Chapter Twenty-Three
When we were far enough away from the door — closed with unnecessary firmness behind us — Clara pulled in a breath I expected to come out with words of reaction.
I blocked them, warning under my breath, “Bryon.”
He was walking toward us up the driveway. An SUV occupied one side of the driveway. The garage door in front of the side where we’d parked was open and the spot inside empty. Putting those clues together, Clara’s van had blocked him from getting into the garage.
“Hi Bryon,” we said together.
“Hi. It’s . . . Clara and Sheila, right? From dog training.”
“Yes. We came by to drop off a casserole. It’s all so awful.” Clara clamped both hands on his forearm in a gesture that could be interpreted as condolence. It also made it harder for him to walk past us.
“Casserole?” he repeated.
I would have guessed that most people would have keyed in on the awful.
“It’s layers of spaghetti and sauce and cheese, all baked together,” Clara said. “So comforting. It’s wonderful. I can say that, because it’s not my recipe.”
His eyes warmed as she described the dish. I guessed Zoley wasn’t much of a cook. The sterility of the kitchen offered the first clue to that.
“It’s all so unbelievable,” Clara continued. “We were talking with Willow Yost and— You know her, don’t you.”
“Sure. She walks Izolde for us. In fact, I should call her, let her know we’re home, but want her to walk both dogs this evening . . . with everything that’s going on.”
“But—” That was genuine surprise from Clara. She heightened it with wide eyes that hid how closely she watched him. “The dogs aren’t here. Zoley called Donna to take them away and—”
“She what?”
Clara’s grip on his arm became a soothing pat.
“They’re fine. You might not know Donna well, but she’ll take excellent care of them. And Willow’s on hand, so they have someone familiar. She said they were so much more relaxed than when she saw them earlier today.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything she says.”
His harsh tone matched his words. For Willow? Or from learning Zoley farmed out the dogs.
“What makes you say not to believe everything Willow says?” I asked.
A spasm crossed his face. “I . . . I shouldn’t have. I don’t know anything for sure. Forget I said—”
“We can’t do that. Not under these circumstances,” I said as sternly as if I were, oh, say, law enforcement. “You must have a reason for saying that. Did you have an experience with her that made you consider her untrustworthy?”
“Not with the dogs. She’s great with them. It was . . . It was something else, something Damon said.”
He stalled.
“Which was . . .?”
“He said she’d been in his stuff.”
Clara’s eyes widened. “She’d been in his stuff? Willow? In what stuff?”
“Like papers, from what he said. In his office. I said I found it hard to believe because she was so good with the dogs. And he said being good with dogs didn’t have anything to do with being a thief.
I asked what she stole and he said he hadn’t figured it out — yet.
That she’d gone through papers in his office, but that he was too smart to keep his cash or other valuables in obvious spots, so she hadn’t gotten away with any of that.
But he was going to check if she was behind some things he thought were fishy.
“I said, aw, c’mon, she’s a kid. She wouldn’t do something like that. He said she was the only person who had the house code and was there without somebody being around.”
“Yet he kept paying her to walk Lucifer.” I didn’t let as much skepticism as I felt come through, aiming to simply point out the discrepancy.
“He might not have. He just said it Thursday night, the night before he died when we were all at dinner, before training. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized someone had been in my files, too.”
“What—?”
Clara cut off my question. “Dinner? Before training? You left the dogs in a vehicle while you ate dinner? It was unusually hot that night, too. Do you know how hot vehicles get? Do you know—?”
Bryon went into a defensive crouch — without actually moving — and interrupted her. “It wasn’t that hot.”
“It was twenty-five degrees warmer before last night’s front and inside a vehicle gets hot so fast, no responsible person would leave a dog—”
I jumped in. I was in sympathy with Clara’s scolding, but if we wanted to talk more to Bryon, this might not be the best approach.
“What did Pammy and your wife say about Damon saying Willow was a thief?” I asked.
“Nothing. They’d gone to the ladies’ room together.”
* * * *
“That was convenient.” Disbelief and disapproval added bite to Clara’s words as we settled into the van.
“Damon supposedly points a finger at Willow over vague going through his papers, but only to Bryon because the wives happened to be away from the table. And then he says he has to get inside. Running away, I say.”
I tactfully didn’t bring up that he might have been running from her thunderous disapproval of leaving dogs in vehicles during meals. “It’s possible, though.”
“What would Willow want in his papers, for heaven’s sake?”
“That would be interesting to find out, wouldn’t it?”
She clicked her tongue.
We’d hit a dead end here — at least until we could talk to Willow Yost again.
“I’ve got to get home to work,” Clara said. “I’ll call when I finish and we can take the dogs to the park then, if that works for you.”
“Sure. That outfit of Zoley’s . . .” I started. “It wasn’t exactly mourning, was it?”
“Well, Pammy’s the one who’s been widowed.”
“Yes. Although if we’re right about Zoley having an affair with Damon, you’d think she’d be a little torn up.”
Her hmm accepted the validity of that point.
“The other thing is, how are we going to find out about the Pammy-Damon relationship? Usually, the person to ask would be the closest girlfriend, but considering we suspect that friend of fooling around with the husband, that’s a no-go . . .”
“I might have an idea,” Clara said slowly. “But I need to check something first. I’ll get back to you.”
Did I want to bug her to tell me what she was thinking? Of course. But I’d made similar statements at times and she’d restrained herself from bugging me. Fair was fair.
Going for full noble, I volunteered, “Zoley saying she’d told her husband over and over that it didn’t bother her that Damon made a lot more money than him was interesting.”
She nodded. “Which was actually poking at him. That would irk anybody.”
“Uh-huh. And if he knew about his wife and Damon — that’s if they were fooling around, which we don’t know for sure, so—”
“Ruby said they were. No need to keep adding qualifiers for the purpose of this conversation.”
“That makes my question much simpler: Did Zoley leave clues for her husband that she was fooling around with Damon?”
We looked at each other for a beat.
“Oh, hell, yes,” I said for both of us. “And chances are good Zoley wasn’t discreet or careful enough for Pammy to miss those clues. Unless Pammy missed the signs on purpose, because she didn’t want to know.”
“But could she have ignored Zoley’s makeup? That has to be to cover a bruise, right? Could Pammy have thought Bryon hit Zoley?”
“He could have, too. Say, if he woke up to what was going on. Hits her then shoots Damon. Though how he got Damon out there—”
“Not Thursday for the bruising,” I interrupted. “I looked up how bruises age last night. It would likely take a day, two, for a bruise to be most visible. Then it would stay that way another day or two before it started fading.”
“That’s why you were looking at her face?”
“Uh-huh. Hope I wasn’t too obvious.”
“Not obvious at all,” she said loyally. “I noticed because I know you well. Seemed to me she had a lot less makeup on today.”
“Agreed. So, if she was hit — or otherwise acquired a bruise — say, Tuesday—”
“Or Monday night after training class,” Clara inserted.
“—the bruise could be most visible as early as Wednesday and stay that way through Friday before it began to fade. Making it reasonable to need less makeup today to cover it up.”
Clara looked at me. “Your words say it all makes sense about the bruises and the makeup, while your voice sounds like you don’t quite believe it.”
I didn’t dispute her assessment. “If Bryon hit Zoley because he realized Monday night what was going on between her and Damon, why wait until Thursday night to shoot Damon?”
“He got angrier after their conflict at training?”
“Tic-tac-toe as a motive for murder?” I asked.
“Displacement? Like in psychology. Acting out his anger over Zoley and Damon at dog training.”
“Would still have the issue of how he got Damon out to Gallows Path.”
“And how Bryon got Damon’s gun, as you pointed out before.” She turned into my driveway, adding with mock disapproval. “Anything else you want to poke holes in?”
“There is something else. We can’t be blinded by our biases from seeing them at training or we could suffer from elephant syndrome.”
“Elephant syndrome?”
Possibly not the formal name. I might have syndromes on the brain.
“Like blindfolded people staged around an elephant and experiencing only what’s in front of them,” I said. “The one by the trunk has a different experience from the one by the tail—”
“Totally different if the elephant decides to—”
“Yes, yes. The point is, we’re feeling the trunk, which doesn’t tell us the whole picture of what’s in front of us. We might be able to describe the trunk quite accurately, but we need to move around the elephant to avoid thinking it’s all trunk.”
“Okay, but what does it have to do with us looking into this?”
“We’re focused on Damon’s relationships with Pammy and Zoley and Bryon, because that’s what we observed at training. But there are other aspects to his life, things we don’t know about. His murder could stem from that.”
“Okay,” she said again, this time in acceptance. “For now, I’m going home to work. You go see Urban Parhem. See if he knows anything about Damon, his connections to other people. Pretty sure the Swindells have been here for generations.”
“But—”
“Go. And we’ll think about how to explore other angles of Damon the elephant.”