got anywhere on Grimm Island.
The river flashed silver between the houses.
A shrimp boat worked its way out toward the sound, low and patient, trailing a cloud of gulls that wheeled and screamed and dove for whatever it stirred up.
I thought about a woman who came only after dark and never drove her own car.
I thought about Henry standing on his porch with the wind knocked out of him.
I thought about how a man could be loved by an entire island and still die alone with a lie laid over him like a sheet.
I was still chewing on it when I turned onto Waterfront and saw the truck in my drive.
A pickup I didn’t know, tailgate down, and a couple of young men in ball caps and basketball shorts hefting banker’s boxes onto my porch.
And there was Walt, planted in the shade of the live oak in a fresh polo with his reading glasses shoved up on his forehead, supervising the operation with his hands clasped behind his back like a foreman who’d never once touched a shovel. His sedan was parked street side.
He lifted one hand when I passed him to pull into my garage.
The contents of James Everett’s attic. And sooner than I’d hoped, and a great deal more of it than I’d bargained for.
I parked and got out, and I looked at the boxes and then at Walt and felt the day tilt toward something longer than I’d planned.
“This is James’s grandson and one of his friends,” Walt said, by way of hello. “They were nice enough to bring everything over for us.”
“We appreciate it,” I said. “Lordy, where are we going to put these. My living room is already full of the boxes we brought from Josephine’s.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said. “But you might put on a fresh pot of tea and put out some cookies. I called the others. This is probably going to take a while.”