Chapter 27 2025
The sheriff walks through the door to the aromas of fresh-brewed coffee, sourdough bread, and the heady scent of roses, undoubtedly fresh cut from Belinda’s prize-winning bushes.
Belinda and Grace are in the living room, laughing, and the sound is like oxygen to his lungs.
For months, his soul has been starved of his wife’s defining exuberance and joy, the cancer dampening her life force in a way he hadn’t thought possible.
Yin-yang, his mother had said the first time she met Grace.
She pulls you up from the depths of your own mind, while you ground her to the earth so she doesn’t float away.
She thought them a good match, and his mother was rarely wrong about such things.
And she wasn’t wrong about them. For twenty-five years, Grace has been his guiding light and his reason for everything.
“There you are!” Grace exclaims, her blue eyes sparking beneath her hairless brow.
“The man of the hour,” Belinda says.
She’s dressed in jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt. Her face is scrubbed clean of the carefully applied makeup she wears at work, and her jet-black hair is mussed, her ME persona abandoned and the rocker chick revealed for the weekend.
“Discover anything interesting at the pond?” she asks, sizing him up as well.
He wonders what she sees—a slightly out-of-shape middle-aged man, sleep deprived with worry for his wife and stress over a murder investigation with too few clues.
Grace sits in the overstuffed brocade chair she inherited from her mother.
It’s fussy and uncomfortable, and they squabbled over it when she first brought it home over a dozen years ago.
Now he knows, whatever the future brings, he will never get rid of it.
Her feet are curled beneath her, and despite the warm spring day, she wears a thick sweater and has a wool throw over her legs.
Before the sheriff can answer, Belinda says, “I’ve still got my money on the serpent.”
“Me too,” Grace says, and they smile conspiratorially at each other.
“Yeah, well, unless the serpent can crawl through holes in brick walls, I’d hold off on making that bet.”
“Ooh, interesting,” Belinda says as Grace says, “And the plot thickens.”
He tells them what he discovered at the pond.
“Meryl Fairbanks?” Belinda says when he finishes, and Grace adds, “The skater?”
“That’s where the path leads. Someone’s been walking from her backyard to the spot where I believe the reverend crawled through the wall and was killed.”
“Well, Meryl certainly didn’t kill him,” Grace says, indignant at even the suggestion that her idol could be involved in anything untoward.
Meryl Fairbanks is Moosewood’s local celebrity sweetheart.
A three-time world figure skating champion and onetime Olympic gold medalist, she’s been the town’s pride and joy since the eighties when she won her first world title at just sixteen.
The media loved her, and so did the public.
Her shapely figure, platinum-blond hair, and quick-wittedness captivated.
She was featured once on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and People magazine twice named her Best-Dressed Athlete.
At the height of her career, she dated an Academy Award–winning actor, then, scandalously, a month after their breakup, married a Heisman Trophy–winning Vikings’ running back in a Las Vegas quickie wedding.
Their breakup, less than a year later, also made headlines.
The running back famously sang “Don’t Give up on Us” from the fifty-yard line as a cool Meryl Fairbanks smiled down sweetly from the stands.
When he finished, she blew him a kiss, then turned and left the stadium as the running back fell to his knees on the Astroturf and cried and the audience booed.
The sheriff had a huge crush on her when he was young.
He was twelve when she won that first world title, and he remembers it like it was yesterday.
She was the sassiest, prettiest girl he’d ever seen.
He’ll never forget the interview she gave the local news station when she came back to Moosewood after the win.
“People are saying you could be the next Sonja Henie,” the reporter said. “Is that your dream to be America’s next ice princess?”
Meryl Fairbanks’s fantastic yellow-green eyes widened as if the compliment was too much, and her dimples twitched a second before she responded, “Yes, yes! That’s the reason I train so hard and compete the way I do, so someday I can live in a shimmering white castle with adorable dwarfs who wait on me hand and foot, and so I can have magic glass slippers, a bejeweled crown, and a charming prince husband who will save me if ever I’m in trouble. ”
She said it all with a dazzling smile and ended the comment with a wink, disarming the reporter so much that he had no idea he was being mocked.
The sheriff fell a little in love with her at that moment and never fully recovered.
He wasn’t the only one. Grace worships the woman. Since before they were married, she’s watched every competition Meryl Fairbanks has ever been a part of, whether as a competitor, commentator, or coach.
“She couldn’t have done it,” Grace continues accusingly. “You know that. She has Parkinson’s.”
It’s true. The last time the sheriff saw Meryl Fairbanks, which was in the grocery store perhaps a month ago, she was using a cane and had a woman with her to help with her shopping.
“I agree. It’s unlikely,” he says. “But I think I’ll pay a visit to her just the same.”
“You just want an excuse to talk to your crush,” Grace teases, and Belinda says, “Even with Parkinson’s, that woman is definitely capable of luring a man to his death. Maybe she and the serpent were in it together.”
Grace chuckles.
Belinda brings the conversation back to the investigation. “So your theory is that the reverend crawled through the hole to meet someone, was shot and dragged into the pond, then over the five months he was missing, his body drifted to the opposite bank?”
“Yes. Which means the person he met also knew about the hole.”
“Well, I think I can narrow that down a bit.”
She stands and gestures for the sheriff to do the same.
“The reason I’m here, other than for Grace’s cooking, is because, after you left the ice box”—ice box is what Belinda calls the autopsy room—“something about the bullet hole was bugging me.”
She takes a step back so she’s faced off with the sheriff.
“Bullet to the heart, right?”
She lifts her right arm and sticks out her finger as if she’s going to shoot the sheriff, a wry grin on her face like she’d truly enjoy that.
“Yup,” the sheriff says.
“And the bullet didn’t shatter the ribs or exit the cavity.”
“Which means it likely came from a small caliber gun.”
Belinda nods. “And that it was likely shot from at least a dozen feet away.” She backs up to put as much space between them as the room allows.
“Which makes it a hell of a shot,” the sheriff says.
Even at close range, most people will miss their target by at least a few inches, the bullet typically striking higher than they were aiming.
Belinda walks back toward him and pokes her finger gun below the Nike swoosh on his shirt. “It clipped the top of the fourth rib and bottom of the sixth rib.” She spins him around and pokes his back beneath his scapula. “Like you said, it was a hell of a shot.”
She backs away again, her finger gun still aimed at him.
“You’re what, about six two?” she asks.
“About that.”
“And the reverend was a couple inches taller.”
“Sounds right.”
“I’m five five.” She pulls the thumb trigger of her pretend gun, and he sees it: The trajectory is wrong. For her to aim at his heart, she has to angle the barrel up.
“So what are you saying?” he asks.
“I’m saying Meryl Fairbanks isn’t your killer, and not because she has Parkinson’s.
It would be nearly impossible to make that accurate and straight a shot if you weren’t on level ground.
Which means the only way that bullet went in as straight as it did was if the killer was close to the reverend’s height. ”
The sheriff scratches his chin. “But that doesn’t make sense.” He holds up his hand with its sausage fingers. “A guy my size or bigger would have paws my size or bigger, and the bruises on the wrist came from hands that were small.”
“Which was what was bugging me. The evidence doesn’t add up. Unless . . .” She pauses for effect.
“Unless what?”
“Unless the person who dragged the reverend into the pond wasn’t the same person who shot him.”