Chapter 14 #2
Dash came back and sat down. His face had changed.
“The lab confirmed it,” he said. “There was something in that decanter. Benzodiazepines. They can’t nail down the specific compound from what was left, but the class is confirmed.”
Dottie exhaled through her nose. “Benzodiazepines are sedatives. Valium, Xanax, that family of drugs. In a high enough dose, mixed with alcohol, they’d have put Henry out cold within thirty minutes. Maybe less. He wouldn’t have struggled. He might not even have known what was happening to him.”
The table was quiet for a moment.
“Anyone connected to Henry or the foundation could have gotten their hands on that class of drug,” Dash said. “Doctors, nurses, even someone with the right connections.”
“That’s not a short list,” Hank said. “Half the board had medical backgrounds. Noreen Goble worked in a clinic for twenty years. Byron Jameson was a neurosurgeon.”
“Byron Jameson is dead,” Deidre said.
“He was very much alive in October of 2001,” I said.
“The point is,” Walt said, “we can’t narrow the suspect pool on the drug alone. Anyone in Henry’s orbit could have managed it.”
Hank leaned forward on his elbows. “Someone in his orbit who also knew his habits. Who knew about the decanter. Who had reason to want him dead.” He paused. “That description fits more than one person in this case.”
Nobody argued with that.
We stacked the dinner plates and moved everything to the sideboard to make room.
Dottie disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a peach cobbler she and Deidre had thrown together that afternoon with the peaches from the farmer’s market, the crust golden and the filling still bubbling at the edges. I put on a fresh pot of coffee.
Hank sat up straighter.
“I’ve been smelling that for two hours,” he said. “I was starting to think it was a cruel joke.”
“I know,” Dottie said, and set it in front of him first.
“Any progress on the handkerchief?” Dash asked, wrapping his hands around his coffee cup.
Walt shook his head. “Two boxes left.”
“Well,” Dottie said, once the cobbler was served, “the dishes can wait.”
Walt brought the last two boxes in from the stack along the wall and set them on the table. Dash pulled one toward him and I sat beside him. Dottie and Deidre took the other end. Hank claimed the corner. Bea topped off her wine and stayed where she was.
The first box was quiet accumulation— the stuff that builds up in the corners of a man’s life without him noticing. Medical conference programs going back to 1989, rubber-banded by year. Three pairs of reading glasses, two of them broken.
“He must have sat on them,” Deidre said, examining a pair.
“Or thrown them,” Hank said. “I throw mine.”
We kept digging. Christmas cards bundled and labeled in Josephine’s handwriting going back decades.
A pocket Bible with a cracked spine and so many paper bookmarks bristling out of it that Deidre made a small pained sound and set it carefully aside.
Golf scorecards going back years, the scores in Henry’s terrible left-handed scrawl.
“Twelve handicap,” Hank said, holding one up.
“That’s respectable,” Dash said.
“Better than mine ever was,” Hank said. “I quit after Eleanor told me I was more pleasant to be around when I didn’t go.”
“Was she right?” I asked.
“Probably. I wasn’t going to tell her that.”
Walt paged through a leather-bound journal, slow and careful, then set it aside. Sermon notes and personal reflections, he said. Nothing for us. There was a spare set of house keys on a ring with no label and a checkbook that Deidre logged without comment.
Then an envelope of photographs.
Deidre passed them around one at a time.
Henry at a foundation gala, black tie, laughing at something off camera.
Henry at someone’s wedding. And then one that stopped its own passing— Henry and James Everett twenty years younger, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, grinning at whoever held the camera.
Two men who’d built something together from nothing.
The second box was mostly files and correspondence. Walt upended it onto the table and we spread everything out so everyone could have a look.
Deidre was the one who spotted it— tucked between two folders near the bottom of the pile, soft and folded, easy to miss. She picked it up by the very edges without a word.
“Sheriff,” she said.
Dash took it from her carefully and slipped it into an evidence bag, then laid it flat on the table. It was a white square of fabric, folded, with an embroidered corner.
I reached out and turned it so the monogram faced up through the plastic.
A single letter. Blue thread on white linen.
J.
“Well,” Bea said, and for once she didn’t follow it with anything.
“That’s what Lila Mae saw,” I said. “On the floor just inside the study door. She left it exactly where she found it.”
“Someone dropped it,” Walt said.
“In a hurry,” Deidre said. “On their way out.”
“Could be Josephine’s,” Bea said. “She packed up that office.”
“Josephine killed her own brother?” Dash asked, brow arched.
“I’ve seen stranger things than that, so we can’t rule it out.
But she told us she wasn’t ready to go through his things for a long time after he died.
And Lila Mae saw the handkerchief that morning and left it where it was.
Crime-scene cleaners come in for the blood and biohazard— they don’t touch anything else. ”
“First thing is to ask her,” Hank said.
“I’ll call her first thing tomorrow,” I said.
“What about James?” Walt asked. “He had a key. He’d been in and out of that house hundreds of times, and he’d know Henry’s habits.”
“But what’s the motive?” Dash asked. “Because of the embezzlement?”
“He could have done it,” Hank said. “But if an audit was run by the new CFO he would’ve been exposed quickly. Now I could see it the other way around. Let’s say Henry had been the one embezzling and James had found out. There’s a motive for murder.”
“Good point,” Dash said, nodding.
“There are lots of people that handkerchief could have belonged to,” Deidre said. “Jackie is another. She worked for Henry. She knew the house. Would know about the drugs as a nurse.”
“And Jennifer Hollis was on the board,” I said. “She had access to the accounts at the foundation, and maybe she realized Henry was getting close to discovering her.”
“Don’t forget Byron Jameson,” Dottie said. “Betrayed father with a wicked temper.”
“What about his daughter?” Walt asked softly. “Her name was Jameson at the time.”
Everyone was silent as we absorbed that thought.
“You think maybe the picture wasn’t as perfect as she painted for us today?” I asked.
“The one thing I learned in my career is that everyone lies to paint themselves in the best light,” he said. “The question is how big is the lie.”
“So maybe they weren’t engaged or he tried to call things off and she was a woman scorned?” I asked skeptically.
“She was with him the night before,” Dash said.
“They could have fought about anything. If we’re wildly speculating, maybe Henry had found out her father was the embezzler.
That would cause tension in a relationship.
They part ways and at some point she comes to the house, drugs the whiskey, and then sits across the desk and has a rational conversation with him until he passes out. She’s the daughter of a surgeon.”
My eyes widened at how clearly he painted the picture, but I was having trouble believing it after the conversation we’d had with her just hours before.
“And then there’s Josephine herself,” Walt said. “We’re taking her word for everything. She’s the one who brought the case to us. She’s the one who handed us the boxes. For all we know she planted that handkerchief herself.”
“A grief-stricken sister spending twenty-five years trying to get someone to listen,” Dottie said slowly. “Or a woman who needed someone to look everywhere but at her?”
I picked up the evidence bag and turned it over once. A single letter. There wasn’t a mark on it, even after all this time.
“We need to interview every one of those people again,” Dash said. “Maybe turn the heat up a little.”
“Byron Jameson is dead,” Deidre said.
“His daughter isn’t,” Dash said.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”
“I thought those were bags under your eyes,” he said, smiling so his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Holy smokes, son,” Hank said. “No wonder you’ve never been married. You’re always supposed to say she’s beautiful. Even if she looks a little rough around the edges.”
I was trying to decide if I should be offended or not, but I was just too tired to care.